Critical Essays on William Faulkner

Robert W. Hamblin

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781496841131
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496841162
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Critical Essays on William Faulkner compiles scholarship by noted Faulkner studies scholar Robert W. Hamblin. Ranging from 1980 to 2020, the twenty-one essays present a variety of approaches to Faulkner's work. While acknowledging Faulkner as the quintessential southern writer—particularly in his treatment of race—the essays examine his work in relation to American and even international contexts. The volume includes discussions of Faulkner's techniques and the psychological underpinnings of both the origin and the form of his art; explores how his writing is a means of "saying 'no' to death"; examines the intertextual linkages of his fiction with that of other writers like Shakespeare, Twain, Steinbeck, Warren, and Salinger; treats Faulkner's use of myth and his fondness for the initiation motif; and argues that Faulkner's film work in Hollywood is much better and of far greater value than most scholars have acknowledged.

Taken as a whole, Hamblin's essays suggest that Faulkner's overarching themes relate to time and consequent change. The history of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha stretches from the arrival of the white settlers on the Mississippi frontier in the early 1800s to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the 1940s. Caught in this world of continual change that produces a great degree of uncertainty and ambivalence, the Faulkner character (and reader) must weigh the traditions of the past with the demands of the present and the future. As Faulkner acknowledges, this process of discovery and growth is a difficult and sometimes painful one; yet, as Hamblin attests, to engage in that quest is to realize the very essence of what it means to be human.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Critical Essays on William Faulkner
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Faulkner, Myth, and Archetype
• “Saying No to Death”: Toward Faulkner’s Theory of Fiction
• “Longer than Anything”: Faulkner’s “Grand Design” in Absalom, Absalom!
• Carcassonne in Mississippi: Faulkner’s Geography of the Imagination
• Beyond the Edge of the Map: Faulkner, Turner, and the Frontier Line
• “No Such Thing as Was”: Faulkner and Southern History
• The Artistic Design of The Sound and the Fury
• Contextual Readings of The Sound and the Fury
• As I Lay Dying: The Oprah Book Club Lectures
• Teaching Intruder in the Dust through Its Political and Historical Context
• “A Fine Loud Grabble and Snatch of AAA and WPA”: Faulkner, Government, and the Individual
• Faulkner and Hollywood: A Call for Reassessment
• The Curious Case of Faulkner’s “The De Gaulle Story”
• Homo Agonistes, or, Faulkner as Sportswriter
• “A Casebook on Mankind”: Faulkner’s Use of Shakespeare
• Faulkner’s Hucks and Jims
• Faulkner and Steinbeck
• “The World Is like an Enormous Spider Web”: The Contrasting Legacies of Thomas Sutpen and Cass Mastern
• “Did You Ever Have a Sister?”: Holden Caulfield and Quentin Compson
• The International Faulkner
• “Like a Big Soft Fading Wheel”: The Triumph of Faulkner’s Art
• About the Author