In Michael Millgate's essay he writes that "To see the places
where an author lived and walked, and typed; to see what he daily
saw, smell what he smelled; experience the resources of his native
climate: these things have the fascination of biography, and they
can illuminate the work, enrich one's individual apprehension of
that work, in much the same way good biography does."
William Faulkner's native climate was the small north
Mississippi town of Oxford after which he patterned his mythical
Yoknapatawpha County. Each year the University of Mississippi,
located in Oxford, sponsors a conference to allow Faulkner
enthusiasts to study the author on his own ground. The essays in
this volume, delivered as part of the 1976 conference, are
concerned with the relationship between William Faulkner's work and
its southern setting.
As Faulkner himself and the authors of these essays insist, the
South is part of the United States and ultimately a part of Western
society. Rather than considering Faulkner as an isolated southern
oddity who inexplicably wrote important fiction, these authors
explore why Faulkner's "Southerness" made him universal.
They do not attempt to draw a one-to-one relationship between
Mississippi and Yoknapatawpha or to reduce Faulkner to the status
of a fictionalizing sociologist recording the life of an area.
Daniel Aaron, for example, traces the historical relationship of
the South to the rest of the United States and to England, isolates
a talent for the concrete and particular as a trait maintained
longer in the South than in other regions, and suggests that
Faulkner, in embodying his universal insights in a concrete setting
and society, was at once most Southern and most universal.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!