This novel of Mississippi hill country life depicts some of the more troubling and unpublicized aspects of the New Deal by tracing the fortunes of the Taylor family, sharecroppers who move to town to work for the "WP and A," the Works Progress Administration. John Faulkner, a one-time WPA project engineer, has much to satirize in this broadly comic novel. First and foremost are the Taylors: exasperating and unemployable, they are unaccountably abiding; hopelessly destitute, they place a higher premium on a new radio than on food and shelter. Faulkner also casts a sardonic eye on the town merchants, who extend credit to WPA workers as quickly as they inflate prices, and, of course, on the WPA itself, an agency that entices naive, desperate country folk with the promise of a dole--only to lay them off and then ignore them. In his foreword, Trent Watts establishes the singularity of Men Working while noting in it echoes of Tobacco Road, As I Lay Dying, and The Grapes of Wrath. Watts also identifies in John Faulkner's tone an ambivalence shared by many southerners who witnessed the changes wrought by "progress" upon their traditional way of life.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, the writer, was a familiar figure to many, a gentle, shy and rather reserved man who, though tweedy, managed always, somehow, to appear dapper. He chose to minimize his role as literary genius, preferring to refer to himself as a simple dirt farmer and resident of Oxford, Mississippi, the prototype of the city of Jefferson, which appeared in almost everything he wrote. But if this William Faulkner was known to many, few ever got beyond that mask to the real Faulkner, a man who clung tenaciously to his privacy, or realized the true degree to which his family and the region that had borne him and molded his character and thinking. Of these, perhaps none knew him so well as his brother, John, himself a writer and as deeply influenced by these same forces. My brother Bill is little concerned with the public image of William Faulkner; rather it is about Bill Faulkner as a boy, growing up in the environment which furnished him with most of the raw material about which he later wrote, and as a man who retained for all of his life an almost mystical feeling for his native land. It is an intimate portrait, etched deeply with humor, of a man fiercely loyal to his family and old friends, though he often disagreed violently with each of them; of a man steeped in the gamey, Rabelaisian humor of the Frontier, which seems mainly to have survived only in the South; and of a man who both loved and hated his native ground because it never lived up to what he felt it capable of being. It is a book remarkable not only for its many insights into one of our most significant writers, but for its unique re-creation, in every detail, of the all-but-forgotten life in a southern village at the turn of the century, a picture sketched with rare skill and humor and a deep sense of nostalgia in the best sense of the word.
This bibliography brings up through 1989 the comprehensive listing of scholarship and criticism on William Faulkner begun by Bassett in two earlier books, William Faulkner: An Annotated Checklist of Criticism (1972) and Faulkner: An Annotated Checklist of Recent Criticism (1983). Since the latter, over a hundred books on Faulkner have been completed, along with hundreds of articles and dissertations. This work lists all new items, often with extensive annotations, and provides separate entries for chapters of books that cover individual novels and stories. Bassett's introductory essay provides an overview of the last decade of Faulkner studies, the first in which post-structuralist and other newer forms of criticism had a major impact on Faulkner studies.
Is William Faulkner’s fiction built on a fundamental dichotomy of outcast individual versus the healthy agrarian community? The New Critics of the 1930s advanced this view, and it has shaped much Faulkner criticism. However, in Faulkner’s Marginal Couple, John Duvall posits the existence of another possibility, alternative communities formed by “deviant” couples. These couples, who violate “normal” gender roles and behaviors, challenge the either/or view of Faulkner’s world. The study treats in detail the novels Light in August, The Wild Palms, Sanctuary, Pylon, and Absalom, Absalom!, as well as several of Faulkner’s short stories. In discussing each work, Duvall challenges the traditional view that Faulkner created active men who follow a code of honor and passive women who are close to nature. Instead, he charts the many instances of men who are nurturing and passive and women who are strong and sexually active. These alternative couples undermine a common view of Faulkner as an upholder of Southern patriarchal values, thus countering the argument that Faulkner’s fiction is essentially misogynist. This new approach, drawing on semiotics, feminism, and Marxism, makes Faulkner more accessible to readers interested in ideological analysis. It also stresses the intertextual connections between Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and non-Yoknapatawpha fiction. Perhaps most importantly, it uncovers what the New Criticism concealed, namely, that Faulkner’s fiction traces the full androgynous spectrum of the human condition.
Considered one of the great American authors of the 20th century, 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. Following his book Faulkner in the Eighties (Scarecrow, 1991) and two previous volumes published in 1972 and 1983, John E. Bassett provides a comprehensive, 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 an organized and accessible list of all significant recent commentary on Faulkner, and the annotations direct readers to those materials of most interest to them. The information contained in this volume is beneficial for scholars and students of this author but also general readers of fiction who have a special interest in Faulkner.
There is a particular fascination when two apparently disjoint areas of mathematics turn out to have a meaningful connection to each other. The main goal of this book is to provide a largely self-contained, in-depth account of the linkage between nonassociative algebra and projective planes, with particular emphasis on octonion planes. There are several new results and many, if not most, of the proofs are new. The development should be accessible to most graduate students and should give them introductions to two areas which are often referenced but not often taught. On the geometric side, the book introduces coordinates in projective planes and relates coordinate properties to transitivity properties of certain automorphisms and to configuration conditions. It also classifies higher-dimensional geometries and determines their automorphisms. The exceptional octonion plane is studied in detail in a geometric context that allows nondivision coordinates. An axiomatic version of that context is also provided. Finally, some connections of nonassociative algebra to other geometries, including buildings, are outlined. On the algebraic side, basic properties of alternative algebras are derived, including the classification of alternative division rings. As tools for the study of the geometries, an axiomatic development of dimension, the basics of quadratic forms, a treatment of homogeneous maps and their polarizations, and a study of norm forms on hermitian matrices over composition algebras are included.
Groups which satisfy commutator relations of the type satisfied by Chevalley groups, called here "groups with Steinberg relations", are shown to have certain nonassociative division algebras as parameters. This, in turn, allows an introduction of coordinates into certain polygonal geometries.
This series brings to life the world of the Old Testament through informative entries and full-color photos and graphics. Here readers find the premier commentary set for connecting with the historical and cultural context of the Old Testament.
One of America's greatest writers, William Faulkner wrote fiction that combined spellbinding Southern storytelling with modernist formal experimentation to shape an enduring body of work. In his fictional Yoknapatawpha County—based on the region around his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi—he created an entire world peopled with unforgettable characters linked into an intricate historical and social web. An introduction to the Nobel-Prize-winning author's life and work, this book devotes opening chapters to his biography and literary heritage and subsequent chapters to each of his major works. The analytical chapters start with his most accessible book, The Unvanquished, a Civil-War-era account of a boy's coming of age. The following chapters orient readers to elements of plot, character, and theme in Faulkner's masterpieces: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Also analyzed and discussed are some of Faulkner's most often anthologized short stories, including A Rose For Emily and Barn Burning, and the longer stories The Bear, Spotted Horses, and The Old Man that were incorporated in the novels Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Clear, insightful analyses of the elements of Faulkner's fiction are supplemented with alternative readings from a variety of critical approaches including gender, rhetorical, performance, and cultural studies perspectives.
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