[PDF] Faulkner And Southern Womanhood eBook

Author : Diane Roberts
Publisher :
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 19,11 MB
Release : 1994
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780820315676

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"In Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, Diane Roberts examines the vexed and contradictory responses of the South's most celebrated novelist to the traditional representations of women that were bequeathed to him by his culture." "The very mention of "the South," Roberts observes, conjures up a crazy quilt of images - from the romantic to the violent, from the gracious and glamorous to the backward and racist. The phrase "southern woman" likewise evokes a whole range of stock characters and stereotypes. Tracing the ways in which William Faulkner characterized women in his fiction, Roberts posits six familiar representations - the Confederate woman, the mammy, the tragic mulatta, the new belle, the spinster, and the mother - and, through close feminist readings, shown how the writer reactivated and reimagined them. In so doing, Roberts sees Faulkner as both a product and a producer of that multi-faceted place - and metaphor - called the South. "As a southerner," she writes, "Faulkner inherited the images, icons, and demons of his culture. They are part of the matter of the region with which he engages, sometimes accepting, sometimes rejecting."" "Drawing on extensive research into southern popular culture and the findings and interpretations of historians, Roberts demonstrates how Faulkner's greatest fiction, published during the 1920s and 1930s, grew out of his reactions to the South's attempts to redefine and solidify its hierarchical conceptions of race, gender, and class. During the era in which Faulkner's psyche was formed, the South's efforts to maintain its cultural stability included everything from lynching to erecting Confederate monuments and apotheosizing Gone with the Wind. Struggling to understand his region, Roberts says, Faulkner exposed the South's self-conceptions as quite precarious, with women slipping toward masculinity, men slipping toward femininity, and white identity slipping toward black. At their best, according to Roberts, Faulkner's novels reveal the South's failure to reassert the boundaries of race, gender, and class by which it traditionally sustained itself." "Earlier studies of female characters in Faulkner's novels have charged the writer with unrelenting misogyny or have read these characters as mythic embodiments of "the life force." Offering a richer view befitting the writer's complexities and contradictions, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood revises, reimagines, and reinvigorates our understanding of Faulkner the artist and Faulkner the southerner. It reveals, fully and contentiously, the challenge Faulkner poses to the South's most sacred icons."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author : Diane Roberts
Publisher :
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 34,66 MB
Release : 1994
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780820317410

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This study examines the vexed and contradictory responses of the South's most celebrated novelist to the traditional representations of women that were bequeathed to him by his culture. Tracing the ways in which William Faulkner characterized women in his fiction, Diane Roberts posits six familiar representations--the Confederate woman, the mammy, the tragic mulatta, the new belle, the spinster, and the mother--and through close feminist readings shows how the writer reactivated and reimagined them. "As a southerner," Roberts writes, "Faulkner inherited the images, icons, and demons of his culture. They are part of the matter of the region with which he engages, sometimes accepting, sometimes rejecting." Drawing on extensive research into southern popular culture and the findings and interpretations of historians, Roberts demonstrates how Faulkner's greatest fiction, published during the 1920s and 1930s, grew out of his reactions to the South's extreme and sometimes violent attempts to redefine and solidify its hierarchical conceptions of race, gender, and class. Struggling to understand his region, Roberts says, Faulkner exposed the South's self-conceptions as quite precarious, with women slipping toward masculinity, men slipping toward femininity, and white identity slipping toward black. At their best, according to Roberts, Faulkner's novels reveal the South's failure to reassert the boundaries of race, gender, and class by which it has traditionally sustained itself.

Author : John T. Matthews
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 5 pages
File Size : 33,42 MB
Release : 2011-10-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1444354914

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Considered 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.

Author : Judith L. Sensibar
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 617 pages
File Size : 41,8 MB
Release : 2009-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0300142439

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In this exploration of Faulkner's creative process, Sensibar discovers that the relationships that Faulkner had with three particular women were not simply close; they gave life to his imagination. The author brings to the foreground, as Faulkner did, this 'female world', an approach unprecedented in Faulkner biography.

Author : Biljana Oklopcic
Publisher : Springer
Page : 124 pages
File Size : 32,59 MB
Release : 2014-06-26
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3662437031

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The last fifty years have witnessed a never-ending flow of criticism of William Faulkner and his fiction. While this book touches on the prevailing critical theory, it concentrates on a number of fresh observations on themes and motifs that place William Faulkner’s fiction in general, regional, global and universal contexts of American and Western literature. Paying special attention to themes and motifs of racism, sexism, women's education, myths and stereotypes – to mention just a few — the book analyzes Faulkner’s ability to write and to be read within and beyond his “native keystone” – his South. Coming from a non US-Americanist perspective, this contribution to the scholarly literature on William Faulkner discusses his best-known novels, contends that regionalism, internationalism and universalism are the context of his fiction and argues for feminist, post-colonial, and psychoanalytical approaches to it. The book is intended for scholars in the field of American literature, American Studies and Southern Studies as it covers the South’s complex history, its peculiar cultural institutions and the daunting body of international critical studies that has flourished around the novels during the last five decades. Graduate students will also find this book useful as it analyzes and interprets the novels and short stories of one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th century in an easily understandable way, offering new and fresh readings on (1) race and gender stereotypes present in American and European culture and literature, (2) conventions of family/genealogical fiction/drama and (3) universal life situations and feelings.

Author : Joel Williamson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 539 pages
File Size : 26,72 MB
Release : 1995-12-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0195356403

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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.