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,
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
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
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,
receives its first ever detailed reading, while
is read anew from the teleological perspective offered by the (undervalued) prophecy that in the end the comic hero would become the book itself