Donald M. Kartiganer - Böcker

Although he belonged to an American generation of writers deeply influenced by the high modernist revolt ""against nature"" and against the self-imposed limits of realism to a palpable world, William Faulkner reveals throughout his work an abiding sensitivity to the natural world. He writes of the big woods, of animals, and of the human body as a ground of being that art and culture can neither transcend nor completely control. The eleven essays that make up this volume, including a paper written by the acclaimed novelist William Kennedy, explore the place of ""the unbuilt world"" in Faulkner's fiction. They give particular attention to the social, mythic, and economic significance of nature, to the complexity of racial identity, and to the inevitable clash of gender and sexuality. These essays were presented in 1996 as papers at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held annually at the University of Mississippi. Included are the following: Lawrence Buell's ""Faulkner and the Claims of the Natural World""; Thomas L. McHaney's ""Oversexing the Natural World""; Theresa M. Towner's ""Color, Race, and Identity in Faulkner's Fiction""; Jay Watson's ""The Art of the Literal in Light in August""; Mary Joanne Dondlinger's ""The Matter of Race and Gender in Faulkner's Light in August""; Louise Westling's ""Sutpen's Marriage to the Dark Body of the Land""; Myra Jehlen's ""Faulkner and the Unnatural""; Diane Roberts's ""Eula, Linda, and the Death of Nature""; David H. Evans's ""'The Bear' and the Incarnation of America""; Wiley C. Prewitt, Jr.'s ""Hunting and Habitat in Yoknapatawpha""; and William Kennedy's ""Learning from Faulkner: The Obituary of Fear."" Donald M. Kartiganer, Howry Chair of Faulkner Studies in the Department of English, and Ann J. Abadie, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, teach at the University of Mississippi.

These thirteen original essays from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1994 at the University of Mississippi, examine William Faulkner's texts in terms of their surprising range of gender portrayals.The collection explores such themes as the male homosocial urge ay the heart of warfare, the blurring of gender distinctions in Faulkner's ""epicene"" figures, the function of cross-dressing as a form of defiance of traditional hierarchies. Several of the essays see in Faulkner a challenge to the ""culture"" vs. ""nature"" dichotomy itself, suggesting that sex may be a product of gender rather than its origin, that the line between the biological given and the social performance may be even more tenuous than we have assumed.More than any other of the various contextualist approaches brought to bear on Faulkner's work, the focus on gender exemplifies the theory of the cultural construction of reality. Recent literary criticism, in large part owing to the emergence of feminism, has convincingly argued the difference between gender and sex, between the acculturated and the naturel. Among the results of the attention to gender in Faulkner studies is a fresh sense of fictional character as a site of multiple, sometimes clashing, personae, each gender role a signifier threatening to float free, speaking the reigning discourse, but always with a touch of conscious or unconscious parody.

These thirteen original papers from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference held in 19921 at the University of Mississippi explore some of the specific ideologies at work in William Faulkner's historical and socioeconomic moment, as well as his unique implementation of those ideologies in his fiction. The essays range from consideration of southern politics and history, consumer culture, race, and gender to theoretical speculation on the nature and impact of ideological analysis itself.