Product Description
The text of this Norton Critical Edition is that of the corrected edition scrupulously prepared by Noel Polk, whose textual note precedes the text. David Minterβs annotations are designed to assist the reader with obscure words and allusions.
"Backgrounds" begins with the appendix Faulkner wrote in 1945 and sometimes referred to as another telling of The Sound and the Fury and includes a selection of Faulknerβs letters, excerpts from two Faulkner interviews, a memoir by Faulkner?s friend Ben Wasson, and both versions of Faulkner's 1933 introduction to the novel. "Cultural and Historical Contexts" presents four different perspectives on the place of the American South in history. Taken together, these worksβby C. Vann Woodward, Richard H. King, Carolyn Porter, and Robert Penn Warrenβprovide the reader with valuable contexts for understanding the novel. "Criticism" includes seventeen essays on The Sound and the Fury that collectively trace changes in the way we have viewed this novel over the last four decades. The critics are Jean-Paul Sartre, Irving Howe, Ralph Ellison, Olga W. Vickery, Cleanth Brooks, Michael Millgate, John T. Irwin, Myra Jehlen, Donald M. Kartiganer, David Minter, Warwick Wadlington, John T. Matthews, Thadious M. Davis, Wesley Morris and Barbara Alverson Morris, Minrose C. Gwin, Andr? Bleikasten, and Philip M. Weinstein. A revised Selected Bibliography is also included.
About the Author
William Faulkner (1897β1962) is the Nobel Prizeβwinning author of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, among other works.
David Minter is Libby Shearn Moody Professor of English at Rice University. He is co-editor of The Harper American Literature and The Columbia Literary History of the United States. He is author of Heirs of Changing Promise: A Cultural History of the American Novel, 1890β1940; William Faulkner: His Life and Work; and The Interpreted Design.