Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Faulkner, William (Cuthbert) - Michael Millgate

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MICHAEL MILLGATE

It is necessary to emphasise that Faulkner in his best work is not concerned with ideas in any abstract sense. His preoccupations are not intellectual but moral; what he offers is not philosophy but wisdom. At the same time, his public statements are in no sense divorced from his literary achievement. The Nobel Prize Speech has sometimes been regarded as very much a post hoc statement, a deliberate effort on Faulkner's part to match with his own grandiloquence the grandeur of the occasion. It should properly be seen as a distillation, necessarily couched in abstract terms, of the kind of statements and moral judgments which had been implicit in his work from the very first. As Faulkner wrote to Warren Beck in 1941: "I have been writing all the time about honor, truth, pity, consideration, the capacity to endure well grief and misfortune and injustice and then endure again …" Like the people of Oxford, so many of Faulkner's critics have...

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1. Introduction
2. Wyndham Lewis
3. Alfred Kazin
4. Clifton Fadiman
5. Michael Millgate
6. Robert Penn Warren
7. Arthur F. Kinney
8. Calvin S. Brown
9. Malcolm Cowley
10. Sean O'Faolain
11. Cleanth Brooks
12. Copyright

1. William Faulkner