Foreword

I have been privileged to edit AmLS in alternating years for the past 10
years, and I marvel how the task has changed in such a brief time. With
the advent of the Internet and on-line databases and particularly email, I
may now double-check citations on my laptop from my living room
rather than roaming the library, and I am able to communicate with
contributors (and the contributors with me and with each other) at the
push of a send button rather than writing postcards or playing phone-tag.
Meanwhile, the sheer volume of scholarship in the Ž eld continues to
proliferate, and so a reminder to all readers: AmLS, including this 39th
annual incarnation in the series, is perforce a selective review.
The roster of contributors, of course, changes by the year. New to
AmLS 2001 are Frank Kearful of Bonn University, who succeeds Chris-
toph Irmscher in writing the section of chapter 20 on ‘‘German Scholar-
ship’’; and E. P. Walkiewicz of Oklahoma State University, who steps in
for Suzanne Clark of the University of Oregon as the author of ‘‘Poetry:
1900 to the 1940s.’’ Those contributors retiring from the annual this year:
Brenda Wineapple of Union College (‘‘Hawthorne’’), Albert J. De Fazio
III of George Mason University (‘‘Hemingway and Fitzgerald’’), J.
Gerald Kennedy of Louisiana State University (‘‘Early-19th-Century Lit-
erature’’), and Michael J. Kiskis of Elmira College (‘‘Late-19th-Century
Literature’’). Among the contributors joining the project next year: Tom
Mitchell of Texas A & M International University, who will contribute
‘‘Hawthorne’’; and Hilary Justice of Illinois State University, who takes
on ‘‘Hemingway and Fitzgerald.’’
Thanks to departing friends and greetings to new and continuing
ones. Professor Nordloh and I are deeply grateful to all contributors for
their hard work and commitment. In many cases the contributors sacri-
Ž ce their summer vacations to this project for no more reward than the
viii Foreword

thanks of their colleagues and a stipend suYcient to cover a monthly

phone bill.
The editors are grateful for both the moral and Ž nancial support they
receive from colleagues and administrators at Indiana University and the
University of New Mexico toward the preparation of these volumes and
the ongoing administration of the series. My special thanks to the staV in
the Department of English at UNM, to Barbara Chen, director of Biblio-
graphical Information Services of the MLA, and her staV for a type
simulation of the 2001 MLA International Bibliography, to publishers
who supply review copies, and to scholars who forward oVprints for the
convenience of AmLS contributors. All materials for AmLS, no matter the
year of coverage, should be directed to David J. Nordloh, Department of
English, Indiana University, Bloomington IN 47405. Notices of publica-
tion may also be sent to him.
Finally, kudos to Mindy Conner and Pam Morrison of the Duke
University Press, who as usual have saved me many an embarrassing
mistake, and a memorial to the late Bob Mirandon, whose friendship and
conversation I miss.
Gary Scharnhorst
University of New Mexico
Key to Abbreviations
Festschriften, Essay Collections,
and Books Discussed in More Than
One Chapter
Across the Great Divide / Matthew
Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee
Garceau, eds., Across the Great Di-
vide: Cultures of Manhood in the
American West (Routledge)
American Aeneas / John C. Shields,
The American Aeneas: Classical
Origins of the American Self
(Tennessee)
American Literary Realism, Critical
Theory, and Intellectual Prestige /
Phillip Barrish, American Literary
Realism, Critical Theory, and Intel-
lectual Prestige, 1880–1995
(Cambridge)
American Sympathy / Caleb Crain,
American Sympathy: Men, Friend-
ship, and Literature in the New Na-
tion (Yale)
Around Quitting Time / Robert
Seguin, Around Quitting Time:
Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in
American Fiction (Duke)
Beyond Nature Writings / Karla Arm-
bruster and Kathleen R. Wallace,
eds., Beyond Nature Writings: Ex-
panding the Boundaries of Ecocriti-
cism (Virginia)
Centre of Wonders / Janet Moore Lind-
man and Michele Lise Tarter, eds.,
A Centre of Wonders: The Body in
Early America (Cornell)
A Companion to Twentieth-Century
Poetry / A Companion to Twentieth-
Century Poetry, ed. Neil Roberts
(Blackwell)
Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation /
Michael Davitt Bell, Culture,
Genre, and Literary Vocation: Se-
lected Essays on American Literature
(Chicago)
Demon of the Continent / Joshua
David Bellin, The Demon of the
Continent: Indians and the Shaping
of American Literature (Penn.)
