A Systematic Study of Faulkner's Legacy in Contemporary American Literature

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Through a systematic exploration of some aspects of William Faulkner's literary legacy which should be pursued in contemporary American litera-ture, the present investigator first grasped the important characteristics of Faulkner's fiction, by focusing on his two contemporary great authors, Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O'Neill, the former from the Piedmont of the South, and the latter from New England : those characteristics are---(1) the exploration of the regional history and identidy, (2) the use of the stream of consciousness, (3) the incessant renovation of the form of the novel, (4) the organic combination of the aboriginal material and the experimental, modern novelist form, (5) the historical sense of the presentness of the past, (6) the introduction of the supernatural elements used in magic realism, (7) the antithetical representation of the human phenomena, (8) the chronicle-like construction of the oeuvre, (9) the psychological investigation of the famil-ial relationship as a ho … More tbed of human conflicts, (10) concern with the idea of metafiction, (11) the Calvinistic recognition of the environmental force as fatality.Next, based on these characteristics of Faulkner's fictional world, the present researcher made clear the peculial qualities of Southern society, which suffered from the great ordeal of the aftermath of the slavery and the defeat in the Civil War, employing two points of view of "race" and class, the essential viewpoints, together with gender, for the contemporary literary study.Thirdly, the present investigator, regarding William Styron and Toni Morrison as the authentic sucessors to Faulkner's legacy in contemporary American literature, studied the former in terms of the incestuous relation between father and daughter in the tragedy of the while middle-class family, while exploring in the latter's fiction the representation of African-Americans in light of the hierarchy of color and gaze, a hierarchy deeply entangled with "race, " a hot issue in the recent literary criticism. At the end of this report is placed a brief supplementary research concerning both these three autors' concern with and representation of the slavery. Less