Darwin And Faulkner S Novels

Displaying a wide range of knowledge and interpretive skill, Darwin and Faulkner's Novels reexamines the fiction of the great twentieth century American author from the interdisciplinary perspective of sociobiology. Challenging the assumption that Faulkner's South was nothing other than a reactionary wilderness and charting the manner in which Faulkner learned and applied his evolutionary concepts, this book unsettles staid interpretations of the Falknerian canon and overturns habitual judgments as to the value of his later novels.

First published in 1990. Balzac, Zola and Faulkner all drew upon the principles of evolutionary theory to represent man’s place in nature and his struggle for survival in their major series La Comèdie humaine, Rougon-Macquart and the Yoknapatawpha fiction. This book focuses on the ‘first’ novels in each author’s series (La Père Goriot, La Fortune des Rougon and Flags in the Dust) and considers how each novel relates to its series and derives a definition of the naturalistic roman-fleuve. To describe this development, the issues of how a scientific idea becomes refracted in a literary genre and how the naturalistic novel developed out of the realistic novel are considered.

Contributions by Josephine Adams, Jeff Allred, Garry Bertholf, Maxwell Cassity, John N. Duvall, Katherine Henninger, Maude Hines, Robert Jackson, Julie Beth Napolin, Rebecca Nisetich, George Porter Thomas, Jay Watson, and Yuko Yamamoto If it seems outrageous to suggest that one of the twentieth century’s most important literary cartographers of the private recesses of consciousness is also among its great novelists of family, William Faulkner nonetheless fits the bill on both counts. Family played an outsized role in both his life and his writings, often in deeply problematic ways, surfacing across his oeuvre in a dazzling range of distorted, defamiliarized, and transgressive forms, while on other occasions serving as a crucible for crushing forces of conformity, convention, and tradition. The dozen essays featured in this collection approach Faulkner’s many families—actual and imagined—as especially revealing windows to his work and his world. Contributors explore the role of the child in Faulkner’s vision of family and regional society; sibling relations throughout the author's body of work; the extension of family networks beyond blood lineage and across racial lines; the undutiful daughters of Yoknapatawpha County; the critical power of family estrangement and subversive genealogies in Faulkner’s imagination; forms of queer and interspecies kinship; the epidemiological imagination of Faulkner’s notorious Snopes family as social contagion; the experiences of the African American families who worked on the writer’s Greenfield Farm property; and Faulkner’s role in promoting a Cold War–era ideology of “the family of man” in post–World War II Japan.

Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Gloria J. Burgess, David A. Davis, Sarah E. Gardner, Richard Godden, Ryan Heryford, Robert Jackson, Gavin Jones, Mary A. Knighton, Peter Lurie, John T. Matthews, Myka Tucker-Abramson, Michael Wainwright, Jay Watson, and Michael Zeitlin The matter of money touches a writer's life at every point—in the need to make ends meet; in dealings with agents, editors, publishers, and bookstores; and in the choice of subject matter and the minutiae of imagined worlds. William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha was no exception. The people and communities he wrote about stayed deeply entangled in personal, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as did the author himself. Faulkner's economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century. The Faulkner met within these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason. Faulkner and Money brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel Laureate and new questions about his art. Essays in this collection address economies of debt and gift giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.

William Faulkner grew up and began his writing career during a time of great cultural upheaval, especially in the realm of sexuality, where every normative notion of identity and relationship was being re-examined. Not only does Faulkner explore multiple versions of sexuality throughout his work, but he also studies the sexual dimension of various social, economic, and aesthetic concerns. In Faulkner's Sexualities, contributors query Faulkner's life and fiction in terms of sexual identity, sexual politics, and the ways in which such concerns affect his aesthetics. Given the frequent play with sexual norms and practices, how does Faulkner's fiction constitute the sexual subject in relation to the dynamics of the body, language, and culture? In what ways does Faulkner participate in discourses of masculinity and femininity, desire and reproduction, heterosexuality and homosexuality? In what ways are these discourses bound up with representations of race and ethnicity, modernity and ideology, region and nation? In what ways do his texts touch on questions concerning the racialization of categories of gender within colonial and dominant metropolitan discourses and power relations? Is there a southern sexuality? This volume wrestles with these questions and relates them to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.

Charles Darwin's theory of descent suggested that man is trapped by biological determinism and environment, which requires the fittest specimens to struggle and adapt without benefit of God in order to survive. Tthis volume focusses on how American literature appropriated and aesthetically transformed this, and related, theories.

Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Thadious M. Davis, Matthew Dischinger, Dotty Dye, Chiyuma Elliott, Doreen Fowler, Joseph Fruscione, T. Austin Graham, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Lisa Hinrichsen, Randall Horton, George Hutchinson, Andrew B. Leiter, John Wharton Lowe, Jamaal May, Ben Robbins, Tim A. Ryan, Sharon Eve Sarthou, Jenna Sciuto, James Smethurst, and Jay Watson At the turn of the millennium, the Martinican novelist Édouard Glissant offered the bold prediction that "Faulkner's oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans," a goal that "will be achieved by a radically 'other' reading." In the spirit of Glissant's prediction, this collection places William Faulkner's literary oeuvre in dialogue with a hemispheric canon of black writing from the United States and the Caribbean. The volume's seventeen essays and poetry selections chart lines of engagement, dialogue, and reciprocal resonance between Faulkner and his black precursors, contemporaries, and successors in the Americas. Contributors place Faulkner's work in illuminating conversation with writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Randall Kenan, Edward P. Jones, and Natasha Trethewey, along with the musical artistry of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton. In addition, five contemporary African American poets offer their own creative responses to Faulkner's writings, characters, verbal art, and historical example. In these ways, the volume develops a comparative approach to the Faulkner oeuvre that goes beyond the compelling but limiting question of influence--who read whom, whose works draw from whose--to explore the confluences between Faulkner and black writing in the hemisphere.