Early America Re-explored / Klaus
Schmidt and Fritz Fleischmann,
eds., Early America Re-explored:
New Readings in Colonial, Early
National, and Antebellum Culture
(Peter Lang)
Embodiment / Cecelia Tichi, Embodi-
ment of a Nation: Human Form in
American Places (Harvard)
x Key to Abbreviations
Encyclopedia of American Cultural and
Intellectual History / Mary Kupiec,
Peter W. Williams, and Mary K.
Cayton, eds., Encyclopedia of Amer-
ican Cultural and Intellectual His-
tory (Scribner’s)
Encyclopedia of American Studies /
George T. Kurian et al., Encyclope-
dia of American Studies (Grolier)
Esoteric Origins / Arthur Versluis, The
Esoteric Origins of the American Re-
naissance (Oxford)
Essays / Michael Schuldiner, ed., Es-
says on Anne Bradstreet, Edward
Taylor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Mellen)
Evelyn Scott / Dorothy M. Scura, ed.,
Evelyn Scott: Recovering a Lost Mod-
ernist (Tennessee)
Feminine ‘‘No!’’ / Todd McGowan,
The Feminine ‘‘No!’’: Psychoanalysis
and the New Canon (SUNY)
Finding Colonial Americas / Carla
Mulford and David S. Shields,
eds., Finding Colonial Americas: Es-
says Honoring J. A. Leo Lemay
(Delaware)
Foundlings / Christopher Nealon,
Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay His-
torical Emotion Before Stonewall
(Duke)
From Richard Wright to Toni
Morrison / JeVrey J. Folks, From
Richard Wright to Toni Morrison:
Ethics in Modern and Postmodern
American Narrative (Peter Lang)
From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park /
Paul Lauter, From Walden Pond to
Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, and
American Studies (Duke)
Genders, Races, and Religious
Cultures / Rachel Blau DuPlessis,
Genders, Races and Religious Cul-
tures in Modern American Poetry
(Cambridge)
Genius in Bondage / Vincent Carretta
and Philip Gould, eds., Genius in
Bondage: Literature of the Early
Black Atlantic (Kentucky)
Genuine Article / Paul D. Gilmore,
The Genuine Article: Race, Mass
Culture, and American Literary
Manhood (Duke)
Getting at the Author / Barbara Hoch-
man, Getting at the Author: Re-
imagining Books and Reading in the
Age of American Realism (Mass.)
He Said, She Says / Mica Howe and
Sarah Appleton Aguiar, eds., He
Said, She Says: An RSVP to the Male
Text (Fairleigh Dickinson)
Holding Their Own / Dorothea
Fischer-Hornung and Heike
Raphael-Hernandez, eds., Holding
Their Own: Perspectives on the
Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the
United States (StauVenburg)
Humor of the Old South / M. Thomas
Inge and Edward J. Piacentino,
eds., The Humor of the Old South
(Kentucky)
Ivory Leg / Thomas Cooley, The Ivory
Leg in the Ebony Cabinet: Madness,
Race, and Gender in Victorian
America (Mass.)
Jean Toomer and the Harlem
Renaissance / Geneviève Fabre and
Michel Feith, eds., Jean Toomer and
the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers)
Key to Abbreviations
Labor’s Text / Laura Hapke, Labor’s
Text: The Worker in American Fic-
tion (Rutgers)
Maritime Fiction / John Peck, Mar-
itime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in
British and American Novels, 1719–
1917 (Palgrave)
Metaphysical Club / Louis Menand,
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of
Ideas in America (Farrar)
Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism,
and the Politics of Community /
Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction,
Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of
Community (Cambridge)
Necro Citizenship / Russ Castronovo,
Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism,
and the Public Sphere in the
Nineteenth-Century United States
(Duke)
Negative Liberties / Cyrus R. K. Patell,
Negative Liberties: Morrison,
Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal
Ideology (Duke)
New Deal Modernism / Michael
Szalay, New Deal Modernism:
American Literature and the Inven-
tion of the Welfare State (Duke)
Not in Sisterhood / Deborah Lindsay
Williams, Not in Sisterhood: Edith
Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale,
and the Politics of Female Authorship
(Palgrave)
Nothing Abstract / Tom Quirk,
Nothing Abstract: Investigations in
the American Literary Imagination
(Missouri)
Novel Art / Mark McGurl, The Novel
Art: Elevations of American Fiction
after Henry James (Princeton)
xi
Novel History / Mark C. Carnes, ed.,
Novel History: Historians and Nov-
elists Confront America’s Past (and
Each Other) (Simon & Schuster)
‘‘The Only EI cient Instrument’’ / Aleta
Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves,
eds., ‘‘The Only EI cient Instru-
ment’’: American Women Writers
and the Periodical, 1837–1916 (Iowa)
Passing / María Carla Sánchez and
Linda Schlossberg, eds., Passing:
Identity and Interpretation in Sex-
uality, Race, and Religion (NYU)
Patchwork Quilt / Suzanne V. Shep-
hard, The Patchwork Quilt: Ideas of
Community in Nineteenth-Century
American Women’s Fiction (Peter
Lang)
Public Sentiments / Glenn Hendler,
Public Sentiments: Structures of Feel-
ing in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature (No. Car.)
