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John T. Matthews, ed. The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. xxii + 230 pp.
Even as her essay "Faulkner and Southern Studies" problematizes Ted Atkinson's 2010 observation of William Faulkner's "seemingly inexhaustible capacity for remaining relevant" (qtd. in Matthews 122), Melanie Benson Taylor argues that "Faulkner's continued centrality actually marks something of a revision" (124). "[H]is solid position within the New Southern Studies," she writes, "amounts to a reterritorialization, one that claims Faulkner as an ambassador to revamped territories of meaning and as a triumphant skeleton key to the myriad revelations that the South always already knew and that critics are only belatedly discovering." In doing so, Taylor captures the pluralistic spirit of this fine collection, whose Faulkner-or better, Faulkners-will strike those long familiar with his work as simultaneously uncannily recognizable and highly original.
In the editor's introduction, John T. Matthews makes a point of recognizing both the connections and divergences from prior scholarship-especially Philip Weinstein's Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (1995). "Readers familiar with the earlier version of the Companion," Matthews writes, "will find continuities with its interests, as well as important evolutions, fresh takes, and new additions" (5). The evolving presence of Matthews himself in this development-he was a contributor to the older collection and is a mentor to several of the contributors of the new one-provides one apt measure of its implications. In some essays, notably those concerning modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, topics that represented central pillars of the 1995 collection, the tension is palpably generational. The very terms themselves give way, as Matthews notes in hinting at the replacement of "postmodernism" by...