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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN num: 9780820327501
ISBN number: 0820327506
Label: University of Georgia Press
Manufacturer: University of Georgia Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 270
Printing Date: December 30, 2005
Publishing house: University of Georgia Press
Sale Popularity Level: 1944091
Studio: University of Georgia Press
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Why, at a time when the American economy produced so little, did Faulkner produce so much? 'Remarkably,' writes Ted Atkinson, 'during a period roughly corresponding to the Great Depression, Faulkner wrote the novels and stories most often read, taught, and examined by scholars.' This is the very first comprehensive study to consider his most acclaimed works in the context of those hard times. Atkinson sees Faulkner's Depression-era novels and stories as an ideological battleground - in much the same way that 1930s America was. With their contrapuntal narratives that present alternative accounts of the same events, these works order multiple perspectives under the design of narrative unity. Thus, Faulkner's ongoing engagement with cultural politics gives aesthetic expression to a fundamental ideological challenge of Depression-era America: how to shape what FDR called a 'new order of things' out of such conflicting voices as the radical left, the Popular Front, and the Southern Agrarians. Focusing on aesthetic decadence in Mosquitoes and dispossession in The Sound and the Fury, Atkinson shows how Faulkner anticipated and mediated emergent sociocultural forces of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In Sanctuary; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and 'Dry September,' Faulkner explores social upheaval (in the form of lynching and mob violence), fascism, and the appeal of strong leadership during troubled times. As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, 'Barn Burning,' and 'The Tall Men' reveal his 'ambivalent agrarianism' - his sympathy for, yet anxiety about, the legions of poor and landless farmers and sharecroppers. In The Unvanquished, Faulkner views Depression concerns through the historical lens of the Civil War, highlighting the forces of destruction and reconstruction common to both events. Faulkner is no proletarian writer, says Atkinson. However, the dearth of overt references to the Depression in his work is not a sign that Faulkner was out of touch with the times or consumed with aesthetics to the point of ignoring social reality. Through his comprehensive social vision and his connections to the rural South, Hollywood, and New York, Faulkner offers readers remarkable new insight into Depression concerns.
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In seeing the barn-burning scene in "As I Lay Dying" as representing "the impulse toward revolution" and a section of Jason's narrative in "The Sound and the Fury" as indicating capitalism standing triumphant after a period beginning about 1890 "when the expanding mercantile economy with an industrial base substantially redefined America's socioeconomic order," Atkinson discloses how Faulkner can be read as a "Depression writer who, in keeping with the times, found his own means of radical and revolutionary expression." Overall, "Faulkner gave to Depression readers an order of things in which totalizing concepts of unity, organic wholeness, and harmony exist not as achievable ends but rather as tenuous constructs" always vulnerable to the natural human desire to pursue individual liberty in multifarious ways. This reading of Faulkner is not an alternative to the generally accepted one of Faulkner as dealing mainly with the rural culture, class and personal relationships, and the psychodynamics peculiar to the latter 1800's and early 1900's South, but it expands it considerably. Rather than seen only as regional inhabitants suffering from their incapacity to accept defeat and in often half-crazed ways trying to maintain a semblance of the traditional social structure, Faulkner's Southern characters can be seen as well as representative Americans dealing with economic hardships and uncertainties of the Depression and struggling with political questions and temptations relating to an authoritarian regime, forms of socialism, and the budding new order offered by Roosevelt. Faulkner's place in the literary politics of his time, a topic often passed by in critical work to unravel the complexities of his characters and his style, is also dealt with in developing how his work reflects the conditions and mentality of his time. Atkinson--who teaches at Augusta State U. in Georgia--sheds light on this broader view of this major American author active in the mid 1900s by focusing on individual characters, incidents, and circumstances in his novels.
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