William Faulkner
Subtitle: self-presentation and performance
By: by James G. Watson.
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Literary modernism series
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Austin
Language: eng
Number of pages: 255
Subjects: Faulkner, William, 1897-1962 -- Criticism and interpretation; Faulkner, William, 1897-1962 -- Correspondence; Letter writing -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Narration (Rhetoric) -- History -- 20th century; American letters -- History and criticism; Modernism (Literature) -- United States; Self-presentation in literature; Autobiography
Description: "In this book, James Watson draws on the entire Faulkner canon, including letters and even photographs, to decipher the complicated ways in which Faulkner put himself forth through written performances and displays based in and expressive of his emotional biography. The topics Watson treats include the overtly performative aspects of The Sound and the Fury and related manuscripts and privately written records of Faulkner's life, the ways in which his complicated marriage and his relationships to male mentors underlie recurring motifs in his fiction such as marriage and fatherhood, his reading of Melville, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, and his working out through them the problematics of authorial sovereignty, his presentation of himself as "Old Moster," the artist-God of his fictional cosmos; and the complex of personal and epistolary relationships that lies behind novels from Soldiers' Pay to Requiem for a Nun."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-243) and index.