When William Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury in 1929 he presented the world with one of the greatest novels of all time and a foremost example of Modernist art. Even as it explores life in the United States South, this novel delves deeply into individual psychology via literary techniques that strain representation to its very limits.

This volume in the Critical Insights series is edited by Taylor Hagood, author of Faulkner’s Imperialism: Space, Place, and the Materiality of Myth and the forthcoming volume Faulkner, Writer of Disability. The collection features an array of readings that range from philosophical approaches to the perspectives offered by the emerging and contested field of fat studies. Topics include constructs of masculinity, war, and industrialism in The Sound and the Fury along with fascinating explorations of time, the instability of meaning, and readings of the novel in relation to other texts by Faulkner and African American writers. Among the contributors are such established and celebrated scholars as James Carothers, Cheryl Lester, Theresa Towner, and Joseph R. Urgo as well as an international cast of important emerging critics such as Georgiana Banita, Peter Froehlich, John B. Padgett, Sarah Robertson, and Frederique Spill.