Events Search

About Keyword Searching (updated 20 April 2021)

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. Keywords are still a work in progress. To date just about 80% the 8433 Events into which we divide the 68 texts have been analyzed and tagged: all 54 short fictions have had at least one set of keywords, as have 11 of the 14 Yoknapatawpha novels. Our goal is to have each Event tagged by at least two scholars, but that is still several years in the future; at this point 21 short fictions and 9 novels have only one set of Keywords (see list below). The 3 untagged novels are Light in August, The Hamlet and The Mansion.

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 with 1 set of Keywords as of April 2021

• Flags in the Dust
• As I Lay Dying
• Sanctuary
• Absalom, Absalom!
• Go Down, Moses
• Intruder in the Dust
• Requiem for a Nun
• The Town
• The Reivers

• "The Hound"
• "Death Drag"
• "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard"
• "Smoke"
• "Beyond"
• "Elly"
• "A Bear Hunt"
• "That Will Be Fine"
• "Uncle Willy"
• "Fool about a Horse"
• "Hand upon the Waters"
• "Pantaloon in Black"
• "Gold Is Not Always"
• "The Bear"
• "Shall Not Perish"
• "Appendix: Compson"
• "An Error in Chemistry"
• "A Courtship"
• "Knight's Gambit"
• "A Name for the City"
• "By the People"