American Designs addresses three major literary critical issues: the hermeneutics of the novel genre; the intense importance of this genre for American literature; and the way James and Faulkner; by writing within hermeneutic traditions of the modern American novel, explore further than any other writers the particular functions of the novelistic designs they inherited and transformed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman contends that in the late fiction of James and Faulkner the search for knowledge of the self and others is presented as a metafictive issue of power, authority, and freedom. While their own interests lead characters in the novels to enact designs on other characters, the novels themselves undermine the validity of any single, imposed design. American writers, Reesman argues, develop narrative structures that fail to close. Theirs is an open-ended search for American identity. Structures remain unfinished or unresolved or "disunified" in order to allow human beings a certain freedom from closed design, and they do this out of a dual reaction against both Old World tradition and New World Puritanism. Reesman probes the relationship between narrative design and "the problem of knowledge" in American literature in her resonant readings the The Ambassadors, Absalom, Absalom!, The Golden Bowl, and Go Down, Moses. James and Faulkner, of course, never knew each other, but in this first book-length comparison of these major authors, Reesman convinces her reader that they would have had a great deal to say to each other. American Designs will be of interest to scholars and students of American literature.

Interrogating the basic assumptions of realism, this study examines the postmodern phenomenon of fiction as the presentation of theories of fiction. The writers critically examined include Nabokov, Woolf, Conrad, Faulkner, Joyce, and Beckett.

Absalom, Absalom! has long been seen as one of William Faulkner's supreme creations, as well as one of the leading American novels of the twentieth century. In this collection Fred Hobson has brought together eight of the most stimulating essays on Absalom, essays written over a thirty-year span which approach the novel both formally and historically. Here are critical responses by Cleanth Brooks, John Irwin, Thadious Davis, and Eric Sundquist, as well as four essays published in the last decade. The casebook concludes with Faulkner's own remarks on the novel, delivered in a discussion with students at the University of Virginia. What emerges from all the selections is a rich and suggestive treatment of a work which Faulkner himself called "the best novel yet written by an American" and a less biased critic has called "the greatest American novel of the century... joining Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn at the pinnacle of American fiction."

In this discerning study of Faulkner's major novels from Sartoris to The Reivers, Lynn Levins answers the criticism that the fictional world of William Faulkner is not heroic enough. Her study analyzes his heroic design--his rendering of the events of his rural community of Yoknapatawpha against scenes from myth, classical drama, epic poetry, and chivalric and historical romance. In each case Faulkner is not parodying traditional literary modes to focus on the grotesque diminution of legend and myth in Yoknapatawpha County; rather he is writing in As I Lay Dying and Old Man and The Hamlet of the fulfillment of an ethical obligation. When that obligation is met in spite of temptations and difficulties, then the action of Anse Burden or the tall convict or the idiot Ike Snopes approaches heroic proportions. Behind the chivalric framework of the tall convict's epic journey or the identification of Thomas Sutpen as the old Greek tragic hero lies a heroic ideal. By employing such a design Faulkner affirms man's historical continuity and asserts his belief that in the twentieth century the heroic is still possible.

Hailed by reviewers upon its publication more than thirty years ago, The Novels of William Faulkner remains the preeminent interpretation of Faulkner in the formalist critical tradition while it inspires Faulknerians of all methodologies. Part One contains detailed analyses of every novel from Soldiers’ Pay to The Reivers, with particular emphasis on elucidation of character, theme, and structural technique. Part Two discusses interrelated patterns and preoccupations in Faulkner’s writing generally. Insightful and well-reasoned, Olga W. Vickery’s work continues to be of enormous benefit to readers and scholars.

This book explores the ways to teach the literary works of William Clark Falkner and William Faulkner to ESL (English as a Second Language) students in today’s digital environment. William Faulkner’s great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, wrote romantic literary works, and William Faulkner critically uses the motifs of his great-grandfather’s works to establish his literary world. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical theory, this book theoretically explains how these two authors imagine the social formations of the American South differently in their literary works. The coined term, social combination—which is defined as the individuals’ mutual effort to have equal relationships for a certain time—is used as a key term to examine how these two authors depict the characters’ personal relationships. William Faulkner employs his characters’ social combination as a resistance against the American South’s romantic illusions that are represented by William Clark Falkner’s literary works. William Faulkner’s historical perspective is beneficial for today’s ESL students, who explore their new egalitarian formations in their digitally expanded world. The last part of this study outlines how an American literary teacher can connect the works of William Clark Falkner and William Faulkner when teaching ESL students by using today’s digital environment. Using three digital platforms—Moodle, WordPress, and Google Drive—a teacher composes egalitarian relationships among class members and inspires students’ autonomous discussion on these two authors’ works. Through these activities, ESL students are expected to comprehend that the literature of the American South is not only the historical development of the foreign region, but the phenomenon that is connected to their own social formations.

"This is a well-organized, gracefully written account of a significant aspect of Southern fiction, and it contains information and incisive commentary that one can find nowhere else." --Thomas Daniel Young Many southern writers imagined the South as a qualified dream of Arcady. They retained the glow of the golden land as a device to expose or rebuke, to confront or escape the complexities of the actual times in which they lived. The Dream of Arcady examines the work of post-Civil War southern writers who criticize the myth of the South as pastoral paradise. Sooner or later in all their idealized worlds, the idyllic vision fades in an inescapable moment of awakening. This moment, which is central to MacKethan's study, produces an atmosphere pastoral in mood and implications. Her perspective analysis juxtaposes the responses of Sidney Lanier, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page, who contributed to yet hope to transcend sectionalism, with the ambivalent views of black writers Charles Chesnutt and Jean Toomer. Considering the writings of the Agrarians, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty, MacKethan then concludes her study by questioning whether the Arcadian dream still serves the artist of our era as a frame for artistic and ideological purposes.