Reading Faulkner' Works From An Ethical Literary Perspective

William Faulkner is a great American writer who wins the Nobel Prize. Ethical ideas are the feature of Faulkner's works. Faulkner is a great writer with social responsibility, who pursues social criticism and ethical teaching in his works without cease. He reveals the evils of slavery, racism in Southern American society. He contributes himself to the development of the southen American society. This thesis employs the ethical literary approch to interpret Faulkner's works.Ethical literary criticism is a literary thoery put forward by Chinese scholars in recent years. It is literary research method based on ethics research method and literary research method. It aims at studying the ethics in the literary works and tries to make the historical, factual explanation on ethical relations between human being and society, human being and nature under the social, political, economical conditions at that time.There are four chapters in the thesis. The first chapter briefly describes the present researches on Faulkner and his literary works and gives a concise introduction to the theory of ethical literary criticism. Ethical literary criticism generally deals with the relation between men and society, the relation between men and nature and the author's ethical thoughts. The second chapter analyzes some of Faulkner's novels from the perspective of the relation between men and society. He truthfully depicts what happens in the southern American society and reveals the evils of slavery, racism and their pernicious impact on men. This chapter interprets the characters in Faulkner's works objectively and dialectically. The third chapter discusses Faulkner's works from the perspective of ties between men and nature. Nature exerts a favorable influnce on men and moulds their moral character. In the nature the white's posterity realize the virtures men should have and they are shameful of what their forefathers have done to the black. The fourth chapter seeks to find the features of Faulkner'sthoughts and their inflences on his creations. The conclution part points out thatFaulkner's novel is conducive to the construction of modern society's morals andethics.