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William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words (20/21 #2)
by Richard GoddenIn William Faulkner, Richard Godden traces how the novelist's late fiction echoes the economic and racial traumas of the South's delayed modernization in the mid-twentieth century. As the New Deal rapidly accelerated the long-term shift from tenant farming to modern agriculture, many African Americans were driven from the land and forced to migrate north. At the same time, white landowners exchanged dependency on black labor for dependency on northern capital. Combining powerful close readings of The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, and A Fable with an examination of southern economic history from the 1930s to the 1950s, Godden shows how the novels' literary complexities--from their narrative structures down to their smallest verbal emphases--reflect and refract the period's economic complexities. By demonstrating the interrelation of literary forms and economic systems, the book describes, in effect, the poetics of an economy. Original in the way it brings together close reading and historical context, William Faulkner offers innovative interpretations of late Faulkner and makes a unique contribution to the understanding of the relation between literature and history.
William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South (Wiley Blackwell Introductions to Literature #45)
by John T. MatthewsConsidered by many to be the most influential US novelist the world has known, William Faulkner's roots and his writing are planted in a single obscure county in the Deep South. A foremost international modernist, Faulkner's subjects and characters, ironically, are more readily associated with the history and sociology of the most backward state in the Union. He experimented endlessly with narrative structure, developing an unorthodox writing style. Yet his main goal was to reveal the truth of "the human heart in conflict with itself," ultimately defining human nature through the lens of his own Southern experience. This comprehensive account of Faulkner's literary career features an exploration of his novels and key short stories, including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and many more. Drawing on psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, feminist, and post-colonial theory, it offers an imaginative topography of Faulkner's efforts to reckon with his Southern past, to acknowledge its modernization, and to develop his own modernist method.
William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance
by James G. WatsonIn his life and writings, William Faulkner continually created and "performed" selves. Even in letters, he often played a part--gentleman dandy, soldier, farmer--while in his fictions these and other personae are counterpoised against one another to create a world of controlled chaos, made in Faulkner's own protean image and reflective of his own multiple sense of self.<P><P>In this groundbreaking book, James Watson draws on the entire Faulkner canon, including letters and photographs, to decipher the complicated ways in which Faulkner put himself forth as the artist he felt himself to be through written performances and displays based on the life he actually lived and the ones he imagined living. The topics Watson treats include the overtly performative aspects of The Sound and the Fury, self-presentation and performance in private records of Faulkner's life, the ways in which his complicated marriage and his relationships to male mentors underlie his fictions' recurring motifs of marriages and fatherhood, Faulkner's readings of Melville, Hawthorne, and Thoreau and the problematics of authorial sovereignty, his artist-as-God creation of a fictional cosmos, and the epistolary relationships with women that lie in the correspondence behind Requiem for a Nun.
William Faulkner, American Writer: A Biography
by Frederick R. KarlFrom the book: "This book attempts to integrate the latest in biographical information with Faulkner's own large body of work in fiction and poetry. It will not replace Joseph Blotner's monumental two-volume biography of Faulkner, which is an altogether different kind of book. I have not attempted to duplicate the full range of details of Faulkner's life that Professor Blotner has so ably researched and presented; but I have used the materials of Faulkner's work as biographical data in ways Professor Blotner did not attempt or intend to do. By integrating life and work, I have tried to avoid a chronicle or linear life study, which in other circumstances has its own kind of value. This study is in the deepest sense a biography: not only a presentation of the relevant facts of the subject's life, but an effort to understand and interpret that life psychologically, emotionally, and literarily. It tries to put Faulkner together- if not entirely as an understandable man then as a man who may be understood as America's greatest novelist of the twentieth century."
William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)
by Ahmed HoneiniWilliam Faulkner and Mortality is the first full-length study of mortality in William Faulkner’s fiction. The book challenges earlier, influential scholarly considerations of death in Faulkner’s work that claimed that writing was his authorial method of ‘saying No to death’. Through close-readings of six key works – The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, "A Rose for Emily", Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses – this book examines how Faulkner’s characters confront various experiences of human mortality, including grief, bereavement, mourning, and violence. The trauma and ambivalence caused by these experiences ultimately compel these characters to ‘say Yes to death’. The book makes a clear distinction between Faulkner’s quest for literary immortality through writing and the desire for death exhibited by the principal characters in the works analysed. William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound offers a new paradigm for reading Faulkner’s oeuvre, and adds an alternative voice to a debate within Faulkner scholarship long thought to have ended.
William Faulkner and Southern History
by Joel WilliamsonTraces Faulkner's ancestry and life, then relates this material to his writings.
