In the following essay, Lessig examines the historical realm of poor Southern whites and Faulkner's portrayal and opinion of them in his Snopes fiction.

In the following essay, Bercovitch takes what he calls a “counterdisciplinary” approach to Faulkner's works.

In the following essay, Radloff discusses the concept of demonism in Faulkner's works.

In the following essay, Simpson examines William Faulkner's works as they demonstrate the fusion and interiorization of history and sexuality in the modern consciousness.

In the following essay, Hlavsa outlines the facets of modernist writing and distinguishes Faulkner as a modernist writer.

In the following essay, Holland-Toll explores the pattern of alienation and absence in Faulkner's tragic novels.

In the following essay, Andrews discusses affinities Faulkner's writings have with the French symbolists and argues that these similarities confirm Faulkner as a uniquely American writer.

In the following essay, Taylor argues that Faulkner's portrayal of the experience of African Americans in the South ultimately fails to provide an accurate picture.

In the following essay, Rossky sketches a pattern of stasis and paralysis which produces a nightmare effect in William Faulkner's Sanctuary, contributing to its criticism of modern society and its commentary on the human condition.

How can we be "in" history and "outside" it at one and the same time? The problem that dogged Faulkner throughout his career can be stated as simply as that, but not his answer to it—because, of course, the answer does not lie in this expressed opinion or in that but in the imaginative discovery of Yoknapatawpha County. Loving his inheritance and hating it, involved with its mythology and yet well aware of the difference between history and myth, Faulkner was in a sense ob...

My sense of the relationship between Faulkner, Freud, and Nietzsche is that they were writers who addressed themselves to many of the same questions, and that at numerous point their works form imaginative analogues to one another. (pp. 2-3) It is precisely because I understand Faulkner, Freud, and Nietzsche to be related specifically as writers that I treat the works of all three as literary texts whose implications are ultimately philosophical. (p. 3)

As a fictionist Faulkner was not of any school, nor would he have abetted or blessed the recruitment of one…. In each work, and throughout each, he is his own man; and at his truest and best he has not yet been proved imitable. In various ways at many points he brilliantly intensified and refined effective fictional practices, by apt extensions of known artistic techniques…. [His] accomplishments remain unparalleled; and with the conspicuous tangentiality and cultural dispersions in more recen...

Faulkner was both a realist and a romanticist and was positively Gothic: an artist can view life from various perspectives if his vision is sufficiently comprehensive and penetrating. Faulkner loved his land and his people too much to reject them in their everyday aspects, without romantic or Gothic makeup and lighting, and some of his characters share his love of the ordinary. He was enough of a romanticist to feel keenly the difference between the reality he observed and what his land and his people had b...

It may seem an exaggeration to look for [the] theological substructures in Faulkner's work, yet the critics have all been struck by his "puritanism," meaning by that term both his visible disgust before the mystery of sex and his deep-seated misogyny—quite natural in a world in which the Immaculate Virgin has not yet come to reestablish the order of things altered by Eve. Faulkner has at least once expressly referred to the Bible in one of his titles (Absalom, Absalom!)—pr...

Although some of William Faulkner's short fiction is beginning to receive the critical attention it has long deserved, those stories that resist ready categorization, particularly those that lie outside the realm of Yoknapatawpha County, remain neglected. "Artist at Home" is such a work. An enigmatic, ironic, and not wholly successful story, it nevertheless makes significant use of narrative techniques, characterizations, and important themes that recur throughout Faulkner's work...

[Faulkner] was a richly gifted writer and there are times when he writes with real genius. He is keenly observant, and when he so wishes can be stereoscopically graphic. He gives us the intimate feel of an old banker's run-down bank and an easy-going little town, its age and southern heat, by referring in passing to the gold lettering on the bank's windows as 'cracked'. He evokes idle days spent sitting on the steps of a country store by letting us catch on the wing a reference t...

It is necessary to emphasise that Faulkner in his best work is not concerned with ideas in any abstract sense. His preoccupations are not intellectual but moral; what he offers is not philosophy but wisdom. At the same time, his public statements are in no sense divorced from his literary achievement. The Nobel Prize Speech has sometimes been regarded as very much a post hoc statement, a deliberate effort on Faulkner's part to match with his own grandiloquence the grandeur of the occasion. It should ...

