Read complete books and articles on: The Marble Faun

Faulkner, William - 1897–1962, American novelist, b. New Albany, Miss., one of the great American writers of the 20th cent. Born into an old Southern family named Falkner, he changed the spelling of his last name to Faulkner when he published his first book, a collection of poems entitled The Marble Faun, in 1924. Faulkner trained in Canada as a cadet pilot in the Royal Air Force in 1918, attended the Univ. of Mississippi in 1919–20, and lived in Paris briefly in 1925. In 1931 he bought a pre–Civil War mansion, "Rowanoak," in Oxford, Miss., where he lived, a virtual recluse, for the rest of his life. As a writer Faulkner's primary concern was to probe his own region, the deep South. Most of his novels are set in Yoknapatawpha county, an imaginary area in Mississippi with a colorful history and a richly varied population. The county is a microcosm of the South as a whole, and Faulkner's novels examine the effects of the dissolution of traditional values and authority on all levels of Southern society. One of his primary themes is the abuse of blacks by the Southern whites. Because Faulkner's novels treat the decay and anguish of the South since the Civil War, they abound in violent and sordid events. But they are grounded in a profound and compassionate humanism that celebrates the tragedy, energy, and humor of ordinary human life. The master of a rhetorical, highly symbolic style, Faulkner was also a brilliant literary technician, making frequent use of convoluted time sequences and of the stream of consciousness technique. He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known novels are The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Hamlet (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954; Pulitzer Prize), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962; Pulitzer Prize). In addition to novels Faulkner published several volumes of short stories including These 13 (1931), Go Down, Moses (1942), Knight's Gambit (1949), and Big Woods (1955); and collections of essays and poems.

See the reminiscences of his brother, John (1963); biographies by H. H. Waggoner (1959) and J. Blotner (2 vol., 1974, repr. 1984); studies by R. P. Adams (1968), L. G. Leary (1973), and J. W. Reed, Jr. (1973); F. J. Hoffman and O. W. Vickery, ed., William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism (1960).

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11 of the Best Books and Articles on: The Marble Faun

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

The Marble Faun, or the Romance of Monte Beni, Vol. I » Read Now
by Nathaniel Hawthorne. 216 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
2.

High Resolution: Critical Theory and the Problem of Literacy (Chap. 2 "The Marble Faun and the Space of American Letters") » Read Now
by Henry S. Sussman. 274 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Literature, Entire Library

At the heart of this important new book is the tension between literacy and the open acknowledgement of discrepancies within social and linguistic fields on the one hand, and what Sussman terms the resolving function, the utopian picture of harmony depicted by the state and large organizations, on...
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At the heart of this important new book is the tension between literacy and the open acknowledgement of discrepancies within social and linguistic fields on the one hand, and what Sussman terms the resolving function, the utopian picture of harmony depicted by the state and large organizations, on the other. After discussing some examples of the resolving function--Barthes's notion of the myth, Kundera's fictional treatment of kitsch, and contemporary television--Sussman draws on a line of theoretical inquiry extending from Saussure to Derrida in order to put forth a differential model of literacy in which the skills necessary to participate productively in culture are more disjunctive than associative in nature. Awareness of the discrepancies set into play by language is necessary, he argues, for both the individual and the society to understand the complex and sometimes contradictory web of socioeconomic, political, and semiological relations in which they are involved. Combining literary theory with close textual readings of works by Hawthorne, Melville, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Italo Calvino, this book is the first to explore the socio-political correlatives to literary studies--the mass media's ambivalence toward the linguistic apprehensions and skills that make them possible.
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3.

The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James and Some Other American Writers (Chap. 3 "'The Marble Faun' and 'The Wings of the Dove'") » Read Now
by Marius Bewley. 248 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
4.

'Villette' and 'The Marble Faun,' in Studies in the Novel » Read Now
by Jack C. Wills. 19 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
5.

Miriam and the Conversion of the Jews in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, in Studies in the Novel » Read Now
by Augustus M. Kolich. 13 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, Literature, Entire Library
6.

The Marble Mother: Hawthorne's Iconographies of the Feminine, in Studies in American Fiction » Read Now
by Todd Onderdonk. 27 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
7.

The Choice of Innocence: Hilda in 'The Marble Faun,' in Studies in the Novel » Read Now
by Emily Schiller. 20 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
8.

"A Frail Structure of Our Own Rearing": The Value(s) of Home in The Marble Faun, in ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly) » Read Now
by Laurie A. Sterling. 19 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
9.

Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850-1910 (Chap. 2 "'The Grand Reservoir of National Prosperity': Connoisseurship, Literary Nationalism, and The Marble Faun") » Read Now
by Nancy Glazener. 373 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library
10.

Storied Cities: Literary Imaginings of Florence, Venice, and Rome (Chap. 16 "Pearls and Carbuncles: The Marble Faun") » Read Now
by Michael L. Ross. 314 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

The fabled cities of Italy--Florence, Venice, and Rome--have each acquired a distinctive tradition of literary representation involving characteristic, recurrent motifs and symbolic signatures. A wealth of writing on each is examined in fiction and poetry of nineteenth and twentieth-century authors...
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The fabled cities of Italy--Florence, Venice, and Rome--have each acquired a distinctive tradition of literary representation involving characteristic, recurrent motifs and symbolic signatures. A wealth of writing on each is examined in fiction and poetry of nineteenth and twentieth-century authors. The analysis points to Florence frequently being depicted in terms of binary oppositions, such as past versus present, stasis versus movement, and light versus darkness. Venetian narratives commonly are infused with motifs relating to dream and unreality, obsession, voyeurism, isolation, melancholia, and death. History, combined with the motif of change, is a controlling metaphor for Roman fiction and poetry. In a wider theoretical framework, this writing is analyzed for the light shed on the issue of the significance of setting in literature.
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11.

American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture ("The New England Maiden and the Fallen Goddess of The Marble Faun" begins on p. 26) » Read Now
by John Gatta. 179 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, Literature, Entire Library

This book explores a notable if unlikely undercurrent of interest in Mary as mythical Madonna that has persisted in American life and letters from fairly early in the nineteenth century into the later twentieth. This imaginative involvement with the Divine Woman -- verging at times on devotional...
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This book explores a notable if unlikely undercurrent of interest in Mary as mythical Madonna that has persisted in American life and letters from fairly early in the nineteenth century into the later twentieth. This imaginative involvement with the Divine Woman -- verging at times on devotional homage -- is especially intriguing as manifested in the Protestant writers who are the focus of this study: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harold Frederic, Henry Adams, and T.S. Eliot. John Gatta argues that flirtation with the Marian cultus offered Protestant writers symbolic compensation for what might be culturally diagnosed as a deficiency of psychic femininity, or anima, in America. He argues that the literary configurations of the mythical Madonna express a subsurface cultural resistance to the prevailing rationalism and pragmatism of the American mind in an age of entrepreneurial conquest.
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