Critics’ Reception And Readers’ Response To William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! And Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind

Résumé: This paper goes back to the first half of the twentieth century aiming to trace the novelistic representations of one of America’s most memorable wars: the Civil War. In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, the antebellum south is depicted domestically, culturally and historically in ways that simultaneously evoke and contradict each other. By contrasting the two novels’ conceptualizations of the Old South, the present research examines how this factor contributed_ if not determined_ their dissimilar receptions by critics and readers as well. Thus, it is concerned with the literary history of the two works and it namely relies on Hans Robert Jauss’ concepts of “horizon of expectations” and “horizontal change” in its interpretation of readers’ and critics’ reactions towards the two novels.

Publié dans la revue: Journal of Studies in Language, Culture and Society (JSLCS)