Reading William Faulkner: 'Go Down, Moses' & 'Big Woods'

By: John Lennard

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Faulkner is notoriously a 'difficult' writer to study, especially for first-time readers. This introductory study begins with three chapters clearly setting out the important facts of his life, mapping the people and history of his recurrent fictional setting, Yoknapatawpha County, and analysing the oddities and problems of his prose style. Later chapters turn directly to Faulkner's great novel Go Down, Moses and his later collection Big Woods, dealing in detail with each story and the intertexts and showing how they connect and add up to something much more than loose collections. Readers new to Faulkner will find it a very helpful introduction to his world, and those already familiar with him a valuable resource. There is also an annotated bibliography. John Lennard was born in Bristol, UK, and taught at the Universities of London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame before becoming Professor of British and American Literature at the University of the West Indies--Mona in 2004-09. He has written Literature Insights on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, and Nabokov, as well as Humanities-Ebooks 'Sightlines' on Octavia Butler, Ian McDonald, Reginald Hill, Walter Mosley, and Tamora Pierce. His essay collections, ‘Of Modern Dragons’ and ‘Of Sex and Faerie’, are also published by HEB, and his other publications include ‘But I Digress’ (Clarendon Press 1991), ‘The Poetry Handbook’ (2e, OUP, 2005), and with Mary Luckhurst ‘The Drama Handbook’ (OUP 2002). For further information see his Wikipedia Page.