Introduction to the hypertext edition
Guide to "April Seventh, 1928" (Benjy's section)
Guide to "June Second, 1910" (Quentin's section)
Guide to "April Sixth, 1928" (Jason's section)
Guide to "April Eighth, 1928" (Dilsey's section)

 

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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