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The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War
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About This Book
Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works' echo of "Lost Cause" romanticism, his depiction of black characters and black speech, and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South, Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Interweaving biography, absorbing literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words recontextualizes Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.
Reviews
"Gorra expertly mines his own deep reading of the Faulkner oeuvre to serve as our Virgil and guide us through an exploration of how the Civil War influenced Faulkner's work and how, in turn, Faulkner's writing helped shape modern literature."
"In setting out to explore what Faulkner can tell us about the Civil War and what the war can tell us about Faulkner, Gorra engages as both historian and literary critic ..."
"This is only to touch the surface of this fine book which, while sharply focused on Faulkner's writing, is broad in the scope of its research ..."
"Gorra demonstrates convincingly that this unshakable past for Faulkner came increasingly to involve race ..."
"This is surely the first account of Faulkner's work that provides a systematic reading of Confederate historiography—the version that Faulkner would have imbibed growing up."
"Much as Malcolm Cowley's Portable Faulkner (1946) demystified the complexities of Yoknapatawpha County for Americans still willing to ignore Jim Crow, this book looks at Faulkner in an era in which Confederate statues are at long last getting pulled down."
"Yet his extended meditation on whether and why we should continue to read the work of a privileged White novelist from Jim Crow Mississippi often seems to describe exactly where we are ..."
"A worthy addition to Faulkner studies, and for larger Southern literature and Civil War collections."
"Gorra's argument, however, depends on close readings of everything from individual sentences to symbols and characters and themes across the author's novels, which collectively make the case that a racist person can be a radical writer."
"There is a kind of tragic sublimity, in Faulkner's work, to the white South's wrongness, to the magnitude of the guilt, and the extent of the attempt to deny or forget it."
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