The Ink of Melancholy – Faulkner`s Novels from the Sound and the Fury to Light in August

PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EDITIONS CITED AND ABBREVIATIONS
Introduction: Masks and Mirrors
One. The Struggle with the Angel
I. The Quest for Eurydice
II. The Agony of Dispossession
III. The Young Man, Desire, and Death
IV. Of Time and the Unreal
V. The Poison of Resentment
VI. An Easter without Resurrection?
Two. Requiem for a Mother
VII. A Tour de Force
VIII. A Dying Life, a Living Death
IX. Turns of Madness
X. The Real and Its Representations
Three. The Blackness of Darkness
XI. The Most Horrific Tale
XII. Terror and Transgression
XIII. The Madness of Bodies
XIV. The Infernal Nursery
Four. Versions of the Sun
XV. In Praise of Helen
XVI. The Cracked Urns
XVII. The Perils of Purity
XVIII. The Fathers
XIX. Circles
Epilogue: Under the Sign of Saturn
NOTES
INDEX

"My purpose . . . is not to put Faulkner's novels on the rack so as to make them confess their secrets. It is not so much a question of exposing them to the light of contemporary scientific discourse as of developing (as one would a photographic negative) an entire body of insights and wisdom already stored away in their folds." - AndrŽ Bleikasten " . . . graduate students, faculty members, and Faulkner scholars will want to know this work because of its fair and comprehensive readings of these four masterpieces." - Choice
" . . . unsurpassed as an act of sustained engagement with Faulkner's language." - New York Review of Books
"We can simply enjoy Bleikasten's intelligence (both senses) as he reads Faulkner's novels with us. Faulkner has found a critic worthy of him . . . The Ink of Melancholy is likely to become a standard work . . . " - Times Literary Supplement
" . . . Professor Bleikasten must be reckoned one of the very finest and best-informed of [Faulkner's] critics." - Michael Millgate
"Bleikasten is a gifted and devoted reader of Faulkner's fiction, and he brings not only a wealth of knowledge but also an appealing modesty to his sense of the critic's tasks." - American Literature
"Professor Bleikasten . . . has written a work which will set the standards for Faulkner criticism for years to come . . . " - Patrick Samway, Virginia Quarterly Review