Faulkner's Families

William Faulkner is one of the twentieth century's most important literary cartographers of the private recesses of consciousness and a great novelist of family. This collection of essays explores his many families as revealing windows to his work and his world, focusing on the role of the child, sibling relations, family networks, queer and interspecies kinship, and the epidemiological imagination of the Snopes family.

Format: Hardback
Length: 277 pages
Publication date: 31 July 2023
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi

William Faulkner, a prominent literary cartographer of the private realms of consciousness and a celebrated novelist of family, defies conventional expectations. His life and writings were intricately intertwined with family, often presenting complex and problematic dynamics. Throughout his oeuvre, Faulkner explored a myriad of distorted, unfamiliar, and transgressive forms of family, while on other occasions, they served as a catalyst for the crushing forces of conformity, convention, and tradition. This collection of essays delves into the diverse families portrayed by Faulkner, both real and imagined, offering insightful windows into his work and the world he inhabited.

Contributors to Faulkner's Families examine various aspects of Faulkner's vision of family and regional society. They explore the significance of the child in his understanding of family and community, analyze sibling relationships across his entire body of work, examine the expansion of family networks beyond bloodlines and racial boundaries, examine the rebellious daughters of Yoknapatawpha County, analyze the critical power of family estrangement and subversive genealogies in Faulkner's imagination, explore forms of queer and interspecies kinship, examine the epidemiological imagination of Faulkner's notorious Snopes family as social contagion, explore the experiences of African American families who worked on his Greenfield Farm property, and analyze Faulkner's role in promoting a Cold War-era ideology of the family of man in post-World War II Japan.

Through these essays, readers gain a deeper understanding of Faulkner's complex and multifaceted portrayal of family. The collection sheds light on the ways in which Faulkner's families reflect and shape his artistic vision, as well as the broader social and cultural contexts in which he operated. It provides valuable insights into the enduring significance of Faulkner's work in the realm of literature and beyond.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496845030