Natural aristocracy
Subtitle: history, ideology, and the production of William Faulkner
By: Kevin Railey.
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Tuscaloosa
Language: eng
Number of pages: 213
Subjects: Faulkner, William, 1897-1962 -- Knowledge -- History.; Faulkner, William, 1897-1962 -- Political and social views.; Literature and history -- Mississippi -- History -- 20th century.; Literature and society -- Mississippi -- History -- 20th century.; Aristocracy (Political science) in literature.; Southern States -- In literature.
Description: "Kevin Railey uses a materialist critical approach - which envisions literature as a discourse necessarily interactive with other forces in the world - to identify and historicize Faulkner's authorial identity. Working from the assumption that Faulkner was deeply affected by the sociohistorical forces that surrounded his life, Railey explores the interrelationships between American history and Faulkner's fiction, between southern history and Faulkner's subjectivity.

Railey argues that Faulkner's obsession with history and his struggle with specific ideologies affecting southern society and his family guided his development as an artist, influencing and overdetermining characterizations and narrative structures as well as the social vision manifest in his work.

By seeing Faulkner the artist and Faulkner the man as one and the same, Railey concludes that the celebrated author wrote himself into history in a way that satisfied the image he had of himself as a natural, artistic aristocrat, based on the notion of natural aristocracy."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [197]-205) and index.
Table of contents: title: Faulkner's Mississippi: ideology and Southern history; title: Faulkner's ideology: ideology and subjectivity; title: The sound and the fury: Faulkner's birth into history; title: Sanctuary: the social psychology of paternalism; title: As I lay dying and Light in August: the social realities of liberalism; title: Absalom, Absalom! and natural aristocracy; title: Absalom, Absalom! and the ideology of race; title: The Snopes trilogy as social vision; title: The Reivers: imaginary resolutions and utopian yearnings.