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It is well known that the novels of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison forcefully undermine the racial and sexual conventions characterizing both the South and contemporary American culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These novels challenge the stereotypes of race and gender prevailing in those times. As critical race theorists have suggested, race and gender are not essentialist notions describing the physiological characteristics of individuals; they are social constructs whose intersections explain an individual’s identity (see Robert Chang, 1–5). In very different ways, the works which this study examines – Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Pudd’nHead Wilson and his other detective novels, William Faulkner’s Light in August, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Three Days Before the Shooting, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy – undermine these constructs of race and gender. More so than Twain’s other detective fction as well as his other novels, The Adventures of Pudd’nHead Wilson undermines the South’s racial and sexual conventions, including its absolute division of black and white and its denigration of black females. Like The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August adopts the multivoiced narratives whose subjective reactions subvert traditional realism’s privileged omniscience and middle-class propriety; however, more forcefully than Faulkner’s other novels, Light in August critiques the racial and gender divisions of the Southern town, undermining the conventional notions of racial, gender, and class differences which the segregated Southern towns treated as absolute. Invisible Man relates the experiences which led Invisible to leave the South, join and reject the university, the business world, the community, and the communist party, and live underground. These experiences forcefully expose the blindnesses of the establishment and the degradation of blacks. Three days Before the Shooting, Ellison’s posthumous novel, also reveals the experiences of the racial divisions in the characters’ social life; however, to show black literature’s American character or American literature’s democratic ideals, Ellison resists the established modernism and faults the black aesthetic. Although reviewers and critics have noted this defense of a democratic American literature as well as his Faulknerian modernism, they do not fully acknowledge the infuence of such changing institutional conditions or, in the name of a public criticism, dismiss them altogether. Like Faulkner and Ellison, Morrison adopts in Beloved (1988) a subjective modernist narrative, rather than the liberal realism of Twain. However, Beloved examines the painful history of slavery, treating it by means of the narrators’ memory, or, as Morrison says, “rememory” the sudden recollection of disturbing experiences appearing in the present but coming from the distant past. Moreover, Morrison has acquired an imposing public stature which enables her work to appeal to both literary critics and ordinary readers invested in “undemanding” popular culture. Unlike the modernism of Faulkner or Ellison, which denigrates commercially successful, popular culture and defends the autonomy and individuality of high art, Beloved brings together high art and popular fction in a postmodern fashion. A Mercy shares the postmodern narrative practices of Beloved; however, Morrison sets the novel in early eighteenth-century America before slavery legitimated racial prejudice rather than in the African American community or its history. While A Mercy develops the contrary perspectives and self-conscious thoughts as well as the deeper or hidden feelings of major and minor characters, the novel elaborates the historical perspective and the critique of patriarchy in Paradise, Beloved, and other previous novels.