John Duvall
- Margaret Church Distinguished Professor of English; Director of Graduate Studies // English
- Affiliated Faculty // American Studies // SIS
- Affiliated Faculty // Film and Video Production // Rueff School
Research Focus
20th and 21st Century American Fiction; modernism and postmodernism
Office and Contact
Biography
Recently, John Duvall has looked at issues in modernist print culture. This focus led to the publication in 2022 of his scholarly edition of William Faulkner’s 1949 collection of detective fiction, Knight’s Gambit, that restores to the collection’s six stories more than 4,000 works cut by magazine editors. In 2024, Penguin Random House released Duvall’s edition of Knight’s Gambit as a Vintage International trade paperback. Duvall also works on matters of racial and sexual identity in 20th- and 21st-century American fiction. He is the author of Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction (2008), Don DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD (2002), The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness (2000), and Faulkner's Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities (1990).
Professor Duvall also has edited seven essay collections: Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism (2015, with Robert P. Marzec), The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction After 1945 (2012), Faulkner and His Critics (2010), The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (2008), Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s WHITE NOISE (2006, with Tim Engles), Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies (2002), and Faulkner and Postmodernism (2002, with Ann J. Abadie).