Since the publication of the “old” Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner twenty years ago the shape of Faulkner studies has diversified exponentially. Indeed, since 1995, the conceptual need to revisit Faulkner – and, again, conceive of him as eminently companionable – seems significant enough for a second volume. Marking the vicennial of its predecessor, the New Companion sets out, in the words of its editor, “to capture continuing developments and fresh directions in the ways scholars and teachers conceive of principle contexts for Faulkner's writing and in the methods advanced to study them” (5). The project is certainly on-trend, particularly as far as the Cambridge imprint is concerned. One of several recent CUP Faulkner “introductions” (a significant other, also edited by Matthews, arrived in 2016), the Companion parcels out some, but by no means all, of the most suggestive recent approaches to Faulkner scholarship. Ecocriticism, queer studies, literary history, postcolonialism, visual studies and cultural anthropology are abundantly, and at times compellingly, provided for here.

Drawing from contemporary developments in affect theory, Jameson's materialism and Dimockian conceptualizations of historical deepnesses, the Companion’s inaugural assertions implicate Faulkner in what Julian Murphet dubs the “New Media Ecology” of capitalist modernity. This “ecology,” for Murphet, speaks to and issues from “a transformed cultural environment whose new technological instruments (radio, cinema, phonographs) cast their audiences and spectators willy-nilly into an immediate present tense, devoid of the ‘deep time’ available to Proustian or Jamesian prose” (15). Murphet takes as an example The Sound and the Fury, reading the work as symptomatic of a formal practice which “adjust[s] its [writerly] technologies to an environment of image-machines, sound-machines and cultural distractions predicated on novelty and disposability” (16). At a discursive level the project is a generative one: Murphet's conflating of Faulknerian textuality – what he dubs a sort of “cultural Fordism” (18) – and the immiserations of technological modernity is insightful, reminding readers once more of Faulkner's modernist credentials. Yet the critical borrowings (which find expressive voicing in earlier works by North, Banta, and Lucic, amongst others) suggest that – at the level of the scholarship itself – we seem to have been here before. Perhaps ironically, then, the “new” media ecology in this “new” companion seems, to poach from Louis Althusser, “always-already” old.

The first of two essays to consider the vexed paradigms of race and ethnicity in Faulkner's fiction, Peter Lurie's essay “History's Dark Markings: Faulkner and Film's Racial Representations,” shifts focus from affect to effect. Lurie's work sets out to critique the filmic apparatuses by which “blackness” achieves literal and figurative projection, reading Light in August in dialectic relation to two films that, for Lurie, define “Americanness” as “white”: Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Jazz Singer (1927). In a second work within visual race theory, “‘What Moves at the Margin’: William Faulkner and Race,” Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman extends Lurie's arguments toward what she, with sustained reference to Absalom, Absalom!, calls “a working theory of differential racialization” (45). Abdur-Rahman mounts a convincing enough case that “whiteness” in Absalom, Absalom! is best understood not as a racial category but as “the organizing apparatus of privilege” (49), and that Faulknerian textuality accords to “the conceptual and the visual logics of racial othering” (56). Decidedly less persuasive, however, is Abdur-Rahman's treatment of what she dubs “the redemptive potentiality of black noise” (52). The claim for auditory “blackness,” while pitched on the stave of racial redemption, troubles the present reader. What might this enduring (incessant, unceasing, inescapable) “black noise” (which for Abdur-Rahman is always in the singular) actually do? What are its politics? Does its “redemptive” aspect quash its revolutionary potentialities? Does “black noise,” as the great redeemer, offer itself up as a thing cooptable by reactionary racism? Is there a “sound” of slavery? And must there be, on some other frequency, a sound that affirms “white generational mastery” (55). By seeking out the grace note of black political liberation (that added ninth, perhaps, that top line of syncopated jazz), the tyranny of Abdur-Rahman's contention becomes audible.

Melanie Benson Taylor and Martyn Bone inhabit the critical centre of the volume, offering assessments of the field as it now stands (Taylor) and as it stood to Faulkner's contemporaries (Bone). While their direction of travel differs, these two essays constitute the critical spine of the volume. Making suggestive reference to recent critical publications in New Southern Studies, notably the important volume Look Away: The U.S. South in New World Studies (2004), Taylor expertly surveys the state of recent excavations on Faulkner, focussing on the Native American and indigenous subjects of Yoknapatawpha County. Bone, with a muscular prose that typifies his work, parses the “Faulkner Effect,” attending gracefully to the velocity with which the Dixie Limited, in Flannery O'Connor's famous idiom, would pass through the literary “South.”

