Faulkner's County PDF Download

Author: Don Harrison Doyle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha

Author: Charles Shelton Aiken
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820332194
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
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.

Author: Evans Harrington
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617035104
Category : Mississippi
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Author: Tim A. Ryan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807160253
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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During the 1920s and 1930s, Mississippi produced two of the most significant influences upon twentieth-century culture: the modernist fiction of William Faulkner and the recorded blues songs of African American musicians like Charley Patton, Geeshie Wiley, and Robert Johnson. In Yoknapatawpha Blues, the first book examining both Faulkner and the music of the south, Tim A. Ryan identifies provocative parallels of theme and subject in diverse regional genres and texts. Placing Faulkner's literary texts and prewar country blues song lyrics on equal footing, Ryan illuminates the meanings of both in new and unexpected ways. He provides close analysis of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 in Faulkner's "Old Man" and Patton's "High Water Everywhere"; racial violence in the story "That Evening Sun" and Wiley's "Last Kind Words Blues"; and male sexual dysfunction in Sanctuary and Johnson's "Dead Shrimp Blues." This interdisciplinary study reveals how the characters of Yoknapatawpha County and the protagonists in blues songs similarly strive to assert themselves in a threatening and oppressive world. By emphasizing the modernism found in blues music and the echoes of black vernacular culture in Faulkner's writing, Yoknapatawpha Blues links elucidates the impact of both Faulkner's fiction and roots music on the culture of the modern South, and of the nation.

Author: Cleanth Brooks
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807116012
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Hailed by critics and scholars as the most valuable study of Faulkner's fiction, Cleanth Brooks's William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country explores the Mississippi writer's fictional county and the commanding role it played in so much of his work. Brooks shows that Faulkner's strong attachment to his region, with its rich particularity and deep sense of community, gave him a special vantage point from which to view the modern world.Books's consideration of such novels as Light in August, The Unvanquished, As I Lay Dying, and Intruder in the Dust shows the ways in which Faulkner used Yoknapatawpha County to examine the characteristic themes of the twentieth century. Contending that a complete understanding of Faulkner's writing cannot be had without a thorough grasp of fictional detail, Brooks gives careful attention to "what happens: In the Yoknapatawpha novels. He also includes useful genealogies of Faulkner's fictional clans and a character index.

Author: Doreen Fowler
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617033896
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Author: Michael Gorra
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631491717
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.

Author: Joel Williamson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195356403
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 539

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Book Description
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.

Author: Annette Trefzer
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604735619
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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William Faulkner grew up and began his writing career during a time of great cultural upheaval, especially in the realm of sexuality, where every normative notion of identity and relationship was being re-examined. Not only does Faulkner explore multiple versions of sexuality throughout his work, but he also studies the sexual dimension of various social, economic, and aesthetic concerns. In Faulkner's Sexualities, contributors query Faulkner's life and fiction in terms of sexual identity, sexual politics, and the ways in which such concerns affect his aesthetics. Given the frequent play with sexual norms and practices, how does Faulkner's fiction constitute the sexual subject in relation to the dynamics of the body, language, and culture? In what ways does Faulkner participate in discourses of masculinity and femininity, desire and reproduction, heterosexuality and homosexuality? In what ways are these discourses bound up with representations of race and ethnicity, modernity and ideology, region and nation? In what ways do his texts touch on questions concerning the racialization of categories of gender within colonial and dominant metropolitan discourses and power relations? Is there a southern sexuality? This volume wrestles with these questions and relates them to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.

Author: Phillip Gordon
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496826019
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
The life and works of William Faulkner have generated numerous biographical studies exploring how Faulkner understood southern history, race, his relationship to art, and his place in the canons of American and world literature. However, some details on Faulkner’s life collected by his early biographers never made it into published form or, when they did, appeared in marginalized stories and cryptic references. The biographical record of William Faulkner’s life has yet to come to terms with the life-long friendships he maintained with gay men, the extent to which he immersed himself into gay communities in Greenwich Village and New Orleans, and how profoundly this part of his life influenced his “apocryphal” creation of Yoknapatawpha County. Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond explores the intimate friendships Faulkner maintained with gay men, among them Ben Wasson, William Spratling, and Hubert Creekmore, and places his fiction into established canons of LGBTQ literature, including World War I literature and representations of homosexuality from the Cold War. The book offers a full consideration of his relationship to gay history and identity in the twentieth century, giving rise to a new understanding of this most important of American authors.