The Signifying Eye will teach even experienced Faulknerians something new on just about every page, while those early in their encounter with Faulkner's novels will be offered a series of brilliant perspectives on the author's astounding creativity and the superabundant richness and complexity of his body of work. With The Signifying Eye Waid will take her place among the most important of all Faulkner critics, and all of us will have to engage and reckon with her book. In this innovative and arresting work Waid persuades us of the value, ultimately the necessity, of understanding Faulkner as a southern modernist working within two seemingly incompatible traditions: the oral traditions of southern, regionalist literature and the self-conscious, print-based textuality of the modernist avantgarde. Yet The Signifying Eye offers us still more. It develops into a meditation on the unique visions of experience that give modern American writing and painting their distinctive character and appeal. A brilliant and important book. This rich collation brings together Faulkner's words and pictures with an impressive array of other artists' pictures--de Kooning, Beardsley, Whistler--and the prose of Wharton, Cather, and Waid herself. Waid's inquisitive eye not only sees but touches all that it lights on.

To see what's there and make it visible to everyone who has the courage to look: that's Waid's mark. The strength of this book is that it is a synthesis of thinking about how William Faulkner engaged with visual culture. That said, this book is hard to summarize, as it is not an exposition of a single argument. It is, rather, an exploration of the significance of Faulkner's writing by an established scholar, Candace Waid, whose ideas are many, acumen is great, and breadth of knowledge is undisputed. What she has presented to us is a conceptually rich, but difficult, book.