FROM FAULKNERS YOKNAPATAWPHA TO WELTYS MORGANA (original) (raw)

Literary Narratives of the Antebellum South: Conceptualizations or Polarizations

2018

The focal point of the present essay is examining the representations of the Old South in Southern American literature. The South as a region (and the prewar epoch) occupied the American imagination for so long, and still does. Not only it gave birth to some of the greatest writers worldwide, but it produced songs, movies, much cotton and also myths. Thus, it is important to investigate the portrayal of the Antebellum South in southern literary works. William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind are one of the novels that marked the southern renaissance (1930s) like no other two did. However, their representations of the Civil War and the southern way of life cannot be more dissimilar. In what way(s) are these narratives different? And what is the impact, if any, of such difference on their reception? These are the main questions that the present research aims to answer.

William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape

Journal of Cultural Geography, 2011

The imaginary Yoknapatawpha County (from an old Chickasaw Indian name 'Yockeney-Patafa') is a universally recognized literary landscape in which legend, truth, and fiction conflue seamlessly in southern writer William Faulkner's apocryphal and vernacular prose. J.K. Wright recognized that ''some novelists have had an even clearer vision for the facts of geography that are of most significance to the average man than do professional writers on geographical subjects'' (Wright 1966. p. 22). The Nobel Prize winning Faulkner lived in the town of Oxford, in Lafayette County Mississippi, and, according to Civil War historian Shelby Foote, possessed ''a good eye for terrain'' (p. 221). And it was from the soil and society of his native region that Faulkner conjured up Yoknapatawpha County and its various characters. Of his inspiration, Faulkner once said ''I was trying to talk about people, using the only tool I knew, which was the country I knew'' (p. 55). Charles S. Aiken's engaging account of Faulkner's writing and native milieu decodes the historical, cultural and natural landscapes of northern Mississippi from which the writer drew such inspiration. Aiken's book sets out to disentangle the various geographies of fact and fiction which anchor Faulkner's canon, and in doing so provides a rich and well mined travelogue into a region of the American South. Commencing with a Saurian survey of the physical geography and settlement patterns of northern Mississippi, Aiken establishes the corporality of the Faulknerian landscape, but also underscores the divergence between the literal and the figurative in his writing. Aiken observes that literary pilgrims to Lafayette County are often ''elated to reach the storied place but are frequently disappointed in not finding all that they anticipate on the landscape, arranged geographically the way they expected'' (p. 1), and notes that: Faulkner did not look inward and think of Yoknapatawpha County as a closed geographical model. Inhabitants of the fictional place reach toward other areas and operate within a broader spatial context. Faulkner considered the Tallahatchie and Yoknapatawpha rivers the boundaries of his county. But significantly, no boundaries are shown on the two maps of the county he drew. (p. 55

Constituting Elements of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: Mirroring of the Actual in the Apocryphal

This paper will attempt to discuss the elements that contributed to the creation of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. To achieve this, the attention will be paid to a complex net of cultural, race, class, and gender relations which have been the basis of Faulkner’s South. In contrast to its historical image that has been based on facts and is, more or less objective, unquestionable and unchangeable, his South has been presented in a more fictional and subjective way; it is a reminiscence inscribed in the writer’s memory as his main source of inspiration.

Truth So Mazed": Faulkner And US Plantation Fiction

2015

should receive honorable mention. In Pudd'nhead Wilson (), Twain's plot switches a "black" and a "white" baby on a Missouri slave plantation and then gives no easy answer to the question of nature versus nurturethat is, whether raising a child as one race or another will determine its character. If anything is proven by Pudd'nhead's riddling plot, it is that whites and blacks are culturally conjoined twins who remain stubbornly blind to this unsettling truth. Twain's satire created a powerful precedent for the doubles and racial paradoxes at the stormy center of Faulkner's work, especially Light in August ()andAbsalom, Absalom! (). Chesnutt decisively intervened in plantation fiction's culture of consensus via his motifs of passing and haunting. Tales such as "Uncle Wellington's Wives" and "The Wife of His Youth" are often misread as parables of light-skinned blacks tempted to pass but then choosing their "real"