William Faulkner In Context

Download or read book William Faulkner in Context written by John T. Matthews and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that conditioned Faulkner's creative work. This book provides a broad and authoritative framework that will help readers to better understand this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical assessment of Faulkner's work as it relates to such topics as genre, reception, and the significance of place. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Los Angeles profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkner's writing was deeply affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. In this volume, a host of renowned scholars shed light on this enigmatic writer and render him accessible to students and researchers alike.

Download or read book William Faulkner in Context written by John T. Matthews and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that conditioned Faulkner's creative work. This book provides a broad and authoritative framework that will help readers to better understand this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical assessment of Faulkner's work as it relates to such topics as genre, reception, and the significance of place. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Los Angeles profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkner's writing was deeply affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. In this volume, a host of renowned scholars shed light on this enigmatic writer and render him accessible to students and researchers alike"--

Download or read book William Faulkner and Southern History written by Joel Williamson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-12-14 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America's great novelists, William Faulkner was a writer deeply rooted in the American South. In works such as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner drew powerfully on Southern themes, attitudes, and atmosphere to create his own world and place--the mythical Yoknapatawpha County--peopled with quintessential Southerners such as the Compsons, Sartorises, Snopes, and McCaslins. Indeed, to a degree perhaps unmatched by any other major twentieth-century novelist, Faulkner remained at home and explored his own region--the history and culture and people of the South. Now, in William Faulkner and Southern History, one of America's most acclaimed historians of the South, Joel Williamson, weaves together a perceptive biography of Faulkner himself, an astute analysis of his works, and a revealing history of Faulkner's ancestors in Mississippi--a family history that becomes, in Williamson's skilled hands, a vivid portrait of Southern culture itself. Williamson provides an insightful look at Faulkner's ancestors, a group sketch so brilliant that the family comes alive almost as vividly as in Faulkner's own fiction. Indeed, his ancestors often outstrip his characters in their colorful and bizarre nature. Williamson has made several discoveries: the Falkners (William was the first to spell it "Faulkner") were not planter, slaveholding "aristocrats"; Confederate Colonel Falkner was not an unalloyed hero, and he probably sired, protected, and educated a mulatto daughter who married into America's mulatto elite; Faulkner's maternal grandfather Charlie Butler stole the town's money and disappeared in the winter of 1887-1888, never to return. Equally important, Williamson uses these stories to underscore themes of race, class, economics, politics, religion, sex and violence, idealism and Romanticism--"the rainbow of elements in human culture"--that reappear in Faulkner's work. He also shows that, while Faulkner's ancestors were no ordinary people, and while he sometimes flashed a curious pride in them, Faulkner came to embrace a pervasive sense of shame concerning both his family and his culture. This he wove into his writing, especially about sex, race, class, and violence, psychic and otherwise. William Faulkner and Southern History represents an unprecedented publishing event--an eminent historian writing on a major literary figure. By revealing the deep history behind the art of the South's most celebrated writer, Williamson evokes new insights and deeper understanding, providing anyone familiar with Faulkner's great novels with a host of connections between his work, his life, and his ancestry.

Download or read book William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape written by Charles Shelton Aiken and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles S. Aiken, a native of Mississippi who was born a few miles from Oxford, has been thinking and writing about the geography of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County for more than thirty years. William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape is the culmination of that long-term scholarly project. It is a fresh approach to a much-studied writer and a provocative meditation on the relationship between literary imagination and place. Four main geographical questions shape Aiken's journey to the family seat of the Compsons and the Snopeses. What patterns and techniques did Faulkner use--consciously or subconsciously--to convert the real geography of Lafayette County into a fictional space? Did Faulkner intend Yoknapatawpha to serve as a microcosm of the American South? In what ways does the historical geography of Faulkner's birthplace correspond to that of the fictional world he created? Finally, what geographic legacy has Faulkner left us through the fourteen novels he set in Yoknapatawpha? With an approach, methodology, and sources primarily derived from historical geography, Aiken takes the reader on a tour of Faulkner's real and imagined worlds. The result is an informed reading of Faulkner's life and work and a refined understanding of the relation of literary worlds to the real places that inspire them.

