Reading Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (Reading Faulkner Series) - Softcover

Ross, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0878059369 ISBN 13: 9780878059362

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 1996

Synopsis

This volume guides readers through one of William Faulkner’s most complex novels. By common consent The Sound and the Fury is a seminal document of twentieth-century literature. Almost from the beginning, it has been a litmus test for critical approaches―from New Criticism to biography and manuscript analysis.

In the past two decades, nearly all of the newest critical theories have come calling on Faulkner’s novel. Yet it resists or evades even the most ardent theorists’ efforts to contain it, and much of its total accomplishment remains unplumbed.

This volume, like others in the Reading Faulkner Series, provides line-by-line interpretation and concentration on individual words and sentences, visual dimensions, time shifts, intricacies of narration, and other obscurities. It explores Faulkner’s words as they appear on the page, deciphering and responding to them in their linear progression and in their cumulating resonances inside and outside the text. Important allusions and references are identified, as are dates and historical passages. For many passages alternative readings are offered. The pagination is keyed to the definitive text of the Vintage edition.

About this title

Book Description:

A handbook for interpreting Faulkner?s great novel

About the Author:

Stephen M. Ross is director of the Office of Challenge Grants, National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also coauthor of Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned and Reading Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, both published by University Press of Mississippi. Noel Polk (1943-2012) was a professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi and Mississippi State University, is the author of many critical studies on Welty and Faulkner, and is the coeditor of the Library of America edition of Faulkner's works.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0878059369
• ISBN 13: 9780878059362
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208