Before William Faulkner, there was Colonel William C. Falkner (1825–1889), the great-grandfather of the prominent and well-known Mississippi writer. The first biography of Falkner was a dissertation by the late Donald Duclos, which was completed in 1961, and while Faulkner scholars have briefly touched on the life of the Colonel due to his influence on the writer’s work and life, there have been no new biographies dedicated to Falkner until now. To the Ramparts of Infinity: Colonel W. C. Falkner and the Ripley Railroad seeks to fill this gap in scholarship and Mississippi history by providing a biography of the Colonel, sketching out the cultural landscape of Ripley, Mississippi, and alluding to Falkner’s influence on his great-grandson’s Yoknapatawpha cycle of stories. While the primary thrust of the narrative is to provide a sound biography on Falkner, author Jack D. Elliott Jr. also seeks to identify sites in Ripley that were associated with the Colonel and his family. This is accomplished in part within the main narrative, but the sites are specifically focused on, summarized, and organized into an appendix entitled “A Field Guide to Colonel Falkner’s Ripley.” There, the sites are listed along with old and contemporary photographs of buildings. Maps of the area, plotting military action as well as the railroads, are also included, providing essential material for readers to understand the geographical background of the area in this period of Mississippi history.

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.

An in-depth exploration of the life and works of the man who would one day serve as a model and influence to his great-grandson, William Faulkner

"This is a beautiful book. Gripping, engaging, and absolutely worth the time it takes to burrow yourself into its reality. I can't recommend it highly enough." —Seanan McGuire The first in a masterful new trilogy from acclaimed author M. R. Carey, The Book of Koli begins the story of a young boy on a journey through a strange and deadly world of our making. Everything that lives hates us... Beyond the walls of the small village of Mythen Rood lies an unrecognizable landscape. A place where overgrown forests are filled with choker trees and deadly seeds that will kill you where you stand. And if they don't get you, one of the dangerous shunned men will. Koli has lived in Mythen Rood his entire life. He believes the first rule of survival is that you don't venture too far beyond the walls. He's wrong. "A captivating start to what promises to be an epic post-apocalyptic fable." —Kirkus "Enthralling...Koli embarks upon a journey as perilous as it is enlightening." —Guardian "The best thing I've read in a long time. I loved it." —Joanne Harris "Carey hefts astonishing storytelling power with plainspoken language, heartbreaking choices, and sincerity like an arrow to the heart." —Locus Look out for the next novels in the trilogy: The Trials of Koli and The Fall of Koli

The Ghost on the Ramparts presents fourteen of R. B. Heilman's essays on the teaching of English and the profession of the humanities. These essays deal with such diverse topics as administrative ways and means, pedagogical shibboleths and heresies, uses and abuses of literacy, clichés of style, moot issues of history and criticism, and above all the nature of the humanities and their continuing significance. The persuasive discussions of all these subjects reflect the author's wide professional experience, his wit and wisdom, and his superb sense of style. The chairman of a distinguished English department for over twenty years, Heilman well knew the ins and outs of administration. He considers not only the practical problems of maintaining a large department but also the more complex matters involving a chairman's attitude toward deans, toward colleagues of many kinds, and toward oneself as a committed teacher and administrator. Also a literary critic of established reputation, Heilman's explicative side appears in most of these essays as he provides illustrative examples from many different sources while discussing the nature of history and criticism in the humanities. The unity of these essays is no less impressive than the mind of their maker, who instances a remarkable capacity for seeing life in the humanities steadily and whole.

William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. Throughout his career, he remained haunted by his inability to master a series of personal and professional challenges: his less-than-heroic military career; the loss of his brother in an airplane crash; a disappointing stint as a Hollywood screenwriter; and a destructive bout with alcoholism. In this imaginative biography, Philip Weinstein--a leading authority on the great novelist--targets Faulkner's embattled sense of self as central to both his life and his work. Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history--with antebellum practices and racial division--take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. Exploring the resonance of his own unpreparedness, Faulkner invented a singular language that captured human consciousness under stress as never before. Becoming Faulkner joins Faulkner's life and art in a bold new way, giving readers a full vantage from which to better understand this twentieth-century literary genius.Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history--with antebellum practices and southern heritage--form a pattern that played out over the course of his entire life. At the same time, these incidents take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. It was in meditating on his failures, his own unreadiness, Weinstein argues, that Faulkner came up with his singular language, one that captured human consciousness under stress as never before. His fruitless striving catapulted American literature to a new level of sophistication.Narrating the events that comprised Faulkner's life, biographers have long struggled to depict his personal complexity, the paradoxes that shaped his decisions and dogged his relationships. But without a consideration of the writing as well, the troubles in the life fail to reveal their deeper resonance. By skillfully analyzing the work while tracing the events, Weinstein achieves a full portrait, revealing struggles that animate his life and shadows that complicate his work. Becoming Faulkner thus conjoins Faulkner's life and art in a bold new way, giving readers a full vantage from which to better understand this twentieth-century literary genius.

This book treats William Faulkner's major fiction--from Flags in the Dust through to Absalom, Absalom!--to a searching reappraisal under the spotlight of a media-historical inquiry. It proposes that Faulkner's inveterate attraction to the paradigms of romance was disciplined and masked by the recurrent use of metaphorical figures borrowed from the new media ecology. Faulkner dressed up his romance materials in the technological garb of radio, gramophony, photography, and cinema, along with the transportational networks of road and air that were being installed in the 1920s. His modernism emerges from a fraght but productive interplay between his anachronistic predilection for chivalric chichés and his extraordinarily knowledgeable interest in the most up-to-date media institutions and forms. Rather than see Faulkner as a divided author, who worked for money in the magazines and studios while producing his serious fiction in despite of their symbolic economies, this study demonstrates how profoundly his mature art was shot through with the figures and dynamics of the materials he publicly repudiated. The result is a richer and more nuanced understanding of the dialectics of his art.