Focusing on the core novels, including The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Sanctuary, Light in August 2003, and Go Down, Moses, David Minter illuminates Faulkner's mature fiction: the tensions at play within the fiction and the creativity not only exhibited by the author but also extended to his characters and required of his readers.Faulkner's achievement, Minter contends, was in combining daring experiments in form with searching examinations of grave social, political, and moral problems. His novels change and expand the role of the reader by means of proliferating narratives that lead to questions rather than answers and to approximation rather than resolution. Minter shows how this process at times implicates the reader in the corruption and violence of the story, as when the reader is required to fill in--out of his or her own experience--the crucial gaps left in the narrative of Sanctuary.Positioning Faulkner on the cusp between modernist and postmodernist writing, Minter shows how his methods undercut the self-contained exclusivity of the New Criticism by integrating the world of the novel with the reader's experience of history and culture.

One of America's greatest writers, William Faulkner wrote fiction that combined spellbinding Southern storytelling with modernist formal experimentation to shape an enduring body of work. In his fictional Yoknapatawpha County—based on the region around his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi—he created an entire world peopled with unforgettable characters linked into an intricate historical and social web. An introduction to the Nobel-Prize-winning author's life and work, this book devotes opening chapters to his biography and literary heritage and subsequent chapters to each of his major works. The analytical chapters start with his most accessible book, The Unvanquished, a Civil-War-era account of a boy's coming of age. The following chapters orient readers to elements of plot, character, and theme in Faulkner's masterpieces: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Also analyzed and discussed are some of Faulkner's most often anthologized short stories, including A Rose For Emily and Barn Burning, and the longer stories The Bear, Spotted Horses, and The Old Man that were incorporated in the novels Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Clear, insightful analyses of the elements of Faulkner's fiction are supplemented with alternative readings from a variety of critical approaches including gender, rhetorical, performance, and cultural studies perspectives.

“Accessible . . . Engaging . . . May well be our fullest account to date of what Bleikasten calls Faulkner’s ‘energy for life’ and ‘will to write.’” —Theresa Towner, author of The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner Writing to American poet Malcolm Cowley in 1949, William Faulkner expressed his wish to be known only through his books—but his wish would not come true. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature several months later, and when he died famous in 1962, his biographers immediately began to unveil and dissect the unhappy life of “the little man from Mississippi.” Despite the many works published about Faulkner, his life and career, it still remains a mystery how a poet of minor symbolist poems rooted in the history of the Deep South became one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Here, renowned critic André Bleikasten revisits Faulkner’s biography through the author’s literary imagination. Weaving together correspondence and archival research with the graceful literary analysis for which he is known, Bleikasten presents a multi-strand account of Faulkner’s life in writing. By carefully keeping both the biographical and imaginative lives in hand, Bleikasten teases out threads that carry the reader through the major events in Faulkner’s life, emphasizing those circumstances that mattered most to his writing: the weight of his multi-generational family history in the South; the formation of his oppositional temperament provoked by a resistance to Southern bourgeois propriety; his creative and sexual restlessness and uncertainty; his lifelong struggle with finances and alcohol; his paradoxical escape to the bondages of Hollywood; and his final bent toward self-destruction. This is the story of the man who wrote timeless works and lived in and through his novels.

This bibliography brings up through 1989 the comprehensive listing of scholarship and criticism on William Faulkner begun by Bassett in two earlier books, William Faulkner: An Annotated Checklist of Criticism (1972) and Faulkner: An Annotated Checklist of Recent Criticism (1983). Since the latter, over a hundred books on Faulkner have been completed, along with hundreds of articles and dissertations. This work lists all new items, often with extensive annotations, and provides separate entries for chapters of books that cover individual novels and stories. Bassett's introductory essay provides an overview of the last decade of Faulkner studies, the first in which post-structuralist and other newer forms of criticism had a major impact on Faulkner studies.

An examination of how Faulkner's work has been analyzed, elucidated, and promoted by a massive body of scholarly work spanning over seven decades.

In Faulkner's Imperialism, Taylor Hagood explores two staples of Faulkner's world: myth and place. Using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the economic, sociological, and political factors in Faulkner's writing, he applies postcolonial theory, cultural materialism, and the work of the New Southernists to analyze the ways myth and place come together to encode narratives of imperialism -- and anti-imperialism -- in the worlds in which Faulkner lived and the one that he created. The resulting discussion highlights the deeply embedded imperial impulses underpinning not just Yoknapatawpha and Mississippi, but the Midwest, the Caribbean, France, and a host of often-overlooked corners of the Faulknerian map. Faulkner defines space in his fiction by creating places through culturally compelling narratives. Although these narrative spaces often have imperial roots, Hagood reveals how the oppressed can subvert these "mythic places" by turning the myths against their oppressors. The Greco-Roman myths long recognized as part of Faulkner's fictional world, for example, define racially hybrid spaces ostensibly designed to articulate white patriarchal narratives of imperial control but which actually carry within their very dreams of Arcady an anti-imperial narrative. In Faulkner's Mississippi Delta, which he modeled after the Nile Delta, plantation owners evoke the imperial power of ancient Egypt to confirm their own cultural ascendancy even while African Americans use biblical narratives of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt to speak against the power that controls them. Faulkner also used places he personally experienced -- such as New Orleans, a city that he recognized as containing multiple layers of imperial design -- to dramatize the constant struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed. Rather than reading the roles of myth and place according to conventional myth criticism or typical place models used by other Faulkner scholars, Hagood examines the intertextuality within Faulkner's writing, as well as the relationship of his writing to others' work, in an attempt to understand how the texts fit together and speak to one another. One of the few books that examine Faulkner's work as a whole, Faulkner's Imperialism moves beyond South-versus-North paradigms to encompass all the spaces within Faulkner's created cosmos, considering their interrelationships in a precise, holistic way.

William Faulkner and Mortality is the first full-length study of mortality in William Faulkner’s fiction. The book challenges earlier, influential scholarly considerations of death in Faulkner’s work that claimed that writing was his authorial method of ‘saying No to death’. Through close-readings of six key works – The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, "A Rose for Emily", Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses – this book examines how Faulkner’s characters confront various experiences of human mortality, including grief, bereavement, mourning, and violence. The trauma and ambivalence caused by these experiences ultimately compel these characters to ‘say Yes to death’. The book makes a clear distinction between Faulkner’s quest for literary immortality through writing and the desire for death exhibited by the principal characters in the works analysed. William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound offers a new paradigm for reading Faulkner’s oeuvre, and adds an alternative voice to a debate within Faulkner scholarship long thought to have ended.