Author: Ted Atkinson Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 082033085X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
“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.
Author: Susan Snell Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820333662 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 434
Book Description
William Faulkner is Phil Stone's contribution to American literature, once remarked a mutual confidant of the Nobel laureate and the Oxford, Mississippi, attorney. Despite his friendship with the writer for nearly fifty years, Stone is generally regarded as a minor figure in Faulkner studies. In her biography Phil Stone of Oxford, Susan Snell offers the first complete critical assessment of Stone's role in the transformation of Billy Falkner, a promising but directionless young man, into William Faulkner, arguably the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century. In the first decades of their friendship, Stone served Faulkner in many ways--as mentor, muse, patron, editor, agent, and publicist. Later, Stone was among Faulkner's first biographers and was a source of archival, biographical, and critical information for such Faulkner scholars as James B. Meriwether and Carvel Collins. Ironically, the most intriguing aspect of Stone's relationship with Faulkner has until now been the least studied. Stone was one of Faulkner's principal character studies, and from his life came the raw material out of which Faulkner constructed a good part of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Stone's Ivy League education, his friendships with gamblers and prostitutes, his family's hunting excursions, even his family's antebellum mansion only begin to suggest the borrowings from Stone's life found in books ranging from The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses to the Snopes trilogy. Faulkner also appropriated Stone's personality and profession to mirror--and sometimes mask--his own insecurities. Such characters as Quentin Compson, Darl Bundren, Horace Benbow, and Gavin Stevens owe much to the author himself but also recall Stone in often subtle ways. The fraternal rivalries for their mother's love that consume Darl Bundren and Quentin Compson, for example, are based on Stone's own unhappy family life. Bundren's and Compson's mothers more closely resemble Stone's mother than Faulkner's. In Stone, Faulkner saw the Old South confronting its twentieth-century crucibles--the teeming, rapacious white lower classes; the Great Depression; and the first stirrings of the civil rights and women's movements. In the 1930s, Faulkner recurrently dealt with the region's decadence and the fall of old patriarchies like the Compson and Sartoris families. During these years, Faulkner's fortunes rose steadily as Stone's declined, but it is Stone's story--not his own--that he chose to tell. Snell says that in a sense Faulkner usurped Stone's place in the South's social order, building his reputation and acquiring real estate as personal and financial failures nearly overwhelmed Stone. Stone's transparent jealousy of Faulkner, personality flaws, and mental instability in his final years have engendered skepticism about his claims concerning the years he had spent "fooling with Bill." But, to hastily relegate Stone to the marginalia of Yoknapatawpha County, Snell suggests, is to leave untapped a rich source of information.Phil Stone of Oxford tells the tragic story of a talented, complex man, bred for power in the declining era of southern patriarchy, yet compelled to pursue the Muse vicariously.
Author: Morris Dickstein Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393338762 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 625
Book Description
A cultural history of the 1930s explores the anxiety, despair, and optimism of the period, exploring how the period culture provided a dynamic lift to the country's morale.
Author: Alison Collis Greene Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199371873 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Nowhere was the transition from church-based aid to federal welfare state brought about by the Great Depression more dramatic than in the South. For a moment, the southern Protestant establishment turned to face the suffering that plantation capitalism pushed behind its image of planter's hatsand hoopskirts. When starving white farmers marched into an Arkansas town to demand food for their dying children and when priests turned away hungry widows and orphans because they were no needier than anyone else, southern clergy of both races spoke with one voice to say that they had done allthey could. It was time for a higher power to intervene. They looked to God, and then they looked to Roosevelt.When Roosevelt promised a new deal for the "forgotten man," Americans cheered, and when he took office, churches and private agencies gratefully turned much of the responsibility for welfare and social reform over to the state. Yet, argues historian Allison Collis Greene, Roosevelt's New Dealthreatened plantation capitalism even while bending to it. Black southern churches worked to secure benefits for their own communities while white churches divided over loyalties to Roosevelt and Jim Crow. Frustrated by their failure and fractured by divisions over the New Deal, leaders in the majorwhite Protestant denominations surrendered their moral authority in the South. Although the Protestant establishment retained a central role in American life for decades after the Depression, its slip from power made room for upstart Pentecostals and independent evangelicals, who emphasized personalrather than social salvation.
