The Mythological Narrative of Southern Tragedy in Absalom, Absalom!

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_31How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Absalom, Absalom!; mythological narrative; mythic archetype; tragedy

Abstract

William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! is set against the historical backdrop of American Southern society before and after the American Civil War. Eschewing traditional linear historical narrative, it employs stream-of-consciousness mythological narrative to depict the genesis and evolution of the Southern tragedy. Existing analyses of Absalom, Absalom! have focused on revealing racial issues and historical trauma within the novel, thereby overlooking the reconstructive role of mythological narrative in historical writing. This paper adopts a mythological narrative perspective to examine the novel’s narrative mechanisms for constructing mythic archetypes and how history manifests as an unending, narrated form of experience. It further explores how William Faulkner shaped Southern society into an internally closed, perpetually self-repairing tragic pattern.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jia Li
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/15
TI  - The Mythological Narrative of Southern Tragedy in Absalom, Absalom!
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 305
EP  - 310
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_31
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_31
ID  - Li2026
ER  -