THE SOUTHERN LITERARY RENAISSANCE

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THE SOUTHERN LITERARY RENAISSANCE

• Writers
• Movements
• Themes

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William Faulkner (1897-1962)
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Family Background

• The firstborn son of a family prominent for three
  generations
• The greatgrandson of Colonel William C. Falkner,
  a Civil War hero and a writer
• Grew up amidst tales from his familys past, a
  sense of an inevit-able decline on him

Colonel William C. Falkner 1826 -1889
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Life and Work

• Born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1902
  the family moved to Oxford, Mss.
• Mississippi State a quintessence of the old
  South no big cities, its provincialism
  relatively untempered by national influences, its
  ideal southern
• A volatile mixture of extremes a manorial
  society side by side with a white folk culture
  still fiercely independent and still practicing
  the frontier virtues and vices

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Educational Background

• Sketchy formal education two years at high
  school and a year at the University of
  Mississippi
• Enrolled in late 1919 after an unsuccessful
  attempt to take part in the WWI
• A special student
• Illustrated several campus publications, wrote
  some poetry sequences for various girlfriends

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Faulkners Literary Education

• Found a dramatic club The Marionettes,
• Wrote a Symbolist-inspired play The
  Marionettes, never produced
• Phil Stone who studied at Yale introduced him to
  the classics, to the contemporary modernist poets
  and to Balzac
• Profound knowledge of Biblical myths, instilled
  by his family, and an enduring love for the works
  of Melville, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, and Conrad

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Faulkners Apprenticeship

• Dropping out of the University in 1921, moved to
  NY, met Elizabeth Prall, the future wife of
  Sherwood Anderson
• Apprenticeship with Anderson in 1925, in New
  Orleans
• Became acquainted with Freuds theories of
  sexuality
• The mythic world of Frazers Golden Bough
• The implications of the literary innovations of
  T. S. Eliot and James Joyce

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Faulkners Apprenticeship

• Absorbed the despair of the post-war generation
  and melded all these influences in his first
  novel Soldiers Pay published with Andersons
  help in 1926
• He left for Europe where he fell in love with
  France forever
• Returning to Mississippi, he worked at various
  jobs but all his various false starts and
  apparently aimless adventuring were to be used in
  one way or another

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Faulkners Life

• Unhappy love affairs
• His beloved Estelle married another man only to
  divorce him and to marry Faulkner
• Some degree of security and identity which helped
  him write 7 masterpieces between 1929 and 1942.

Estelle Oldham, 1913
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Faulkners First Works

• His first not quite successful attempts to write
  poetry in the vein of neo-romantic decadence
• A collection of poems, The Marble Faun (1924)
• Soldiers Pay (1926)
• Mosquitoes (1927)

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Little postage-stamp of soil

• Following Andersons advice, concentrated on what
  he came to call his little postage-stamp of
  soil
• His first novel in the masterpiece series was
  Sartoris (1929)
• Placed the action in a fictional county
  Yoknapatawpha and Jefferson
• The setting of all of his great novels

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Yoknapatawpha County

• Created a mythic cosmos
• Populated by all the different classes, races and
  genders of the South

Map of Yoknapatawpha County from The Portable
Faulkner 1946
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Major Works

• The Sound and the Fury (1929)
• Four narrators three brothers and their black
  nurse, circling back to the same narrative issues
  but in different voices
• An unsurpassed examples of the use of the stream
  of consciousness
• A radically new prose style suitable for
  expressing the lost of familial love and honor,
  for making the readers aware of the decline of a
  great culture

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Major Works

• As I Lay Dying (1930)
• Using the same technique of narration but
  employing much more narrative voices
• Tells the story of a poor white family who are on
  their way to bury their mother
• The new possibilities opened by the modernist
  experiments in narration
• To tell of the frustration of modern existence,
  of the indeterminacy of life, of the
  impossibility of closure

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Popular Writings

• Turned to popular cultural production, to support
  his family
• Wrote what the critics would call a lurid
  potboiler, Sanctuary (1931), a book about rape,
  abduction and corruption
• Then he tried to forge a career as a script
  writer at Hollywood

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Faulkner in Hollywood

• To Have and Have Not, Warner Brothers, 1944
• Director Howard Hawks
• Screenplay Jules Furthman and William Faulkner

Lauren Bacall as Marie Brownand Humphrey Bogart
as Harry Morgan
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Faulkner in Hollywood

• The Big Sleep,Warner Brothers, 1946, Director
  Howard Hawks
• Screenplay William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and
  Jules Furthman(based on the novel by Raymond
  Chandler)

Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe andLauren
Bacall as Vivian
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Faulkner in Hollywood

• The Southerner, United Artists, 1945, Director
  Jean Renoir, Screenplay Jean Renoir, Hugo Butler
  (Based on George Sessions Perrys Hold Autumn in
  Your Hand)
• No screen credit for Faulkner, but he told Cowley
  that it represent-ed his best film work

The Southerner, the Grand Prize, Venice Film
Festival
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Faulkners Works

• In 1932 he published another of his masterworks,
  Light in August
• Exploits to the full the possibilities of the
  modernist novel to probe into the depths of the
  mythic unconscious, to use C.Jungs terminology
  
• Tackles the difficult questions of race,
  sexuality and religious beliefs

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Faulkners Works

• Pylon (1935)
• Absalom, Absalom (1936)
• A modernist landmark
• The story of Thomas Sutpens family rise and
  decline told by four different narrators
  including one from The Sound and the Fury
• The multiple points of view the unfolding not
  only of a personal story of incest, psychic
  perversion and material obsession but the
  intricate and complex racial history

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Faulkners Works

• Tried to redeem this dark vision of his native
  region in The Unvanquished (1938)
• Begins in comedy but ends in tragedy once again
  centered on the history of a family from an
  earlier book, that of John Sartoris
• Continued experimenting with points of view The
  Wild Palms(1939), entirely built around the use
  of counterpoint and the alternation of two
  discrete narratives

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Faulkners Works

• His last two masterworks
• The Hamlet (1940), the finest comedy and the
  first in a trilogy of novels about the rise of
  the Snopes family
• Go Down, Moses (1942), a family novel revolving
  around the uneasy issues of race and ethnicity
• It contains probably his best piece of writing,
  The Bear, an exploration of the meaning of
  personal and public history

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Faulkners Works

• By 1946 all of his books were out of print but
  after Malcolm Cowleys The Portable Faulkner
  (1946), the critics re-assessed his career
• In 1950 he received the Nobel Prize
• He continued writing a moral fiction
• Requiem for a Nun (1951)
• A Fable (1954)
• The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959)

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Faulkners Art

• Most of his novels, using different characters
  to tell parts of the story demonstrate how
  meaning resides in the manner of telling, as much
  as in the subject
• The use of various viewpoints makes him more
  self-referential, or reflexive, than Fitzgerald
  or Hemingway
• Each novel reflects upon itself, while it
  simultaneously unfolds a story of universal
  interest and is part of the history of a region

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Faulkners Art

• Two important dimensions to Faulkners work
• A total dislocation of order expressed in the
  broken narratives and chronology of his stories,
  in the long and convoluted sentences which
  radically disrupt the traditional grammatical
  order of English
• Bespeak the disruption of human consciousness
  brought about by modernity

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Faulkners Art

• The creation of a fixed universe, the
  Yoknapatawpha County, a world containing a
  complete encyclopaedia of the manners and morals,
  the habits and customs, and the beliefs and
  values of the post-Civil War South
• Yet he does not write as the sociologist or the
  historian of manners, he is always the artist,
  always concerned to provide a work of the
  imagination

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Eudora Welty (1909-2001)
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Weltys Family

• Weltys family belonged to the privileged class
  in the South. Her father built a thirteen-story
  skyscraper in Jackson, and was head of Lamar
  Insurance Co., although he had no college
  education.
• Welty inherited a culture that stressed such
  ideas as the past, culture, and gentility

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Weltys Works

• A Curtain of Green, and Other Stories, 1941
• The Robber Bridegroom, 1942
• The Wide Net, and Other Stories, 1943
• Delta Wedding, 1946
• Music from Spain, 1948
• The Golden Apples, 1949
• The Ponder Heart, 1954

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Weltys Works

• The Bride of the Innisfallen, and Other Stories,
  1955
• The Shoe Bird, 1964
• Thirteen Stories, 1965
• A Sweet Devouring, 1969
• Losing Battles, 1970
• The Optimist's Daughter, 1972
• Acrobats in a Park, 1980

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Weltys Works

• Moon Lake and Other Stories, 1980
• White Fruitcake, 1980
• The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1980
• Retreat, 1981
• Eudora Welty Complete Novels, 1998
• Eudora Welty Stories, Essays, and Memoir, 1998

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Weltys Works

• Nonfiction
• The Eye of the Story Selected Essays and
  Reviews, 1978
• Miracles of Perception The Art of Willa Cather,
  1980
• One Writer's Beginnings, 1984
• The Little Store, 1985
• A Writer's EyeCollected Reviews,1994

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Weltya Art

• Portrays women who rebel against the stereotypes
  society has created and especially against the
  stereotype of the Southern lady
• This stereotype was created to perpetuate the
  supremacy of the white race over the other races
  in the South
• It elevated the mistress of the house to a
  pedestal of purity and innocence, inaccessible to
  men from other races

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Weltya Art

• The image identified with regional honour as a
  repository for traditional Southern values,
  embodying the ideals of perfection and submission
  for women
• One of the chief concerns of Southern women
  writers has become the way in which women can
  struggle with this image and create their own
  identities

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Weltys Art

• Weltys chief concern
• Often implies that the power of women derives
  from the traditional domestic sphere
• Her fiction permeates with vivid sights, smells,
  and sounds as her photography does

Beggar at the Fair gate with jiggling dolls
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Humor and the Writers from the South

• A very important characteristics of many of the
  writings of that time is the subtle combination
  of serious literary purpose with profoundly comic
  elements
• William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, as well as
  Erskine Caldwell, Flannery OConnor and Walker
  Percy are among the best practitioners of that
  art, but an intrinsic comic element can be found
  in the work of nearly all southern writers of the
  first rank

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Other Southern Writers

• After the Renaissance, Southern literature has
  continued to thrive
• Some of the subsequent Southern writers
  influenced by Faulkner, such as Reynolds Price,
  James Dickey, and Barry Hannah
• African American writers Alice Walker, Ernest
  Gaines and Dori Sanders
• The womens tradition Flannery OConnor, Carson
  McCullers, Ellen Douglas, Elizabeth Spencer, Lee
  Smith, Dori Sanders