Religious Perspectives In Faulkner S Fiction Yoknapatawpha And Beyond

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.

Sometimes called the American Shakespeare, William Faulkner is known for providing poignant and accurate renderings of the human condition, creating a world of colorful characters in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, and writing in a style that is both distinct and demanding. Though he is known as a Southern writer, his appeal transcends regional and even national boundaries. Since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, he has been the subject of more than 5,000 scholarly books and articles. Academic interest in his career has been matched by popular acclaim, with some of his works adapted for the cinema. This reference is an authoritative guide to Faulkner's life, literature, and legacy. The encyclopedia includes nearly 500 alphabetically arranged entries for topics related to Faulkner and his world. Included are entries for his works and major characters and themes, as well as the literary and cultural contexts in which his texts were conceived, written, and published. There are also entries for relatives, friends, and other persons important to Faulkner's biography; historical events, persons, and places; social and cultural developments; and literary and philosophical terms and movements. The entries are written by expert contributors who bring a broad range of perspectives and experience to their analysis of his work. Entries typically conclude with suggestions for further reading, and the volume closes with a bibliography and detailed index.

This book studies literary epiphany as a modality of character in the British and American novel. Epiphany presents a significant alternative to traditional models of linking the eye, the mind, and subject formation, an alternative that consistently attracts the language of spirituality, even in anti-supernatural texts. This book analyzes how these epiphanies become "spiritual" and how both character and narrative shape themselves like constellations around such moments. This study begins with James Joyce, 'inventor' of literary epiphany, and Martin Heidegger, who used the ancient Greek concepts behind 'epiphaneia' to re-define the concept of Being. Kim then offers readings of novels by Susan Warner, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, each addressing a different form of epiphany.

In his Yoknapatawpha fiction, William Faulkner takes his readers to a literary microcosm which is characterized by an inseparable interconnectedness of space, time, and man. As he probes into the layers of Southern space and history, Faulkner selects and arranges the geographical and historical idiosyncracies of his Southern environment, unifying them by his artistic imagination to create a web of spatio-temporal images. Tracing the writer's creative handling of his sources, this book examines Faulkner's unique combination of fact and fiction, of reality and imagination. It makes transparent the process by which Faulkner applies his individual experience of place and heritage to design a narrative world in which space and time are equal-ranking determinants of human reality.