An analysis of the Poor Whites in Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy

DOI

10.2991/icsste-15.2015.55How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Poor whites; Faulknerian

Abstract

The American literary canon witnessed the abundance of poor whites. In various works over different epochs and genres, for example, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and George Washington Harris’s SutLovingood, depression-era destitute farmers and nowadays the trailer trash, these poor whites with their frontier tall tale tradition and local color dialect, had occupied important positions. The denigration of poor whites could be traced back to 1728 when William Byrd depicted the lazy woods folk that lived in the deep mountains in Virginia in History of the Dividing Lineand Other Tracts: History of the Dividing Line (1866). Ever since, the poor whites have remained humorous and comic in southern literature. In Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932)and George M. Weston’s The Poor Whites of the South(1856), one might also find the well-established stereotype of poor whites as being a “shiftless, illiterate and often vicious group of people” (Brooks, 1963: 11). These mountain poor were related to “a range of values that provoked disapproval” (Kidd, 2004: 115). Naturally, there were exceptions, among which John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) of the great depression drew wide sympathy and recognition.

Copyright

© 2015, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Huang Xiuguo
PY  - 2015/04
DA  - 2015/04
TI  - An analysis of the Poor Whites in Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy
BT  - Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Social Science and Technology Education
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 186
EP  - 191
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icsste-15.2015.55
DO  - 10.2991/icsste-15.2015.55
ID  - Xiuguo2015/04
ER  -