Fictions of Labor considers William Faulkner's representation of the structural paradoxes of labour dependency in the Southern economy from the antebellum period through to the New Deal. This book seeks to link stylistic aspects of Faulkner's writing to a generative social trauma which constitutes its formal core. That trauma, Godden argues, is a labour trauma, centred on the debilitating discovery by the Southern owning class of its own production by those it subordinates. Using close textual analysis and careful historical contextualization, Richard Godden produces a persuasive account of the ways in which Faulkner's work rests on deeply submerged anxieties about the legacy of violently coercive labour relations in the American South.
| ISBN: | 9780521044271 |
| Publication date: | 11th October 2007 |
| Author: | Richard Keele University Godden |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 308 pages |
| Series: | Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers |