Synopses & Reviews
Few twentieth-century writers are as revered as William Faulkner. This collection brings together the best literary criticism on Faulkner from the last six decades, detailing the imaginative and passionate responses to his still-controversial novels. By focusing on the criticism rather than the works, Linda Wagner-Martin shows the primary directions in Faulkner’s influence on critics, writers, and students of American literature today. This invaluable volume reveals the patterns of change in literary criticism over time, while exploring the various critical streams—language theory, feminism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis—that have elevated Faulkner’s work to the highest rank of the American literary pantheon.
About the Author
Linda Wagner-Martin holds the Hanes Chair of American Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has received Guggenheim, NEH, ACLS, and Rockefeller Fellowships and has served as president of the American literature section of the MLA, and as president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society.
Table of Contents
"So I, who never had a war ... " : William Faulkner, war, and the modern imagination / Donald M. Kartiganer -- Unquiet ghosts : memory and determinism in Faulkner / Lee Anne Fennell -- "He was getting it involved with himself" : identity and reflexivity in William Faulkner's Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! / Helen Lynne Sugarman -- "Like a lady I et" : Faulkner, food, and femininity / Christina Jarvis -- The abjection of Addie and other myths of the maternal in As I lay dying / Diana York Blaine -- A measure of innocence : Sanctuary's Temple Drake / Dianne Luce Cox -- "All that matters is that I wrote the letters" : discourse, discipline, and difference in Requiem for a nun / Kelly Lynch Reames -- (Re)reading Faulkner as father and daughter of his own text / Minrose C. Gwin -- Faulkner and the politics of incest / Karl Zender -- The "incredibly loud ... miss-fire" : a sexual reading of Go down, Moses / Neil Watson -- The comic structure of The sound and the fury / Fred Chappell -- Faulkner's commedia : synecdoche and anagogic symbolism in The sound and the fury / James M. Mellard -- Faulkner's family dilemma : Quentin's crucible / Gary Storhoff -- Jason Compson : the demands of honor / Linda Welshimer Wagner -- Opening Pandora's box : re-reading Compson's letter and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! / David Krause -- Absalom, Absalom! : the movie / Joseph Urgo -- Faulkner's narrative styles / J.E. Bunselmeyer -- Why did the Snopeses name their son "Wallstreet Panic"? : Depression humor in Faulkner's The hamlet / Andrea Dimino -- Knight's gambit : Poe, Faulkner, and the tradition of the detective story / John T. Irwin -- Madame Bovary and Flags in the dust : Flaubert's influence on Faulkner / Philip Cohen -- From Oxford : the novels of William Faulkner / Richard Ray.