Fictions of Labor

Fictions of Labor considers William Faulkner’s representation of the structural paradoxes of labour dependency in the Southern economy from the antebellum period through to the New Deal. This book seeks to link stylistic aspects of Faulkner’s writing to a generative social trauma which constitutes its formal core. That trauma, Godden argues, is a labour trauma, centred on the debilitating discovery by the Southern owning class of its own production by those it subordinates. Using close textual analysis and careful historical contextualization, Richard Godden produces a persuasive account of the ways in which Faulkner’s work rests on deeply submerged anxieties about the legacy of violently coercive labour relations in the American South.

• A labour-based economic account of Faulkner’s major work • A Marxist approach which nevertheless stays close to the textuality • Of interest to critics concerned with historical approaches to literature

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Quentin Compson: Tyrrhenian vase or crucible of race?; 2. Absalom, Absalom! Haiti and labor history: reading unreadable revolutions; 3. Absalom, Absalom! and Rosa Coldfield: or, \'What is in the Dark House?\'; 4. The persistence of Thomas Sutpen: Absalom, Absalom!, time, and labor discipline; 5. Forget Jerusalem, go to Hollywood - \'To Die. Yes. To Die?\' (A coda to Absalom, Absalom!); Afterword; Notes; Bibliography of works cited; Index.