Overview

Outraged and Amazed focuses on how Absalom, Absalom!'s complex narrative functions as a vehicle through which social order in the South is represented, challenged and renegotiated. Exploring Quentin Compson's attempt to understand his own identity through the complicated and incomplete story of Thomas Sutpen, it demonstrates how the poetics, structure and central conflicts of the novel derive from a combination of its characters' intense resistance to their proscribed social limitations and their desire to wrest control of their identities through and from the act of storytelling. Intending to present a narrative that could explain the past in a way that makes sense of their world and their place in it, these would-be authors are instead confronted with their limitations and the inadequacy of their knowledge. Outraged and Amazed explores the bewildering, tangled, dislocated, and confused story we are left with – a story of the South that is plausible but unverifiable, at once self-reflexively fictive and true.

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9781527508439

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Reviews

Joel Peckham's Outraged and Amazed offers a fascinating reading of Absalom, Absalom! along narratological and psychoanalytic lines, demonstrating in detail the ways in which Faulkner's characters not only stand in for key elements of Southern culture, but also struggle against the novel's confluence of formal and social structures. Peckham's nuanced study is perhaps at its most rewarding in its focus on moments of metanarrative-how the mixed-race Charles Bon functions as a text to be written and rewritten, how Thomas Sutpen seeks to author his own future, or how Rosa Coldfield attempts to (re)tell her life story to Quentin Compson. While situated firmly within Faulkner's version of Mississippi, Peckham's approach parallels new movements in Southern studies, asking how this novel's tangled representations of a local history might speak to the construction of history itself, especially as this question leads to new ways of understanding temporal, spatial, and racial patterns. Faulknerians and readers more broadly interested in American cultural studies will find much to savor in these pages. -John K. Young, author of How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O'Brien's Process of Textual Production

Author Information

Joel Peckham is Assistant Professor of Regional Literature and Creative Writing at Marshall University, USA. He is also a poet, essayist, and scholar of American literature whose work has been published in numerous journals throughout the USA. His articles on southern literature have appeared in American Literature, The Mississippi Quarterly, The Southern Quarterly and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. His other works of poetry and creative nonfiction include God's Bicycle, Resisting Elegy, and Body Memory.

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