Publishing the Family / June Howard,
Publishing the Family (Duke)
Reconstituting Authority / William E.
Moddelmog, Reconstituting Author-
ity: American Fiction in the Province
of the Law, 1880–1920 (Iowa)
Regional Fictions / Stephanie Foote,
Regional Fictions: Culture and Iden-
tity in Nineteenth-Century Ameri-
can Literature (Wisconsin)
Revolutionary Memory / Cary Nelson,
Revolutionary Memory: Recovering
the Poetry of the American Left
(Routledge)
Richard Wright’s Travel Writings / Vir-
ginia Whatley Smith, ed., Richard
Wright’s Travel Writings: New Re-
ections (Miss.)
xii
Roman Holidays / Robert K. Martin
and Leland S. Person, eds., Roman
Holidays: American Writers and Art-
ists in Nineteenth-Century Italy
(Iowa)
Saints, Sinners, Saviors / Trudier
Harris, Saints, Sinners, Saviors:
Strong Black Women in African-
American Literature (Palgrave)
Slippery Characters / Laura Browder,
Slippery Characters: Ethnic Imper-
sonators and American Identities
(No. Car.)
Telling the Stories / Elizabeth HoVman
Nelson and Malcolm A. Nelson,
eds., Telling the Stories: Essays on
American Indian Literatures and
Cultures (Peter Lang)
Temples for Tomorrow / Geneviève
Fabre and Michel Feith, eds., Tem-
ples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at
the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana)
Trickster Lives / Jeanne Campbell
Reesman, ed., Trickster Lives: Cul-
ture and Myth in American Fiction
(Georgia)
White Diaspora / Catherine Jurca,
White Diaspora: The Suburb and
the Twentieth-Century American
Novel (Princeton)
Writing the Meal / Diane McGee,
Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fic-
tion of Early Twentieth-Century
Women Writers (Toronto)
Periodicals, Annuals, Series
AAR / African American Review
AI / American Imago
AICRJ / American Indian Culture and
Research Journal
AIQ / American Indian Quarterly
Key to Abbreviations
AJ / Appalachian Journal: A Regional
Studies Journal
AL / American Literature
ALR / American Literary Realism
AmDram / American Drama
AmerS / American Studies (Lawrence,
Kansas)
AmerSt / American Studies (Warsaw,
Poland)
AmLH / American Literary History
AmLS / American Literary Scholarship
AmPer / American Periodicals
Amst / Amerikastudien
AmStScan / American Studies in
Scandinavia
ANCH / American Nineteenth Century
History
Annales du CRAA / Centre de Re-
cherches sur l’Amérique Anglophone
(Cedex, France)
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Ar-
ticles, Notes, and Reviews
AQ / American Quarterly
AR / Antioch Review
ArQ / Arizona Quarterly
Art History
ASch / American Scholar
ASInt / American Studies International
ATQ / American Transcendental
Quarterly
BB / Bulletin of Bibliography
BoundaryII / Boundary 2: An Interna-
tional Journal of Literature and
Culture
Burroughs Bulletin
Callaloo: A Black South Journal of Arts
and Letters
CE / College English
CEA / CEA Critic
CHum / Computers and the
Humanities
CL / Comparative Literature
Key to Abbreviations
CLAJ / College Language Association
Journal
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and
Culture: A WWWeb Journal
CLS / Comparative Literature Studies
Clues: A Journal of Detection
CMat / Critical Matrix: The Princeton
Journal of Women, Gender, and
Culture
CollL / College Literature
CQ / Cambridge Quarterly
Crit / Critique: Studies in Modern
Fiction
Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature
and the Arts
CS / Concord Saunterer
Cultural Critique
Dickensian
DLB / Dictionary of Literary
Biography
Documentary Editing
DrSt / Dreiser Studies
EAL / Early American Literature
EAPR / Edgar Allan Poe Review
EAS / Essays in Arts and Sciences
ECr / Esprit Créateur
ECS / Eighteenth-Century Studies
ECW / Essays on Canadian Writing
EDJ / Emily Dickinson Journal
EGN / Ellen Glasgow Newsletter
EIC / Essays in Criticism (Oxford,
England)
EJ / English Journal
EJCSt / European Journal of Cultural
Studies
EJES / European Journal of English
Studies
ELH / (formerly Journal of English
Literary History)
ELN / English Language Notes
EnvE / Environmental Ethics
EnvP / Environmental Politics
xiii
EONR / Eugene O’Neill Review
ES / English Studies: A Journal of En-
glish Language and Literature
ESC / English Studies in Canada
ESQ: A Journal of the American
Renaissance
EuWN / Eudora Welty Newsletter
EWhR / Edith Wharton Review
Expl / Explicator
Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fic-
