Absalom, Absalom!: A Norton Critical Edition: 0 (Norton Critical Editions)

“With the Norton Critical Edition of Absalom, Absalom!, Susan Scott Parrish has set a new standard for studying Faulkner’s masterwork that will benefit both students and researchers in the decades to come. Situating this most difficult of novels in its historical, authorial, and critical contexts is no easy feat, but it is one that Parrish has accomplished with grace and aplomb. An astounding achievement!” ―Dr. Ahmed Honeini, Royal Holloway, University of London

“Parrish’s indispensable edition offers students and professors a wealth of historical and cultural information about Faulkner’s greatest novel. Including the authoritative text, relevant short stories by Faulkner, crucial contextual material, and some of the most important criticism, this volume deserves a place on every Americanist’s bookshelf. This will be the definitive edition of Absalom, Absalom! for years to come.” ―Harilaos Stecopoulos, University of Iowa

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• The authoritative text of Absalom, Absalom!, established by Noel Polk in 1986 and accompanied by Susan Scott Parrish’s introduction and explanatory footnotes.
• Two maps and five other images.
• A rich selection of background and contextual materials carefully arranged to draw readers into the American South of William Faulkner’s imagination. Topics include “Contemporary Reception,” “The Writer and His Work,” and “Historical Contexts.”
• Seventeen critical essays on the novel’s major themes, from classic literary critiques to recent scholarship on, among other topics, race, gender, and the environment.
• A chronology and a selected bibliography.

William Faulkner (1897–1962) is the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, among other works. These two novels were originally published by Liveright in the 1920s.

Susan Scott Parrish is a professor in the Department of English and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. She researches the history of how races and environments have been mutually constituted in North America since the colonial period. Her books include The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World, and, as editor or coeditor, Robert Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia and The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the American Antiquarian Society, and the University of Michigan’s Humanities Institute. And her teaching at the University of Michigan has been recognized with the John Dewey Award, the University Undergraduate Teaching Award, and an Arthur?F. Thurnau professorship. She is currently the Chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows.