The Ink of Melancholy

Faulkner's Novels from the Sound and the Fury to Light in August

Bibliographic Data

ID23550364
AuthorsAndre Bleikasten
Year1990
Pages400
Publication date1990-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueThe ink of melancholy (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/2051.0
OpenAlexW4409447239
ISBN9780253312006
Open LibraryOL2218438M
LanguageEN
Citations received3

The period from the late 1920s to the early 1940s was in Faulkner's career one of prodigious fertility, and the creative outburst on which it opens-from The Sound and the Fury (1929) through As I Lay Dying (1930) and Sanctuary (1931) to Light in August (1932)-touches indeed on the miraculous. It is the four children of this miracle that André Bleikasten re-examines and re-evaluates in his substantial new book on Faulkner. But rather than approach Faulkner's fiction from a priori theoretical assumptions and process it through some prefabricated grid, he has concentrated on the text themselves: on the motivations and circumstances of their composition, on the rich array of their themes, structures, textures, on their various narrative protocols and the endless interplay of their tropes and codes, on their points of emphasis and repetition as well as their rifts and gaps. Brilliant in its thought and argument, drawing eclectically on the resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and other disciplines, and using modern critical theory without ever being arcane or trendy, Bleikasten's book is a highly personal performance and one of the most insightful and stimulating studies that Faulkner has received.

Art · Composite material · Inkwell · Materials Science · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Criticism and interpretation · Melancholy in literature · william Faulkner (1897-1962)

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