Faulkner and Slavery

William Faulkner's first work of fiction in 1930 explored the experience and perspective of an enslaved individual, and he repeatedly returned to the theme of slavery in his fiction for the next two decades. This collection examines the legacies of African chattel slavery in Faulkner's writings and personal history, exploring how slavery, capitalism, and modernity are intertwined across his oeuvre. It also examines how the history of slavery at the University of Mississippi informs writings like Absalom, Absalom! and how the authors remodeling work on his own residence brought him into an uncomfortable engagement with the spatial and architectural legacies of chattel slavery in north Mississippi.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 31 July 2023
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi

In 1930, the same year he moved into Rowan Oak, a slave-built former plantation home in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner published his first work of fiction that gave serious attention to the experience and perspective of an enslaved individual. For the next two decades, Faulkner repeatedly returned to the theme of slavery and to the figures of enslaved people in his fiction, probing the racial, economic, and political contours of his region, nation, and hemisphere in works such as The Sound and the Fury; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and Go Down, Moses. Faulkner and Slavery is the first collection to address the myriad legacies of African chattel slavery in the writings and personal history of one of the twentieth century's most incisive authors on US slavery and the long ordeal of race in the Americas. Contributors to the volume examine the constitutive links among slavery, capitalism, and modernity across Faulkner's oeuvre. They study how the history of slavery at the University of Mississippi informs writings like Absalom, Absalom! and trace how slavery's topologies of the rectilinear grid or square run up against the more reparative geography of the oval in Faulkner's narratives. Contributors explore how the legacies of slavery literally sound and resound across centuries of history, and across multiple novels and stories in Faulkner's fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, and they reveal how the author's remodeling work on his own residence brought him into an uncomfortable engagement with the spatial.

Weight: 388g
Dimension: 151 x 229 x 143 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496846495