The Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conferences began over forty years ago, in 1974: which means it is now, inevitably, a challenge to organizers to come up with new and plausible themes. William Faulkner died in 1962; and so for the 2012 conference those organizing the occasion hit upon the topic of “Fifty Years after Faulkner.” The strength of such a topic is its elasticity, of course. But so, equally obviously, is its weakness. As this volume suggests, just about anything Faulknerian can be absorbed under such a title. What we have here, as a result, is an eclectic mix, a (necessarily incomplete) map of just where Faulkner studies stands now.

All the same, certain common themes emerge. There is one essay, the opening one by Ramón Saldívar, devoted to the processes of globalization that link Faulkner's South across national boundaries and categories to other cultures – most notably, in this case, those elsewhere in the Americas. The three essays following this, written by Deborah Clarke, David M. Earle and Jason D. Fichtel, address the issue of Faulkner's canonicity, his place in the pantheon of major writers and the question whether or not the construction of such a pantheon is useful or even viable. Three further essays, authored by Hortense J. Spillers, Joseph Fruscione and Terrell L. Tebbetts, adopt a comparatist approach, situating Faulkner's work in contexts supplied by the writings of (respectively) W. E. B. Du Bois, Ernest Hemingway and Jayne Anne Phillips. These are followed by four essays mapping the intersections between Faulkner's artistic activities and other artistic and technological media. One, by Randall Wilhelm, explores Faulkner's own early work as an illustrator and its possible impact on his later writing. Another, by Julie Beth Napolin, considers the part that sound technology plays in Faulkner's fiction. And the other two, by Michael P. Bibler and Matthew Pratt Guterl, ask us to look at Faulkner's writing as mediated by interpretations of it in dance and film.

And then, not for the first time, comes something completely different. A joint essay by Patricia E. Horn, Jessica Martell and Zackary Vernon on Faulkner's use of local historical material, particularly plantation ledgers, is followed by four contributions that investigate Faulkner's work in relation to the “long” civil rights movement. David A. Davis goes for a comparative analysis of Faulkner and Richard Wright; Alan Nadel approaches Faulkner's writing in terms of emerging Cold War imperatives; Ted Atkinson offers a survey of Faulkner's entanglement with civil rights history; and Sharon Monteith, in turn, reports on responses to Faulkner's work from those involved with civil rights activism in the South in the 1960s.

Appropriately, this collection ends on last things. Three essays reassess Faulkner's final novel, The Reivers, published in the year of his death. François Pitavy argues that, in this novel, Faulkner manages a paradigm shift on racial attitudes and a redefinition of citizenship. Richard Moreland and Cheryl Lester then push this revisionary approach to a novel often seen as sentimental and nostalgic a little further, by suggesting that The Reivers actually dramatizes an invitation to engage in social change and a challenge to future generations to assume responsibility for social and civic progress. Finally, in the last two essays, the subject is, quite literally, death. Charles Reagan Wilson poses the possibility that Faulkner's work offers an insight into a specifically southern approach to dying. And Elizabeth Fielder explores Faulkner's dramatizations of funeral services and the rituals of burial: the ubiquitous presence of such dramatic moments in such books as Go Down, Moses, their crafty negotiating of racial and social boundaries, the salutary reminder all these scenes provide that death is not only a completion but also a reflection of life.

Inevitably, some of the essays in this collection stand out. Those by Saldívar, Pitavy and Wilson, for instance, are all magisterial; each is beautifully nuanced and deeply informed, the fruit of a lifetime's work in the field. The ones by Clarke, Earle and Tebbett possess a different kind of excellence: each, in its way, offers intellectual provocation. Clarke does this by challenging what she sees as the deification of Faulkner – on the grounds that this severely limits our understanding of Faulkner's writing and the literary process. Earle makes an intriguing and persuasive connection between Faulkner's fiction – and, for that matter, modernism in general – and popular fiction. And Tebbetts unravels a dialogue between Faulkner's writing and that of Jayne Anne Phillips that enables us to see both from a fresh perspective. Other essays, including those by Monteith and Horn, Martell and Vernon, are wonderful sources of new information or add a new dimension to our reading of Faulkner. Particularly striking here are those essays that resituate Faulkner's work in the contexts of dance, the visual arts and sound technologies.

This may not be the most focussed of collections. Some individual essays are weakened by overstatement of the obvious or by the simple fact that a lot can happen, and arguably has happened, in the four years from 2012 to 2016. When we are told, for instance, that “racial challenges are less likely to be a matter of life and death” (198), some of us may wonder if – even if this were ever true (which I doubt) – the Black Lives Matter movement now clearly demonstrates the contrary. Finally, and more pervasively, several essays tend to fall into the trap of assuming that appreciation is coextensive with agreement: in other words, that, to make the most of Faulkner, we must make him somehow coincide with, rather than challenge, our own values. No amount of special pleading, in my opinion, is going to make Faulkner's work appear more progressive and forward-looking than it actually is; I am an admirer of Faulkner and a socialist but I hope I don't confuse the two.

Or as one contributor to this collection puts it, going against the grain of others, “One can love a writer and still criticize him” (21). Precisely. On the whole, the essays gathered together here fulfil a vital task of criticism by providing a creative interrogation of, and a set of fresh insights into, the work at hand. This may not be the most focussed of collections; there is no grand strategy here. But what we get instead is a series of lively skirmishes, interventions (and mostly energetic and enlightening ones) in current debates. And what we also get, as we should, is encouragement to return to Faulkner's work with a sense that, even now, that work still matters.