| Popis: |
The main aim of this thesis is to analyze the decline of the so-called Southern aristocracy in two selected novels by William Faulkner, namely Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury. Their protagonists are members of rich planter family in the first case, or, as in the second case, descendants of such a family. They all inhabit Faulkner's fictitious Yoknapatawpha County and are considered Southern aristocrats by their fellow citizens. Yet they are not living the life of leisure and luxury often ascribed to people of their rank but facing their own decline instead. In both novels, the nature of this decline is both materialistic and spiritual; the latter being the beginning of the former. The decline of Southern aristocracy is primarily seen as a conflict of two sets of values or, in other words, as a struggle between the "Old South" and the "New South." Therefore the main cause of this decline is seen in the enormous dependence on the past, which goes hand in hand with the notion of the myth of the antebellum South. The first two chapters of this thesis constitute a theoretical introduction for the subsequent analyses of the novels, for they discuss the key concepts associated with the South; namely the myth of the Old South in comparison with the actual historical development, and the notion... |
