Outraged and Amazed: Transgressing the South in Faulkner

Product Description This monograph 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 Compsons attempt to understand his own identity through the complicated and incomplete story of Thomas Sutpen, Joel Peckhams Outraged and Amazed: Transgressing the South in Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! 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 witha story of the South that is plausible but unverifiable, at once self-reflexively fictive and true. About the Author 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 books of poetry and creative nonfiction include Gods Bicycle, Resisting Elegy, and Body Memory.