William Faulkner : an economy of complex words / Richard Godden.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Godden, Richard, 1946-

Series:

20/21 (Princeton, N.J.)

20/21

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Faulkner, William, 1897-1962--Criticism and interpretation.

Faulkner, William.

Economics in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (263 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ ; Woodstock, Oxfordshire : Princeton University Press, c2007.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

In William Faulkner, Richard Godden traces how the novelist's late fiction echoes the economic and racial traumas of the South's delayed modernization in the mid-twentieth century. As the New Deal rapidly accelerated the long-term shift from tenant farming to modern agriculture, many African Americans were driven from the land and forced to migrate north. At the same time, white landowners exchanged dependency on black labor for dependency on northern capital. Combining powerful close readings of The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, and A Fable with an examination of southern economic history from the 1930's to the 1950's, Godden shows how the novels' literary complexities--from their narrative structures down to their smallest verbal emphases--reflect and refract the period's economic complexities. By demonstrating the interrelation of literary forms and economic systems, the book describes, in effect, the poetics of an economy. Original in the way it brings together close reading and historical context, William Faulkner offers innovative interpretations of late Faulkner and makes a unique contribution to the understanding of the relation between literature and history.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Earthing The Hamlet

Chapter 2. Comparative Cows: Reading The Hamlet for Its Residues

Chapter 3. Revenants, Remnants, and Counterrevolution in "The Fire and the Hearth"

Chapter 4. "Pantaloon in Black" and "The Old People": Migration, Mourning, and the Exquisite Corpse of African American Labor

Chapter 5. Reading the Ledgers: Textual Variants and Labor Variables / Godden, Richard / Polk, Noel

Chapter 6. Find the Jew: Modernity, Seriality, and Armaments in A Fable

Chapter 7. "The Bugger's a Jew": A Fable as Melancholic Allegory

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612086939

9781282086937

1282086936

9781400827916

1400827914

OCLC:

336510685