William Faulkner and the Materials of Writing
by Jonathan BerlinerWilliam Faulkner and the Materials of Writing examines the many physical texts in Faulkner's novels and stories from letters and telegrams to Bibles, billboards, and even the alphabetic shape of airport runways. Current investigations in print culture, book history, and media studies often emphasize the controlling power of technological form; instead, this book demonstrates how media should be understood in the context of its use. Throughout Faulkner's oeuvre, various kinds of writing become central to characters forming a sense of the self as well as bonds of intimacy, while ideologies of race and gender connect to the body through the vehicle of writing. This book combines close reading analysis of Faulkner's fiction with the publication history of his works that together offer a case study about what it means to live in a world permeated by media.
William Faulkner (Comprehensive Research and Study Guide)
by Harold BloomCommentary on the author's major works and on his life.
William Faulkner Day by Day
by Carl RollysonWilliam Faulkner has been the topic of numerous biographies, papers, and international attention. Yet there are no collected resources providing a comprehensive scope of Faulkner’s life and work before now. William Faulkner Day by Day provides unique insight into the daily life of one of America’s favorite writers. Beyond biography, this book is an effort to recover the diurnal Faulkner, to write in the present tense about past events as if they are happening now. More importantly, this book is concerned with more than the writer’s life. Instead, it examines the whole man—the daily, mundane, profound, life changing, and everything in between. Spanning from the 1825 birth of Faulkner’s great-grandfather to Faulkner’s death 137 years later to the day, author and biographer Carl Rollyson presents for the first time a complete portrait of Faulkner’s life untethered from any one biographical or critical narrative. Presented as a chronology of events without comment, this book is accompanied by an extensive list of principal personages and is supported by extensive archival research and interviews. Populated by the characters of Faulkner’s life—including family and friends both little known and internationally famous—this book is for Faulkner readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the man and his work.
William Faulkner in Context
by John T. MatthewsWilliam 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 Hollywood 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.
William Faulkner in Holly Springs
by Sally WolffWilliam Faulkner in Holly Springs describes places and people in this small Mississippi town and defines how these newly identified individuals and locales affected Faulkner’s writings. Author Sally Wolff uncovers new information about Faulkner’s sources and examines how the town of Holly Springs, its people, and its culture influenced the Nobel Laureate and the literature he produced. Wolff argues that this information can serve as touchstone sources for some of Faulkner’s most renowned fiction, including The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Intruder in the Dust, and Requiem for a Nun.Information from various interviews with over twenty current and former citizens of Holly Springs also helps to reveal Faulkner’s presence in this small town and the ways in which he drew from and then transformed what he found there into some of the greatest works in American letters. A clearer understanding of Faulkner’s sources helps elucidate the breadth of creativity and imagination with which he forged his world-famous literature.
William Faulkner in Hollywood: Screenwriting for the Studios (The South on Screen)
by Stefan SolomonA scholarly examination of the scripts and fiction Faulkner created during his foray as a Hollywood screenwriter. During more than two decades (1932-1954), William Faulkner worked on approximately fifty screenplays for major Hollywood studios and was credited on such classics as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. Faulkner&’s film scripts—and later television scripts—constitute an extensive and, until now, thoroughly underexplored archival source. Stefan Solomon analyzes the majority of these scripts and also compares them to the fiction Faulkner was writing concurrently. His aim: to reconcile two aspects of a career that were not as distinct as they first might seem: Faulkner the screenwriter and Faulkner the modernist, Nobel Prize–winning author. As Solomon shows Faulkner adjusting to the idiosyncrasies of the screenwriting process (a craft he never favored or admired), he offers insights into Faulkner&’s compositional practice, thematic preoccupations, and understanding of both cinema and television. In the midst of this complex exchange of media and genres, much of Faulkner&’s fiction of the 1930s and 1940s was directly influenced by his protracted engagement with the film industry. Solomon helps us to see a corpus integrating two vastly different modes of writing and a restless author. Faulkner was never only the southern novelist or the West Coast &“hack writer&” but always both at once. Solomon&’s study shows that Faulkner&’s screenplays are crucial in any consideration of his far more esteemed fiction—and that the two forms of writing are more porous and intertwined than the author himself would have us believe. Here is a major American writer seen in a remarkably new way.
