Faulkner's Reception of Apuleius' The Golden Ass in The Reivers

Faulkner's final novel, "The Reivers", has been gently dismissed by scholars and critics as no more than its subtitle claims," A Reminiscence". Although the new millennium has seen a new appreciation for Faulkner's later novels, "The Reivers" is still perceived as a slightly fictionalized comic memoir romanticizing the early life of the author in the pre-civil rights American South. This volume takes this dismissal of "The Reivers" to task for failing to appreciate its employment of the Apuleian narrative of life-altering metamorphosis to offer, as his literary farewell, hope for humanity's self-redemption. Vernon L. Provencal" "studies the reception of "The Golden Ass" in "The Reivers" as comic novels of moral "katabasis" (wilful descent into the lawless underworld) and providential "anabasis" (societal and spiritual redemption). As the independent basis of the reception study, "The Reivers" receives its first ever detailed reading, while "The Golden Ass" is read anew from the teleological perspective

offered by the (undervalued) prophecy that in the end the comic hero would become the book itself. [Publisher's Text]

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