Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Faulkner's Conditional Conception: Nietzsche, Matisse, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

Faulkner's Conditional Conception: Nietzsche, Matisse, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

Wainwright, Michael

Hardcover

Series: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century

PhilosophyLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 3032196191
ISBN13: 9783032196194
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: May 26 2026
Pages: 303
Weight: 1.17
Height: 0.75 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English

This book reexamines William Faulkner's If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939), a novel of increasing sociohistorical importance despite being one of Faulkner's lesser known and studied works. Wainwright traces Faulkner's 1925 visit to Paris, where he frequented major and minor art galleries and exhibitions and gained a formative appreciation of color and form, color as form, and form as color. Fauvism, the art movement of wild beasts led at the time by Henri Matisse and inspired by Nietzsche, offered Faulkner this depth. Wainwright argues that the chain of recognition from Nietzsche to Matisse to Faulkner, while fundamental to Faulkner's canon, comes startlingly to the fore in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, a book that measures the sociopolitical as well as the cultural situation of an epoch, a period of episodic violence on a global scale, a time of individual bloodshed and collective loss. In surveying the Fauvist bedrock to Faulkner's career as a writer, this book draws together philosophy, art, and literature before analyzing their influence on him. This process harnesses the thoughts of Faulkner's contemporaries, both relevant authors and relevant critics, voices that often go unheard in Faulkner studies. The result is a profound meditation on the secular eschatology of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, a doctrine comprising conception, abortion, birth, and death.

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Wainwright, Michael

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Literary Criticism

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