This book draws on post-Darwinian advances in scientific disciplines to reanalyze canonical works of literature. This wide-ranging analysis includes studies of the works of Oscar Wilde, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Giovanni Boccaccio, Theodore Dreiser, John Roderigo Dos Passos, and William Faulkner.

"This book offers the first full-length study of the chess structures, motifs, and imagery in William Faulkner's Knight's Gambit. Wainwright looks at the importance of chess as a literary device and examines the structural analogy drawn between the game and linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure"--

Displaying a wide range of knowledge and interpretive skill, Darwin and Faulkner's Novels reexamines the fiction of the great twentieth century American author from the interdisciplinary perspective of sociobiology. Challenging the assumption that Faulkner's South was nothing other than a reactionary wilderness and charting the manner in which Faulkner learned and applied his evolutionary concepts, this book unsettles staid interpretations of the Falknerian canon and overturns habitual judgments as to the value of his later novels.