Faulkner: The House Divided extends Abraham Lincoln's metaphor of a polarized nation to the twentieth-century. Southern psyche and the extraordinary career of its foremost spokeman. Through readings of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses, Eric Sundquist probes William Faulner's complex attitudes toward the tragedy of the Civil War, toward Jim Crow laws, racial violence, and segregation, toward Black freedom and white fears.

Faulkner's novels and their intricate narratice technique express the tragic passions, betrayed human sympathies, and potentially violent pressures for social change that governed the relationships between Blacks and whites. In this detailed and at times controversial study, now available for the first time in paperback, Sundquist examines the novelist's gradual discovery and artistic mastery of the racial problems that make up his own history and that of his country. "The novels that demand our attention now, as they always will," he writes, "are the ones in which the nation's most tragic and defining historical experience found its appropriately convulsive forms of expression and in which Faulkner became the great writer he has always been recognized to be."

About the Author

Eric J. Sundquist is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and editor of American Realism: New Essays.

Reviews
A determined study of the political evidence, of contemporary literature and of sociological documents. In this he has been strikingly successful. Times Literary Supplement Summarizing Sundquist's argument hardly captures the dense richness of his book. The readings turn up variation after variation on the riddling paradoxes that indenture the white Southerner to the legacies of bondage and emancipation. American Literature



Book Information
ISBN 9780801831645
Author Eric J. Sundquist
Format Paperback
Page Count 200
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 283g