The problem that faces every student of Faulkner's writing is its lack of a center, the gap between his power and its source, that curious abstract magnificence (not only a magnificence of verbal resources alone) which holds his books together, yet seems to arise from debasement or perplexity or a calculating terror. It is the gap between the deliberation of his effects, the intensity of his every conception, and the besetting and depressing looseness, the almost sick passivity, of his basic meaning ...

[Brooks, one of the most notable scholars of Faulkner, says of his William Faulkner: First Encounters: "[This book] has been written for the general reader and for the student coming to Faulkner for the first time." Brooks adds that he "limits himself" to discussions of theme, character, plot, and historical and fictional settings. The following excerpts from Brooks's introduction illustrate his main concerns throughout this lucid, informative analysis of Faulkner's...

William Faulkner's "address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature" is a classic statement of humanist affirmation. (p. 366) The text that appears in freshman anthologies is a noble statement, a model of rhetoric transcending platitude. But the text that Faulkner delivered to the Swedish Academy—albeit an identical one—is false and insincere. It lacks eloquence, because Faulkner did not fully believe what he was saying.

"Mistral" combines the mysterious death of a young village man on the eve of his wedding, with a priest's illicit passion for his beautiful female ward, the dead man's fiancée, and hence recalls not only the romantic suspicion and intrigue of "Jealousy" and "The Cobbler,"… but also the portrait of a libidinous, tormented priest, originally intended as part of the series of short stories and prose sketches Faulkner published in the Times-P...

Many informed Americans now consider William Faulkner to be the greatest American fiction writer of the 20th century and just possibly in our history. But his achievement of such recognition came to him with a painful slowness. He was 53 when he won the Nobel Prize, and in his acceptance speech he described his life's work as having been accomplished "in the agony and sweat of the human spirit…." Many of us now know enough about his life to realize that he did not exaggerate. A d...

Mayday is derivative in idea and technique, a product of a self-conscious affecting of Symbolist art quivering at its own fragility in a harsh and cruel world at the same time it openly parodies young passions and lusts. The setting is medieval: Sir Galwyn of Arthgyl is given a dream of death by St. Francis, and, accompanied by Pain and Hunger, he sets out on his journey of life to be united with this Little Sister. The first men who try to stop him protect Yseult whose naked bathing in a pool not only arou...

[Faulkner's short fiction that was] not included in Collected Stories and Knight's Gambit—has survived only in the bound files of old magazines and in hard-to-find books: in obscure, out-of-the-way publications or in editions long out of print. Moreover, at the author's death in 1962, there were 13 essentially complete narratives left in manuscript, surviving but not conveniently available to students of Faulkner's career. With the Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, ...

The Uncollected Stories is not merely an act of publication, but a work of serious and useful scholarship. As the editor explains, it "consists of three kinds of stories: those which William Faulkner published but never reprinted in any of his short-story collections, those which he later revised to become parts of later books, and those which have remained until now unpublished." (p. 221) It is a useful service to make the stories which were revised for inclusion in later books conveniently a...

The sound of ticking clocks and watches often provides the accompaniment for William Faulkner's tales of decline and change in the South. A clock strikes the quarter hours in the afternoon quiet of the Sartoris mansion; Miss Emily's "invisible watch" marks the passage of time within the shadowed rooms of the decaying Grierson house; and Quentin Compson's timepiece, once his grandfather's, its hands twisted off, ticks on, adding to the sound and the fury of his final...

Mayday itself is not, as one might expect, a fumbling piece of apprentice-work, but a skillful and amusing exercise in a very minor literary genre which might be described as a lightly allegorical medieval pastiche. It is the story of Sir Galwyn of Arthygal, who, accompanied by Hunger and Pain, rides forth as a new knight, kills "a small dragon of an inferior and cowardly type," seduces three beautiful princesses in three consecutive days and immediately abandons each of them, and finally, wit...

I came to every new Faulkner opus wearily determined to see in it what my betters saw. No more than the next man do I enjoy looking like a dunce. But, no matter how hard I tried, I was licked every time. Some major defect, some incurable myopia, prevented me from seeing in him more than a dazzling, though often unsuccessful technician, passionately and sincerely creating a private world whose inhabitants would be completely unrecognizable to the natives of Oxford, Mississippi, but are apparently immediately...