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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.

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Before Morphosis Nascent Morphosis Continued Morphosis Inside Morphosis Within Morphosis Subsumed Morphosis

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´This is an assured and highly original study of one of William Faulkner´s most neglected works. Exposing the nineteenth-century chess master from New Orleans Paul Morphy as a key source of inspiration for Faulkner´s conception of Gavin Stevens, Wainwright argues successfully for a reassessment of ´Knight´s Gambit´ as a key text in our understanding of the novelist´s personal accommodation of postmodernism. At the same time, he provides a range of historically and theoretically informed insights into the engagement of twentieth-century literature with structuralist and poststructuralist thinking as well into as the psychology of chess as a game. My hat goes off to him.´ David Rogers, Head of School of Humanities, Kingston University

´This study fills a critical absence in Faulkner studies and brings to that gap a fresh, innovative, and verifiable approach . . . Wainwright enters entirely new territory with this study . . . I recommend it highly.´ - Joseph Urgo, Professor of English and President, St. Mary´s College of Maryland

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MICHAEL WAINWRIGHT Visiting lecturer at Staffordshire University, UK.

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