Ritið : tímarit Hugvísindastofnunar - 01.01.2019, Page 154

FRÁ SUðRI TIL NORðURS
167
A B S T R A C T
From South to North
William Faulkner and Guðmundur Daníelsson
During the Forties, Icelandic novelist Guðmundur Daníelsson, wrote a trilogy
called Out of the Ground Wast Thou Taken: Fire (1941), Sand (1942) and The Land
beyond the Land (1944). Leading up to the publications Daníelsson was vocal about
the fact that he had read the works of American novelist William Faulkner. Later in
life he would reveal that he read Faulkner in Norwegian translations and proudly
acknowledged the direct line of descent he recognized between his own work and
that of his American colleague. Until now no systematic analyzes has been done on
the many parallels between their works.
The article is divided in two. The first half unfolds in which ways Daníelsson
reproduced structures, milieu, ideas, characters and events from Faulkner’s nov-
el Light in August in Fire. The latter half of the article situates Daníelsson’s trilogy
within a critical framework developed by Faulkner scholars in the last two decades
where they have explored the relationship between Faulkner and the many writers
who have engaged with him from the postcolonial world. Questions will be raised
about if and then how Daníelsson deals with Iceland’s postcolonial past in his novels,
with a special emphasis on the connection between power and identity as it mani-
fests itself in relation to, for example, class, race, gender and disability.
Keywords: Guðmundur Daníelsson, William Faulkner, literary history, world litera-
ture, postcolonial literary criticism, identity
Haukur Ingvarsson
Rithöfundur og doktorsnemi í íslenskum bókmenntum
Hugvísindasviði Háskóla Íslands
Sæmundargötu 2
IS-101 Reykjavík, Ísland
haukuri@hi.is