When it appeared in the American Mercury in March 1931, the editor, H. L. Mencken, prevailed on William Faulkner to make changes in “That Evening Sun” (then entitled “That Evening Sun Go Down”) to make it more palatable to the… Read More ›
William Faulkner
Analysis of William Faulkner’s Shall Not Perish
At the height of World War II, William Faulkner wrote a pair of compelling stories exploring the viability and importance of America as a nation. Though the United States as a whole was his theme in these two wartime stories,… Read More ›
Analysis of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily
Initially published in Forum on April 30, 1930, and collected in These Thirteen in 1931, “A Rose for Emily” remains one of William Faulkner’s most read, most anthologized, and most significant stories. From every imaginable perspective, critics have scrutinized the… Read More ›
Analysis of William Faulkner’s Pantaloon in Black
The third of seven stories composing William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942), “Pantaloon in Black” is the tragic and poignant story of Rider, a black sawmill worker who is made a widower when his young bride, Mannie, dies only six… Read More ›
Analysis of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses
Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner’s 12th novel, is generally ranked as one of his greatest—not least because it doubles as a unique collection of short stories. Most of these stories had been published separately between 1935 and 1942, in such… Read More ›
Analysis of William Faulkner’s Stories
William Faulkner (1897-1962) has been credited with having the imagination to see, before other serious writers saw, the tremendous potential for drama, pathos, and sophisticated humor in the history and people of the South. In using this material and, in… Read More ›
Modern Novels and Novelists
One way to understand the modern novel is to show its development in the work of writers such as Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner. This list is by no means exclusive, but… Read More ›
Gothic Novels and Novelists
The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. It began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), then traveled through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin,… Read More ›
Experimental Novels and Novelists
Literature is forever transforming. A new literary age is new precisely because its important writers do things differently from their predecessors. Thus, it could be said that almost all significant literature is in some sense innovative or experimental at its… Read More ›
The Urban Neurotic Jew in Woody Allen’s Short Fiction
Woody Allen is one of the most prolific artists of the twentieth century. He is a highly praised director and scriptwriter, a successful actor, a dedicated clarinettist, an appreciated playwright, and an awarded short fiction writer. His entire work testifies… Read More ›
Analysis of William Faulkner’s Novels
When William Faulkner (1897-1962) accepted the Nobel Prize in December, 1950, he made a speech that has become a justly famous statement of his perception of the modern world and of his particular place in it. In the address, Faulkner speaks… Read More ›
The Poetics of Modernism: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Modernism comprised a broad series of movements in Europe and America that came to fruition roughly between 1910 and 1930. Its major exponents and practitioners included Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Luigi… Read More ›
Georg Lukacs as a Marxist Literary Theorist
The Hungarian thinker and aesthetician Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) has played a pivotal role in the development of Western Marxism, which refers to a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and central Europe. The Western Marxists are in opposition… Read More ›
Symbolist Movement in Poetry
A term specifically applied to the work of late 19th century French writers who reacted against the descriptive precision and objectivity of realism and the scientific determinism of naturalism, Symbolism was first used in this sense by Jean Moreas in… Read More ›
Techniques of Fragmentation Used in Modernism
Modernism, which emerged out of an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy“, rightly represented in Klee’s painting, The Angel of History, found its radical expression in literature through the techniques of impressionism and subjectivity as exemplified in the stream-of-consciousness method… Read More ›
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