This book argues that Faulkner unlocked his truest potential as a modernist artist by turning away from the modernity of the Great War toward aspects of modernity closer to his Mississippi home.

Through detailed analyses of individual texts, from the earliest poetry through Go Down, Moses, Singal traces Faulkner's attempt to liberate himself from the powerful and repressive Victorian culture in which he was raised by embracing the Modernist culture of the artistic avant-garde. Most important, it shows how Faulkner accommodated the conflicting demands of these two cultures by creating a set of dual identities - one, that of a Modernist author writing on the most daring and subversive issues of his day, and the other, that of a southern country gentleman loyal to the conservative mores of his community. It is in the clash between these two selves, Singal argues, that one finds the key to making sense of Faulkner.

First published in 1977, this book focuses on Modernism, one of the most frequently used terms in the discussion of twentieth-century literature and culture. It provides an historical account of the concept, showing the relation of Modernism to Victorian culture and uses the work of Henry James and W. B. Yeats in its analysis. The text focuses on the time period between 1910 and 1930 and considers the criticism of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Joyce’s Ulysses, Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the complex relationship of D. H. Lawrence to Modernism. The author also includes a section on developments since 1930 to show both the value of Modernism as a critical term, and the problems of achieving an exact usage.

Throughout his career Faulkner retold some of the same stories about some of the same events and characters, but retold them differently. For many years now these rewritings and revisions have been judged failures of craft. But Faulkner knew they were there and defended his discrepancies, associating them with learning about human character. Richard Moreland argues that these revisionary repetitions in fact constitute Faulkner's conscious critique of modernism. Moreland's readings of Absalom! Absalom!, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses Requiem for a Nun and other works reveal Faulkner's explorations of both the motivations and consequences of modernism in the context of America's dominant discourses of class, race, gender and sexuality.

This collection of essays by ten major scholars explores Faulkner's widespread cultural import.

"Lurie takes particular interest in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in August of stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I forget thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism."--BOOK JACKET.

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism is the first full-length study of the vexed relationship between America's great modernist writers and the nation's “second city.” Michelle E. Moore explores the ways in which the defining writers of the era-Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald-engaged with the city and reacted against the commercial styles of "Chicago realism" to pursue their own, European-influenced mode of modernist art. Drawing on local archives to illuminate the literary culture of early 20th-century Chicago, this book reveals an important new dimension to the rise of American modernism.

Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to 'unknowling' by addressing the work of three experimental writers: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, & William Faulkner.

Where William Faulkner's fiction stands in relation to that of Ellison, Pynchon, Nabokov, and other postmodern greats

In a major reinterpretation, Resisting History reveals that women, as subjects of writing and as writing subjects themselves, played a far more important role in shaping the landscape of modernism than has been previously acknowledged. Here Barbara Ladd offers powerful new readings of three southern writers who reimagined authorship between World War I and the mid-1950s. Ladd argues that the idea of a "new woman" -- released from some of the traditional constraints of family and community, more mobile, and participating in new contractual forms of relationality -- precipitated a highly productive authorial crisis of gender in William Faulkner. As "new women" themselves, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty explored the territory of the authorial sublime and claimed, for themselves and other women, new forms of cultural agency. Together, these writers expose a territory of female suffering and aspiration that has been largely ignored in literary histories. In opposition to the belief that women's lives, and dreams, are bound up in ideas of community and pre-contractual forms of relationality, Ladd demonstrates that all three writers -- Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, Welty in selected short stories and in The Golden Apples, and Hurston in Tell My Horse -- place women in territories where community is threatened or nonexistent and new opportunities for self-definition can be seized. And in A Fable, Faulkner undertakes a related project in his exploration of gender and history in an era of world war, focusing on men, mourning, and resistance and on the insurgences of the "masses" -- the feminized "others" of history -- in order to rethink authorship and resistance for a totalitarian age. Filled with insights and written with obvious passion for the subject, Resisting History challenges received ideas about history as a coherent narrative and about the development of U.S. modernism and points the way to new histories of literary and cultural modernisms in which the work of women shares center stage with the work of men.