Faulkner and Southern Womanhood
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.32 (843 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0820317411 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 246 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-01-06 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Virtually every page offers, for me at least, a provocative interpretation of even the tiniest detail. (Anne Goodwyn Jones Mississippi Quarterly) . Clearly she has read the Faulkner criticism as carefully and as widely as she has the numerous texts of southern culture within whose context she carries out her own analyses of Faulkner's work. Roberts's readings are everywhere interesting, and frequently new. Her literary scholarship, too, is exemplary
This study examines the vexed and contradictory responses of the South's most celebrated novelist to the traditional representations of women that were bequeathed to him by his culture.Tracing the ways in which William Faulkner characterized women in his fiction, Diane Roberts posits six familiar representationsthe Confederate woman, the mammy, the tragic mulatta, the new belle, the spinster, and the motherand through close feminist readings shows how the writer reactivated and reimagined them. At their best, according to Roberts, Faulkner's novels reveal the South's failure to reassert the boundaries of race, gender, and class by which it has traditionally sustained itself.. Struggling to understand his region, Roberts says, Faulkner exposed the South's self-conceptions as quite precarious, with women slipping toward masculinity, men slipping toward femininity, and white identity slipping toward black. "As a southerner," Roberts writes, "Faul
S. H. Wells said For Students and Everyone else too. Diane Roberts attempts to tackle the enormous topic of Faulkner's female characters. Roberts divides her study into six sections (Confederate Woman, Mammy, Tragic Mulatta, New Belle, Night Sister, and Mothers) focusing on a type of character. Roberts asserts that she "found it useful to recover some of these stereotype, or stock characters, to read Faul. Wonderful! A Customer This book is exquisitely written, fascinating--I highly recommend it not only for the Faulkner scholar, but for anyone (like me!) who is interested in his writings. Roberts' writing remains free from pretentious jargon, unlike so many scholarly works, and the ideas posited are original, thought provoking, and just plain INTERESTING!
Diane Roberts is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama. She is the author of "Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region."