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Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
As I Lay Dying is a Modernist novel that subverts traditional formal conventions from older works, and paints an impressionistic and experiential picture of the story for readers. At the same time, the novel is a Southern Gothic work that concerns itself with the American South's past and future as a region, often using grotesque or supernatural elements to explore this idea.
The stranger, more fantastical elements of the Gothic are an interesting contrast with Faulkner's stylistic Modernism—other Modernists often favored real, believable plot-lines and avoided anything that might be considered "magical." Faulkner breathes new life into older methods of storytelling by reviving the supernatural for a modern audience, and he pushes forward the Modernist technique by adding his unique spin. Like the novel itself, the genre is concerned with a collision of past and future.
As I Lay Dying is also part of the Southern Renaissance, which reoriented stories set in the South away from the pre-Civil War period and toward more modern Southern realities like Reconstruction and the Great Depression’s impact on agricultural laborers. Though Faulkner's characters may sometimes long for an apocryphal memory of a simpler, more glamorous South, the novel itself does not. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner is interested in the development of the contemporary South.
