Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun: A Critical Study

Polk, Noel

Literature & Fiction

Indiana Univ. Pr

Collected Stories of William Faulkner: Concordances to the Forty-Two Short Stories, with Statistical Summaries and Vocabulary Listings for Collected Stories, These 13, and Dr. Martino and Other Stories

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Books on Demand

This full-dress bibliography of the works of one of America’s greatest writers contains essential information for all serious scholars of Eudora Welty and her long and distinguished career.
It is a complete record of the rich treasury of the various physical forms in which her books have been published and reprinted over the course of her long life in professional writing. Her career, begun in 1936 when she published her first short story in a “little magazine” in Ohio, has flourished, along with her growing stature as a major figure in world literature, with an ever-increasing proliferation of new editions and foreign translations.
For more than twenty years Noel Polk has been one of the leading scholars of Welty’s works. During these two decades he has compiled this definitive catalog in which he details the casing, colors, size, paper type, binding format, and dust jacket of each book and analyzes the various editions, printings, states, and issues of each title. He includes a history of the writing, editing, publishing, and printing of each book, compiled from publishers’ and agents’ records.
Polk divides the bibliography into two chronological sections. The first focuses on Welty’s books. The other focuses of her publications in magazines, her fiction and nonfiction prose contributions to books other than her own, and her juvenilia, book reviews, dust-jacket blurbs, poetry, and photographic work. The bibliography includes a list of translations of Welty’s works into other languages. An appendix, “A Eudora Welty Publishing Log,” chronologically lists extracts from the bibliography that demonstrate the intimate interconnection of all facets of Welty’s extraordinary career.

Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

This book collects choice selections of his Faulkner criticism from the past fifteen years. Its publication and underscores the significance of Polk's indispensable work in Faulkner studies, both in criticism and in the editing of Faulkner's texts. In the title essay, his focus is mainly upon the context of Freudian themes, expressly in the works written between 1927 and 1932, the period in which Faulkner wrote and ultimately revised Sanctuary, a novel to which Polk has given concentrated study during his distinguished career. He has connected the literature with the life in a way not achieved in previous criticism. Although other critics, notably John T. Irwin and Andre Bleikasten, have explored Oedipal themes, neither perceived them operating so completely at the center of Faulkner's work as Polk does in this essay.

Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner

History & Criticism

Univ Pr of Mississippi

Reading Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (Reading Faulkner Series)

A handbook for interpreting Faulkner’s great novel

Ross, Stephen M.

Noel Polk, the Faulkner scholar and academician, is a native of the small Mississippi city of Picayune. In his career as an international scholar and traveler and in his role as a teacher and a professor of literature he has moved beyond his origins while continuing to be nourished by his hometown roots. Like many other southern men he doesn't fit the outside world's stereotype of the southern male. "I almost invariably see myself depicted in the media as either a beer-drinking meanspirited pickup-driving redneck racist, a julep-sipping plantation-owning kindhearted benevolent racist, or, at best, a nonracist good ole boy, one of several variations of Forrest Gump, good-hearted and retarded, who makes his way in the modern world not because he is intelligent but because he's - well, good hearted." In Outside the Southern Myth Polk offers an apologia for a huge segment of southern males and communities that don't belong in the media portraits. His town was not antebellum. There were no plantations. No Civil War battles were fought there. It had little racial divisiveness. It was one of the thousands that mushroomed along the railroads as a response to logging and milling industries. It was mainly middle-class, not reactionary or exclusive. While evoking both the pleasures and the problems of his past-band trips, a yearning for cityscapes, religious conversion, awakening to the realities of fundamentalist fervor- Polk offers himself, his family, and his town to exemplify an aspect that is more American than southern and a tradition that is not mired in the past. As he explores the ways in which his experience of the South defined him, he concludes that his life has been experienced in a parallel universe, not in a time warp. He and many like him exist outside the southern myth. Noel Polk is the author of Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (University Press of Mississippi) and editor of the Reading Faulkner Series and of eleven Faulkner texts for Random House, The Library of America, and Vintage International.

Outside the Southern Myth

Community & Culture

This book by a major scholar of William Faulkner's writings collects choice selections of his Faulkner criticism from the past fifteen years. Its publication underscores the significance of his indispensable work in Faulkner studies, both in criticism and in the editing of Faulkner's texts.  Here, Polk's focus is mainly upon the context of Freudian themes, expressly in the works written between 1927 and 1932, the period in which Faulkner wrote and ultimately revised Sanctuary, a novel to which Polk has given concentrated study during his distinguished career. He has connected the literature with the life in a way not achieved in previous criticism. Although other critics, notably John T. Irwin and Andre Bleikasten have explored Oedipal themes, neither perceived them as operating so completely at the center of Faulkner's work as Polk does in these essays.

Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! (Reading Faulkner Series)

Absalom, Absalom! has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him." On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate, demanding prose style, and its haunting dramatization of the South's intricate, demanding history make it a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature.Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! offers a close examination and interpretation of the novel. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.

Urgo, Joseph R.

As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South's literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking. His essays in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition maintain an abiding interest in Polk's major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work's larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse--the bricks and mortar, as it were--and a work's grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk's scholarship. Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition collects Polk's essays from the late-1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South's literary heritage, the volume asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis. Noel Polk is professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of the Mississippi Quarterly. From 1981 to 2006, he edited the Library of America's complete edition of William Faulkner's novels. He is the author of Outside the Southern Myth; Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner; and Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work.

Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

United States

As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South's literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking. 
His essays in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition maintain an abiding interest in Polk's major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work's larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse--the bricks and mortar, as it were--and a work's grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk's scholarship. 
Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition collects Polk's essays from the late-1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South's literary heritage, the volume asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis.
 As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South's literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking. 
His essays in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition maintain an abiding interest in Polk's major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work's larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse--the bricks and mortar, as it were--and a work's grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk's scholarship. 
Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition collects Polk's essays from the late-1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South's literary heritage, the volume asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis.

Essays & Correspondence

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Books by Polk, Noel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Polk, Noel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun: A Critical Study

Collected Stories of William Faulkner: Concordances to the Forty-Two Short Stories, with Statistical Summaries and Vocabulary Listings for Collected Stories, These 13, and Dr. Martino and Other Stories

Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work

Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner

Reading Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (Reading Faulkner Series)

Outside the Southern Myth

Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner

Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! (Reading Faulkner Series)

Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition