The New Territory, a collection of fourteen critical essays, is a substantial and highly significant scholarly landmark in what might be termed “the new Ellison studies” – that is to say, in the recent reassessments of Ralph Ellison to which the posthumous appearance of huge sections of his second and unfinished novel have given rise. A surprising number of American literature enthusiasts have yet to reckon with the fact that, in 2010, eleven hundred very large pages of Ellison's work-in-progress, which have been painstakingly edited and assembled by coeditors John Callahan and Adam Bradley, were published (in the Modern Library imprint at Random House) under the title Three Days before the Shooting …. That publication was the occasion for a symposium at Washington and Lee University in 2012 entitled Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century, and that symposium in turn gave rise to this anthology.

In their invaluably detailed introduction, Marc Conner and Lucas Morel document the breadth and depth of writings by Ellison that have seen the light since his death, including the Collected Essays (1995); the short stories (Flying Home and Other Stories (1996)), the correspondence with Albert Murray (Trading Twelves (2000)), and the eagerly awaited Selected Letters. The New Territory both articulates and answers “the need for a criticism that can match the complexity of Ellison's work” (9). The essays, all by established Ellison scholars, are grouped into three parts: the first constitutes four strikingly fresh perspectives on Invisible Man, which range from Patrice Rankine's meditation on the implications of the 2012 stage version of the text (adapted by Oren Jacoby, directed by Christopher McElroen) to Herman Beavers's application of sound studies theory in his exploration of “oppositionality” (75).

The book's central section then showcases five weighty explorations of Three Days before the Shooting …, naming the tome that is its subject “Ellison's ongoing epic of America” (115). The third and final part evaluates Ellison's wider and always-evolving cultural significance, from his short stories of the 1940s up to and including the implications of his work in the context of the Obama presidency. As a whole, the collection does at least three things at once. It engages seriously and at length with what Ross Posnock calls the “Ellison animus” (285); that is, with the controversy and hostility that his work has provoked, and that is epitomized by the Arnold Rampersad biography of 2007.Footnote ¹ It indirectly offers a very welcome “reader's guide” or way into the structure and nature of the formidable work Three Days …, and most usefully of all it lays a foundation of sustained and profound critical exegesis of that text.

It is the central section that, to my mind, stands out: each of the five essays therein – by Eric Sundquist, Lena Hill, Marc Conner, Timothy Parrish and Grant Shreve – sheds fascinating light on the “new” text by combining persuasive, detailed, intricate close readings with compelling broader claims about the work in its entirety. While contrasting in their approaches (and indeed at times implicitly challenging or countering each other), these essays also fit well together. Lena Hill's fascinating interpretation of moments of ekphrasis in Three Days …, in which she links symbolism about fatherhood to Ellison's political ideology, is strikingly complemented by Marc Conner's meticulous analysis of Ellison's “agon” with literary “fathers” such as Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Joyce in the same text. These chapters are notable for the depth of their analysis, their impressive familiarity with the Ellison archive in the Library of Congress, their rethinking of “received wisdom,” and hence their contribution of layer after complex new layer to what we know about Ralph Ellison.

The New Territory implicitly points the way to significant future lines of enquiry even as it elegantly expounds its numerous arguments and themes. What about the gender politics in Ellison's posthumous publications, for example? What about their transnational reach and implications? The task of coming fully to terms with the richness and the conundrum of Three Days before the Shooting … may well itself prove an always-unfinished (and indeed unfinishable) project. But at least the work has now begun in earnest, and the bar is certainly set high.