tion and Fantasy
FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Jour-
nal Dedicated to Critical and Cre-
ative Work in the Realms of Science
Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism,
Surrealism, Myth, Folklore, and
Other Supernatural Genres
FJ / Faulkner Journal
FSN / Fitzgerald Society Newsletter
FSt / Feminist Studies
G&H / Gender and History
GaR / Georgia Review
GLQ / A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies
GLR / Gay and Lesbian Review
HedgehogR / Hedgehog Review
Hemingway Newsletter
HJEAS / Hungarian Journal of English
and American Studies
HJM / Historical Journal of
Massachusetts
HJR / Henry James Review
HLQ / Huntington Library Quarterly
HN / Hemingway Review
HSJ / Housman Society Journal
HudR / Hudson Review
IFR / International Fiction Review
Igitur: Revista Annuale di Lingue, Let-
terature e Culture Moderne
Imaginaires: Revue du Centre de Re-
cherche sur l’Imaginaire dans les Lit-
tératures de Langue Anglaise
(Reims)
xiv
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Liter-
ature and Environment
ISR / Interdisciplinary Science Review
JACC / Journal of American and Com-
parative Cultures (formerly Journal
of American Culture)
JAmS / Journal of American Studies
JCPS / Journal for the Psychoanalysis of
Culture and Society
JDPN / John Dos Passos Newsletter
JEP / Journal of Evolutionary
Psychology
JER / Journal of the Early Republic
JFA / Journal of the Fantastic in the
Arts
JFCSMP / James Fenimore Cooper So-
ciety Miscellaneous Papers
JLJ / Jack London Journal
JML / Journal of Modern Literature
JMMLA / Journal of the Midwest Mod-
ern Language Assn.
JNT / Journal of Narrative Technique
JPC / Journal of Popular Culture
JSP / Journal of Speculative Philosophy
JSSE / Journal of the Short Story in En-
glish (Angers, France)
JUUHS / Journal of the Unitarian-
Universalist Historical Society
Kairos
KSJ / Keats-Shelley Journal
L&M / Literature and Medicine
L&P / Literature and Psychology
L&T / Literature and Theology: An In-
terdisciplinary Journal of Theory and
Criticism
L&U / Lion and the Unicorn: A Crit-
ical Journal of Children’s Literature
Lang&Lit / Language and Literature
LCUT / Literary Chronicle of the Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin
Legacy: A Journal of American Women
Writers
Key to Abbreviations
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville
Studies
LFQ / Literature/Film Quarterly
LGJ / Lost Generation Journal
LI / Literary Imagination
LIT / Literature Interpretation Theory
LJGG / Literaturwissenschaftliches
Jahrbuch im Auftrage der Gorres-
Gesellschaft
MD / Modern Drama
MELUS: The Journal of the Society for
the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature
of the United States
Menckeniana: A Quarterly Review
MFS / Modern Fiction Studies
Midamerica: The Yearbook of the So-
ciety for the Study of Midwestern
Literature
MissQ / Mississippi Quarterly
MLQ / Modern Language Quarterly
MLR / Modern Language Review
MLS / Modern Language Studies
MoMo / Modernism/Modernity
Mosaic: A Journal for the Inter-
disciplinary Study of Literature
MP / Modern Philology
MQ / Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of
Contemporary Thought
MQR / Michigan Quarterly Review
MR / Massachusetts Review
MSEx / Melville Society Extracts
MTJ / Mark Twain Journal
N&Q / Notes and Queries
Narrative
NCC / Nineteenth-Century Contexts
NCF / Nineteenth-Century Literature
NConL / Notes on Contemporary
Literature
NCP / Nineteenth Century Prose
NCS / Nineteenth-Century Studies
NDQ / North Dakota Quarterly
Key to Abbreviations
Neohelicon: Acta Comparationis Lit-
terarum Universarum
NEQ / New England Quarterly
NER / New England Review and Bread
Loaf Quarterly
NewC / The New Criterion
NFS / Nottingham French Studies
NHR / Nathaniel Hawthorne Review
NLH / New Literary History: A Jour-
nal of Theory and Interpretation
Novel: A Forum on Fiction
NTQ / New Theatre Quarterly
NY / New Yorker
PA / ProŽ ls Américains (Univ. de Paul
Valéry, Montpellier)
Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra
Pound Scholarship
Paragraph: The Journal of the Modern
Critical Theory Group
Parnassus: Poetry in Review
PBSA / Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America
PennH / Pennsylvania History
PLL / Papers on Language and
Literature
PMHB / Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography
PMLA / Publications of the Modern
Language Assn.