Download or read book As I Lay Dying written by William Faulkner and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, As I Lay Dying tells the story of the dysfunctional Bundren family as they set out to fulfill Addie Bundren’s dying wish. Told by fifteen narrators, including Jewel, Cash, Darl and Dewey Dell, As I Lay Dying uses stream of consciousness to unveil each character’s motivations for carrying out Addie’s wish, along with a multitude of lies they have been hiding from each other. As I Lay Dying was Faulkner’s fifth novel and is included in the Modern Library’s list of 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel inspired a number of critically-acclaimed books including Graham Swift’s Last Orders and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body: A Novel. The title, which inspired the name of the Grammy-nominated band As I Lay Dying, is derived from Homer’s The Odyssey. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

Download or read book Children of the Dark House written by Noel Polk and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1998-07 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Polished and refitted into a new critical matrix, these essays by a distinguished Faulkner editor and scholar in no way resemble the casual self-anthologizing often encountered. Polk's stature as a critic meshes neatly with his work as an editor; his patent joy at the very sight of Faulkner manuscripts is inspiriting, and his professed commitment to Freudian readings is borne lightly (that is, expressed in sensible, jargon-free discourse that is both witty and brilliant). --J. M. Ditsky, Choice First published in 1996, this book by a major scholar of William Faulkner's writings collects choice selections of his Faulkner criticism from the past fifteen years. Its publication underscores the significance of his indispensable work in Faulkner studies, both in criticism and in the editing of Faulkner's texts. Here, Polk's focus is mainly upon the context of Freudian themes, expressly in the works written between 1927 and 1932, the period in which Faulkner wrote and ultimately revised Sanctuary, a novel to which Polk has given concentrated study during his distinguished career. He has connected the literature with the life in a way not achieved in previous criticism. Although other critics, notably John T. Irwin and Andre Bleikasten have explored Oedipal themes, neither perceived them as operating so completely at the center of Faulkner's work as Polk does in these essays. Noel Polk, a professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the editor of the definitive texts of Faulkner's works. He also is one of the most notable scholars of Eudora Welty's works and the author of Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work (University Press of Mississippi)

Download or read book Faulkner and the Great Depression written by Ted Atkinson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2006-12-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Remarkably,” writes Ted Atkinson, “during a period roughly corresponding to the Great Depression, Faulkner wrote the novels and stories most often read, taught, and examined by scholars.” This is the first comprehensive study to consider his most acclaimed works in the context of those hard times. Atkinson sees Faulkner’s Depression-era novels and stories as an ideological battleground--in much the same way that 1930s America was. With their contrapuntal narratives that present alternative accounts of the same events, these works order multiple perspectives under the design of narrative unity. Thus, Faulkner’s ongoing engagement with cultural politics gives aesthetic expression to a fundamental ideological challenge of Depression-era America: how to shape what FDR called a “new order of things” out of such conflicting voices as the radical left, the Popular Front, and the Southern Agrarians. Focusing on aesthetic decadence in Mosquitoes and dispossession in The Sound and the Fury, Atkinson shows how Faulkner anticipated and mediated emergent sociocultural forces of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In Sanctuary; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and “Dry September,” Faulkner explores social upheaval (in the form of lynching and mob violence), fascism, and the appeal of strong leadership during troubled times. As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, “Barn Burning,” and “The Tall Men” reveal his “ambivalent agrarianism”--his sympathy for, yet anxiety about, the legions of poor and landless farmers and sharecroppers. In The Unvanquished, Faulkner views Depression concerns through the historical lens of the Civil War, highlighting the forces of destruction and reconstruction common to both events. Faulkner is no proletarian writer, says Atkinson. However, the dearth of overt references to the Depression in his work is not a sign that Faulkner was out of touch with the times or consumed with aesthetics to the point of ignoring social reality. Through his comprehensive social vision and his connections to the rural South, Hollywood, and New York, Faulkner offers readers remarkable new insight into Depression concerns.