Phil Stone of Yoknapatawpha

Phil Stone of Yoknapatawpha PDF Author: Susan Snell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Lawyers
Languages : en
Pages : 1156

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Phil Stone of Yoknapatawpha

Phil Stone of Yoknapatawpha PDF Author: Susan Snell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Lawyers
Languages : en
Pages : 1156

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Book Description


Phil Stone of Oxford

Phil Stone of Oxford PDF Author: Susan Snell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333662
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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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.

Phil Stone, 74, a Lawyer, Gave Early Aid to Faulkner

Phil Stone, 74, a Lawyer, Gave Early Aid to Faulkner PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 29

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Isn't Justice Always Unfair?

Isn't Justice Always Unfair? PDF Author: J. Kenneth Van Dover
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879727239
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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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.

Genius of Place

Genius of Place PDF Author: Max Putzel
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807112052
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Until recently most discussions of William Faulkner have centered exclusively on his novels. Yet no chronicle of Faulkner's Growth as a literary artist, perhaps America’s foremost in this century, can afford to overlook the years he spent struggling to establish himself as a writer of short stories. To trace in detail Faulkner's personal and artistic growth during the prolific years 1925-1931, when he was approaching artistic ripeness and earning belated recognition, has hitherto been impossible. There seemed to be no means of dating the innumerable drafts, the false starts and fumbling revisions, among the thousands of sheets left behind when he died in 1962. Max Putzel’s critical study of these crucial formative years fills this gap—assigning dates to the sketches and drafts of stories and relating them both to Faulkner’s jealously guarded private life and the several critical histories of the novels that have recently appeared. Putzel maintains there is a necessary, a “symbiotic” relation between the novels and the stories. He also finds that the short story form Faulkner found so hard to master liberated a lyrical power that had been stifled during his confused dilettante period as a poet in a provincial southern town. Yet his turbulent, ambivalent feelings about that town and its inhabitants were essential to his development, however slowly and reluctantly he surrendered to their benign influence—the genius of his homeplace. Faulkner also was sensitive to the monumental revolutionary changes, even the trivial fads and foibles, of his own time—the changes that swept the world outside of Oxford, Mississippi, after the Great War he so regretted having missed. Faulkner’s maturing vision of man, history, and class and caste relations was affected by Einstein’s theory of relativity, Freud’s probing into the hidden wellsprings of human behavior, Eliot’s borrowings from anthropology, Joyce’s new rhetoric, Diaghilev’s eclecticism, Picasso’s ventures in cubism and classicism---not to mention the Treaty of Versailles, Prohibition, jazz, free love, free spending, gang violence, false prosperity, the crash, and the depression. These factors also helped shape a style capable of evoking passion and tenderness, anger and laughter, and every intermediate shade of feeling---a style demanding the creative effort of readers. Genius of Place takes all this into account while seeking to determine what is likely to endure and reward future readers of works like “Carcassonne” and The Sound and the Fury, the Snopes trilogy and As I Lay Dying, “Dry September” and Sanctuary.

The Faulkner Newsletter & Yoknapatawpha Review

The Faulkner Newsletter & Yoknapatawpha Review PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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The Evolution of Southern Culture

The Evolution of Southern Culture PDF Author: Numan V. Bartley
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820310329
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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The American South has long been a subject of endless scholarly fascination. Historians and social scientists have endeavored to decipher the "enigma" of the region and to identify the formative factors that have molded the southern experience.They have searched for a "central theme" that would explain southern behavior and have debated the extent to which the region was "distinctive" from the rest of the nation. More recently, historical scholarship has shown a growing interest in the evolution of southern culture and the forces that shaped it. The southern enigma is yet to be fully deciphered, but The Evolution of Southern Culture addresses questions crucial to an understanding of the region's history. The book brings together original, searching essays by nine of the nation's most distinguished scholars: Immanuel Wallerstein, Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eric Foner, Nell Irvin Painter, George M. Frederickson, Joel Williamson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Faulkner on the Color Line

Faulkner on the Color Line PDF Author: Theresa M. Towner
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617030961
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This study argues that Faulkner's writings about racial matters interrogated rather than validated his racial beliefs and that, in the process of questioning his own ideology, his fictional forms extended his reach as an artist. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner wrote what critics term “his later novels.” These have been almost uniformly dismissed, with the prevailing view being that as he became a more public figure, his fiction became a platform rather than a canvas. Within this context Faulkner on the Color Line redeems the novels in the final phase of his career by interpreting them as Faulkner's way of addressing the problem of race in America. They are seen as a series of formal experiments Faulkner deliberately attempted as he examined the various cultural functions of narrative, most particularly those narratives that enforce American racial ideology. The first chapters look at the ways in which the ability to assert oneself verbally informs matters of individual and cultural identity in both the widely studied works of Faulkner's major phase and those in his later career. Later chapters focus on the last works, providing detailed readings of Intruder in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun, the Snopes trilogy, A Fable, and The Reivers. The book examines Faulkner as he confronted the vexing questions of race in these novels and assesses the identity of Faulkner as the Nobel Prize winner who claimed on many occasions that he was “tired,” maybe “written out.” In his decision not to speak in the identity of the Black people represented in his fiction, in his decision to write instead about the complexities of all racial constructions, he produced a host of characters suffering within the rigid protocols on race that had been enforced in America for centuries. As a private, white individual, he could never be other than what he was. Rather than attempt to reconcile Faulkner the public man with the private one, however, this study concludes that through his fiction Faulkner the artist questioned himself and came to understand others across the color line.

William Faulkner, Letters & Fictions

William Faulkner, Letters & Fictions PDF Author: James G. Watson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477303421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Besides the groundbreaking novels and stories that brought him fame, William Faulkner throughout his life wrote letters—to his publisher, his lovers, his family, and his friends. In this first major study of epistolarity in Faulkner's work, James G. Watson examines Faulkner's personal correspondence as a unique second canon of writing, separate from his literary canon with its many fictional letters but developing along parallel lines. By describing the similarity of forms and conventions in Faulkner's personal and fictional correspondence, Watson clearly demonstrates that Faulkner's personal experience as a writer of letters significantly shaped his imaginative work early and late. Letters are always about themselves; they re-create a world between the sender and the receiver. In this illuminating study, Faulkner's personal letters are treated as a form of reflexive writing: first-person narratives in which Sender self-consciously portrays Self to a specific Receiver, likewise portrayed in the letter-text. This duality of actual experience and imaginative re-creation measures the personal distances between the life of the writer and the written self-image. It reveals that letters are at once fragments of autobiography and fictions of self. Such "laws of letters" apply equally to the letters that appear throughout Faulkner's novels and stories. The twenty-one letters and telegrams in The Sound and the Fury, for example, portray character, propel plot, and convey important themes of failed communication and broken identity. From Soldiers' Pay to his last work, Faulkner's carefully lettered canon of fiction is dramatic evidence of his understanding of epistolarity and of the extent to which he adapted letters, including some of his own, to shape his fictional world.

William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha

William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha PDF Author: Elizabeth Margaret Kerr
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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