An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury's
Hypertext Edition
Peter Stoicheff
William Faulkner's 1929 novel The Sound and the
Fury is a complex text. Its narrative structure is highly complicated;
its frequent use of stream of consciousness creates great narrative
density; it is highly allusive and intertextual throughout; and its
chronologically restless first section is difficult to understand for
most readers.
It was this complexity that initially attracted the
editors of this edition to the idea of placing The Sound and the
Fury within a digital environment. The possibilities for visually
displaying a text's information and structures in a hypertext format
are rich and productive, and the first goal of this edition was to exploit
those possibilities to display the novel's first, chronologically most
difficult, section.
This electronic edition also contains examples of
intertexts that influence the novel, as well as critical commentaries
on those influences. The novel has received much attention since its
publication, and a wide variety of other critical perspectives are represented
here, from early reviews to more recent poststructural examinations.
This edition contains the complete text and relevant
apparatus such as Faulkner's two 1933 introductions to the novel, his
1945 Appendix, and examples of his manuscripts. In creating this edition,
the editors have to date concentrated on the novel's first and second
sections, "April Seventh, 1928," and "June Second, 1910." They are presently
the most "complete" of the novel's four sections.
It is hoped that the material and its presentation
in this edition will be useful to The Sound and the Fury's newest
and, simultaneously, more advanced readers. Few electronic editions
of novels exist; the ones that do are primarily simple digital copies
of texts and not critical editions of them. The editors of this edition
have tried to use, in a careful fashion, the possibilities of the hypertext
platform to create a critical edition of scholarly value.
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