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William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies (Lives & Legacies (Oxford)) ReviewDon't dismiss this book because of its brevity. Porter clearly knows her stuff. Without any apparent biases (Marxist, Freudian, or archetypal) she gives clear, insightful, and helpful readings of all of Faulkner's major novels and is clearly well-read in all of the important Faulkner criticism and scholarship produced over the past half-century. It is refreshing to find an academic who can produce an "introduction" of this breadth and complexity without writing down to those just beginning their foray into her subject. She assumes her readers are interested in getting the most out of their reading of Faulkner and provides sufficient background (biographical as well as critical) to help them do so. I read this book with great interest over the course of a week, underlining many of her points for future reference. She covers all of Faulkner's major works (The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Sanctuary, Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!) and makes a good case for including Go Down, Moses and The Hamlet among them. She even argues in favor of taking Faulkner's last novel, The Reivers, (often dismissed as a nostalgic reverie) as a serious contribution to the Yoknapatawpha literature. In addition, she acknowledges the value of a number of non-Yoknapatawpha texts (such as Pylon and The Wild Palms) for understanding Faulkner's experimentation and innovation in the art of narrative (a key theme throughout her book). At the same time, she is not blind to Faulkner's weaknesses (such as his early failings as a poet, his insecurities and need to self-mythologize, his alcoholism, and his eventual decline as an artist after his "major phase" from 1929 to 1942). Her discussions of race and gender issues are frank, helpful, and unfreighted by polemics. Her "Final Note to New Readers: Bibliography" is full of helpful tips on how to read Faulkner. "I tell my students always," she writes, "get used to not knowing exactly what's going on. Understanding will come, but the pleasure of confusion comes first. The language itself should be your first seduction" (p. 187). Porter has not written "Faulkner for Dummies," but has offered a great introduction into the vast and diverse imaginative world of the greatest American writer of the twentieth century.William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies (Lives & Legacies (Oxford)) OverviewIn this newest volume in Oxford's Lives and Legacies series, Carolyn Porter, a leading authority on William Faulkner, offers an insightful account of Faulkner's life and work, with special focus on the breathtaking twelve-year period when he wrote some of the finest novels in American literature. Porter ranges from Faulkner's childhood in Mississippi to his abortive career as a poet, his sojourn in New Orleans (where he met a sympathetic Sherwood Anderson and wrote his first novel Soldier's Pay), his short but strategically important stay in Paris, his "rescue" by Malcolm Crowley in the late 1940s, and his winning of the Nobel Prize. But the heart of the book illuminates the formal leap in Faulkner's creative vision beginning with The Sound and the Fury in 1929, which sold poorly but signaled the arrival of a major new literary talent. Indeed, from 1929 through 1942, he would produce, against formidable odds--physical, spiritual, and financial--some of the greatest fictional works of the twentieth century, including As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Porter shows how, during this remarkably sustained burst of creativity, Faulkner pursued an often feverish process of increasingly ambitious narrative experimentation, coupled with an equally ambitious thematic expansion, as he moved from a close-up study of the white nuclear family, both lower and upper class, to an epic vision of southern, American, and ultimately Western culture. Porter illuminates the importance of Faulkner's legacy not only for American literature, but also for world literature, and reveals how Faulkner lives on so powerfully, both in the works of his literary heirs and in the lives of readers today.Want to learn more information about William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies (Lives & Legacies (Oxford))?
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