The life of William Faulkner : a critical biography
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The life of William Faulkner : a critical biography
（Blackwell critical biographies, 5）
Blackwell, c1994
Available at / 42 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Bibliography: p. [422]-434
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
William Faulkner was a white Southerner creatively obsessed with problems of personal identity, social change, region, sexuality, race, and that elaborate circuitry of passion and power, the family. Throughout his life, Faulkner was driven to pursue elusive objects of desire that seemed to lose their desirability the closer he came to them. For much of his life he also felt impelled to speak out against racial injustice in a way that made him many enemies in the South and even alienated members of his own family. In this reassessment of Faulkner, Richard Gray uses and develops recent theories about the relationship between writing and historical experience, language and social change, to draw a detailed portrait of the place and times Faulkner inhabited and to reveal just how intimately woven together were the tangled threads of Faulkner's personal and public experience - the privacy that Faulkner cherished and the history in which, whether he liked it or not, he was ensnared. Attending closely to each of the novels Gray shows how they contain an often undisclosed biography that is at once personal and cultural. he also shows how those novels speak to, and sometimes for, each of us today as individual human subjects and historical agents - confronted with the same stubborn problems and similar choices.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: fictions of history - an approach to Faulkner. Part 1 On privacy: Faulkner and the human subject
- history as autobiography - the world of Faulkner
- autobiography as history - the life of Faulkner. Part 2 Faulkner the apprentice: trying out different voices - the early prose and poetry
- of loss and longing - soldier's pay and mosquitoes. Part 3 Rewriting the homeplace: ancestor worship, patricide and the epic past - flags in the dust and sartoris
- voices, absence and cultural autobiography - "The Sound of the Fury"
- a Southern carnival - "As I Lay Dying"
- and woman was invented - "Sanctuary". Part 4 Of past and present conflicts: language, power and the verbal community - "Light in August"
- the virile pilot and the seductions of the aitr - "Pylon"
- history is what hurts - "Absalom, Absalom!"
- the plantation romance and the madwoman in the attic - "The Unvanquished". Part 5 Public faces and private places: now about these women - "The Wild Palms"
- let's make a deal - "The Hamlet"
- things fall apart - "Go Down, Moses"
- watching the detectives - "Intruder in the Dust". Part 6 The way home: finished and unfinished business - "Knight's Gambit" and "Requiem For A Nun"
- of crowds, control and courage - "A Fable"
- distant voice, desperate lives - "The Towns"
- then the letting go - "The Mansion". Postscript - back to Earth: the romance of the family- "The Reivers"
- "I was Here" - Faulkner family tree.
by "Nielsen BookData"