William Faulkner, Gavin Stevens, and the Cavalier Tradition
William Faulkner, Gavin Stevens, and the Cavalier Tradition

Author: Lorie Watkins Fulton

Publisher: Modern American Literature

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781433111556

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Many readers imagine Gavin Stevens as the character most similar to William Faulkner in all of his apocryphal Yoknapatawpha, and while Stevens was once considered the most reliable Faulknerian spokesperson, ample scholarship has demonstrated that he functions as far more than merely the author's mouthpiece. In William Faulkner, Gavin Stevens, and the Cavalier Tradition, Lorie Watkins Fulton defines Stevens's role and examines the scope of his influence. Fulton proposes that Faulkner uses similarities between himself and Stevens to voice, at a fictional remove, concerns about people of his own class and even of his own ancestry. Ultimately, she suggests that Stevens's manipulations of the law, his misunderstanding of human beings, and his rhetorically high-minded pursuit of «not so much truth as of justice, or of justice as he sees it» remove him ideologically only a degree or two away from the most terrifying dictators of the twentieth century.

Faulkner and History
Faulkner and History

Author: Jay Watson

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2017-03-15

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1496810007

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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.

Faulkner's Geographies
Faulkner's Geographies

Author: Jay Watson

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2015-06-25

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1496802284

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The recent spatial turn in social theory and cultural studies opens up exciting new possibilities for the study of William Faulkner's literature. The fictional domains of Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson, Mississippi, are not simply imagined communities but imaginative geographies of remarkable complexity and detail, as evidenced by the maps Faulkner created of his “apocryphal” county. Exploring the diverse functions of space in Faulkner's artistic vision, the eleven essays in Faulkner's Geographies delve deep into Yoknapatawpha but also reach beyond it to uncover unsuspected connections and flows linking local, regional, national, hemispheric, and global geographies in Faulkner's writings. Individual contributions examine the influence of the plantation as a land-use regime on Faulkner's imagination of north Mississippi's geography; the emergence of “micro-Souths” as a product of modern migratory patterns in the urban North of Faulkner's fiction; the enlistment of the author's work in the geopolitics of the cultural Cold War during the 1950s; the historical and literary affiliations between Faulkner's Deep South and Greater Mexico; the local and idiosyncratic as alternatives to region and nation; the unique intersection of regional and metropolitan geographies that Faulkner encountered as a novice writer immersed in the literary culture of New Orleans; the uses of feminist geography to trace the interplay of gender, space, and movement; and the circulation of Caribbean and “Black South” spaces and itineraries through Faulkner's masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! By bringing new attention to the function of space, place, mapping, and movement in his literature, Faulkner's Geographies seeks to redraw the very boundaries of Faulkner studies.

A Literary History of Mississippi
A Literary History of Mississippi

Author: Lorie Watkins

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2017-05-31

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1496811909

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With contributions by Ted Atkinson, Robert Bray, Patsy J. Daniels, David A. Davis, Taylor Hagood, Lisa Hinrichsen, Suzanne Marrs, Greg O'Brien, Ted Ownby, Ed Piacentino, Claude Pruitt, Thomas J. Richardson, Donald M. Shaffer, Theresa M. Towner, Terrence T. Tucker, Daniel Cross Turner, Lorie Watkins, and Ellen Weinauer Mississippi is a study in contradictions. One of the richest states when the Civil War began, it emerged as possibly the poorest and remains so today. Geographically diverse, the state encompasses ten distinct landform regions. As people traverse these, they discover varying accents and divergent outlooks. They find pockets of inexhaustible wealth within widespread, grinding poverty. Yet the most illiterate, disadvantaged state has produced arguably the nation's richest literary legacy. Why Mississippi? What does it mean to write in a state of such extremes? To write of racial and economic relations so contradictory and fraught as to defy any logic? Willie Morris often quoted William Faulkner as saying, "To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi." What Faulkner (or more likely Morris) posits is that Mississippi is not separate from the world. The country's fascination with Mississippi persists because the place embodies the very conflicts that plague the nation. This volume examines indigenous literature, Southwest humor, slave narratives, and the literature of the Civil War. Essays on modern and contemporary writers and the state's changing role in southern studies look at more recent literary trends, while essays on key individual authors offer more information on luminaries including Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, and Margaret Walker. Finally, essays on autobiography, poetry, drama, and history span the creative breadth of Mississippi's literature. Written by literary scholars closely connected to the state, the volume offers a history suitable for all readers interested in learning more about Mississippi's great literary tradition.

Faulkner's Media Romance
Faulkner's Media Romance

Author: Julian Murphet

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-13

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0190664258

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This book treats William Faulkner's major fiction--from Flags in the Dust through to Absalom, Absalom!--to a searching reappraisal under the spotlight of a media-historical inquiry. It proposes that Faulkner's inveterate attraction to the paradigms of romance was disciplined and masked by the recurrent use of metaphorical figures borrowed from the new media ecology. Faulkner dressed up his romance materials in the technological garb of radio, gramophony, photography, and cinema, along with the transportational networks of road and air that were being installed in the 1920s. His modernism emerges from a fraght but productive interplay between his anachronistic predilection for chivalric chichés and his extraordinarily knowledgeable interest in the most up-to-date media institutions and forms. Rather than see Faulkner as a divided author, who worked for money in the magazines and studios while producing his serious fiction in despite of their symbolic economies, this study demonstrates how profoundly his mature art was shot through with the figures and dynamics of the materials he publicly repudiated. The result is a richer and more nuanced understanding of the dialectics of his art.

Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction
Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction

Author: P. Bedore

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-11-07

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1137288655

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This book reveals subversive representations of gender, race and class in detective dime novels (1860-1915), arguing that inherent tensions between subversive and conservative impulses—theorized as contamination and containment—explain detective fiction's ongoing popular appeal to readers and to writers such as Twain and Faulkner.

Blue-Collar Pop Culture
Blue-Collar Pop Culture

Author: M. Keith Booker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-03-09

Total Pages: 639

ISBN-13:

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From television, film, and music to sports, comics, and everyday life, this book provides a comprehensive view of working-class culture in America. The terms "blue collar" and "working class" remain incredibly vague in the United States, especially in pop culture, where they are used to express and connote different things at different times. Interestingly, most Americans are, in reality, members of the working class, even if they do not necessarily think of themselves that way. Perhaps the popularity of many cultural phenomena focused on the working class can be explained in this way: we are endlessly fascinated by ourselves. Blue-Collar Pop Culture: From NASCAR to Jersey Shore provides a sophisticated, accessible, and entertaining examination of the intersection between American popular culture and working-class life in America. Covering topics as diverse as the attacks of September 11th, union loyalties, religion, trailer parks, professional wrestling, and Elvis Presley, the essays in this two-volume work will appeal to general readers and be valuable to scholars and students studying American popular culture.