Faulkner the Storyteller

Blair Labatt (Author)

9780817353506

Paperback / softback, published 29 January 2006

296 pages
22.7 x 15.4 x 1.8 cm, 0.46 kg

[Faulkner the Storyteller] offers a fresh view of Faulkner's ocuvre, one that places the Snopes Trilogy at the center of his aesthetic project and not in the margins where too many critics have relegated it. It has the potential of reviving formalist studies of Faulkner, which have been overrun recently by other schools of criticism. - Joseph Urgo, author of Faulkner's Apocrypha: A Fable, Snopes, and the Spirit of Human Rebellion.

Novels like ""The Sound and the Fury"" and ""Absalom, Absalom!"" are often thought of as canonical modernist texts antagonistic to traditional notions of plot and storytelling. Blair Labatt, however, argues that Faulkner's fiction, regardless of its modernist gestures, is filled and driven by sophisticated manifestations of plot - willed challenges, structural targets, gambits, designs, and battles - a language of competition and conflict and a syntax of events.