Outraged and amazed: transgressing the south in Faulkner's 'Absalom, Absalom!'

This monograph focuses on how 'Absalom, Absalom!''s complex narrative functions as a vehicle through which social order in the South is represented, challenged and renegotiated.

Exploring Quentin Compson's attempt to understand his own identity through the complicated and incomplete story of Thomas Sutpen, Joel Peckham demonstrates how the poetics, structure and central conflicts of the novel derive from a combination of its characters' intense resistance to their proscribed social limitations and their desire to wrest control of their identities through and from the act of storytelling.