William Faulkner

This study 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. 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.