Character and Personality in the Novels of William Faulkner

Book excerpt: Bockting has produced a work that focuses on the "people" that Faulkner created in his four major psychological novels: The Sound and the Fury (1929); As I Lay Dying (1920), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The author writes not about these people, either as literary characters or as human beings, but instead has allowed them to come alive in their own time, through their own texts. Psychostylistics is the innovative approach to the literary character that Bockting employs, bringing together new developments in narrative psychology and psychiatry with literary stylistics and mind-style to provide detailed textual and contextual evidence in support of its observations on personality. Contents: The Literary Character: Between Life and Linguistic Style; Mind-Style in The Sound and the Fury; Multiple Voices in As I Lay Dying; Light in August and the Issues of Unreliability; Absalom, Absalom!: A Novel of Attribution; Character, Personality, and Psychostylistics.