Sutpen and The South: A Study of Absalom, Absalom!

PMLA ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 80 (5) ◽  
pp. 596-604
Author(s):  
Melvin Backman
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The South ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
To Come ◽  
Historical Truth

Seven years after the publication of The Sound and the Fury came Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The Sound and the Fury dealt with the fall of a family, Absalom deals with the fall of a society. The Quentin Compson of Absalom is not quite the same as the earlier Quentin: his concern is social rather than personal and his role is identified for the most part with a central quest in the novel—the quest to discover the truth about the rise and fall of his South. In its search for the truth about a whole society, the novel circles and shuttles back and forth in time, its sentences twist and strain, and its narrators attempt to recreate a past on the basis of some fact and much conjecture. Sometimes the narrators mislead unintentionally, sometimes they contradict one another, and often they are carried away by their own bias, preoccupation, or imagination. Yes, it is hard to come by truth, but still one might question whether a novel whose pitch is too shrill, whose approach is emotional and poetic, whose perspective seems unclear and shifting—one might question whether such a work presents the best way of getting at historical truth. The method of narration apparently mirrors not only the difficulty in getting at truth but the struggle to face truth. For all its straining, its complexities and obscurities, Absalom, I would conclude, is Faulkner's most historical novel.

scholarly journals Mito e historia del Cid en la novela “El señor de las dos religiones” de Juan José Hernández

2018 ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Peter Ivanov Mollov
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Novela Historica ◽  
Historical Truth

El texto constituye un análisis literario de la novela histórica de Juan José Hernández El señor de las dos religiones. Se pretende analizar cómo el autor traza la imagen de Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar y los diversos aspectos de su personalidad presentándolo desde el punto de vista del rey Alfonso VI, el narrador de la novela. Nos proponemos asimismo indagar hasta qué punto la imagen literaria del Cid creada por el novelista se corresponde con la verdad histórica, a fin de valorar la historicidad de la obra.The text consists in a literary analysis of the historical novel Lord of two religions by Juan José Hernández. Our purpose is to analyse how the author traces the image of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar and the diverse aspects of his personality presenting the hero from King Alfonso VI’s point of view, as narrator of the novel. Our purpose is also to investigate if the literary image of Cid created by the novelist corresponds with the historical truth, in order to value the historicity of the work. 

scholarly journals “The Pugachevites” by E. A. Salias in the Reception of F. M. Dostoevsky: on the Epic Character of the Russian Novel

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 92-113
Author(s):  
Nadezhda G. Mikhnovets
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Russian History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Russian Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Further Development

The article analyzes the nature of the interaction between first-line literature and fiction in the 1860–1870s as dynamic, versatile and dialogical. It is argued that the historical novel by E. A. Salias “The Pugachevites” (1874), based on the discoveries of the epic novel “War and Peace” by L. N. Tolstoy, testified to the process of strengthening the epic tendency in Russian literature of the 19th century. The novel by E. A. Salias was not exclusively secondary, the portrayal of the “predatory type” hero became innovative, but not deeply understood by the fiction writer. It is noted that further development was undertaken by F. M. Dostoevsky at the first stage of the creation of the novel “The Adolescent”. Its distinctive feature was the consideration of the “predatory type” in the context of the Russian history of spiritual quests of the 17th–19th centuries. The description of the stages of development of the type by F. M. Dostoevsky made it possible to come to the conclusion that the process of cognition of the Russian character, the identification of the laws of the historical development of Russia presupposed a versatile comprehension of the national foundations of life, which predetermined the epic character as the leading feature of the Russian novel of the second half of the 19th century.

The Four Narrative Perspectives in Absalom, Absalom!

