TY - JOUR
AU - Justus, James H.
AB -  William Faulkner: T h e Yoknapatawpha Country. By CLEANTH BROOKS. 500. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963. Pp. xiv $8.50. Cleanth Brooks’s new book-the first of a proposed two-volume study of Faulkner-is easy to dislike. “Certain literary critics who have written on Faulkner” are not likely to enjoy being compared to Shreve, the “sounding board and mouthpiece” which Faulkner created in Absalom, Absalom! to acknowledge the “modern, ‘liberal,’ twentieth-century reader, who is basically rational, skeptical, without any special concern for history, and pretty well emancipated from the ties of family, race, or section.” Neither are these critics likely to take kindly to a spate of two- and three-paragraph essays which Brooks supplies as “Notes” (seventy-seven pages on such matters as “Home-Made Coffins,’’ “The Southern View of Rape,” “Sutpen as the Typical Southerner,” “Joe Christmas as a Christ-Symbol,” along with a series of chronologies for the action in Sanctuary, T h e Mansion, and Absalom, Absalom!, a chart setting down the precise financial sleight-ofhand by which Ratliff outsmarted Flem Snopes in T h e Hamlet, and supplementary observations on Faulkner inspired by psychologists and theologians). But perhaps the loudest demur will come over the primary thesis in 
TI - William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country
JF - Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History
DO - 10.1215/00267929-25-2-231
DA - 1964-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/duke-university-press/william-faulkner-the-yoknapatawpha-country-H01lKG8ptf
SP - 231
VL - 25
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -