American Designs: The Late Novels of James and Faulkner

American Designs addresses three major literary critical issues: the hermeneutics of the novel genre; the intense importance of this genre for American literature; and the way James and Faulkner; by writing within hermeneutic traditions of the modern American novel, explore further than any other writers the particular functions of the novelistic designs they inherited and transformed.

Jeanne Campbell Reesman contends that in the late fiction of James and Faulkner the search for knowledge of...