"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.
William Faulkner more than any other writer is intimately associated with the South about which he wrote. This biography reveals the man and his family and the ways in which southern culture and his ...own life were wound around one another in his greatest works.
During more than two decades (1932-1954), William Faulkner worked on approximately fifty screenplays for studios, including MGM, 20th Century-Fox, and Warner Bros., and was credited on such classic ...films asThe Big SleepandTo Have and Have Not. The scripts that Faulkner wrote for film-and, later on, television-constitute an extensive and, until now, thoroughly underexplored archival source. Stefan Solomon not only analyzes the majority of these scripts but compares them to the novels and short stories Faulkner was writing at the same time. Solomon's aim is to reconcile two aspects of a career that were not as distinct as they first might seem: Faulkner as a screenwriter and Faulkner as a high modernist, Nobel Prize-winning author.
Faulkner's Hollywood sojourns took place during a period roughly bounded by the publication ofLight in August(1932) andA Fable(1954) and that also saw the publication ofAbsalom, Absalom!;Go Down, Moses; andIntruder in the Dust. As Solomon shows Faulkner attuning himself 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 classic cinema and the emerging medium of 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, sensitive to the different demands of each. Faulkner was never simply 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.
Axestraces the intimate relationship between the texts published by Willa Cather and William Faulkner between 1922 and 1962. When those texts are juxtaposed and examined carefully, the two writers ...seem intensely conscious of, and responsive to, each other's work. In fact, both at some point appear to have caricatured or parodied the other in print. Judging by the texts they left behind, they titillated, offended, exhilarated, and-especially-energized each other. Some readers may conclude that for forty years they helped create each other-the rival geniuses and axes of American fiction in the twentieth century.
At the end of their lives, Cather planned a story to appear posthumously as advice to Faulkner about life and literary style; he planned his last novel to answer her in spirit and published it a month before his death. This groundbreaking study is provocative and sure to ignite the imaginations of literary critics and devoted readers of each author.
A literary scholar explores how the greatest British and American authors wrote about the grief and mourning resulting from WWI.
In response to the devastating trauma of World War I, British and ...American authors wrote about grief. The need to articulate loss inspired moving novels by Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Woolf criticized the role of Britain in the "war to end all wars," and Faulkner recognized in postwar France a devastation of land and people he found familiar from his life in a Mississippi still recovering from the American Civil War. InCharacter and Mourning, Erin Penner shows how these two modernist novelists took on the challenge of rewriting the literature of mourning for a new and difficult era.
Faulkner and Woolf address the massive war losses from the perspective of the noncombatant, thus reimagining modern mourning. By refusing to let war poets dominate the larger cultural portrait of the postwar period, these novelists negotiated a relationship between soldiers and civilians-a relationship that was crucial once the war had ended. Highlighting their sustained attention to elegiac reinvention over the course of their writing careers-fromJacob's Room to The Waves, from The Sound and the Fury to Go Down, Moses-Penner moves beyond biographical and stylistic differences to recognize Faulkner and Woolf's shared role in reshaping elegiac literature in the period following the First World War.
Modernism, postwar manhood, and the individual talent : maturing in the 1920s -- Petulant jibes, catfishlike uncatfishivity, and Hemingwaves : the rivalry escalates in the 1930s -- "Glad to shoot it ...out" : ranking and dueling in the 1940s -- Nobel laureates, wolves, and higher-ranking writers : crescendo and decrescendo in the 1950s and 1960s -- Rivals, matadors, and hunters : textual sparring and parallels
William Faulkner was an aviation cadet in Canada in the closing days of WW I. He later owned his own airplane, and even put on a few air shows. When he wrote of flying, as he often did, it was with a ...great deal of expertise but little concern for the edification of his readers. The result is that many of the five hundred or so passages dealing with aviation in his works are all but incomprehensible to the non-pilot. This work elucidates all the aeronautical references in Faulkner's fiction and verse which might prove troublesome to the general reader. This monograph contains three main sections: An introduction to flight, designed especially for the non-technical reader and intended to provide enough background in aerodynamics and aircraft design to enable one to follow Faulkner's argument intelligently; a brief biography of Faulkner as a pilot and aviation enthusiast; and a reader's guide through the individual works in which aviation plays a part.
Ink of Melancholy re-examines and re-evaluates William Faulkner's work from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, one of his most creative periods. Rather than approach Faulkner's fiction through a ...prefabricated grid, André Bleikasten concentrates on the texts themselves—on the motivations and circumstances of their composition, on the rich array of their themes, structures, textures, points of emphasis and repetition, as well as their rifts and gaps—while drawing on the resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology. Brilliant in its thought and argument, Ink of Melancholy is one of the most insightful and stimulating studies of Faulkner's work.
Nobel laureate William Faulkner is one of the most distinctive voices in American literature. Known for his opaque prose style and his evocative depictions of life in the American South, he is ...recognised as one of the most important authors of the twentieth century. This introductory book provides students and readers of Faulkner with a clear overview of the life and work of one of America's most prolific writers of fiction. His nineteen novels, including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Go Down, Moses and Absalom, Absalom! are discussed in detail, as are his major short stories and nonfiction. Focused on the works themselves, but also providing useful information about their critical reception, this introduction is an accessible guide to Faulkner's challenging and complex oeuvre.
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