Faulkner And Religion

These ten essays from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1989 at the University of Mississippi, explore the religious themes in William Faulkner's fiction. The papers published here conclude that the key to religious meaning in Faulkner may be that his texts focus not so much on God but on a human aspiration of the divine.

This literary critical study counters the usual tendency to segregate Southern literature from African American literary studies. Noting that William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor are classified as Southern writers, whereas Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright are considered black authors, Timothy P. Caron argues for an integrated study of the South's literary culture. He shows that the interaction of Southern religion and race binds these four writers together. Caron broadens our understanding of Southern literature to include both white and African American voices. Analyzing O'Connor's Wise Blood, Faulkner's Light in August, Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain, and Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, Caron shows that these writers share an intertwined concern for issues of race and religion. These two significant components of Southern culture form the intertextual network that binds together such seemingly disparate texts. These authors not only interact among themselves in acknowledged and unacknowledged ways, but also with the South's discursive practices. Most particularly, Caron sees common struggles over the Word, as he investigates how these writers use the Bible in their understandings of race and religion in the American South. While all four authors argue for the centrality of the Bible in both the black and white Southern experience, each offers a different view of how this iconic text has shaped Southern culture and its literature.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Light in August" by William Faulkner. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Religion has permeated nearly every aspect of modern southern culture in the US, with results that range from portraits of Jesus on black velvet to the soul-stirring orations of Martin Luther King Jr. This work gives an appraisal of religion's influence on such expressions of regional life as literature, music and folk art.

This book addresses the religious scope of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, one of the most controversial issues in studies of his work. Current criticism is divided between those who find a theological dimension in his works, and those who reject such an approach on the grounds that the nihilist discourse characteristic of his narrative is incompatible with any religious message. McCarthy’s tendencies toward religious themes have become increasingly more acute, revealing that McCarthy has adopted the biblical language and rhetoric to compose an "apocryphal" narrative of the American Southwest while exploring the human innate tendency to evil in the line of Herman Melville and William Faulkner, both literary progenitors of the writer. Broncano argues that this apocryphal narrative is written against the background of the Bible, a peculiar Pentateuch in which Blood Meridian functions as the Book of Genesis, the Border Trilogy functions as the Gospels, and No Country for Old Men as the Book of Revelation, while The Road is the post-apocalyptic sequel. This book analyzes the novels included in what Broncano defines as the South-Western cycle (from Blood Meridian to The Road) in search of the religious foundations that support the narrative architecture of the texts.

First published in 1988, the aim of this study is to define the role of religious meaning in the modern novel and to demonstrate that the novel can successfully express a religious feeling, but not a religious commitment. Through the analysis of four novels by Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Werfel and Bernanos, the work explains why novels with a single definite commitment tend to be implausible and lacking in aesthetic unity. This book will be of interest to those studying religion in 19th Century literature.