This collection concentrates on earlier, less accessible material on Faulkner that will complement rather than duplicate existing library collections. Vol I: General Perspectives; Memories, Recollections and Interviews; Contemporary Political Opinion Vol II: Assessments on Individual Works: from Early Writings toAs I Lay Dying Vol III: Assessments on Individual Works: fromSanctuarytoGo Down Moses and Other Stories Vol IV: Assessments on Individual Works: from the Short Stories toThe Reivers; Faulkner and the South; Faulkner and Race; Faulkner and the French.

This Guide explores the wealth of critical material generated by these two exceptional works of modernist fiction. From the initially mixed critical responses to the novels in the early 1930s, the Guide follows the enormous growth of interest in Faulkner's work across six decades. New writings shaped by a range of critical theories are discussed, offering the reader a clear view of the place now given to one of America's most innovative and influential novelists.

As I Lay Dying; Light in August; The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom!; "The Bear"; and many others.

A standard reference work in American literature, this volume is the most complete and detailed guide to the novels of William Faulkner. Edmond L. Volpe's aim is to reveal the greatness of Faulkner's art and the scope and profundity of his personal vision of life. He describes the dominant patterns in the fiction by isolating Faulkner's major themes and by analyzing his narrative techniques and style. He then offers extensive, individual interpretations of the nineteen novels, tracing the development of Faulkner's ideas, and includes a set of genealogical tables for each major family in the novels. Both scholarly and accessible:, this unique: treatment of Faulkner's novels—from Soldiers' Pay to The Reivers—helps the reader come to a thorough understanding of a great American writer.

In this newest volume in Oxford's Lives and Legacies series, Carolyn Porter, a leading authority on William Faulkner, offers an insightful account of Faulkner's life and work, with special focus on the breathtaking twelve-year period when he wrote some of the finest novels in American literature. Porter ranges from Faulkner's childhood in Mississippi to his abortive career as a poet, his sojourn in New Orleans (where he met a sympathetic Sherwood Anderson and wrote his first novel Soldier's Pay), his short but strategically important stay in Paris, his "rescue" by Malcolm Crowley in the late 1940s, and his winning of the Nobel Prize. But the heart of the book illuminates the formal leap in Faulkner's creative vision beginning with The Sound and the Fury in 1929, which sold poorly but signaled the arrival of a major new literary talent. Indeed, from 1929 through 1942, he would produce, against formidable odds--physical, spiritual, and financial--some of the greatest fictional works of the twentieth century, including As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Porter shows how, during this remarkably sustained burst of creativity, Faulkner pursued an often feverish process of increasingly ambitious narrative experimentation, coupled with an equally ambitious thematic expansion, as he moved from a close-up study of the white nuclear family, both lower and upper class, to an epic vision of southern, American, and ultimately Western culture. Porter illuminates the importance of Faulkner's legacy not only for American literature, but also for world literature, and reveals how Faulkner lives on so powerfully, both in the works of his literary heirs and in the lives of readers today.