French Faulknerian scholars have often claimed, and with convincing evidence, that they recognized Faulkner's creative genius long before their colleagues across the Atlantic began to appreciate what was happening in north-central Mississippi. After the publication in French of As I Lay Dying and Light in August, Maurice Edgar Coindreau, Faulkner's sympathetic and intelligent translator, reassured Americans in his 1937 essay entitled "France and the Contemporary American Novel" that any fears they might have concerning the image of America Faulkner and other fiction writers portrayed in their stories and novels were unfounded. Encouraged not only by such sage enthusiasm but by the philosophical support of Camus and Sartre, the French read Faulkner carefully and placed him quickly among the deities in their literary pantheon. Within the last ten years, French scholars have deftly probed Faulkner's imagination by placing him under the critical microscopes of Freud, Lacan, and Genette, and with each examination Faulkner has emerged sound, healthy, and surprisingly human. Professors Andre Bleikasten, Michel Gresset, and Jean Rouberol have been in the forefront of Faulkner scholarship in France, and their books,* based on their doctoral dissertations, reveal the scope and depth of presentday research being done in France; most of all, their methodological approaches show that they do not follow any specific school of thought but rather rely on and employ the * Respectively, Bleikasten's Parcours de Faulkner, Gresset's Faulkner ou la fascination: Poetique du regard, and Rouberol's L'Esprit du Sud dans f'oeuvre de Faulkner.