“Faulkner: Past and Future”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Penn Warren
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The South ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Personal Testimony

This chapter offers a local and personal testimony about the influence of William Faulkner. The author of this chapter remembers the day he, while attending Oxford University, received a copy of Soldiers' Pay. It was also the time when he was making his first serious attempt at fiction, with a setting in the part of the South where he had grown up. He suggests that the first, powerful impact of Faulkner's work was by an immediate intuition, not by the exegesis of critics. The author also looks back to the place and time when Faulkner began to write. The chapter argues that Faulkner is the most profound experimenter in the novel that America has produced, but the experiments were developed out of an anguishing research into the southern past and the continuing implications of that past.

LITTLE BUILDERS: CORAL INSECTS, MISSIONARY CULTURE, AND THE VICTORIAN CHILD

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Elleray
Keyword(s):  
South Pacific ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Pacific Island ◽  
The South ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Coral Island ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
Child Reader

In his Preface to R. M. Ballantyne's most famous novel, J. M. Barrie writes that “[t]o be born is to be wrecked on an island,” and so the British boy “wonder[s] how other flotsam and jetsam have made the best of it in the same circumstances. He wants a guide: in short, The Coral Island” (v). While for Barrie the island is a convenient shorthand for masculine self-actualization, the question pursued here is the relevance of a coral island, or more specifically the coral that forms the island, to the child reader. Published in 1857 and widely recommended for boys in the latter half of the nineteenth century, The Coral Island presents three boys, shipwrecked in the South Pacific, who in the first half of the novel demonstrate their resourcefulness in forming an idyllic community. Their pre-lapsarian paradise is then disrupted, first by Pacific Island cannibals and then by European pirates, the juxtaposition implicitly presenting civility as a quality that must be actively maintained by the European reader, rather than assumed as inherent in ethnicity. The second half of the novel sees the boy narrator, and eventually all the boys, implicated in key Western activities in the South Pacific: piracy, trade, and missionary activity. The latter is important to Ballantyne, a staunch Christian himself, and is focused through the historical phenomenon of Pacific Island “teachers,” that is, converted Pacific Islanders who preceded or accompanied European missionaries in the effort to spread Christianity across the South Pacific. The missionary work highlighted in the novel, as this essay will show, is also integrally connected to the coral featured prominently in its title.

scholarly journals Humanism in Red: A New Mainstream Narrative in the Pop Songs in 1980s' China

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lijuan Qian
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Film Version ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
Recent Interpretation

This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in Oxford Handbook of the Music of China (Oxford University Press ) The articulation of humanism is a recurrent theme in various Chinese literature and arts over the history. One of such well-known cases is the classic novel Journey to the West (Xi you ji) dates from the 16 th Century which stresses the issues of freedom, fighting with the authorities, the loss of belief, and the importance of self-direction. Various adapted versions from this novel popular over since then which hinted strong desire to humanism expression under China’s tight central governance. The recent interpretation of nationwide impacted products is an online novel The Wu Kong’s Biography (Wukong zhuan, written by Zeng Yu, pseudonym Jin Hezai, 2000) which adding the ambitions to challenge the authorities, an imaginary compensation of the young people in China (Liao, 2017). The great popularity of the novel leads to the release of its film version Wu Kong in 2017. Even the theme song of this movie “Equaling Heaven” (music and sung by Hua Chenyu, lyrics by Jin Hezai) brings a real hit in Chinese popular music scene. It was performed by Tibetan singer Zahi Bingzuo, the 2017 winner of The Voice of China in his final song-battle in that show (Qian, 2017: 57-8) and then Hua Chenyu in the TV talent show Singer (Geshou) in 2018. The humanism articulation of the song, same as in the novels and movie, shown well in the song: When I were young and wild, were worthy of it, who would give me a belief? …I could still smile before dawn… ignore the fate decided by the god and I would say the fate follows my heart. 1 Humanist articulations are part of a trend in Chinese pop song that dates back to the 1980s, when that genre first reappeared as an indigenous entertainment genre within China itself. As a transitional phrase during which multiple pre-existing and newly emerging social

“On Coming Late to Faulkner”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padgett Powell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
English Teacher ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Local Soil

In this chapter, the author talks about coming late to William Faulkner. He begins by saying that “if you discover the Old Man late: you have heard of him if you have heard of William Shakespeare, if you have heard of the Civil War, and your apprehension of him will be constituted of a vague kind of hybrid of those entities grown out of more or less local soil...” According to the author, if you come to Faulkner late you may escape finding yourself enthralled, intoxicate, intestate. He recalls the time his English teacher gave him a copy of Absalom, Absalom! and says he was not the same boy when he finished reading the novel.

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