A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Light in August" by William Faulkner. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

With contributions by Eric J. Sundquist, Craig Werner, Blyden Jackson, Thadious Davis, Pamela J. Rhodes, Walter Taylor, Noel Polk, James A. Snead, Philip M. Weinstein, Lothar Hönnighausen, Frederick R. Karl, Hoke Perkins, Sergei Chakovsky, Michael Grimwood, and Karl F. Zender The essays in this volume address William Faulkner and the issue of race. Faulkner resolutely has probed the deeply repressed psychological dimensions of race, asking in novel after novel the perplexing question: what does blackness signify in a predominantly white society? However, Faulkner's public statements on the subject of race have sometimes seemed less than fully enlightened, and some of his black characters, especially in the early fiction, seem to conform to white stereotypical notions of what black men and women are like. These essays, originally presented by Faulkner scholars, black and white, male and female, at the 1986 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, the thirteenth in a series of conferences held on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi, explore the relationship between Faulkner and race.

Peter brings modern critical tools to his task, as well as a thorough knowledge of the canon of Faulkner criticism dealing with stock images in literature. Among the topics discussed are: the cultural legacy and the influence of light and dark imagery on him; his early characterizations of black existence; the historical context for black existence in the Yoknapatawpha world; the racism in this world which is a scheme of larceny designed to strip the blacks of their soul; the dilemmas of miscegenation and mulatto crises; Diley Gibson's obsession with time; the heroism of Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust, and Nancy Mannigoe in Requiem for a Nun; highlighting the comic end of life; and Faulkner's struggle with racial chaos and national destiny. Also includes a glossary of black characters in Faulkner's novels. ISBN 0-8482-5675-1 : $25.00.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, University of Mannheim (Lehrstuhl für Amerikanische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft), language: English, abstract: This paper seeks to explore the social construction of race and how race constitutes identity in "Light in August" by means of historic background. William Faulkner is one of the most popular and influential authors of the 20th century; not without reason has he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. Setting most of his novels' plots in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississipi, he portrays life in the American South and the still lingering aftermaths of the lost Civil War, some of which are: Southern history, climate, geography, natural life, customs, traditions, ideologies, living conditions and speech patterns. In "Light in August", race, like in many of Faulkner's works, is a basic theme. However, in "Light in August", belonging to a certain race is not only part of a person's identity; it is the central framework. Not only is race decisive of how fellow men and women encounter and treat a person but also how this person sees and perceives him- or herself. Hence, identity feeds from race. If there is no clear affiliation to a specific race, identity crisis and a constant search for self can arise as is the case with Joe Christmas in Faulkner's novel. It impacts how Christmas is approached from a very young age by those who know of his black background. Moreover, people change their behavior towards Christmas once they discover that he is partly of African-American origin. The biggest burden for Christmas, though, is how he himself cannot figure out who he is and where his place in Southern society is.