Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1973. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 472-519).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 40-41). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Uppsala University, 1983. / Includes index. Bibliography: p. 159-169.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-49). Also available on the Internet.

The influence of the pre-Civil War Southwestern humorists on the work of William Faulkner has long been hypothesized. But it has received scant critical attention, much of it erroneous or so general as to be almost meaningless. While Faulkner's total vision is more than merely humorous, humor is a significant part of that vision. And the importance of frontier humor to Faulkner's art is further substantiated by the fact that many of his grotesque passages derive from elements of this humor. Frontier humor flourished from I830 to I860, and while a large group of men then flooded American newspapers with contributions, it now survives in anthologies and the book-length collections of its most prominent writers — Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Joseph Glover Baldwin, Johnson Jones Hooper, William Tappan Thompson, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and George Washington Harris. Their writings illustrate the genre's growth from mere regionalism in eighteenth century diction to the robust and masculine humor in the frontiersman's own language. Harris is the best of these humorists because he has a better sense of incongruity and consistently tells his stories in the earthy vernacular of the frontiersman; and Faulkner himself admires Sut Lovingood, principle character-cum-raconteur of Harris's best work. Therefore, in this thesis I focus on Harris's Sut Lovingood in relation to the Snopes trilogy of Faulkner — his longest unified work and a "chronicle” of Yoknapatawpha County with much frontier humor in it. A major parallel between Faulkner and Harris is their similar use of the story-within-a-story device and their similar technical rendering of the highly figurative and even in Harris's time somewhat stylized language of the frontier. Their common Southern heritage and the lack of change in the post-bellum Southern backwoodsman conduces to a similar milieu. Harris's and Faulkner's recurrent theme of retribution derives from the frontiersman's individualism and from his concern for at least the rudiments of society. Both authors create a large number of frontier characters at and their principal frontier characters are at once superb story tellers and epitomize the best ideals of the American frontier. The purpose of this thesis, then, is to examine the ways in which Faulkner parallels Harris's frontier humor. Having established Harris as the best writer in his group, I discuss the two authors' structures and techniques, their milieus and themes, and their characters. The trilogy's similarities with and deviations from Harris's Sut Lovingood help to illuminate Faulkner's artistry as well as to suggest the strength of Harris's influence on Faulkner. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study explores the nature and extent of Sherwood Anderson's influence upon William Faulkner. It demonstrates, through the use of the comparative method, that Anderson's influence is a major and continuous one. The early New Orlean Sketches strongly echo and, at times, imitate Anderson's work. Faulkner's first novel, Soldiers' Pay, was not only written at Anderson's suggestion but also published through his influence. In Mosquitoes, Faulkner closely modeled his main character after Anderson. Anderson helped Faulkner to organize some of the "folk" material in that novel. Faulkner's early use of negro characters to embody a kind of sane, healthy alternative to the world of the whites may well have been encouraged by Anderson's example. Furthermore, Anderson played an important role, at a crucial period In Faulkner's development, in directing him to the fictional use of the Yoknapatawpha material. He led Faulkner to realize that universality in art could grow out of regional material. Faulkner's sense of community and his exploration of the individual's search for community so closely resemble Anderson's as to suggest some indebtedness. Faulkner's dramatization of the effects of the destruction of that community by the forces of modern commerce and industry is rendered in terms similar to Anderson's. Also, Faulkner's creation of an idyllic, rural world in contrast to the mechanistic, urban world resembles that in Anderson's stories of horses and men. And Faulkner uses Anderson's idea that the world of horses is a totally male world elsewhere in his fiction. There is a strong resemblance, finally, in Faulkner's and Anderson's concept of the grotesque: for both, it concerns truth and its consequences in the individual's Isolation and behaviour. In fact, it is argued that Anderson's "theory of the grotesque" provides a rationale for the larger structure of some of Faulkner's most important work. For these reasons, it is concluded that Anderson was an important force in shaping the form and content of Faulkner's art. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study analyzes these stories in their original and later forms, both to discover the types of changes Faulkner made and to determine whether or not he followed any pattern in the revisions.

No description available.

Disability and animality have frequently been conjoined in American literature as the limit cases of cognition, language, and narrative. In modern and contemporary fiction, this intersection is not just thematic, but also an opportunity for formal experimentation. My dissertation considers a century-spanning group of authors that includes William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and contemporary disabled writers and artists such as Jillian Weise, Kathy High, and Sharona Franklin. It uses a combination of close reading, historical research, and theoretical analysis to argue that some of the last century’s most influential literary experiments have built upon aesthetic modes associated with both disability and animality. For instance, in The Sound and the Fury, Benjy Compson’s famously associative narration is driven as much by canine-identified sensory tendencies of smell and touch as it is by human cognitive difference, and the folkloric interludes central to Their Eyes Were Watching God are catalyzed by the work-debilitated body of a mule. Few scholars have recognized the extent to which disability and animality are entangled as aesthetic categories, because each field has typically disavowed the other: disability studies makes “full humanity” a goal while assuming the inferiority of nonhumans, and animal studies often elevates nonhuman species by emphasizing their intelligence and physical abilities. My project bridges this impasse by showing how disability and animality come together to push language and literature in new directions, revealing an unrecognized literary tradition in which narratorial capacity, ethical consideration, and even access to the text do not depend on supposedly human-defining abilities like spoken language and written literacy.