| This dissertation is a reassessment of one of William Faulkner's most neglected and underestimated novels: The Unvanquished. Faulkner himself dismissed this novel, and critics have tended to do the same, as they point out that Faulkner was attempting to cash in on the popular genre of the Civil War romance. Faulkner was indeed trying to make some badly needed money both when he wrote the original Civil War stories for The Saturday Evening Post, and later when he only slightly revised those stories to be published as The Unvanquished. But this study argues that instead of being dismissed as a conventional Southern romance, The Unvanquished is best interpreted as a parody of its popular genre.; The bulk of this dissertation involves a close examination of those aspects of The Unvanquished which both subvert a popular Southern genre and at the same time enlarge upon what Faulkner was saying about Southern culture elsewhere in his canon, especially in Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, Flags in the Dust, and The Sound and the Fury. Those aspects which receive such close examination are the Old South, the Civil War, the Confederate hero, Southern Womanhood, Damn Yankees, and Slave Darkies. Faulkner's treatment of these standard components of Southern fiction is shown to diverge radically from the norm and therefore to result in a profound commentary on all these aspects of Southern culture as well as Southern literature. Thus, this dissertation concludes, The Unvanquished deserves more attention as Faulkner's satire of a popular genre, and this satire deserves to figure more prominently in the Faulkner canon. |
