Hugh M. Ruppersburg examines the use of narrative viewpoint and structure in four representative novels by William Faulkner: Light in August, Pylon, Requiem for a Nun, and Absalom, Absalom! In his discussion of these four works he refers frequently, and often at length, to Faulkner's other novels and stories, so that the book offers a comprehensive examination of the narrative principle that underlie Faulkner's literary achievement. Ruppersburg shows how the Nobel Prize-winning novelist employed a number of elements to guarantee the impersonality of his fiction--how he built his novels primarily around the speech and thoughts of his characters. The absence of a judgmental authorial or narrational voice, says Ruppersburg, compels the reader to reach his own judgment concerning the behavior of these characters as well as the meaning and value of the fiction. By fusing a number of individual perspectives into a composite perspective, Faulkner gives the community itself a voice. He also uses narrative viewpoint to dramatize the individual's search for identity and the nature of truth, time, history, and human consciousness. Most significantly, the author says, Faulkner's manipulation of character perspective forces the reader to participate in the narrative process on the same level as that of the fictional characters. Voice and Eye in Faulkner's Fiction is primarily intended for the literature teacher and specialist, but it is directed as well to all readers curious about Faulkner's methods and the ways in which his novels work.

In this new edition, what was already an expansive work has been updated and further enlarged to include information not only on American and British novelists but also on writers in English from around the world.

Bockting has produced a work that focuses on the "people" that Faulkner created in his four major psychological novels: The Sound and the Fury (1929); As I Lay Dying (1920), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The author writes not about these people, either as literary characters or as human beings, but instead has allowed them to come alive in their own time, through their own texts. Psychostylistics is the innovative approach to the literary character that Bockting employs, bringing together new developments in narrative psychology and psychiatry with literary stylistics and mind-style to provide detailed textual and contextual evidence in support of its observations on personality. Contents: The Literary Character: Between Life and Linguistic Style; Mind-Style in The Sound and the Fury; Multiple Voices in As I Lay Dying; Light in August and the Issues of Unreliability; Absalom, Absalom!: A Novel of Attribution; Character, Personality, and Psychostylistics.

One of America's greatest writers, William Faulkner wrote fiction that combined spellbinding Southern storytelling with modernist formal experimentation to shape an enduring body of work. In his fictional Yoknapatawpha County—based on the region around his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi—he created an entire world peopled with unforgettable characters linked into an intricate historical and social web. An introduction to the Nobel-Prize-winning author's life and work, this book devotes opening chapters to his biography and literary heritage and subsequent chapters to each of his major works. The analytical chapters start with his most accessible book, The Unvanquished, a Civil-War-era account of a boy's coming of age. The following chapters orient readers to elements of plot, character, and theme in Faulkner's masterpieces: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Also analyzed and discussed are some of Faulkner's most often anthologized short stories, including A Rose For Emily and Barn Burning, and the longer stories The Bear, Spotted Horses, and The Old Man that were incorporated in the novels Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Clear, insightful analyses of the elements of Faulkner's fiction are supplemented with alternative readings from a variety of critical approaches including gender, rhetorical, performance, and cultural studies perspectives.