A beautifully illustrated children’s book unlike any other—a tender and atmospheric tale written by William Faulkner as a present for his future stepdaughter “If you are kind to helpless things, you don’t need a Wishing Tree to make things come true.” A strange boy leads a birthday girl and her companions on a hunt for the wishing tree, which brings them many surprising and magical adventures. Written in 1927 and eventually published in 1964 as a limited edition featuring Don Bolognese’s striking illustrations, The Wishing Tree reveals another side to a visionary of American letters, making it a welcome gift to children and to all readers of Faulkner.
Contributions by Josephine Adams, Jeff Allred, Garry Bertholf, Maxwell Cassity, John N. Duvall, Katherine Henninger, Maude Hines, Robert Jackson, Julie Beth Napolin, Rebecca Nisetich, George Porter Thomas, Jay Watson, and Yuko Yamamoto If it seems outrageous to suggest that one of the twentieth century’s most important literary cartographers of the private recesses of consciousness is also among its great novelists of family, William Faulkner nonetheless fits the bill on both counts. Family played an outsized role in both his life and his writings, often in deeply problematic ways, surfacing across his oeuvre in a dazzling range of distorted, defamiliarized, and transgressive forms, while on other occasions serving as a crucible for crushing forces of conformity, convention, and tradition. The dozen essays featured in this collection approach Faulkner’s many families—actual and imagined—as especially revealing windows to his work and his world. Contributors explore the role of the child in Faulkner’s vision of family and regional society; sibling relations throughout the author's body of work; the extension of family networks beyond blood lineage and across racial lines; the undutiful daughters of Yoknapatawpha County; the critical power of family estrangement and subversive genealogies in Faulkner’s imagination; forms of queer and interspecies kinship; the epidemiological imagination of Faulkner’s notorious Snopes family as social contagion; the experiences of the African American families who worked on the writer’s Greenfield Farm property; and Faulkner’s role in promoting a Cold War–era ideology of “the family of man” in post–World War II Japan.
What happens when you marry into a family that includes a Nobel Prize winner who is arguably the finest American writer of the twentieth century? Lawrence Wells, author of In Faulkner’s Shadow: A Memoir, fills this lively tale with stories that answer just that. In 1972, Wells married Dean Faulkner, the only niece of William Faulkner, and slowly found himself lost in the Faulkner mystique. While attempting to rebel against the overwhelming influence of his in-laws, Wells had a front-row seat to the various rivalries that sprouted between his wife and the members of her family, each of whom dealt in different ways with the challenges and expectations of carrying on a literary tradition. Beyond the family stories, Wells recounts the blossoming of a literary renaissance in Oxford, Mississippi, after William Faulkner’s death. Both the town of Oxford and the larger literary world were at a loss as to who would be Faulkner’s successor. During these uncertain times, Wells and his wife established Yoknapatawpha Press and the quarterly literary journal the Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review. In his dual role as publisher and author, Wells encountered and befriended Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Willie Morris, and many other writers. He became both participant and observer to the deeds and misdeeds of a rowdy collection of talented authors living in Faulkner’s shadow. Full of personal insights, this memoir features unforgettable characters and exciting behind-the-scene moments that reveal much about modern American letters and the southern literary tradition. It is also a love story about a courtship and marriage, and an ode to Dean Faulkner Wells and her family.
When the matriarch of the Bundren family dies, her family must confront the daunting task of transporting her body across the state of Mississippi for burial in her hometown. As they embark on this journey, with the coffin in tow, they face several trials and tribulations that not only complicate their travel but also highlight the innate dysfunction of the family's complex dynamic. This comprehensive volume explores the themes of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying through the lens of family dysfunction, offering readers a critical look at the intersection between literature and sociology. The book examines Faulkner's life and influences and explores concepts such as the role of maternal influence and sibling rivalry within the novel and within the broader context of society. Chapters also offer a contemporary perspective on family dysfunction through discussion of topics such as the effects of emotional neglect and the role of maternal instincts.
