SOURCE: "Faulkner Criticism: Will It Ever End?," in The South Carolina Review, Vol. 25, No. 1, Fall, 1992, pp. 183-92.

In the following excerpt, Lyday presents mixed opinions of Brooks's ideas.

Cleanth Brooks's William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963) and William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978) have recently been reissued in twin paperback editions by Louisiana State University Press. The former volume was a kind of culmination of the literary wars between the Southern New Critics and the New York Intellectuals, who never really buried their differences as much as Schwartz implies. How does The Yoknapatawpha Country hold up after nearly thirty years? It has probably been the single most influential critical work on Faulkner ever published. It has certainly drawn more vigorous dissent than any other work on Faulkner, but that is largely because it refuses to fade into oblivion, as so many lesser books have done. It seems sentimental and...