You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A Study Guide for William Faulkner's "The Unvanquished," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
Presenting religion as journalism's silent partner, From Yahweh to Yahoo!provides a fresh and surprising view of the religious impulses at work in contemporary newsrooms. Focusing on how the history of religion in the United States entwines with the growth of the media, Doug Underwood argues that American journalists draw from the nation's moral and religious heritage and operate, in important ways, as personifications of the old religious virtues. Underwood traces religion's influence on mass communication from the biblical prophets to the Protestant Reformation, from the muckraker and Social Gospel campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the modern age of mass media. While forces have pushed journalists away from identifying themselves with religion, they still approach such secular topics as science, technology, and psychology in reverential ways. Underwood thoughtful analysis covers the press's formulaic coverage of spiritual experience, its failure to cover new and non-Christian religions in America, and the complicity of the mainstream media in launching the religious broadcasting movement.
Creating Yoknapatawpha is a study of the crucial interplay of reading and writing processes involved in constructing the textual environment of William Faulkner’s work, and the nature and significance of the world created by these many forces. Yoknapatawpha County, the author contends, is the product of these mainly mental processes of construction at all levels, and it is in the similar and even analogous situations that exist between readers and writers of and in the fiction that the dynamic of Faulkner’s work is most keenly discovered. The book discusses novels from throughout Faulkner’s career, and uses elements of Bakhtinian and reader-response theory, among others, to explore its subject, eschewing the limited focus both of strictly formal and more content-oriented approaches, and demonstrating the need for readers and writers to work together, whether harmoniously or otherwise. By examining the fictive nature of Yoknapatawpha, and the requirement for everybody to participate fully in its creation, we can establish useful bases for investigations into the ‘real world’ issues with which Faulkner is so concerned.
Although William Faulkner's imagination is often considered solely tragic, it actually blended what Faulkner himself called the bizarre and the terrible. Not only did Faulkner's vision encompass both comedy and tragedy; it perceived a latent humor in tragedy and vice versa. As a result, Faulkner's fiction is seldom simply comic or simply tragic. Faulkner's comedy incorporates tragedy and despair, and the humor in his novels may serve as well to intensify as to relieve a tragic or horrific effect. This study examines Faulkner's first nine novels, from Soldiers' Pay to Absalom, Absalom!, showing how humor is used to express theme: how it appears in the action, characters, and discourse of each novel; and how it contributes to the overall effect of each novel. In each case, even in the most pained and angry novels, Faulkner's practice of humor expresses his view that humor is an inseparable element of human experience. Ryuichi Yamaguchi is Professor of English and American literature at the Aichi University in Japan.
American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in US culture. Critiquing the impulse to see history in seminal works like Griffith's Birth of a Nation and the residual positivism of New Historicist methodology, the book challenges this shared visual epistemology . It traces meaningful exceptions to this pattern across canonical figures from US literature and film.
Many of the finest critics working in American literature explore the representation of time from colonial times to the present.
Essayists survey the recent thought and research concerning outstanding authors, trends, and movements in American literature.
That Faulkner was a “liar” not just in his writing but also in his life has troubled many critics. They have explained his numerous “false stories,” particularly those about military honors he actually never earned and war wounds he never sustained, with psychopathological imposture-theories. The drawback of this approach is that it reduces and oversimplifies the complex psychological and aesthetic phenomenon of Faulkner's role-playing. Instead, this critical study by one of the most acclaimed international Faulkner scholars takes its cue from Nietzsche's concept of “truth as a mobile army of metaphors” and from Ricoeur's dynamic view of metaphor and treats the wearing of masks n...
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 Faulkne...