William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance(Literary Modernism)

In his life and writings, William Faulkner continually created and "performed" selves. Even in letters, he often played a part-gentleman dandy, soldier, farmer-while in his fictions these and other personae are counterpoised against one another to create a world of controlled chaos, made in Faulkner's own protean image and reflective of his own multiple sense of self. In this groundbreaking book, James Watson draws on the entire Faulkner canon, including letters and photographs, to decipher the complicated ways in which Faulkner put himself forth as the artist he felt himself to be through written performances and displays based on the life he actually lived and the ones he imagined living. The topics Watson treats include the overtly performative aspects of The Sound and the Fury, self-presentation and performance in private records of Faulkner's life, the ways in which his complicated marriage and his relationships to male mentors underlie his fictions' recurring motifs of marriages and fatherhood, Faulkner's readings of Melville, Hawthorne, and Thoreau and the problematics of authorial sovereignty, his artist-as-God creation of a fictional cosmos, and the epistolary relationships with women that lie in the correspondence behind Requiem for a Nun.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Abbreviations Used Preface I. Self-Presentation and Performance II. Photographs, Letters, and Fictions III. Marriage Matters IV. Who's Your Old Man? V. Stage Manager VI. Old Moster Notes Works Cited Index

About the Author :
James G. Watson is Professor of English at the University of Tulsa.

Review :
"Intersecting biography and criticism, this book is essential for [library] collections supporting Faulkner and American literature." - Choice "Displaying an astonishing familiarity with every day of Faulkner's life and every line of his work, Watson demonstrates that, from the beginning of his career, the Mississippi writer used the people (including his father), anxieties, and experiences of his life in nearly every facet of his fiction... Watson's study will help revive interest in the very early works and will give additional resonance to several of Faulkner's novels, particularly The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, and Absalom, Absalom!" - Library Journal "The relations between biography and fiction, between experience and creation, form a seamless tapestry under Watson's expert hand... Watson's book is a delicately nuanced study of a complex and compelling writer, whose work continues to yield fresh surprises. It brings us closer than before to the man he must have been and earns for the book a place on the list of essential Faulkner studies." - Faulkner Newsletter