A New Historicist Approach To Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy

The Snopes Trilogy, William Faulkner’s masterpiece in his later literary career, has been widely recognized for its profound thoughts and exquisite literary tactics. Faulkner conceives the Southern history in the text through depicting the rise of Snopes family, historical fragments of different stratifications, poor whites’living and the transgression of gender relation. The construction of history indicates Faulkner’s new historicist thoughts in his dealing with text and history.This thesis, based on previous critics’ researches and new historicist intertexuality of history and texts, explores the elements of specific history that influence Faulkner’s writing and captures the historic realities represented in the trilogy. Besides, the present author investigates Faulkner’s literary devices to compile history, and therefore reveals the arrogation of the oppressed group combined with Foucault’s theory on power discourse and Bakhtin’s grotesque body.A conclusion is drawn that the trilogy indicates Faulkner’s complicated emotion towards the history of the New South. The intertextuality of the history and text in the trilogy exhibits Faulkner’s new historicist concern about human nature and their dilemma. The Snopes trilogy, in the dimension of new historicism, provides the readers an approach to touch the history of the South. Faulkner’s contradictory construction of the South expresses his deep attachment to his hometown, and still further reveals his frustrated and sorrow attitude to the rising capitalism and the establishment of new Southern order.