Description
Book SynopsisProvides a set of readings of William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses - sometimes characterized as a novel, sometimes as a collection of stories-that offers a deep understanding of the interrelationship between the treatment of persons as property and the perception of laws, social forms, and rituals as games.
Trade Review“Every now and then, a book comes along that takes us utterly by surprise, reconfiguring old geographies of criticism with originality, power, and brilliance. Thadious M. Davis has produced just such a book. We (and William Faulkner!) are blessed by her attention to race, property, agency, game theory, and critical legal studies. Yoknapatawpha and its creator find radically new use value for a new millennium in Davis’s labors, and we are all gifted with beautifully written scholarship, and an indispensable pedagogical meditation. Davis’s ‘Book of Moses’ is must reading.”—Houston A. Baker, Jr., author of
Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-reading Booker T.”From the opening lines, we are in the presence of an original and powerful voice that expands the boundaries of the field of ‘law and literature’ and offers a fresh way of understanding one of William Faulkner’s most elliptical texts.”—Linda K. Kerber, May Brodbeck Professor of History, University of Iowa
”It may sound hyperbolic to claim that nothing like this exists in Faulkner scholarship, but that’s my claim.
Games of Property contributes to a new understanding of not only
Go Down, Moses, but of much of Faulkner’s work.”—Linda Wagner-Martin, Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Table of ContentsIllustrations viii
Acknowledgments x
Introduction: The Game of Genre 1
1. The Game of Challenge
43
2. The Object of Property 77
3. The Game of Boundaries
119
4. The Subject of Property 174
5. Conclusion: The Game of Compensation 223
Notes 263
Bibliography 309
Index 330
