New Light Thrown On Faulkner's Light In August

A compelling portrait of Southern society of the U.S.A, Light in August (1932) is one of William Faulkner's most important, most challenging, and most widely studied novels. It traces the history of a group of characters shaped by and responding to the religious, cultural, and racial traditions of the American South. Yet among both critics and readers the work causes a lot of controversy, regarding its composition, structure, theme, narrative techniques and so on. This thesis will focus on its multiple themes and how these themes are demonstrated, indicated, or implied by analyzing its figures'characterization and writing style.So this thesis is not solely to discuss the themes themselves, but goes into how the author presents the reader a three themes in the novel. Although most, certainly not all, have borrowed ideas, principles, and concerns from the literary critics, theories and theses already discussed, I have formed my own formula to describe, study, analyze, justify, interpret, and evaluate this specific work of art----Light in August. Based on a brief survey of both domestic and international research and criticism available, the author of this thesis maintains the themes of the novel should be approached from many angles and a variety of critical and scholarly skills to interpret and understand . With the purpose of shedding new light on the novel, the author tries taking a holistic, related, developmental, and dialectical look at it. Specifically, the basic and concrete methods governing the criticism of the novel involve four unities of induction and deduction, of analysis and synthesis, of abstract and concrete, and of logic and history.The first part of the thesis, chapter two, is devoted to theme and subject of the novel, comprising the relation between individual and community (the focus of this part), racism, religion. The second part refers to chapter three——themes highlighted by figures'characterization, involving Joe (with a fairly lengthy justification), Lena, and Burden. Chapters four, making up the third part, seeks to find out how the author presents the multiple themes by applying style and technique, including linguistic, naming and names, symbol and style. In order to make the thesis a whole, at the beginning is the introduction, discussing reason and objective, necessity and possibility, approach to criticism, and content and structure; and at the end is the conclusion, a summary of the thesis as well as limitations of it.