Home

About Us

Help

Jobs

News

Site Index

OUP Worldwide

My Account

My Wish List

View Basket

Email this to a Friend

Printer-Friendly View

Basket: 0 items | £0.00

Becoming Faulkner The Art and Life of William Faulkner

View Larger

Related Categories

Literary Studies - Twentieth Century Onwards

Literary Studies - Fiction, Novelists & Prose Writers

Also Recommended

A Journey Through American Literature

Kevin J. Hayes

£11.99

Accented America

The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism

Joshua L. Miller

£15.99

Beneath the American Renaissance

The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville

David S. Reynolds

£15.99

New in Paperback

Winner of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature's C. Hugh Holman Award

Becoming Faulkner

The Art and Life of William Faulkner

Philip Weinstein

OUP USA

272 pages | 16 b/w photos | 235x156mm

978-0-19-989835-0 | Paperback | 28 June 2012

Price: £12.99

Add to Wish List

Identifies the fascinating paradox at the heart of Faulkner: how failure formed the basis for his unparalleled success as a novelist
Winner of the Society for Study of Southern Literature's C. Hugh Holman Award
Written in a lively style that allows readers to easily navigate their way through Faulkner famously complex narratives
An excellent primer for Faulkner's wide-ranging corpus

William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. Throughout his career, he remained haunted by his inability to master a series of personal and professional challenges: his less-than-heroic military career; the loss of his brother in an airplane crash; a disappointing stint as a Hollywood screenwriter; and a destructive bout with alcoholism. In this imaginative biography, Philip Weinstein—a leading authority on the great novelist—targets Faulkner's embattled sense of self as central to both his life and his work. Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history—with antebellum practices and racial division—take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. Exploring the resonance of his own unpreparedness, Faulkner invented a singular language that captured human consciousness under stress as never before. Becoming Faulkner joins Faulkner's life and art in a bold new way, giving readers a full vantage from which to better understand this twentieth-century literary genius.

Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history—with antebellum practices and southern heritage—form a pattern that played out over the course of his entire life. At the same time, these incidents take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. It was in meditating on his failures, his own unreadiness, Weinstein argues, that Faulkner came up with his singular language, one that captured human consciousness under stress as never before. His fruitless striving catapulted American literature to a new level of sophistication.

Narrating the events that comprised Faulkner's life, biographers have long struggled to depict his personal complexity, the paradoxes that shaped his decisions and dogged his relationships. But without a consideration of the writing as well, the troubles in the life fail to reveal their deeper resonance. By skillfully analyzing the work while tracing the events, Weinstein achieves a full portrait, revealing struggles that animate his life and shadows that complicate his work. Becoming Faulkner thus conjoins Faulkner's life and art in a bold new way, giving readers a full vantage from which to better understand this twentieth-century literary genius.

Readership: Students and scholars of American literature.

The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.

Subscribe to RSS feeds

Becoming Faulkner

The Art and Life of William Faulkner

Share