"William Faulkner (1897-1962) produced such enduring novels as The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and As I Lay Dying, as well as many short stories. His works continue to be a source of interest to scholars and students of literature, and the immense amount of criticism about the Nobel-prize winner continues to grow. Bassett provides an annotated listing of commentary in English on William Faulkner since the late 1980s. This volume dedicates its sections to book-length studies of Faulkner, commentaries on individual novels and short works, criticism covering multiple works, biographical and bibliographical sources, and other materials such as book reviews, doctoral dissertations, and brief commentaries. This bibliography provides a list of all significant recent commentary on Faulkner, and the annotations direct readers to those materials of most interest to them." -- From back of book.
This non-academic author, a retired lawyer, brings William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! to life as uncertainty in Dixie. He traces Faulkner's portrait of the efforts of Thomas Sutpen to create a family dynasty in wealth and community respect and of Rosa Coldfield to revenge Sutpen's treatment of her as a mere reproduction tool. Both efforts are analyzed as life sterilizers inevitably doomed to failure by the uncertainties in life and as examples of the tension between control of the future and love, a choice Faulkner had to make in his own personal life. Line by line analyses of critical portions of the novel reveal its subtleties to the reader. The explanation points out the intentional gaps and spaces in the story that invite reader participation as to what happened. This author gives you his interpretation. You are invited to create your own version of what "really" happened in this archetypal setting in Faulkner's famous Jefferson, Mississippi.
For more than eighty years, Faulkner criticism has attempted to "see all Yoknapatawpha," the fictional Mississippi county in which the author set all but four of his novels as well as more than fifty short stories. One of the most ambitious of these attempts is the ongoing Digital Yoknapatawpha, an online project that is encoding the texts set in Faulkner’s mythical county into a complex database with sophisticated front-end visualizations. In Digitizing Faulkner, the contributors to the project share their findings and reflections on what digital research can mean for Faulkner studies and, by example, other bodies of literature. The essays examine Faulkner’s characters, events, locations, and visualizations, as well as offering more theoretical reflections on digitally mapping specific texts and stories, including the pedagogical implications of this digital approach. Digitizing Faulkner explores how a twenty-first-century research tool intersects with twentieth-century sensibilities, ideologies, behaviors, and material cultures to modify and enhance our understanding of Faulkner’s texts. Contributors: Johannes Burgers, Ashoka University * John Michael Corrigan, National Chengchi University, Taiwan * Ren Denton, East Georgia State College * Jennie Joiner, Keuka College * Erin Penner, Asbury University * Stephen Railton, University of Virginia * Christopher Rieger, Southeast Missouri State University * Ben Robbins, University of Innsbruck * Melanie Benson Taylor, Dartmouth College * Lorie Watkins, William Carey University
This is a genealogical study of the families of Russell Faulkner (ca.1775-1840s) of Edgefield District, SC; his son Elijah Faulkner (1813-1896), and his grandson Eligah Melvin Faulkner (1858-1941). It includes death and marriage records, obituaries, deeds, grave inscriptions and over 230 census records. It covers over 237 years of the Faulkner family in Edgefield, Greenwood, McCormick, and Aiken Counties, South Carolina
This comprehensive Companion to William Faulkner reflects the current dynamic state of Faulkner studies. Explores the contexts, criticism, genres and interpretations of Nobel Prize-winning writer William Faulkner, arguably the greatest American novelist Comprises newly-commissioned essays written by an international contributor team of leading scholars Guides readers through the plethora of critical approaches to Faulkner over the past few decades Draws upon current Faulkner scholarship, as well as critically reflecting on previous interpretations
Chapter 1 provides some general context about Faulkner's life and work in the American South and' Yoknapatawpha County', and introduces the form and style of Faulkner's novel. Chapter 2 provides a discussion of the contexts of Southern history and Faulkner's family history. Chapter 3 is a discussion of the influences on Faulkner of Modernist literature and Modernist psychology and philosophy. Chapter 4 gives a close commentary on each of the novel's four narratives.
