Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Saying No to Death? William Faulkner's aesthetic of mortality -- A fine dead sound: Quentin Compson's suicide in The Sound and the Fury -- Living was terrible: Confrontations with mortality in As I Lay Dying -- Burying the fallen monument: The death of the Old South in "A Rose for Emily" -- A bloody mischancing of human affairs: Murder and violence in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! -- Ah'm goan home: Narration, homegoing, and whiteness in Go Down, Moses -- Conclusion: Breaking the pencil: Death and voice in Faulkner's fiction.

"William Faulkner and Mortality is the first full-length study of mortality in William Faulkner's fiction. The book challenges earlier, influential scholarly considerations of death in Faulkner's work that claimed that writing was his authorial method of 'saying No to death'. Through close-readings of six key works-The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, "A Rose for Emily", Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses-this book examines how Faulkner's characters confront various experiences of human mortality, including grief, bereavement, mourning, and violence. The trauma and ambivalence caused by these experiences ultimately compels these characters to 'say Yes to death'. The book makes a clear distinction between Faulkner's quest for literary immortality through writing and the desire for death exhibited by the principal characters in the works analysed. William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound offers a new paradigm for reading Faulkner's oeuvre, and adds an alternative voice to a debate within Faulkner scholarship long thought to have ended"--

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