Books by Doreen Fowler
Drawing the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O'Connor, and Morrison
In an original contribution to the psychoanalytic approach to literature, Doreen Fowler focuses on the fiction of four major American writers―William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison―to examine the father's function as a "border figure." Although the father has most commonly been interpreted as the figure who introduces opposition and exclusion to the child, Fowler finds in these literary depictions fathers who instead support the construction of a social identity by mediating between cultural oppositions.
Fowler counters the widely accepted notion that boundaries are solely sites of exclusion and offers a new theoretical model of boundary construction. She argues that boundaries are mysterious, dangerous, in-between places where a balance of sameness and difference makes differentiation possible. In the fiction of these southern writers, father figures introduce a separate cultural identity by modeling this mix of relatedness and difference. Fathers intervene in the mother-child relationship, but the father is also closely related to both mother and child. This model of boundary formation as a balance of exclusion and relatedness suggests a way to join with others in an inclusive, multicultural community and still retain ethnic, racial, and gender differences.
Fowler's model for the father's mediating role in initiating gender, race, and other social differences shows not only how psychoanalytic theory can be used to interpret fiction and cultural history but also how literature and history can reshape theory.
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Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed
Doreen Fowler's Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed is only the second book-length pychoanalytic interpretation of Faulkner's oeuvre and the first to be predicated on Lacanian theory as modified by Kristeva and Chodorow. Fowler exposes psychic conflicts that drive Faulkner's fiction and posits from them an underlying tension between the desire for difference and wholeness, between the mother and the father, between the living body and death.
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Faulkner and the Southern Renaissance (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)
by Ann J Abadie, Doreen Fowler
About the Author Doreen Fowler is professor of English at the University of Kansas. She is coeditor of many volumes in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series, published by University Press of Mississippi.Ann J. Abadie is former associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and coeditor of numerous scholarly collections from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Product Description It began in the 1930s in a powerful and elegant literature arising from a seemingly improbable place, the rural, agrarian South. This literary flowering, a proliferation of southern letters, is called the Southern Renaissance. Although the definitive history of the southern literary renaissance has yet to be written, its leading figure, without question, was William Faulkner. Helping to define and describe this startling literary phenomenon and Faulkner's place in it are papers of eight noted scholars included in this collection. Brooks, Rubin, King, Minter, Watkins, Samway, Blackburn, and Spencer, one of the authors whose fiction is identified with the movement, focus their papers upon the philosophical and critical aspects of the Southern Renaissance. From the Inside Flap Collected essays on the relation of the Nobel Laureate to the Southern renaissance From the Back Cover Collected essays on the relation of the Nobel Laureate to the Southern renaissance
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