Author: Richelle Putnam Publisher: Arcadia Publishing ISBN: 1439674159 Category : Photography Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
By the time the Great Depression was well underway, Mississippi was still dealing with the lingering effects of the flood of 1927 and the Mississippi Valley drought of 1930. As Pres. Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, Mississippi senator Pat Harrison, chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, oversaw the passage of major New Deal legislation, from which Mississippi reaped many benefits. Other Mississippi politicians like Gov. Mike Connor initiated measures to improve the treatment of inmates at Parchman Prison in the Delta and Gov. Hugh White established the Balancing Agriculture with Industry initiative. Women also played an active role. The Natchez Garden Club successfully spurred tourism by starting the state's first pilgrimage in 1932. Mississippians found employment through the Public Works Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, which stimulated economic development through new and add-on construction in urban and rural areas and the construction of nine state parks. For black Mississippians, segregation and discrimination in New Deal benefits and jobs continued, but what they did receive from the federal government spurred a determination to fight for equality in the Jim Crow South.
Author: Michael Golay Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 143919601X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
The first account of the remarkable eighteen-month journey of Lorena Hickok, intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, throughout the country during the worst of the Great Depression, bearing witness to the unprecedented ravages; an indelible portrait of an unprecedented crisis. DURING THE HARSHEST year of the Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, a top woman news reporter of the day and intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, was hired by FDR’s right-hand man Harry Hopkins to embark upon a grueling journey to the hardest-hit areas of the country to report back on the degree of devastation. Distinguished historian Michael Golay draws on a trove of original sources—including the moving, remarkably intimate, almost daily letters between Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt—as he re-creates that extraordinary journey. Hickok traveled by car almost nonstop for eighteen months, from January 1933 to August 1934, surviving hellish dust storms, rebellions by coal workers in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and a near revolution by Midwest farmers. A brilliant observer, Hickok wrote searing and deeply empathetic reports to Hopkins and letters to Mrs. Roosevelt that comprise an unparalleled record of the worst economic disaster in the history of the country. Historically important, they crucially influenced the scope and strategy of the Roosevelt administration’s unprecedented relief efforts. America 1933 reveals Hickok’s pivotal contribution to the policies of the New Deal and sheds light on her intense but ill-fated relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt and the forces that inevitably came between them.
Author: Bradley Harris Dowden Publisher: Bradley Dowden ISBN: 9780534176884 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 516
Book Description
This book is designed to engage students' interest and promote their writing abilities while teaching them to think critically and creatively. Dowden takes an activist stance on critical thinking, asking students to create and revise arguments rather than simply recognizing and criticizing them. His book emphasizes inductive reasoning and the analysis of individual claims in the beginning, leaving deductive arguments for consideration later in the course.
Author: Richard Godden Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400827914 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
In 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.
Author: Leigh Anne Duck Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820334189 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
How could liberalism and apartheid coexist for decades in our country, as they did during the first half of the twentieth century? This study looks at works by such writers as Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison to show how representations of time in southern narrative first accommodated but finally elucidated the relationship between these two political philosophies. Although racial segregation was codified by U.S. law, says Leigh Anne Duck, nationalist discourse downplayed its significance everywhere but in the South, where apartheid was conceded as an immutable aspect of an anachronistic culture. As the nation modernized, the South served as a repository of the country's romantic notions: the region was represented as a close-knit, custom-bound place through which the nation could temper its ambivalence about the upheavals of progress. The Great Depression changed this. Amid economic anxiety and the international rise of fascism, writes Duck, "the trope of the backward South began to comprise an image of what the United States could become." As she moves from the Depression to the nascent years of the civil rights movement to the early cold war era, Duck explains how experimental writers in each of these periods challenged ideas of a monolithically archaic South through innovative representations of time. She situates their narratives amid broad concern regarding national modernization and governance, as manifest in cultural and political debates, sociological studies, and popular film. Although southern modernists' modes and methods varied along this trajectory, their purpose remained focused: to explore the mutually constitutive relationships between social forms considered "southern" and "national."
Author: William Faulkner Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 030779198X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
This is the second volume of Faulkner’s trilogy about the Snopes family, his symbol for the grasping, destructive element in the post-bellum South. Like its predecessor The Hamlet, and its successor The Mansion, The Town is completely self-contained, but it gains resonance from being read with the other two. The story of Flem Snopes’ ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, the book is rich in typically Faulknerian episodes of humor and of profundity.
Author: Ted Atkinson
Author: Susan Snell
Author: Morris Dickstein
Author: Alison Collis Greene
Author: Richelle Putnam
Author: Michael Golay
Author: Bradley Harris Dowden
Author: Richard Godden
Author: Leigh Anne Duck
Author: William Faulkner