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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.
Contributions by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Jordan Burke, Rebecca Bennett Clark, James C. Cobb, Anna Creadick, Colin Dayan, Wai Chee Dimock, Sarah E. Gardner, Hannah Godwin, Brooks E. Hefner, Andrew B. Leiter, Sean McCann, Conor Picken, Natalie J. Ring, Calvin Schermerhorn, and Jay Watson William Faulkner remains a historian’s writer. A distinguished roster of historians are drawn to him as a fellow historian, a shaper of narrative reflections on the meaning of the past; as a historiographer, a theorist and dramatist of the fraught enterprise of doing history; and as a historical figure himself, especially following his mid-century emergence as a public intellectual after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume brings together historians and literary scholars to explore the many facets of Faulkner’s relationship to history: the historical contexts of his novels and stories; his explorations of the historiographic imagination; his engagement with historical figures from both the regional and national past; his influence on professional historians; his pursuit of alternate modes of temporal awareness; and the histories of print culture that shaped the production, reception, and criticism of Faulkner’s work. Contributors draw on the history of development in the Mississippi Valley, the construction of Confederate memory, the history and curriculum of Harvard University, twentieth-century debates over police brutality and temperance reform, the history of modern childhood, and the literary histories of antislavery writing and pulp fiction to illuminate Faulkner’s work. Others in the collection explore the meaning of Faulkner’s fiction for such professional historians as C. Vann Woodward and Albert Bushnell Hart. In these ways and more, Faulkner and History offers fresh insights into one of the most persistent and long-recognized elements of the Mississippian’s artistic vision.
Francisco grew up at McCarroll Place, his familyb2ss ancestral home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, thirty miles north of Oxford. In the conversations with Wolff, he recalls that as a boy he would sit and listen as his father and Faulkner sat on the gallery and talked about whatever came to mind. Francisco frequently told stories to Faulkner, many of them oft-repeated, about his family and community, which dated to antebellum times. Some of these stories, Wolff shows, found their way into Faulknerb2ss fiction. Faulkner also displayed an absorbing interest in a seven-volume diary kept by Dr. Franciscob2ss great-great-grandfather Francis Terry Leak, who owned extensive plantation lands in northern Mississippi before the Civil War. Some parts of the diary recount incidents in Leakb2ss life, but most of the diary concerns business transactions, including the buying and selling of slaves and the building of a plantation home.
Contributions by Tim Armstrong, Edward A. Chappell, W. Ralph Eubanks, Amy A. Foley, Michael Gorra, Sherita L. Johnson, Andrew B. Leiter, John T. Matthews, Julie Beth Napolin, Erin Penner, Stephanie Rountree, Julia Stern, Jay Watson, and Randall Wilhelm In 1930, the same year he moved into Rowan Oak, a slave-built former plantation home in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner published his first work of fiction that gave serious attention to the experience and perspective of an enslaved individual. For the next two decades, Faulkner repeatedly returned to the theme of slavery and to the figures of enslaved people in his fiction, probing the racial, economic, and political contours of his region, nation, and hemisphere in work such as The Sound and the Fury; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and Go Down, Moses. Faulkner and Slavery is the first collection to address the myriad legacies of African chattel slavery in the writings and personal history of one of the twentieth century’s most incisive authors on US slavery and the long ordeal of race in the Americas. Contributors to the volume examine the constitutive links among slavery, capitalism, and modernity across Faulkner’s oeuvre. They study how the history of slavery at the University of Mississippi informs writings like Absalom, Absalom! and trace how slavery’s topologies of the rectilinear grid or square run up against the more reparative geography of the oval in Faulkner’s narratives. Contributors explore how the legacies of slavery literally sound and resound across centuries of history, and across multiple novels and stories in Faulkner’s fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, and they reveal how the author’s remodeling work on his own residence brought him into an uncomfortable engagement with the spatial and architectural legacies of chattel slavery in north Mississippi. Faulkner and Slavery offers a timely intervention not only in the critical study of the writer’s work but in ongoing national and global conversations about the afterlives of slavery and the necessary work of antiracism.
Illustrates how Faulkner and Hemingway's artistic paths and performed masculinities clashed as the authors measured themselves against each other and engendered a mutual psychological influence.
Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha
In this major reassessment, now available in paperback, Richard Gray uses and develops recent theories about the relationship between writing and historical experience, language and social change, to draw a brilliantly detailed portrait of the place and times Faulkner inhabited. Attending closely to each of the novels, Gray shows how they brim with an often undisclosed biography that is at once personal and cultural.
From the hunter-gatherers two million years ago to the ancient empires of Persia and China, and from the Russian Revolution to modern imperialism, humans have always struggled to create a better society than what came before. All over the world at numerous points in the past, a different way of life has become an absolute necessity, over and over again. This is a history of the humans in these struggles--the hominid and the hunter, the emperor and the slave, the dictator and the revolutionary. Reading against the grain of mainstream histories, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past has never been predetermined. From antiquity to feudalism, and from fascism to our precarious political present, choices have always been numerous and complex, and the possible outcomes have ranged broadly between liberation and barbarism. Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives the transformative events of our many histories. This is a history of power, abuse, and greed, but also one of liberation, progress, and solidarity. In our fraught political present--as we face the loss of civil liberties and environmental protections, the rise of ethnonationalism, and the looming threat of nuclear war--we need the perspective of these histories now more than ever. The lesson of A Radical History of the World is that, if we created our past, we can also create a better future.
It seems appropriate, if not inevitable, that one of our best critics should be the foremost authority on one of our best novelists. Cleanth Brooks, the author of three seminal studies of William Faulkner, has been a serious student of that master craftsman's fiction for more than four decades. In this new collection, Brooks considers many of the important characteristics of Faulkner's work. He focuses more specifically than he has in the past on certain questions and in some instances offers rebuttals to what he considered unfair assessments of Faulkner. In the first essay, Brooks challenges the notion that Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and other members of the Fugitive-Agrarian movement at Vanderbilt University were slow to recognize Faulkner's achievements. Indeed, Brooks provides clear evidence not only that the Fugitives were early supporters of Faulkner but that Faulkner and the Fugitives shared many concerns and ideas about their region. Brooks also writes about Faulkner's personal beliefs and demonstrates how the virtues Faulkner held in highest esteem -- such as courage and honor -- are embodied in his fiction. In two essays, "Faulkner and the Community" and "Faulkner's Two Cities," Brooks analyzes the importance of a closely knit world -- specifically the hill region of north Mississippi and the cities of Memphis and New Orleans -- to Faulkner's works. Brooks considers Faulkner's serious regard for the chivalric tradition, as well as his amusement in Gavin Stevens' exemplification of it in Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun. Faulkner's treatment of women characters, especially in Light in August and The Hamlet, is discussed, as are his ideas about the American Dream. These essays are vintage Brooks. The prose is, as always, felicitous, the manner modest and winning, the thought pertinent and rigorous. Despite the thematic diversity of the essays, the emphasis is ultimately the same: reading and rereading the novels of William Faulkner is a continuing pleasure and an enduring challenge.
“Accessible . . . Engaging . . . May well be our fullest account to date of what Bleikasten calls Faulkner’s ‘energy for life’ and ‘will to write.’” —Theresa Towner, author of The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner Writing to American poet Malcolm Cowley in 1949, William Faulkner expressed his wish to be known only through his books—but his wish would not come true. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature several months later, and when he died famous in 1962, his biographers immediately began to unveil and dissect the unhappy life of “the little man from Mississippi.” Despite the many works published about Faulkner, his life and career, it still remains a mystery how a poet of minor symbolist poems rooted in the history of the Deep South became one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Here, renowned critic André Bleikasten revisits Faulkner’s biography through the author’s literary imagination. Weaving together correspondence and archival research with the graceful literary analysis for which he is known, Bleikasten presents a multi-strand account of Faulkner’s life in writing. By carefully keeping both the biographical and imaginative lives in hand, Bleikasten teases out threads that carry the reader through the major events in Faulkner’s life, emphasizing those circumstances that mattered most to his writing: the weight of his multi-generational family history in the South; the formation of his oppositional temperament provoked by a resistance to Southern bourgeois propriety; his creative and sexual restlessness and uncertainty; his lifelong struggle with finances and alcohol; his paradoxical escape to the bondages of Hollywood; and his final bent toward self-destruction. This is the story of the man who wrote timeless works and lived in and through his novels.