Author: Susan Snell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333662
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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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: Judith L. Sensibar
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300142439
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 617
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Book Description
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: Kirk Curnutt
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789140412
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
William Faulkner examines the life and work of the American modernist whose experiments in style and form radically challenged not only the experience of time in narrative, but also conceptions of the American South, race, and the explosive fear of miscegenation. Beginning with the 1929 publication of The Sound and the Fury (his fourth novel), Faulkner produced a dazzling series of masterpieces in rapid order, including As I Lay Dying; Sanctuary; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and Go Down, Moses—novels and stories that alternately exhilarated and exasperated critics and left readers gasping to keep pace with his storytelling innovations. Transforming his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, into the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner created his own microcosm in which compassion and personal honor struggle to stand up to the violence, lust, and greed of the modern world. As prolific as Faulkner was, however, the career of this Nobel laureate was neither easy nor carefree. He was perpetually strapped for cash, burdened with supporting a large extended family, ambivalent toward his marriage, and vulnerable to alcoholism. Honoring both the man and the artist, this book examines how Faulkner strained to balance these pressures and pursue his literary vision with single-minded determination.
Author: Carl Rollyson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496842871
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
William Faulkner has been the topic of numerous biographies, papers, and international attention. Yet there are no collected resources providing a comprehensive scope of Faulkner’s life and work before now. William Faulkner Day by Day provides unique insight into the daily life of one of America’s favorite writers. Beyond biography, this book is an effort to recover the diurnal Faulkner, to write in the present tense about past events as if they are happening now. More importantly, this book is concerned with more than the writer’s life. Instead, it examines the whole man—the daily, mundane, profound, life changing, and everything in between. Spanning from the 1825 birth of Faulkner’s great-grandfather to Faulkner’s death 137 years later to the day, author and biographer Carl Rollyson presents for the first time a complete portrait of Faulkner’s life untethered from any one biographical or critical narrative. Presented as a chronology of events without comment, this book is accompanied by an extensive list of principal personages and is supported by extensive archival research and interviews. Populated by the characters of Faulkner’s life—including family and friends both little known and internationally famous—this book is for Faulkner readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the man and his work.
Author: Jay Watson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
Forensic Fictions is the first book-length critical study of William Faulkner's fictional depictions of the legal vocation and the practice of law. Examining Faulkner's lawyer characters in light of the southern storytelling tradition, Jay Watson argues that the forensic competence of the Faulknerian lawyer is a direct function of his skill as a raconteur. To trace the biographical and historical roots of Faulkner's lifelong preoccupation with the legal profession, Watson draws on contemporary scholarship in narrative, rhetoric, jurisprudence, legal and intellectual history, literary theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His approach yields insightful readings of forensic characters and scenes from such works as "An Odor of Verbena," The Hamlet, "Wild Palms," Absalom, Absalom! and The Reivers. Watson shows the links between storytelling and the competence of Faulkner's legal characters by examining the intertextual logic that connects the two most important lawyers in the Yoknapatawpha fiction: the incompetent Horace Benbow and the more capable Gavin Stevens, whose entrance into Faulkner's oeuvre coincides with Benbow's untimely departure from it. Focusing on the nine novels in which these two characters appear, Watson traces the evolutionary process by which Stevens supplants Benbow. Three of the Stevens novels--Intruder in the Dust, Knight's Gambit, and Requiem for a Nun--from what Watson calls Faulkner's "forensic trilogy" and, when read together, constitute the writer's most sustained investigation of the rhetorical and ethical responsibilities of the lawyer-citizen. Faulkner, Watson argues, saw the forensic figure as a potential hybrid of homo loquens and homo politicus, capable of combing the roles of storyteller, rhetorician, and theatrical performer with those of critic, citizen, and ethical man. As such, this figure served as a provocative authorial surrogate through whom Faulkner could explore diverse and often contradictory aspects of his personal experience, his family background, his cultural heritage, and, most of all, his own artistic use of language.
Author: A. Nicholas Fargnoli
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438108591
Category : Mississippi
Languages : en
Pages : 575
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Book Description
As I Lay Dying; Light in August; The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom!; "The Bear"; and many others.
Author: J. Kenneth Van Dover
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879727239
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
Isn't Justice Always Unfair? explores the uncommonly long and uncommonly rich relationship between the fictional detective and his or her South. It begins with the New Orleans expatriate, Legrand, uncovering Captain Kidd's treasure on an island off Charleston, South Carolina; it covers the satires and parodies of Mark Twain and the polished stories of Melville Davisson Post and Irvin S. Cobb; and it concludes with surveys of the many good and excellent writers who are using the form of the detective story to compose inquiries into the character of life in the South today. At the center of Isn't Justice Always Unfair? lies an analysis of a most remarkable phenomenon: William Faulkner's exploitation of the genre as an avenue into his postage stamp of Southern experience, Yoknapatawpha County.
Author: Robert Coles
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820315362
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
Flannery O'Connor's South offers a forceful analysis, both literary and philosophical, of Flannery O'Connor's life and literature. First published in 1980, this study draws upon Robert Coles' personal experiences in the South during the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, his brief acquaintance with Flannery O'Connor, and his careful readings of her works. The voices and gestures of the people Coles met in the South help illuminate the social scene that influenced one of the region's most valuable and interesting writers.
Author: Donald M. Kartiganer
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604730293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
Essays in centennial celebration of William Faulkner and his achievement With essays and commentaries by André Bleikasten, Joseph Blotner, Larry Brown, Thadious M. Davis, Susan V. Donaldson, Doreen Fowler, The Reverend Duncan M. Gray, Jr., Minrose C. Gwin, Robert W. Hamblin, W. Kenneth Holditch, Lothar Hönnighausen, Richard Howorth, John T. Irwin, Donald M. Kartiganer, Robert C. Khayat, Arthur F. Kinney, Thomas L. McHaney, John T. Matthews, Michael Millgate, David Minter, Richard C. Moreland, Gail Mortimer, Albert Murray, Noel Polk, Carolyn Porter, Hans H. Skei, Judith L. Sensibar, Warwick Wadlington, Philip M. Weinstein, Judith Bryant Wittenberg, and Karl F. Zender William Faulkner was born September 25, 1897. In honor of his centenary the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference of 1997 brought together twenty-five of the most important Faulkner scholars to examine the achievement of this writer generally regarded as the finest American novelist of the twentieth century. The panel discussions and essays that make up Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect provide a comprehensive account of the man and his work, including discussions of his life, the shape of his career, and his place in American literature, as well as fresh readings of such novels as The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and Go Down, Moses. Spanning the full range of critical approaches, the essays address such issues as Faulkner's use of African American dialect as a form of both appropriation and repudiation, his frequent emphasis on the strength of heterosexual desire over actual possession, the significance of his incessant role-playing, and the surprising scope of his reading. Of special interest are the views of Albert Murray, the African American novelist and cultural critic. He tells of reading Faulkner in the 1930s while a student at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. What emerges from this commemorative volume is a plural Faulkner, a writer of different value and meaning to different readers, a writer still challenging readers to accommodate their highly varied approaches to what André Bleikasten calls Faulkner's abiding "singularity." At the University of Mississippi Donald M. Kartiganer fills the William Howry Chair in Faulkner Studies in the department of English and Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
Author: Phillip Gordon
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496826019
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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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.
