William Faulkner and Mortality

<p><em>William Faulkner and Mortality</em> is the first full-length study of mortality in William Faulkner’s fiction. The book challenges earlier influential scholarly considerations of death in Faulkner’s work that claimed that writing was his authorial method of ‘saying No to death’. Through close-readings of six key works – <em>The Sound and the Fury</em> <i>As I Lay Dying</i> A Rose for Emily <i>Light in August</i> <i>Absalom Absalom!</i> and <em>Go Down Moses</em> – this book examines how Faulkner’s characters confront various experiences of human mortality including grief bereavement mourning and violence. The trauma and ambivalence caused by these experiences ultimately compel these characters to ‘say Yes to death’. The book makes a clear distinction between Faulkner’s quest for literary immortality through writing and the desire for death exhibited by the principal characters in the works analysed. <i>William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound</i> offers a new paradigm for reading Faulkner’s oeuvre and adds an alternative voice to a debate within Faulkner scholarship long thought to have ended.</p>