Skei, Hans H.: Faulkner and Other Southern Writers

The first part of Faulkner and Other Southern Writers includes ten articles on various aspects of William Faulkner’s writing. Here are discussions of the early as well as of the late career, a study of metafictional elements in Faulkner’s fiction as well as of the existential experience that can be found in many of his short stories. Even Faulkner’s humor is considered, and in an attempt to compare two great contemporary writers in different languages, the modernisms of Faulkner and the great Norwegian novelist Olav Duun are investigated. The second part of the book consists of articles on Southern writers Mary Boykin Chesnut, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty and Cormack McCarthy. They are all approached in different ways, but with the exception of one of the two articles on Shelby Foote, all the essays basically deal with one single work of fiction - from Foote’s monumental The Civil War: A Narrative to the terrifying beauty of McCarthy’s last "Southern book," Suttree. Hans H. Skei is professor of comparative literature at the University of Oslo. His most recent book is Reading Faulkner’s Best Short Stories (University of South Carolina Press, 1999), and together with Per Winther and Jakob Lothe he has edited and contributed to The Art of Brevity. Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, published by the same press in 2004.

Novus Studies in Literature 8.