William Faulkner, Letters & Fictions

James G. Watson

Published by University of Texas Press 1989

William Faulkner, Letters & Fictions

James G. Watson

https://doi.org/10.7560/765030

Overview
Contents

About this book

Besides the groundbreaking novels and stories that brought him fame, William Faulkner throughout his life wrote letters—to his publisher, his lovers, his family, and his friends. In this first major study of epistolarity in Faulkner's work, James G. Watson examines Faulkner's personal correspondence as a unique second canon of writing, separate from his literary canon with its many fictional letters but developing along parallel lines. By describing the similarity of forms and conventions in Faulkner's personal and fictional correspondence, Watson clearly demonstrates that Faulkner's personal experience as a writer of letters significantly shaped his imaginative work early and late.

Letters are always about themselves; they re-create a world between the sender and the receiver. In this illuminating study, Faulkner's personal letters are treated as a form of reflexive writing: first-person narratives in which Sender self-consciously portrays Self to a specific Receiver, likewise portrayed in the letter-text. This duality of actual experience and imaginative re-creation measures the personal distances between the life of the writer and the written self-image. It reveals that letters are at once fragments of autobiography and fictions of self.

Such "laws of letters" apply equally to the letters that appear throughout Faulkner's novels and stories. The twenty-one letters and telegrams in The Sound and the Fury, for example, portray character, propel plot, and convey important themes of failed communication and broken identity. From Soldiers' Pay to his last work, Faulkner's carefully lettered canon of fiction is dramatic evidence of his understanding of epistolarity and of the extent to which he adapted letters, including some of his own, to shape his fictional world.

Author / Editor information

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

Reviews

... this study is at once authoritative and suggestive and will unquestionably shape the way subsequent critics read Faulkner the writer and view Faulkner the man.... Watson does a superb job of bringing us closer to both the work and the man.

— South Central Review

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Abbreviations Used Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments James G. Watson Publicly Available Download PDF	xv
I. The Two Canons Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
II. Crossings Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
III. Integrated Letters Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	58
IV. Letters at Hand Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	92
V. Broken Letters Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
VI. Personal Distances: The Public Man of Letters Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205

Language: English
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 232

eBook

Published: September 12, 2014
ISBN: 9781477303412