Description
"Faulkner, Masculinity, and Modernism" focuses on the relationship between William Faulkner's narrative experiments and cultural constructions of masculinity, from traditional notions of white male southern honor to alternative forms of masculinity and sexuality explored by modernist writers in general. Faulkner himself was acutely aware that he lived in a region where, as he noted, art "was really no manly business" and where the male artist was "forced to choose, lady and tiger fashion, between being an artist and being a man." That "choice" would have a profound impact upon Faulkner's early self-definition as artist and on his later interrogation of conventional definitions of masculinity and femininity. Rather than simply building on existing scholarship exploring Faulkner's narrative representations of masculinity from a psychoanalytical and poststructualist perspective, this study constructs a critical perspective of Faulkner's work drawing from both the new scholarship on gender and literary modernism and recent historical studies on white and black southern masculinity. This study aims to construct this sort of critical, interdisciplinary perspective of masculinity in Faulkner's fiction.
