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

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, Andre 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.