The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War [Hardcover]

A Spectacular.... Surely among the most dexterous, dynamic, and consistently surprising studies ever written about an English-language novelist.... This is surely the first account of Faulkners work that provides a systematic reading of Confederate historiographythe version that Faulkner would have imbibed growing up. And yet Gorras well-conceived, exhaustively researched book probes historys refusals... Rich in insight... Timely and essential as we confront, once again, the question of who is a citizen and who among us should enjoy its privileges. Michael Gorra, an English professor at Smith, believes Faulkner to be the most important novelist of the 20th century. In his rich, complex, and eloquent new book, Eloquent analysis. . . . Graceful. . . . A nimble hybrid that blends literary analyses with history, biography, and personal narrative. . . . [Gorra] movingly narrates the debacles at Bull Run and Gettysburg and effortlessly slides from astute analyses of Faulkners best stories, like Mountain Victory, to such novels as Michael Gorras provocative and engrossing new book, Powerful... Mr. Gorra demonstrates convincingly that this unshakable past for Faulkner came increasingly to involve race.... For Mr. Gorra, Faulkners fiction should be read these days for 'the drama and struggle and paradox and power of his attempt to work through our history, to wrestle or rescue it into meaning.' Reading Faulkner today we discover just how much imagination and courage can be required to face the past. Faulkners enduring, ubiquitous quote that the past is never dead might be a fitting epitaph for this new book. In this timely re-examination, Gorra considers how Faulkner should be read in the 21st century, with a focus on the depiction of Black people and racism in his fiction. A magisterial, multidisciplinary study of Faulkner that shakes the dust off his canonization. As esteemed literary scholar Gorra informs us in this transcendent study, European audiences hlsI