Although all published biographical information on Toni Morrison agrees that her birth name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, John Duvall's book challenges this claim. Using new biographical information, he explores the issue of names and naming in Morrison's fiction and repeatedly finds surprising traces of the Nobel Prize-winning author's struggle to construct a useable identity as an African American woman novelist. Whatever the exact circumstances surrounding her decision to become Toni, one thing becomes clear: the question of identity was not a given for Morrison.
Although all published biographical information on Toni Morrison agrees that her birth name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, John Duvall's book challenges t...
Don DeLillo's satiric novel White Noise, prophetic in 1985 about American society's rampant consumerism, information overload, overreliance on the media, and environmental problems, may seem to today's students simply a description of their lived reality. The challenge for teachers, then, is to help them appreciate both the postmodern qualities of the novel and its social critique.
Don DeLillo's satiric novel White Noise, prophetic in 1985 about American society's rampant consumerism, information overload, overreliance on the med...
Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction explores a form of racial passing that has gone largely unnoticed. Duvall makes visible the means by which southern novelists repeatedly imagined their white characters as fundamentally black in some sense. Beginning with William Faulkner, Duvall traces a form of figurative and rhetorical masking in twentieth-century southern fiction that derives from whiteface minstrelsy. In the fiction of such subsequent writers as Flannery O'Connor, John Barth, Dorothy Allison, and Ishmael Reed, the reader sees characters who present a white face to the world,...
Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction explores a form of racial passing that has gone largely unnoticed. Duvall makes visible the means by which...
Since the 1960s, William Faulkner, Mississippi's most famous author, has been recognized as a central figure of international modernism. But might Faulkner's fiction be understood in relation to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as well as James Joyce's Ulysses?
In eleven essays from the 1999 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner and Postmodernism examines William Faulkner and his fiction in light of postmodern literature, culture, and theory. The volume explores the variety of ways Faulkner's art can be used to...
Since the 1960s, William Faulkner, Mississippi's most famous author, has been recognized as a central figure of international modernism. But might ...
Drawn from the pages of Modern Fiction Studies--with its distinguished tradition of publishing scholarship on William Faulkner--this landmark volume collects nineteen seminal essays that focus on Faulkner's most popular fiction, reflecting the enduring relevance of his canon.
The essays are grouped thematically into four categories--Myth and Religion; Temporality, History, and Trauma; Gender and Race: Affect, the Body, and Identity; and Modernity and Modernist Technique. For ease of use in the classroom, MFS editor John N. Duvall has also included two appendixes. The...
Drawn from the pages of Modern Fiction Studies--with its distinguished tradition of publishing scholarship on William Faulkner--this landmar...
Is William Faulkner's fiction built on a fundamental dichotomy of outcast individual versus the healthy agrarian community? The New Critics of the 1930s advanced this view, and it has shaped much Faulkner criticism. However, in Faulkner's Marginal Couple, John Duvall posits the existence of another possibility, alternative communities formed by "deviant" couples. These couples, who violate "normal" gender roles and behaviors, challenge the either/or view of Faulkner's world.
The study treats in detail the novels Light in August, The Wild Palms,...
Is William Faulkner's fiction built on a fundamental dichotomy of outcast individual versus the healthy agrarian community? The New Critics of the ...
White southern writers are frequently associated with the racism of blackface minstrelsy in their representations of African American characters, however, this book makes visible the ways in which southern novelists repeatedly imagine their white characters as in some sense fundamentally black.
White southern writers are frequently associated with the racism of blackface minstrelsy in their representations of African American characters, howe...