Essays by Patricia E. Chu and Susan Scott Parrish articulate the burgeoning ecological profile of much recent Faulkner scholarship. In a rich, materialistically grounded essay, Chu

Inflected by the critical vocabularies of Gramsci, Simmel and Foucault, and anchored to readings of Faulkner's neglected story “The Tall Men” (1941), Chu situates Faulkner as “part of an Anglo-American modernist movement that collectively (if not always accurately) expressed anxiety about the targets of the new state strategies of governance” (59). Chu's arguments urge us to consider afresh the political relation between regional and national contexts. Conceived less as a zone distinct from the national polity than as one enmeshed in its workings, the “South” resonates as “an epitome of modernity” (7).

In her essay “As I Lay Dying and the Modern Aesthetics of Ecological Crisis” Susan Scott Parrish reads for what we might call the ontoecology of Faulknerian praxis. Central to Parrish's essay are patient considerations of “what happens when an aesthetics that responds to modernization's destructiveness tries to reproduce that violence” (87). Focussing on the “visual estrangements of the avant-garde” (79), estrangements with which As I Lay Dying would become synonymous, Parrish offers genuine insights into the aesthetics of a work whose formal procedures would draw from local and international zones.

Yet perhaps the Companion’s dominant critical mode is hemispheric and transnational studies, and is articulated by a trilogy of essays, by Hugues Azérad and Randy Boyagoda and co-authored by Ramón Saldívar and Sylvan Goldberg. Azérad copiously exemplifies recent efforts amongst post-Glissant Faulkner scholarship to leaven Faulkner from the loam of the American South, reading him, instead, as cardinally invested not in regional but in hemispheric conversations. In turn, and through repeated readings of Absalom, Absalom!, the postcolonial profile of the Companion is made abundantly clear. Azérad argues with confidence that the “excavation of a poetic intention out of the wreckage of colonization and western imperialism took place not in world metropolitan centers but at the periphery, in the Caribbean” (165). It remains to be seen if the Caribbean “turn” will sustain a properly global “poetics of relation,” to use Glissant's term, but what is clear is that the “archipelagic thought” (165), to which its postcolonial readers here refer, has become a standard fixture within contemporary debates on Faulkner.Footnote ¹

Faulkner's Geographies, edited by Jay Watson and Ann J. Abadie (2015), marks a qualified return to the thematic analyses disavowed by the Cambridge Companion. Privileging “geographies” as mediating concerns in Faulkner's oeuvre, the volume seeks to invoke the “mobility, place and spatial imagination” of Faulkner's formalism, and seeks to do so without capitulating to the regionalist thinking that permeates even its most sophisticated articulations. This is a delicate critical operation, and here fraught with self-consciousness, yet the volume executes the “spatial turn” with no little success. Across eleven short essays, contributors to Faulkner's Geographies offer urgent and at times invigorating analyses that get us thinking about the locatednesses of Faulkner's forms, his materiality as a (dis)placeable subject, and his current situatedness in the critical tradition.

In “Local Places/Modern Spaces,” Barbara Ladd scrutinizes the perceived localism of Faulknerian formalism, arguing against regionalism and toward what she calls a “crossroads local” (11). For Ladd, this involves reading for and across the fissures of prose forms that resist yet at the same time succumb to their own spatial ambivalences. For Ladd, the “crossroads local” is corporeally derived. “Faulkner's bodies,” Ladd argues,

In “Designing Spaces: Sutpen, Snopes, and the Promise of the Plantation,” Scott Romine skilfully delineates what we might call a “poetics of relation,” this time between the plantation, for Watson “the New World's most durable and pernicious fantasy construction,” and “the grammars of space” by which the plantation, in Faulkner, achieves iterative traction (xvi). Reading Faulkner as the faulty cartographer of a mythical “South,” Romine approaches “the homogenizing work of Faulkner's mapping [as] not merely crude or irrelevant to his fiction, but rather symptomatic of fantasies of stable geographies and coherent fictions of space that operate within it” (18). Paired with Ladd, Romine finds himself in stellar company, articulating with no little success the fictive geographies for which the mature work would increasingly come to stand. Benjamin S. Child's “‘No Kind of Place’: New York City, Southernness, and Migratory Modernism” is similarly invested in mining new locations for continued engagements with Faulknerian forms. Informed by Deleuzean notions of the rhizome, Child offers some generally stimulating commentary on what he calls “the Faulknerian microSouth” (50).

Kita Douglas takes us from the “microSouth” to a micro-reading of the South's forms and syntax. “Jamestown and Jimson Weed: Charting the Autochthonous Claim of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury” leavens a notable, underarticulated textual presence in Faulkner's 1929 novel: Benjy Compson's precious weed. Drawing on previous work by Richard Godden and Charles Peavey, Douglas's work around autochthony – what we might dub the historicity of herbed forms – is, as Douglas concedes, “speculative,” but richly so. The resonances of the rank weed are transformative in the context of a volume driven to provide a properly “geographical” account of Faulknerian modes. Understood as a semantically generative unit, the Jimson (a corruption of Jamestown and metonym for the settlement's toxicity) is, for Douglas, quite literally rooted in historical invocations of southern historiography. Focussing on Bacon's rebellion of 1676, Douglas skilfully parses the connections between weed and world, bringing fresh insights into the materiality of Faulkner's symbolic economy.

Jose E. Limon's essay marks a turn toward analysis of Mexico, initiating a suggestive new direction for Faulknerians. Disappointingly, however, Limon eschews the kind of close work demonstrated so pliably by Douglas, steering instead a somewhat impressionistic course through loosely historicized reckonings of the Mexican–American War toward often anodyne comparisons between Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Americo Paredes, Carlos Fuentes and Rolando Hinojosa.

Following Limon's work comes a discreet trilogy that “examine[s] different aspects of the productive but also problematic engagements with Caribbean geographies in one of Faulkner's greatest novels” (xviii), Absalom, Absalom!. Together, Ryan Heryford, Valerie Loichot and Farah Jasmine Griffin provide powerful commentary on the emergence of Haiti as the preeminent unit of revolutionary resistance in Faulkner and a signifier for black political power. Heryford's work offers illuminating historicized readings of the historical anachronism at the centre of Faulkner's novel (Faulkner has Sutpen recruit “slave” labour from a location already “free”). Heryford skilfully ties this “anachronism” into conversations surrounding US imperialism across the long twentieth century. Referencing American colonization initiatives in the 1820s, and US aggressions during its generation-long occupation of Haiti in the twentieth century, Heryford argues compellingly for the centrality of Haiti in the historical imagination of the southern planter class. Loichot attests to what she calls “an extensive view of the multifarious presence of the Caribbean in Absalom, Absalom!, not only to demonstrate how Faulkner wrote the Caribbean, but more importantly to address what, in Faulkner's work, has allowed for so many Caribbean writers to adopt the Mississippi man as their own” (114). Loichot argues persuasively for Haiti's centrality in Absalom!, offering suggestive means for further study. More, the mention of Aimé Césaire is particularly fruitful, and symptomatic of an important new thrust in Faulkner studies. Farah Jasmine Griffin provides the final expression of the Companion’s Caribbean commitment, through a “pedagogically driven” (129) essay centred on the presence of Faulkner on black literature syllabi. With reference to Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, Griffin argues that Faulkner's inclusion as a writer of the “black South” enables a dialectic conversation between white and black Souths. Griffin's arguments are skilfully delivered, if somewhat thin on the critical turns that have come, in the last twenty years, to radically redefine conceptualizations of the US South.

As in the Companion, the Caribbean Faulkner achieves predominance here, demonstrating the growing corpus of writings on a geographically displaced Faulkner. That the Caribbean now garners such attention is to be celebrated, providing as it does an opportunity to read Faulkner out of and across the parochial South. Yet the scholarship gathered in these volumes simultaneously exposes its own imaginative limitations. Given the bid for Faulkner as a “world writer” (6), as John T. Matthews puts it in the Introduction to the New Cambridge Companion, it is perhaps surprising that world systems approaches are entirely overlooked. A Faulkner filtered through Immanuel Wallerstein, for example, might have spoken in interesting ways to the volume's excellent Glissantian readings.

In a shift away from the Caribbean context, Harilaos Stecopoulos's “William Faulkner and the Problem of Cold War Modernism” offers a genuinely incisive critical register through which investigations of the political Faulkner – that is, the Faulkner at mid-century – might be grounded. Drawing on critically neglected materials pertaining to Faulkner's role as cultural attaché, notably the documents of the PTP (People to People) scheme, Stecopoulos compellingly situates the political processes by which Faulkner would be coopted into the intellectual ferment of Cold War ideologies. Dispiritingly, Faulkner's Geographies ends with a truncated evocation of the feminist paradigm and its relation to Faulknerian productions: Lorie Watkin's “Woman in Motion: Escaping Yoknapatawpha.” In the context of what is an otherwise ably judged collection, the placement of this work shunts the feminist Faulkner to the margins of a discourse within which it should play a central part.

The New Cambridge Companion and Faulkner's Geographies affirm the insistences of many within the field, and the exasperations of those without it, that the Dixie Limited is losing none of its critical velocity. This is not because Faulkner will endure but because his readers are finding increasingly imaginative ways in which he might be framed. Despite the conservatism, then, that pockmarks much Faulkner scholarship, these volumes affirm a sense that moves toward a liberated Faulkner seem eminently possible, if not already under way.