Above all, let's talk about the historical background of the southern Renaissance. First, there was the historical significant confluct between the Hamiltonian north and the Jeffersonian South. Second, the civil war stood as the watershed of two different stages in many aspects. The south was never more united closely spirtually than before. Third, American southern literature can date back to Edgar Allen Poe, and reach its summit with the appearance of the two gaints Faulkner and Wolfe.
The southern Renaissance is featured in its unique feeling of guilt, failure and poverty as well. Its unique features are the southern Myths like: Chevalier hertiage, Agrarian virtue, Plantation aristocracy, Lost cause, White supremacy and Purity of womanhood.
Southern Literature has its unique features. It is a tight-knit, long-established community and the emotional, almost physical, response to the southern environment. It has the accustomed patterns of speech, black and white, the intimate knowledge of characteristic body carriage and movement. It has a high rhetorical quality in narration and a profound consciousness of time. It is also twisted, violent and pessimistic dealing with displacement and human distorted innocence.
William Faulkner is an American novelist and poet whose works feature his native state of Missisippi and regarded one of the most influential writers of the twentiwth century. He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature and a representative of writer using stream of consciousness. His works are famous for multiple narrations and time shifts within narrative and known to be very challenging and difficult.
Faulker's most celebrated novel is The sound and the Fury, which derives from shakespeare's drama "人生如痴人说梦，充满着喧哗与骚动，却没有任何意义。"
As for the setting of most of his works, he wrote that "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whether talentsm I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own."
The setting of most of his works are in the American South, with his emphasis on the Southern subjects and consciousness. Subject matters from a small region in Northern Missisippi, Yoknapatawpha county which is actually an imagery place based on Faulkner's childhood memory about the place where he grew up, the town of Oxford in his native Lafayette county. Yoknapatawpha country is a country in northern Missisippi, the setting for most of william Faulkner's novels and short stories, and patterned upon Faulkner's actual home in Lafayette county, Missisippi.
With his rich imagination, Faulkner turned the land, the people and the history of the region into a literary creation and a mythical kingdom. Created Yoknapatawpha county, modeled after Oxford.
Major themes of his works are three. First, he explains the present by the examing the past, by telling the stories of several generations of family to show how history changes life. Second, he was interested in the relationship between blacks and whites, especially concerned about the problems of the people who were of the mixed race of black and white, unacceptable to both races. Third, conflicts between generations, classes, races, man and environment. Moreover, there is horror, violence and abnormal is his works.
"Barn Burning", in its examination of a boy's struggle with family loyalty and a higher sense of justice, fits firmly in Faulkner's familiar fictional mode.
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