Ink of Melancholy

<p>The period from the late 1920s to the early 1940s was in Faulkner's career one of prodigious fertility and the creative outburst on which it opens--from <i>The Sound and the Fury</i> (1929) through <i> As I Lay Dying </i>(1930) and <i>Sanctuary </i>(1931) to <i>Light in August </i>(1932)--touches indeed on the miraculous. It is the four children of this miracle that André Bleikasten re-examines and re-evaluates in his substantial new book on Faulkner. But rather than approach Faulkner's fiction from a priori theoretical assumptions and process it through some prefabricated grid he has concentrated on the text themselves: on the motivations and circumstances of their composition on the rich array of their themes structures textures on their various narrative protocols and the endless interplay of their tropes and codes on their points of emphasis and repetition as well as their rifts and gaps. <br /><br />Brilliant in its thought and argument drawing eclectically on the resources of philosophy psychoanalysis anthropology and other disciplines and using modern critical theory without ever being arcane or trendy Bleikasten's book is a highly personal performance and one of the most insightful and stimulating studies that Faulkner has received.</p>