PMPA / Publications of the Missouri
Philological Assn.
PoeS / Poe Studies
Political Theory
POMPA / Publications of the Mis-
sissippi Philological Assn.
PoT / Poetics Today
Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism
Prospects: An Annual Journal of Ameri-
can Cultural Studies
Proteus: A Journal of Ideas
QUERTY: Arts, Littératures, & Civil-
isations du Monde Anglophone
xv
Qui Parle
RALS / Resources for American Literary
Study
R&L / Religion and Literature
Raritan, A Quarterly Review
RCF / Review of Contemporary Fiction
REALB / REAL: The Yearbook of Re-
search in English and American
Literature
RFEA / Revue Française d’Etudes
Américaines
Rhetorica
RSQ / Rhetoric Society Quarterly
SAF / Studies in American Fiction
SAIL / Studies in American Indian
Literature
SCS / Stephen Crane Studies
SECC / Studies in Eighteenth-Century
Culture
SELL / Studies in English Language
and Literature
ShARew / Sherwood Anderson Review
(formerly Winesburg Eagle)
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of
Jewish Studies
Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture
and Society
SLJ / Southern Literary Journal
SLN / Sinclair Lewis Newsletter
SLSc / Studies in the Linguistic Sciences
Smithsonian
SNNTS / Studies in the Novel (Univ.
of North Texas)
SoAR / South Atlantic Review
SoCJ / Southern Communications
Journal
SoQ / Southern Quarterly
SoR / Southern Review
SPAS / Studies in Puritan American
Spirituality
SR / Sewanee Review
SSF / Studies in Short Fiction
xvi
Style
Symbiosis
TCL / Twentieth-Century Literature
TDR / The Drama Review
Theater
ThS / Theatre Survey: The Journal of
the American Society for Theatre
Research
TJ / Theatre Journal
Transactions of the Peirce Society /
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society: A Quarterly Journal in
American Philosophy
TSLL / Texas Studies in Literature and
Language
TSWL / Tulsa Studies in Women’s
Literature
TWN / Thomas Wolfe Review
VN / Victorian Newsletter
VQR / Virginia Quarterly Review
WAL / Western American Literature
W&I / Word and Image: A Journal of
Verbal/Visual Inquiry (London,
England)
W&Lang / Women & Language
WC / Wordsworth Circle
WCPMN / Willa Cather Newsletter
and Review
WF / Western Folklore
WHR / Western Humanities Review
WilsonQ / Wilson Quarterly
WMQ / William and Mary Quarterly
WS / Women’s Studies
WSJour / Wallace Stevens Journal
WSQ / Women’s Studies Quarterly
WVUPP / West Virginia University
Philological Papers
WW / Women’s Writing
WWQR / Walt Whitman Quarterly
Review
YER / Yeats Eliot Review
Key to Abbreviations
YJC / The Yale Journal of Criticism: In-
terpretation in the Humanities
Publishers
Aarhus / Aarhus, Denmark:
Universitetsforlag
ABC-CLIO / Santa Barbara, Cal.:
ABC-CLIO
Alabama / Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Ala-
bama Press
Archon / Hamden, Conn.: Archon
Books
Arizona / Tucson: Univ. of Arizona
Press
Ashgate / Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate
Ballantine / New York: Ballantine
Books, Inc. (div. of Random
House, Inc.)
Bedford / New York: Bedford Books
(dist. by St. Martin’s)
Berghahn / Paris: Berghahn Books
Blackwell / Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
Ltd.
Blaue Eule / Essen: Die Blaue Eule
Broadview / Peterborough, Ont.:
Broadview Press
Broadway / New York: Broadway
Books
Bucknell / Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell
Univ. Press (dist. by Associated
Univ. Presses)
Calif. / Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press
Cambridge / New York: Cambridge
Univ. Press
Camden House / Columbia, S.C.:
Camden House
Carroll / New York: Carroll & Graf
(dist. by Publisher Group West)
Checkmark / New York: Checkmark
Books (imprint of Facts on File,
Inc.)
Key to Abbreviations
Chicago / Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press
Classic / Murrieta, Cal.: Classic
Books
CoVee House / Minneapolis: CoVee
House Press
Continuum / New York: Continuum
Publishing Co. (dist. by Harper &
Row Pubs., Inc.)
Cornell / Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ.
Press
Dalkey Archive / Elmwood Park, Ill.:
Dalkey Archive Press
Delaware / Newark: Univ. of Dela-
ware Press (dist. by Associated
Univ. Presses)
Doubleday / New York: Doubleday
& Co., Inc. (div. of Bantam Dou-
bleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc.)
