William Faulkner

Noel Polk

Part of The Wadsworth Casebooks for Reading, Research, and Writing Series, this new title provides all the materials a student needs to complete a literary research assignment in one convenient location.

A Rose for Emily

John D. Hart

Concordances to the Forty-five Short Stories

Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner

Concordances to the Forty-two Short Stories, with Statistical Summaries and Vocabulary Listings for Collected Stories, These 13, and Dr. Martino and Other Stories

Collected Stories of William Faulkner

Ann J. Abadie

A critical exploration of the effects and influence of America's wars upon the works of the Nobel Prize laureate

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2001

Faulkner and War

A Concordance to the Novel

The Hamlet

Absalom, Absalom!

Kenneth L. Privratsky

The Sound and the Fury

Intruder in the Dust

A Fable

Polished and refitted into a new critical matrix, these essays by a distinguished Faulkner editor and scholar in no way resemble the casual self-anthologizing often encountered. Polk's stature as a critic meshes neatly with his work as an editor; his patent joy at the very sight of Faulkner manuscripts is inspiriting, and his professed commitment to Freudian readings is borne lightly (that is, expressed in sensible, jargon-free discourse that is both witty and brilliant). --J. M. Ditsky, Choice First published in 1996, this book by a major scholar of William Faulkner's writings collects choice selections of his Faulkner criticism from the past fifteen years. Its publication underscores the significance of his indispensable work in Faulkner studies, both in criticism and in the editing of Faulkner's texts. Here, Polk's focus is mainly upon the context of Freudian themes, expressly in the works written between 1927 and 1932, the period in which Faulkner wrote and ultimately revised Sanctuary, a novel to which Polk has given concentrated study during his distinguished career. He has connected the literature with the life in a way not achieved in previous criticism. Although other critics, notably John T. Irwin and Andre Bleikasten have explored Oedipal themes, neither perceived them as operating so completely at the center of Faulkner's work as Polk does in these essays. Noel Polk, a professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the editor of the definitive texts of Faulkner's works. He also is one of the most notable scholars of Eudora Welty's works and the author of Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work (University Press of Mississippi)

Text and Context in Faulkner

Children of the Dark House

A Fable: Mean-Z

Eudora Welty--a bibliography of her work

Joseph R. Urgo

Absalom, Absalom! has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him." On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate, demanding prose style, and its haunting dramatization of the South's intricate, demanding history make it a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature. Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! offers a close examination and interpretation of the novel. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.

Reading Faulkner

Like many other southern men, Noel Polk doesn't fit the outside world's stereotype of the southern male. This notable Faulkner critic is a native of the small Mississippi city of Picayune. In his career as an international scholar and traveler and in his role as a teacher and a professor of literature, he has moved beyond his origins while continuing to be nourished by his hometown roots. "I almost invariably see myself depicted in the media as either a beer-drinking, mean-spirited, pickup-driving redneck racist; a julep-sipping, plantation-owning, kind-hearted, benevolent racist; or, at best, a nonracist good ole boy, one of several variations of Forrest Gump, good-hearted and retarded, who makes his way in the modern world not because he is intelligent but because he's--well, good hearted." In Outside the Southern Myth Polk offers an apologia for a huge segment of southern males and communities that don't belong in the media portraits. His town was not antebellum. There were no plantations. No Civil War battles were fought there. It had little racial divisiveness. It was one of the thousands that mushroomed along the railroads as a response to logging and milling industries. It was mainly middle-class, not reactionary or exclusive. While evoking both the pleasures and the problems of his past--band trips, a yearning for cityscapes, religious conversion, awakening to the realities of fundamentalist fervor--Polk offers himself, his family, and his town to exemplify an aspect that is more "American" than "southern" and a tradition that is not mired in the past. As he explores the ways in which his experience of the South defined him, he concludes that his life has been experienced in a parallel universe, not in a time warp. He and many like him exist outside the southern myth.

Outside the Southern Myth

Noel Polk

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