PMLA ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Gartrell Levins
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Moral Outrage ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The South ◽  
As I Lay Dying ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
Selection Of

In Absalom, Absalom!, as in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner's concern is with the individual's subjective apprehension of the palpable world of experience. In the latter novels he distinguishes one character's point of view from another's by means of significant variations in language and style in those sections which present a different individual consciousness. The distinction among the four narrative perspectives in Absalom, Absalom!, however, is not stylistic, but formal. Faulkner differentiates the viewpoints in the novel by shaping each perspective after a different literary genre. It is a skillful adaptation of form to meaning, for the selection of these particular genres expresses, structurally, the imagination's subjective act of re-creating history, engaged in by four narrators emotionally involved in either Thomas Sutpen or the Southern myth: Rosa Coldfield, haunted by the moral “outrage” inflicted by the “demonic” Sutpen, shapes her narrative to the Gothic mystery; Mr. Compson, convinced of the epical proportions of the South, relates his narrative as a Greek tragedy; Quentin, obsessed by Henry's relationship with Judith because of his own involvement with Caddy, presented in The Sound and the Fury, expresses his narrative in the framework of the chivalric romance; and Shreve, the detached, intellectual Northerner, relieves the intensity of the preceding viewpoints by means of the ludicrous humor of the tall tale.

The Contemporary South African Trauma Novel: Michiel Heyns’ Lost Ground (2011) and Marlene van Niekerk’s The Way of the Women (2008)

2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-165
Author(s):  
Ewald Mengel
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Marked Contrast ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
South African Politics ◽  
To Come ◽  
Real Strength ◽  
The Way

AbstractAfter the end of apartheid in 1990 and the new constitution of 1994, the genre of the contemporary South African novel is experiencing a heyday. One reason for this is that, with the end of censorship, the authors can go about unrestraint to take a critical look at the traumatized country and the state of a nation that shows a great need to come to terms with its past. In this context, trauma and narration prove to be a fertile combination, an observation that stands in marked contrast to the deconstructionist view of trauma as ‘unclaimed’ experience and the inability to speak about it. Michiel Heyns’ Lost Ground (2011) and Marlene van Niekerk’s The Way of the Women (2008) are prime examples of the contemporary South African trauma novel. As crime fiction, Lost Ground not only tells a thrilling story but is also deeply involved in South African politics. The novelist Heyns plays with postmodernist structures, but the real strength of the novel lies in its realistic milieu description and the analysis of the protagonist’s traumatic ‘entanglements’. The Way of the Women is mainly a farm novel but also shows elements of the historical novel and the marriage novel. It continues the process of the deconstruction of the farm as a former symbol of the Afrikaner’s pride and glory. Both novels’ meta-fictional self-reflections betray the self-consciousness of their authors who are aware of the symbolization compulsions in a traumatized country. They use narrative as a means of ‘working through’, coming to terms with trauma, and achieving reconciliation. Both novels’ complex narrative structures may be read as symbolic expressions of traumatic ‘entanglements’ that lie at the heart of the South African dilemma.

Drawing the Written Woman

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-63
Author(s):  
Sonia Lagerwall
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Dynamic Adaptation ◽  
Adaptation Process ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Artistic Training

This article deals with Philippe Druillet's three-volume comic adaptation (1980–1985) of Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert's historical novel from 1862, set three centuries BC. Flaubert was famous for not wanting his texts illustrated: he argued that the preciseness of images would undo the poetic vagueness of his written words. The article examines how Druillet tackles the challenge of graphically representing Flaubert's canonical work without reducing the priestess Salammbô into a given type. The analysis shows a dynamic adaptation process in which Druillet gives a kaleidoscopic form to Flaubert's text. His variation on the Salammbô character foregrounds photography, a medium historically relevant to the novel but also to Druillet's own artistic training. Featuring his character Lone Sloane in the role of Mathô, the adaptation proves to be a highly personal appropriation of the novel, where Druillet enhances an autobiographical dimension of his work previously hinted at in La Nuit and Gaïl.

Vision

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Holt
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Strategic Vision ◽  
Henry Mintzberg ◽  
To Come

If knowledge does not create a sustained and unified sense of organizational self (skepticism is rife) then strategic inquiry can turn to vision, a move advocated by Henry Mintzberg amongst others. The chapter considers what it is to author a strategic vision, using the novel The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells as an indicative and provocative example of an organizational attempt to present its own form to itself and others. The risks associated with propaganda and dogmatic assertion are discussed, as are the strategy documents by which many modern organizations attempt to instil an equivalent vision to that envisaged by Wells.