Duke / Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ.
Press
Everyman / London: Everyman
Facts on File / New York: Facts on
File, Inc.
Fairleigh Dickinson / Teaneck, N.J.:
Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press
(dist. by Associated Univ. Presses)
Farrar / New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, Inc.
Fine / New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc.
Fitzroy Dearborn / Chicago: Fitzroy
Dearborn
Florida / Gainesville: Univ. of Florida
Press
Florida State / Tallahassee: Florida
State Univ. Press
Four Courts / Dublin and Portland,
Ore.: Four Courts Press
Gale / Detroit: Gale Group (subs. of
Thomson/Gale Publishing, Inc.)
Geneva / Louisville: Geneva Press
xvii
Georgia / Athens: Univ. of Georgia
Press
Grant / West Kingston, R.I.: D. M.
Grant
Great Books / Chicago: Great Books
Foundation
Greenhaven / San Diego: Greenhaven
Press
Greenwood / Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, Inc.
Grolier / New York: Grolier
Educational
HarperCollins / New York: Harper-
Collins Pubs., Inc. (div. of News
Corp., Ltd.)
Harvard / Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press
Helm: MountŽ eld, East Sussex: Helm
Information
Hill & Wang / New York: Hill &
Wang, Inc. (div. of Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, Inc.)
Holt / New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Hopkins / Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press
Houghton MiZin / Boston:
Houghton MiZin Co.
Illinois / Champaign: Univ. of Illinois
Press
Indiana / Bloomington: Indiana
Univ. Press
International Scholars / Lanham,
Md.: International Scholars
Iowa / Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press
Island / Washington, D.C.: Island
Press
iUniverse / Lincoln: iUniverse
Kent State / Kent, Ohio: Kent State
Univ. Press
Kentucky / Lexington: Univ. Press of
Kentucky
xviii
Knopf / New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc. (subs. of Random House, Inc.)
Lehigh / Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh
Univ. Press (dist. by Associated
Univ. Presses)
Leuven / Leuven, Belgium: Leuven
Univ. Press
Lexington / Lanham, Md.: Lexington
Press
Library of America / New York: Li-
brary of America (dist. by Viking
Penguin, Inc.)
Library of Virginia / Richmond: Li-
brary of Virginia
Lindisfarne / Great Barrington,
Mass.: Lindisfarne Books
Locust Hill / West Cornwall, Conn.:
Locust Hill Press
Longman / White Plains, N.Y.: Long-
man, Inc.
LSU / Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
Univ. Press
Lyons / Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press
Macmillan / New York: Macmillan
Reference USA
McFarland / JeVerson, No. Car.:
McFarland & Co., Inc.
Manchester / Manchester: Manches-
ter Univ. Press (dist. by St. Martin’s
Press, Inc., subs. of Macmillan
Publishing Co.)
Mass. / Amherst: Univ. of Mas-
sachusetts Press
Mellen / Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin
Mellen Press
Mercer / Macon, Ga.: Mercer Univ.
Press
Michigan / Ann Arbor: Univ. of
Michigan Press
Key to Abbreviations
Minnesota / Minneapolis: Univ. of
Minnesota Press
Miss. / Jackson: Univ. Press of
Mississippi
Missouri / Columbia: Univ. of Mis-
souri Press
MLA / New York: Modern Language
Assn. of America
Modern Library / New York: Modern
Library
Nebraska / Lincoln: Univ. of Ne-
braska Press
New England / Hanover, N.H.: Univ.
Press of New England
New Hampshire / Hanover: Univ. of
New Hampshire Press
New Mexico / Albuquerque: Univ. of
New Mexico Press
No. Car. / Chapel Hill: Univ. of
North Carolina Press
Norton / New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., Inc.
NPF / Orono, Me.: National Poetry
Foundation
NYU / New York: New York Univ.
Press
Oak Knoll / New Castle, Del.: Oak
Knoll Press
Ohio / Athens: Ohio Univ. Press
Ohio State / Columbus: Ohio State
Univ. Press
Okla. / Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma
Press
Overlook / New York: Overlook Press
(dist. by Viking Penguin, Inc.)
Oxford / New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, Inc.
Palgrave / New York: Palgrave (dist.
by St. Martin’s Press)
Paulist / Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press
Key to Abbreviations
Penguin / New York: Penguin Books
Penn. / Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn-
sylvania Press
Penn. State / University Park: Penn-
sylvania State Univ. Press
Peter Lang / New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, Inc. (subs. of Verlag
Peter Lang AG [Switzerland])
Pluto / London: Pluto Press
Poisoned Pen / Scottsdale, Az.: Poi-
soned Pen Press
Prentice Hall / Englewood CliVs,
N.J.: Prentice Hall
Princeton / Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton Univ. Press
Provence / Aix: Univ. de Provence
Purdue / West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue
Univ. Press
Putnam / New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons
Randall / Portsmouth, N.H.: Peter E.
