In 1957 and 1958 William Faulkner was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia. During that time he held thirty-seven conferences and answered over two thousand questions on a wide range of concerns, from exegetic problems in his novels to the role of the writer in modern society. Almost every word was recorded on tape, and the result is the classic Faulkner in the University, originally published in 1959 and now available for the first time in a paperback edition. The material collected here offers testimony to some fascinating exchanges between the author and his public and makes up one of the few sourcebooks available on Faulkner's personal views. As the writer himself commented, "These are questions answered without rehearsal or preparation, by a man old enough in the craft of the human heart to have learned that there are no definitive answers to anything, yet still young enough in spirit to believe that truth may still be found provided one seeks enough, tests and discards, and still tries again".
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.
Sometimes called the American Shakespeare, William Faulkner is known for providing poignant and accurate renderings of the human condition, creating a world of colorful characters in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, and writing in a style that is both distinct and demanding. Though he is known as a Southern writer, his appeal transcends regional and even national boundaries. Since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, he has been the subject of more than 5,000 scholarly books and articles. Academic interest in his career has been matched by popular acclaim, with some of his works adapted for the cinema. This reference is an authoritative guide to Faulkner's life, literature, and legacy. The encyclopedia includes nearly 500 alphabetically arranged entries for topics related to Faulkner and his world. Included are entries for his works and major characters and themes, as well as the literary and cultural contexts in which his texts were conceived, written, and published. There are also entries for relatives, friends, and other persons important to Faulkner's biography; historical events, persons, and places; social and cultural developments; and literary and philosophical terms and movements. The entries are written by expert contributors who bring a broad range of perspectives and experience to their analysis of his work. Entries typically conclude with suggestions for further reading, and the volume closes with a bibliography and detailed index.
One of the few of William Faulkner’s works to be set outside his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Pylon, first published in 1935, takes place at an air show in a thinly disguised New Orleans named New Valois. An unnamed reporter for a local newspaper tries to understand a very modern ménage a trois of flyers on the brainstorming circuit. These characters, Faulkner said, “were a fantastic and bizarre phenomenon on the face of the contemporary scene. . . . That is, there was really no place for them in the culture, in the economy, yet they were there, at that time, and everyone knew that they wouldn’t last very long, which they didn’t. . . . That they were outside the range of God, not only of respectability, of love, but of God too.” In Pylon Faulkner set out to test their rootless modernity to see if there is any place in it for the old values of the human heart that are the central concerns of his best fiction. Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.
The complete text of Faulkner’s third novel, published for the first time in 1973, appeared with his reluctant consent in a much cut version in 1929 as Sartoris.
The overview of William Faulkner‟s scholarship shows certain obvious limitations in concern to his treatment to his fictional female characters. Critics have concentrated on the male characters the outmost. The first limitation is that the critics have not paid the needed attention to his treatment of the female characters in their totality. Critics have taken up Faulkner‟s characterization but their concentration is more on the male figures only. If at all they discuss women characters, they are seen as figure only. If at all they discuss women characters, they are seen as subordinate figures to their male counterparts. The second limitation is that the bulk of Faulkner scholarship treats Faulkner‟s individual works, in these studies also the concentration is mainly on the themes and techniques, and the discussion on female characters is again scanty. Quite a few studies concentrate deeply on his individual works and explain Faulkner‟s larger themes but they, too, are specifically male oriented. The next limitation is that a large number of articles, appearing in various decades, also, cover individual aspects of Faulkner‟s themes and characters, and give only partial treatment to his women characters. The fourth limitation is that even while discussing Faulkner as moralist the concentration is more on the male figure than the female figures. The last limitation of Faulkner scholarship is that mostly it concentrates on his craftsmanship; a large number of studies on Faulkner assess his stylistics and technique. Tracing technical aspects, thematic patterns, and stylistic devices used by him critics establish Faulkner scholarship, but are oblivion to the central thrust of women characters. Thus Faulkner scholarship treats women characters, either as secondary characters, or, at the most, in relation to their male counterparts only. They have been treated less as individuals than as common commodities; the critics have been casual in their approach towards women characters and taken them for granted. This nonchalant view may lead us to conclude that women in Faulkner are „a silent sex‟. For that a complete survey has been done as mentioned in “Introduction” of the study to trace scope on full length study in context to Faulkner‟s women characters. At times, the survey let to conclude that Faulkner himself is not projecting as pleasant pictures of women in his novels as he does in the case of male figures. In fact, Faulkner was accused of being hostile to women. At times, Faulkner may strike us as a misogynist. These points led to give a kind of impulse to start working on the women characters in Faulkner. His imaginary fictional world – Yoknapatawpha- explains the intertexuality, so sometimes the same women character in different types of roles in his novels, or shows amelioration and redemption in his other text. Keeping all these points in consideration as his indispensable women characters fascinate to study in-depth and I could got the form under the heading Faulkner’s Treatment of Women. It is a humble attempt; I do not claim it to the last word on the issue. -Dr. Vibha Manoj sharma
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Light in August" by William Faulkner. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
