Reading William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

Our top-selling Study Guide is intended both for first-time readers of The Sound and the Fury and—since it offers new scholarship and critical argument on Faulkner—for established critics and scholars.

Contents

Chapter 1 provides some general context about Faulkner's life and work in the American South and “Yoknapatawpha County”, and introduces the form and style of Faulkner's novel.
Chapter 2 provides a discussion of the contexts of Southern history and Faulkner's family history.
Chapter 3 is a discussion of the influences on Faulkner of Modernist literature and Modernist psychology and philosophy.
Chapter 4 gives a close commentary on each of the novel's four narratives.

About the author

Dr. Michael Cotsell is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Delaware. He was the one time Associate Editor of the Dickens Companions series to which he contributed The Companion to “˜Our Mutual Friend” (Edinburgh University press, 1986) and the General Editor of the Series English Literature and the Wider World for which he edited the volume Creditable Warriors: English Literature and the Wider World, 1830-76 (Ashfield Press,1990). He has edited the World's Classics edition of Our Mutual Friend and volumes of critical essays on Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities and is the author of Barbara Pym (MacMillan, 1989). His most recent book is The Theater of Trauma: American Modernist Drama and the Psychological Struggle for the American Mind, 1900-1930 (Peter Lang, 2005). He continues to work on psychiatry and American Modernism.