A Study Of Place In Short Fiction By James Joyce William Faulkner And Sherwood Anderson

This book sheds light on the modernist short story cycle and its pivotal role in representing and depicting place. With an ever-changing attitude towards place and what it means, modernist writers found in the short story cycle a suitable form to depict this sense of change. Drawing from a range of recent theories of the short story cycle and theories of place, this book highlights, in a comparative way, the role of the emergent short story genre and its seminal role in grasping and capturing a fragmented world through the various short and interconnected narratives and narrative strategies a short story cycle can accommodate. As such, this text contributes to the study of the modernist short story (cycle), American literature, Irish literature, comparative literature, and theories and studies of place.

In 1925 William Faulkner began his professional writing career in earnest while living in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He had published a volume of poetry (The Marble Faun), had written a few book reviews, and had contributed sketches to the University of Mississippi student newspaper. He had served a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Corps and while working in a New Haven bookstore had become acquainted with the wife of the writer Sherwood Anderson. In his first six months in New Orleans, where the Andersons were living, Faulkner made his initial foray into serious fiction writing. Here in one volume are the pieces he wrote while in the French Quarter. These were published locally in the Times-Picayune and in the Double Dealer. The pieces in New Orleans Sketches broadcast seeds that would take root in later works. In their themes and motifs these sketches and stories foreshadow the intense personal vision and style that would characterize Faulkner’s mature fiction. As his sketches take on parallels with Christian liturgy and as they portray such characters as an idiot boy similar to Benjy Compson, they reveal evidence of his early literary sophistication. In praise of New Orleans Sketches, Alfred Kazin wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “the interesting thing for us now, who can see in this book the outline of the writer Faulkner was to become, is that before he had published his first novel he had already determined certain main themes in his work.” In his trailblazing introduction, Carvel Collins often called “Faulkner’s best-informed critic,” illuminates the period when the sketches were written as the time that Faulkner was making the transition from poet to novelist. “For the reader of Faulkner,” Paul Engle wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “the book is indispensable. Its brilliant introduction . . . is full both of helpful information . . . and of fine insights.” “We gain something more than a glimpse of the mind of a young genius asserting his power against a partially indifferent environment,” states the Book Exchange (London). “The long introduction . . . must rank as a major literary contribution to our knowledge of an outstanding writer: perhaps the greatest of our times.”

The past several decades have seen an explosion of interest in narrative, with this multifaceted object of inquiry becoming a central concern in a wide range of disciplinary fields and research contexts. As accounts of what happened to particular people in particular circumstances and with specific consequences, stories have come to be viewed as a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change. However, the very predominance of narrative as a focus of interest across multiple disciplines makes it imperative for scholars, teachers, and students to have access to a comprehensive reference resource.

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Martin Kreiswirth challenges the accepted notion that The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner's fourth and possibly finest novel, represented an unprecedented turning point in the writer's literary career, a quantum leap in his imaginative development. He argues that Faulkner's earlier work, both published and unpublished, not only distinctly prefigured techniques, narrative strategies, and creative procedures used in the writing of his fourth novel, but also provided him with materials and methods to which he could return. Viewed in the context of his literary development, the author says, the writing of The Sound and the Fury constituted for Faulkner not so much a mysterious leap as a moment of initiation; it marks that crucial point in his career at which he revisited his past, saw it anew, and reworked it into his future. Focusing his attention on the works that preceded The Sound and the Fury--and specifically on the strategies and conventions that informed those works--Kreiswirth reassesses Faulkner's imaginative growth and offers new insights into the place and significance of The Sound and the Fury itself. He provides detailed analyses of such works as the New Orleans short fiction, the abandoned novel Elmer, Mosquitoes, Flags in the Dust, and particularly Faulkner's neglected first novel, Soldier's Pay. These texts are reexamined not only as anticipations of later developments but as literary achievements in their own right.

Faulkner was a master of the short story. Most of the stories in this collection are drawn from the greatest period in his writing life, the fifteen or so years beginning in 1929, when he published The Sound and the Fury. They deal with many of the themes found in the novels and with the subjects and characters of small-town Mississippi life that are uniquely Faulkner's. In "A Rose for Emily", the first of his stories to appear in a national magazine, a straightforward, neighborly narrator relates a tale of love, betrayal, murder, and implied necrophilia. The vicious Snopes family of The Hamlet trilogy turns up in "Barn Burning" (1938), about a son's response to the activities of his arsonist father. Other inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County appearing here include Jason and Caddy Compson, childish witnesses to the terror of the pregnant black laundress in "That Evening Sun" (1930), who fears that her lover will murder her.