Randall
Random House / New York: Random
House, Inc.
Rodopi / Amsterdam: Editions
Rodopi BV
Routledge / New York: Routledge,
Chapman & Hall, Inc.
Rowman & LittleŽ eld / Savage, Md.:
Rowman & LittleŽ eld
Rutgers / New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers Univ. Press
Rutledge / Dansbury, Conn.:
Rutledge Books
San Diego / San Diego State Univ.
Press
Sarabande / Louisville, Ky.: Sara-
bande Books
Scarecrow / Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow
Press, Inc.
xix
Scribner’s / New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons
Signet / New York: Signet Books
Simon & Schuster / New York: Si-
mon & Schuster, Inc.
So. Car. / Columbia: Univ. of South
Carolina Press
So. Ill. / Carbondale: Southern Il-
linois Univ. Press
Stanford / Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
Univ. Press
StauVenburg / Tübingen: StauVen-
burg Verlag
St. James / Chicago: St. James Press
St. Martin’s / New York: St. Martin’s
Press, Inc. (subs. of Macmillan
Publishing Co.)
SUNY / Albany: State Univ. of New
York Press
Susquehanna / Selinsgrove, Pa.: Sus-
quehanna Univ. Press (dist. by As-
sociated Univ. Presses)
Swallow / Athens, Oh.: Swallow Press
Syracuse / Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse
Univ. Press
TCU / Fort Worth: TCU Press
Teachers & Writers / New York:
Teachers & Writers Collaborative
Tennessee / Knoxville: Univ. of Ten-
nessee Press
Texas / Austin: Univ. of Texas Press
Toronto / Toronto: Univ. of Toronto
Press
Turku / Turku, Finland: Univ. of
Turku
Univ. Press / Lanham, Md.: Univer-
sity Press of America
Virginia / Charlottesville: Univ. Press
of Virginia
VU / Amsterdam: VU Univ. Press
xx
Wadsworth / Belmont, Cal.:
Wadsworth/Thomson Learning
Wayne State / Detroit: Wayne State
Univ. Press
Whitston / Troy, N.Y.: Whitston
Publishing Co.
Wildside / Holicong, Pa.: Wildside
Press
Winter / Heidelberg: Carl Winter
Key to Abbreviations
Wissenschaftlicher /
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier
Wood Thrush / St. Albans, Vt.:
Wood Thrush Books
Xavier / New Orleans: Xavier Review
Press
Yale / New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ.
Press
1 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and
Transcendentalism
David M. Robinson

It is a measure of the present moment in literary studies that the political

character of Transcendentalism, an important but somewhat secondary
interpretive question from the beginnings of the movement, has now
moved front and center as today’s readers try to discern how the Tran-
scendentalists thought and acted as political agents, and how they speak
politically to us now. Margaret Fuller continues to mirror contemporary
political concerns, with her activities in New York and Italy ever more
prominent. A selected volume of Robert Hudspeth’s invaluable edition of
Fuller’s letters will bring her a wider readership, and 20 new papers from a
conference in Rome extend our knowledge of her Italian experience. In a
new intellectual biography, JeVrey Steele sheds light on Fuller’s develop-
ment in the earlier 1840s. The political Emerson, a central and controver-
sial Ž gure for more than a decade now, is given further elaboration in a
new collection ed. T. Gregory Garvey and in a number of other new
essays. Insofar as the political Emerson is also in many respects the later
Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson’s new edition of his Later
Lectures will add signiŽ cantly to the ongoing critical recovery of Emer-
son’s later career. Thoreau studies have also been shaped by the political
orientation of recent criticism, but the major critical events this year are
Alan D. Hodder’s reinterpretation of Thoreau’s religious sensibility and
Elizabeth Hall Witherell’s edition of his essays and poems for the Library
of America.

