Full Description
Ink of Melancholy re-examines and re-evaluates William Faulkner's work from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, one of his most creative periods. Rather than approach Faulkner's fiction through a prefabricated grid, André Bleikasten concentrates on the texts themselves—on the motivations and circumstances of their composition, on the rich array of their themes, structures, textures, points of emphasis and repetition, as well as their rifts and gaps—while drawing on the resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology. Brilliant in its thought and argument, Ink of Melancholy is one of the most insightful and stimulating studies of Faulkner's work.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Editions Cited and Abbreviated
Introduction:Masks and Mirrors
Part 1: The Struggle with the Angel
1. The Quest for Eurydice
2. The Agony of Dispossession
3. The Young Man, Desire, and Death
4. Of Time and the Unreal
5. The Poison of Resentment
6. An Easter without Resurrection?
Part 2: Requiem for a Mother
7. A "Tour de Force"
8. A Dying Life, A Living Death
9. Turns of Madness
10. The Real and Its Representations
Part 3: The Blackness of Darkness
11. "The Most Horrific Tale"
12. Terror and Transgression
13. The Madness of Bodies
14. The Infernal Nursery
Part 4: Versions of the Sun
15. In Praise of Helen
16. The Cracked Urns
17. The Perils of Purity
18. The Fathers
19 Circles
Epilogue: Under the Sign of Saturn
Notes
Index
