An Experimentalist's Literary Inheritance: Faulkner's Literary Origins

Faulkner will always have a place in modernist literature for his contribution to the stream-of-consciousness tradition. It is also because of his daring and ingenious innovations in this tradition that he earned the title of experimentalist, but what cannot be ignored is that he owed much to other literary traditions in his creation. Tracing his abundant literary origins, this paper examines his inheritance from American and European writers in terms of poetic elements like imagery, diction, technique, and form, as well as novelistic factors including the theme, setting, characterization, point of view, and linguistic style, thus proving that “literature can never be completely detached from tradition or innovated without foundation”.

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