In an original contribution to the psychoanalytic approach to literature, Doreen Fowler focuses on the fiction of four major American writers--William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison--to examine the father's function as a "border figure." Although the father has most commonly been interpreted as the figure who introduces opposition and exclusion to the child, Fowler finds in these literary depictions fathers who instead...