Events Search

About Keyword Searching

Keywords allow you to search Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions for recurring themes, motifs, techniques and so on, using a set of tags that the project's editors have entered as part of the data for each textual Event. At this point keywords are very much a work in progress. To date just about half of the 8270 Events into which we divide the 68 texts have been analyzed and tagged - a list of which novels and stories have been "keyword"ed by at least one scholar appears below. Our goal is to have each Event tagged by at least two scholars, but that is still several years in the future.

Keywords are organized into a three-term sequence. The 7 broad categories you can see on the Search form (Environments, Actions, etc.) are further divided into intermediate terms like Time of Day or Weather (two of the 11 intermediate terms for Environments). Each of these "second-level" boxes contains its own set of more specific terms, like "Twilight" - that particularly Faulknerian time of day. You can search at any of these levels. Pull-down menus of the second- and third-tier terms will help you find your way to the terms that might be most relevant to you.

The "All" category allows you to search directly the several thousand keywords that the project's editors have entered. As you type in that box, the auto-complete function will offer you a list of words and phrases to select from; typing "violence," for example, identifies a set of keywords that includes "Domestic violence," "Interracial violence," and so on. "Old Keywords" allows you to search the thousands of terms we entered when the DY texts were originally analyzed, while the project was in the process of developing a restricted keyword vocabulary. Although before 2018 keywords were not regularized in any way, we recommend also using the "All" option, which does cover all the fictions; we plan to retain this original keyword data even after the present scheme has been fully implemented.

As with all searches, the results are returned as a set of links - in this case of specific Events, grouped by texts which are listed chronologically in order of publication.

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Texts tagged as of February 2021: 10 novels|45 short stories (* indicates only one editor so far)

• * Flags in the Dust
• The Sound and the Fury
• * As I Lay Dying
• * Sanctuary
• * Absalom, Absalom!
• The Unvanquished
• * Intruder in the Dust
• * Requiem for a Nun
• * The Town
• The Reivers

• "A Rose for Emily"
• "Red Leaves"
• "Dry September"
• "That Evening Sun"
• "Ad Astra"
• "Hair"
• "Spotted Horses"
• "All the Dead Pilots"
• "A Justice"
• * "Death Drag"
• "Centaur in Brass"
• * "Smoke"
• "Miss Zilphia Gant"
• "There Was a Queen"
• * "Beyond"
• "Wash"
• "Elly"
• "A Bear Hunt"
• "Mule in the Yard"
• "Ambuscade"
• "Retreat"
• "Raid"
• "Skirmish at Sartoris"
• * "That Will Be Fine"
• * "Uncle Willie"
• "Lion"
• "The Unvanquished"
• "Vendee"
• "Monk"
• "Barn Burning"
• * "Hand upon the Waters"
• "A Point of Law"
• "Old People"
• "Tomorrow"
• "Go Down, Moses"
• "The Tall Men"
• "Two Soldiers"
• "Delta Autumn"
• "Shingles for the Lord"
• "My Grandmother Millard"
• * "Shall Not Perish"
• * "A Courtship"
• * "Knight's Gambit"
• * "A Name for the City"
• "Race at Morning"