Kidnapped

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Ian Duncan
Keyword(s):  
West Coast ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
First Time ◽  
Adventure Stories

Your bed shall be the moorcock’s, and your life shall be like the hunted deer’s, and ye shall sleep with your hand upon your weapons.’ Tricked out of his inheritance, shanghaied, shipwrecked off the west coast of Scotland, David Balfour finds himself fleeing for his life in the dangerous company of Jacobite outlaw and suspected assassin Alan Breck Stewart. Their unlikely friendship is put to the test as they dodge government troops across the Scottish Highlands. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, Kidnapped transforms the Romantic historical novel into the modern thriller. Its heart-stopping scenes of cross-country pursuit, distilled to a pure intensity in Stevenson’s prose, have become a staple of adventure stories from John Buchan to Alfred Hitchcock and Ian Fleming. Kidnapped remains as exhilarating today as when it was first published in 1886. This new edition is based on the 1895 text, incorporating Stevenson’s last thoughts about the novel before his death. It includes Stevenson’s ‘Note to Kidnapped’, reprinted for the first time since 1922.

scholarly journals Belonging in the Coronaverse: Will There Be Time?

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-115
Author(s):  
Kate Fischer ◽  
Malika Rakhmonova ◽  
Mike Tran
Keyword(s):  
College Experience ◽  
The United States ◽  
Limited Time ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Residential University ◽  
To Come ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
University Experience ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Older Siblings

Abstract Since the spring of 2020 SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, has upended lives and caused a rethinking of nearly all social behaviors in the United States. This paper examines the ways in which the pandemic, shutdown, and gradual move towards “normal” have laid bare and obfuscated societal pressures regarding running out of time as it pertains to the residential university experience. Promised by movies, television, and older siblings and friends as a limited-time offer, the “typical” college experience is baked into the U.S. imaginary, reinforcing a host of notions of who “belongs” on campus along lines of race, class, and age. Fed a vision of what their whole lives “should be”, students who enter a residential four-year college are already imbued with a nostalgia for what is yet to come, hailed, in Althusser’s (2006[1977]) sense, as university subjects even before their first class. The upheaval of that subjecthood during the pandemic has raised important questions about the purpose of the college experience as well as how to belong to a place that is no longer there.

scholarly journals Critiquing Anthropocentrism in Henry Ole Kulet’s Vanishing Herds

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-55
Author(s):  
Pushpa Raj Jaishi
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Critical Issue ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
East African ◽  
To Come

Vanishing Herds (2011) is Henry Ole Kulet’s novel that hovers around the ecological depletion caused by the anthropocentric attitude of the human beings. Set in the East African Savannah, the novel grapples with the critical issue of anthropogenic environmental degradation. The novel is based on the tribulations of a young Maasai couple –Kedoki and Norpisia whose epic journey through the wilderness provides a window through which the destruction of the physical environment can be viewed. Additionally, the text catalogues the challenges faced by a pastoralist community’s attempt to come to terms with the socio-economic realities of a fast-evolving contemporary society. The paper is an attempt to study this novel under the surveillance of green lens and throw light on the ecological destruction especially the clearing of the forest by human self centered endeavors and to critique the anthropocentric attitude of the human beings that render the environment at the verge of destruction.

Queer Masculinities: Gender Roles, the Abject and Bottomhood in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (4) ◽  
pp. 739-757
Author(s):  
Christina Slopek
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Sexual Intimacy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Language Politics ◽  
White American ◽  
Sexual Orientations ◽  
Gender Performances ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender

Abstract This article analyzes queerness in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), teasing out how the queer relationship at the core of the novel is framed. Ocean Vuong’s novel mobilizes queerness to straddle boundaries between cultures, gender roles and bodies. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous places the queer sexual orientations and gender performances of its protagonists, one Vietnamese American, one white American, in firm relation to the formative force of cultural contexts. Zooming in on two young boys’ queerness, the novel diversifies gender roles and makes room especially for non-normative masculinities. What is more, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous mobilizes the abject to showcase how queer sexual intimacy straddles boundaries between bodies and subjects. The article attends to language politics in connection with the novel’s coming-out performance, striated constructions of gender roles and their interplay with the abject and “bottomhood” (Nguyen 2014: 2) to come to grips with the novel’s diversification of queer masculinities.

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