The Spider in the Cup: Yoknapatawpha County’s Fall into the Unknowable

by Barbara H. Fried

Barbara Fried presents here a refined feminist reading of the sharply divergent attitudes toward knowledge attributed to men and women in Faulkner’s fiction. Against a backdrop of the first Fall, the author traces the process by which Faulkner’s men embrace a state of non-being and his women a life of greater knowledge in their twentieth-century fall into the unknowable. Drawing on the main body of Faulkner’s work with close attention to The Sound and the Fury , this richly conceived and gracefully written study animates in a new way the work of one of America’s foremost writers.

64 pages, Paperback

First published April 19, 1978