William Faulkner recognized voice as one of the most distinctive and powerful elements in fiction when he delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, describing the last sound at the end of the world as man's "puny inexhaustible voice, still talking." As a testimonial of an artist's faith in his art, the speech raised the value of voice to its highest reach for man, as "one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Stephen Ross explores the nature of voice in William Faulkner's fiction by examining the various modes of speech and writing that his texts employ. Beginning with the proposition that voice is deeply involved in the experience of reading Faulkner, Ross uses theoretically grounded notions of voice to propose new ways of explaining how Faulkner's novels and stories express meaning, showing how Faulkner used the affective power of voice to induce the reader to forget the silent and originless nature of written fiction. Ross departs from previous Faulkner criticism by proceeding not text-by-text or chronologically but by construction a workable taxonomy which defines the types of voice in Faulkner's fiction: phenomenal voice, a depicted event or object within the represented fictional world; mimetic voice, the illusion that a person is speaking; psychic voice, one heard only in the mind and overheard only through fiction's omniscience; and oratorical voice, an overtly intertextual voice which derives from a discursive practice--Southern oratory--recognizable outside the boundaries of any Faulkner text and identifiable as part of Faulkner's biographical and regional heritage. In Faulkner's own experience, listening was important. As he once confided to Malcolm Cowley, "I listen to the voices, and when I put down what the voices say, it's right." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Ross conducts a careful analysis of this fundamental source of power in Faulkner's fiction, concluding that the preponderance of voice imagery, represented talking, verbalized thought, and oratorical rhetoric and posturing makes the novels and stories fundamentally vocal. They derive their energy from the play of voices on the imaginative field of written language.

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” —William Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.

Sound Effects combines literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory in eleven original articles which explore the potential of the object voice as an analytic tool to approach fiction. Alongside the gaze, the voice is Jacques Lacan’s original addition to the set of partial objects of classical psychoanalysis, and has only recently been theorised by Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More (2006). With notable exceptions like Garrett Stewart’s Reading Voices (1990), the sonorous element in fiction has received little scholarly attention in comparison with poetry and drama. Sound Effects is a contribution to the burgeoning field of sound studies, and sets out to fill this gap through selective readings of English and American fiction of the last two hundred years. Contributors: Fred Botting, Natalja Chestopalova, Mladen Dolar, Matt Foley, Alex Hope, Phillip Mahoney, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Jorge Sacido-Romero, Marcin Stawiarski, Garrett Stewart, Peter Weise, and Bruce Wyse.

Originally published in 1986. William Faulkner’s major novels represent one of the earliest American explorations into the paradoxes inherent in both literary discourse and racial segregation in the American South. Figures of Division demonstrates that these works reject conventional divisions and a social and linguistic deception, and discover a reality where people merge across social boundaries. This analysis of Faulkner’s narrative discourse shows for the first time that the mechanisms of social division profoundly affect both the content and the form of his major novels.

Forensic Fictions is the first book-length critical study of William Faulkner's fictional depictions of the legal vocation and the practice of law. Examining Faulkner's lawyer characters in light of the southern storytelling tradition, Jay Watson argues that the forensic competence of the Faulknerian lawyer is a direct function of his skill as a raconteur. To trace the biographical and historical roots of Faulkner's lifelong preoccupation with the legal profession, Watson draws on contemporary scholarship in narrative, rhetoric, jurisprudence, legal and intellectual history, literary theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His approach yields insightful readings of forensic characters and scenes from such works as "An Odor of Verbena," The Hamlet, "Wild Palms," Absalom, Absalom! and The Reivers. Watson shows the links between storytelling and the competence of Faulkner's legal characters by examining the intertextual logic that connects the two most important lawyers in the Yoknapatawpha fiction: the incompetent Horace Benbow and the more capable Gavin Stevens, whose entrance into Faulkner's oeuvre coincides with Benbow's untimely departure from it. Focusing on the nine novels in which these two characters appear, Watson traces the evolutionary process by which Stevens supplants Benbow. Three of the Stevens novels--Intruder in the Dust, Knight's Gambit, and Requiem for a Nun--from what Watson calls Faulkner's "forensic trilogy" and, when read together, constitute the writer's most sustained investigation of the rhetorical and ethical responsibilities of the lawyer-citizen. Faulkner, Watson argues, saw the forensic figure as a potential hybrid of homo loquens and homo politicus, capable of combing the roles of storyteller, rhetorician, and theatrical performer with those of critic, citizen, and ethical man. As such, this figure served as a provocative authorial surrogate through whom Faulkner could explore diverse and often contradictory aspects of his personal experience, his family background, his cultural heritage, and, most of all, his own artistic use of language.

In this groundbreaking collection, twelve international scholars – with backgrounds in disability studies, English and world literature, classics, and history – discuss the representation of dis/ability, medical "cures," technology, and the body in science fiction.

“A man is the sum of his misfortunes.” —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner’s provocative and enigmatic 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, is widely acknowledged as one of the most important English-language novels of the twentieth century. This revised and expanded Norton Critical Edition builds on the strengths of its predecessors while focusing new attention on both the novel’s contemporary reception and its rich cultural and historical contexts. The text for the Third Edition is again that of the corrected text scrupulously prepared by Noel Polk, whose textual note precedes the novel. David Minter’s annotations, designed to assist readers with obscure words and allusions, have been retained. “Contemporary Reception,” new to the Third Edition, considers the broad range of reactions to Faulkner’s extraordinary novel on publication. Michael Gorra’s headnote sets the stage for assessments by Evelyn Scott, Henry Nash Smith, Clifton P. Fadiman, Dudley Fitts, Richard Hughes, and Edward Crickmay. New materials by Faulkner (“The Writer and His Work”) include letters to Malcolm Cowley about The Portable Faulkner and Faulkner’s Nobel Prize for Literature address. “Cultural and Historical Contexts” begins with Michael Gorra’s insightful headnote, which is followed by seven seminal considerations—five of them new to the Third Edition—of southern history, literature, and memory. Together, these works—by C. Vann Woodward, Richard H. King, Richard Gray, William Alexander Percy, Lillian Smith, William James, and Henri Bergson—provide readers with important contexts for understanding the novel. “Criticism” represents eighty-five years of scholarly engagement with The Sound and the Fury. New to the Third Edition are essays by Eric Sundquist, Noel Polk, Doreen Fowler, Richard Godden, Stacy Burton, and Maria Truchan-Tataryn. A Chronology of Faulkner’s life and work is newly included along with an updated Selected Bibliography.