William Faulkner

This concise and focused study of Faulkner’s literary lives can help readers sort through the questions raised by his work and by the voluminous response to it.

Despite all the biographical studies devoted to William Faulkner, there are still many fundamental contradictions in the way he is perceived. He has been described as a creator of worlds à la Dickens and as one of postmodernism’s avatars, as indifferent to the intellectual currents of his time and as profoundly indebted to them, as deeply insightful about issues like race, class, and gender and as someone who merely reflects contemporary anxieties about them. A concise and focused study of Faulkner’s literature and life that will help readers sort through the questions raised by his work and by the voluminous response to it.

David Rampton is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. His publications include Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (CUP, 1984), Vladimir Nabokov (Macmillan, 1993), Prose Models (co-ed., HBJ, 1989 – 2nd ed).

Introduction * The Lyric Moment (1924-28) * Modernism’s Contradictory Propositions (1929-34) * “The Furious Murmur of their Chivalry” (1935-38) * The Historian of the Present (1939-42) * “Oratory out of Solitude” (1943-62) * Posthumous Lives * Index