William Faulkner in the Media Ecology (Southern Literary Studies)
by Richard Godden Robert Jackson Julian Murphet John T. Matthews Mark Steven Stefan Solomon Sarah Gleeson-White Donald Kartiganer Catherine G. Kodat Peter Lurie Sascha Morrell Jay Watson Michael ZeitlinWilliam Faulkner in the Media Ecology explores the Nobel Prize-winning author immersed in the new media of his time. Intersecting with twentieth-century technology such as photography, film, and sound recording, these twelve essays portray Faulkner as not only as a writer looking back on the history of the U.S. South, but also as a screenwriter, aviator, and celebrity. This fresh, interdisciplinary approach to Faulkner presents an innovative way of reassessing a body of literary work that has engaged readers and critics for over sixty years. Essays by John T. Matthews, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Stefan Solomon, and Donald M. Kartiganer assess how Faulkner's legacy has been shaped through media adaptation and public commemoration of his work. Jay Watson, Michael Zeitlin, Sarah Gleeson-White, Robert Jackson, and Sascha Morrell consider a range of media relevant to the creation of the writer's stories and ways to recalibrate traditional thinking about his writing. Mark Steven, Peter Lurie, and Richard Godden examine how the vastly different mediations of both cinema and money influenced Faulkner's work. Editors Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon have brought together some of the most prominent voices in Faulkner studies, along with a number of emerging scholars, to construct a portrait of Faulkner as a thoroughly modern writer, as much attuned to the evolution of the contemporary world as he was to the past.
William Faulkner, Life Glimpses
by Louis Daniel BrodskyDuring thirty years of literary collecting, Louis Daniel Brodsky has acquired some of the most important source materials on the life and work of William Faulkner anywhere available. Indeed, the Brodsky Collection, now owned by Southeast Missouri State University, has been characterized by Robert Penn Warren as "stupendous. " In William Faulkner, Life Glimpses, Brodsky mines this storehouse of previously unpublished material, using interviews, letters, speeches, movie scripts, and notes to enrich our understanding of this well-known Southern writer. The result is a highly readable biography that is thematic and episodic rather than chronological in its organization. Building on specific documents in the collection, Brodsky opens new windows on the parallel development of Faulkner's literary career and personal life. New material on the early poems ''Elder Watson in Heaven" and "Pregnancy" gives insight into Faulkner's developing literary and personal aesthetics during the 1920s and 1930s. Faulkner's metamorphosis from self-doubting, isolated artist to confident public spokesman during the 1940s and 1950s forms the central core of the study. Through previously unavailable screenplays written for Warner Bros. during World War II and an interview with Faulkner's fellow screenwriter Albert I. "Buzz" Bezzerides, Brodsky charts the decline in Faulkner's literary output and his corresponding discovery of a public voice. He shows how Faulkner's astonishingly positive 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech was not a sudden about-face from the bleak outlook that had produced The Sound and the Fury. Rather, Faulkner's years in Hollywood showed him that words, even screenplays, could shape the way people think and react. Faulkner's lifelong quest for a "manly" role ended, Brodsky declares, when he took up the mantle of public spokesmanship. In the final chapter, a revealing interview with Faulkner's granddaughter, Victoria Fielden Johnson, paints an insider's portrait of life at the Faulkner home, Rowan Oak. A copy of Faulkner's recipe for curing pork, included in the appendix, emphasizes his longterm struggle to produce fine literature while supplying the everyday needs of a large family. These and other materials, previously unavailable to scholars and the reading public, will broaden and enrich our understanding of one of America's most celebrated writers.
William Faulkner of Yoknapatawpha County
by Lewis LearyOne of a series entitled Twentieth Century American Writers.
William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition (Southern Literary Studies)
by David H. EvansIn William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition, David H. Evans pairs the writings of America's most intellectually challenging modern novelist, William Faulkner, and the ideas of America's most revolutionary modern philosopher, William James. Though Faulkner was dubbed an idealist after World War II, Evans demonstrates that Faulkner's writing is deeply connected to the emergence of pragmatism as an intellectual doctrine and cultural force in the early twentieth century. Tracing pragmatism to its very roots, Evans examines the nineteenth-century confidence man of antebellum literature as the original practitioner of the pragmatic principle that a belief can give rise to its own objects. He casts this figure as the missing link between Faulkner and James, giving him new prominence in the prehistory of pragmatism. Moving on to Jamesian pragmatism, Evans contends that James's central innovation was his ability to define truth in narrative terms -- just as the confidence man did -- as something subjective and personal that continually shapes reality, rather than a set of static, unchanging facts.In subsequent chapters Evans offers detailed interpretations of three of Faulkner's most important novels, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and The Hamlet, revealing that Faulkner, too, saw truth as fluid. By avoiding conclusion and finality, these three novels embody the pragmatic belief that life and the world are unstable and constantly evolving. Absalom, Absalom! stages a conflict of historical discourses that -- much like the pragmatic concept of truth -- can never be ultimately resolved. Evans shows us how Faulkner explores the conventional and arbitrary status of racial identity in Go Down, Moses, in a way that is strikingly similar to James's criticism of the concept of identity in general. Finally, Evans reads The Hamlet, a work that is often used to support the idea that Faulkner is opposed to modernity, as a depiction of a distinctly pragmatic and modern world.With its creative coupling of James's philosophy and Faulkner's art, Evans's lively, engaging book makes a bold contribution to Faulkner studies and studies of southern literature.
William Faulkner's 'Absalom, Absalom!: A Critical Casebook (Routledge Library Editions: The American Novel #13)
by Elisabeth MuhlenfeldOriginally published in 1984. William Faulkner is the most studied American author of our time. This volume presents a collection of some of the best critical essays on William Faulkner’s ninth novel Absalom, Absalom!. Numerous approaches are represented; among them are theme studies, close readings, psychological studies, source studies, structural studies, and analyses of style and narrative technique.
William Faulkner's Characters: An Index to the Published and Unpublished Fiction (Routledge Library Editions: The American Novel #5)
by Thomas E. DasherOriginally published in 1981. This index to characters and names in the published and unpublished fiction of William Faulkner is in two parts. The first, divided into novels, short stories, and unpublished fiction, lists the characters within each individual work. The second is an index of all named characters. Within each division of the first part of the index, works are listed alphabetically. The characters and names in each work are divided into fictional, unnamed, historical, Biblical and literary/mythic. The Master Index of named characters is a conflation of all the fictional characters as well as historical/Biblical/literary/mythic characters and names which appear in all the fiction. All characters are identified as clearly and succinctly as possible without interpretation of their roles.
William Faulkner's Gothic Domain
by Elizabeth M. KerrFrom the book: "The term "Gothic" unfortunately has pejorative connotations which we must recognize before giving it the comprehensive definition necessary to an examination of the pervasive Gothic elements in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels. In current literary criticism "Gothic" either refers in the historical sense to the Gothic novel as a subgenre, from Horace Walpole through his literary successors such as Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles Maturin, or is loosely applied to various aspects of serious modern novelists such as Faulkner and Carson McCullers."
William Faulkner's Light in August (Modern Critical Interpretations)
by Harold BloomEssays from various critics.
William Gager: The Complete Works (Routledge Revivals)
by William GagerPublished in 1994: This book represents the Latin Playwright’s work of the Tudor period.
William Gibson (Modern Masters of Science Fiction)
by Gary WestfahlThe leading figure in the development of cyberpunk, William Gibson (born in 1948) crafted works in which isolated humans explored near-future worlds of ubiquitous and intrusive computer technology and cybernetics. This volume is the first comprehensive examination of the award-winning author of the seminal novel Neuromancer (and the other books in the Sprawl trilogy, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive), as well as other acclaimed novels including recent bestsellers Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. Renowned scholar Gary Westfahl draws upon extensive research to provide a compelling account of Gibson's writing career and his lasting influence in the science fiction world. Delving into numerous science fiction fanzines that the young Gibson contributed to and edited, Westfahl delivers new information about his childhood and adolescence. He describes for the first time more than eighty virtually unknown Gibson publications from his early years, including articles, reviews, poems, cartoons, letters, and a collaborative story. The book also documents the poems, articles, and introductions that Gibson has written for various books, and its discussions are enriched by illuminating comments from various print and online interviews. The works that made Gibson famous are also featured, as Westfahl performs extended analyses of Gibson's ten novels and nineteen short stories. Lastly, the book presents a new interview with Gibson in which the author discusses his correspondence with author Fritz Leiber, his relationship with the late scholar Susan Wood, his attitudes toward critics, his overall impact on the field of science fiction, and his recently completed screenplay and forthcoming novel.
William Gibson's "Neuromancer": A Critical Companion (Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon)
by Graham J. MurphyWilliam Gibson’s Neuromancer: A Critical Companion presents Gibson’s rise as an influential figure within and beyond the science fiction field. Gibson’s success with Neuromancer, the first novel to win the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and Philip K. Dick Award, is in part a direct result of the rising popularity of cyberpunk in the early- to mid-1980s, although it could just as easily be said cyberpunk’s success was in no small part a direct result of Neuromancer’s explosion onto the science fiction scene.Neuromancer’s ongoing relevance remains undiminished because we are effectively living in a technocultural age that is increasingly difficult to distinguish from Gibson’s novel. As Graham J. Murphy demonstrates in this companion, the novel remains instrumental in thinking through the ongoing explorations of the posthuman:transhumanism, the Utopia/Anti-Utopia dynamic, and capitalist realism, to name a few of themore significant critical vehicles with which to better understand and contextualize our technocultural age and Neuromancer’s role in both shaping it and responding to it. This book provides a critical introduction to Neuromancer and cyberpunk culture.