i Emerson
a. Emerson’s Later Lectures The publication of Ronald A. Bosco and
Joel Myerson’s The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871 (2
vols., Georgia) is a signal event, providing a more accurate delineation of
4 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

the development of Emerson’s thought in his last three productive de-

cades. As we are coming to recognize, these were indeed productive years
in which Emerson’s growing intellectual range met a widening national
and international audience. These 49 lectures, which vary widely in
topic, remind us of Emerson’s commitment to the possibilities of the
lecture as a tool of public education and provide important information
on his response to the extraordinary developments in American culture
between the middle 1840s and the early 1870s. While I have only begun to
tap into these riches, I would call attention to three lectures from the
1848–49 series, Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century (1: 127–89),
a signiŽ cant revelation of Emerson’s engagement with science at this
period; and the related 1858 series, Natural Method of Mental Philosophy
(2: 41–129). The original formulations of what James E. Cabot and
Edward Waldo Emerson later assembled as Natural History of Intellect,
these lectures in fact constitute the philosophical steps that Emerson took
after ‘‘Experience’’ and must be seen as some of his most ambitious proj-
ects. Certainly the Later Lectures will enrich and accelerate the discourse
about Emerson at mid-century, alter our map of his intellectual develop-
ment, and augment our understanding of his cultural signiŽ cance.

b. The Emerson Dilemma In The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson

and Social Reform (Georgia) T. Gregory Garvey gathers 11 new essays that
explore ‘‘how Emerson’s reform activism emerges out of his transcenden-
talism and how [his] transcendentalism . . . shaped his involvement in
reform movements.’’ Garvey’s ‘‘Introduction: The Emerson Dilemma’’
(pp. xi–xxviii) surveys the history of Emerson’s political reputation to
show that the debate over his political identity was alive among his
contemporaries. While Emerson’s statements on reform are usually dated
to the late 1830s, Susan L. Roberson in ‘‘Reform and the Interior Land-
scape: Mapping Emerson’s Political Sermons’’ (pp. 3–13) reminds us that
in 1830–31 Emerson ‘‘spoke out against slavery and the treatment of the
Southern Indians’’ from his Second Church pulpit. Roberson links the
sermons to Emerson’s concern over the declining health of his wife Ellen,
Ž nding that Emerson worked out ‘‘symbolically his personal and philo-
sophical struggle with mortality and loss’’ by delivering ‘‘jeremiads about
the diseased social body —the nation —substituting it for the diseased
body of the woman he loved ‘too deeply.’ ’’ The relationship between
Emerson’s identity as a reformer and his theory of public expression is
delineated in Garvey’s ‘‘Emerson’s Political Spirit and the Problem of
David M. Robinson 5

Language’’ (pp. 14–34), an explanation of the corrosion of Emerson’s

early faith in the eYcacy of ‘‘a transcendent ‘Spirit’ ’’ mediated ‘‘by a
prophetic public spokesperson such as a minister, scholar, or poet.’’
Emerson came to see that his ideal poet ‘‘cannot speak in a way that
represents a sectarian religious or partisan political interest’’ and thus
reinvented the poet as ‘‘the representative,’’ a Ž gure more capable of
addressing the social issues of his day.
In a richly detailed consideration of Emerson’s reaction to Thoreau’s
1846 arrest, ‘‘Emerson, Thoreau’s Arrest, and the Trials of American
Manhood’’ (pp. 35–64), Linck C. Johnson connects Emerson’s disap-
proval of Thoreau’s act of resistance to his own conception of the incom-
patibility of political engagement and literary productivity. Johnson as-
tutely calls our attention to the irony that later evolved: Emerson became
ever more deeply involved in antislavery politics while Thoreau returned
to more purely literary pursuits. Thus by the time that Thoreau Ž nally
published Walden, Emerson was devoting much of his attention to the
antislavery addresses that were among his chief accomplishments in the
early and middle 1850s. In ‘‘Pain and Protest in the Emerson Family’’
(pp. 67–92) Phyllis Cole traces the family context of the evolution of
Emerson’s views on antislavery and women’s rights, Ž nding his Aunt
Mary ‘‘a deep, long-term source of his idealist principles’’ and his wife,
Lidian, the one who ‘‘established his daily context as one of sentimental
feeling.’’ Lidian’s participation in the Concord Female Anti-Slavery So-
ciety became an important aspect of the family’s engagement with anti-
slavery. Although Mary and Lidian ‘‘were proto-feminists,’’ they found it
more diYcult to move Emerson toward a full acceptance of women’s
rights. He ‘‘spoke of women’s rights to education, property, and equality
in marriage,’’ Cole observes, but ‘‘he evoked no concrete sense of injustice
done in any of these areas.’’
The critical disparity over Emerson’s political identity is well illus-
trated in two noteworthy essays on Emerson’s relationship with Fuller
and his resulting stand on women’s rights. Armida Gilbert in ‘‘ ‘Pierced by
the Thorns of Reform’: Emerson on Womanhood’’ (pp. 93–114) makes a
trenchant argument that Emerson’s standpoint on women’s rights must
be understood within the constantly moving milieu of the early women’s
rights movement. ‘‘Woman,’’ written soon after Emerson had prepared
the Fuller Memoir, carries ‘‘an agenda of women’s rights that was ex-
tremely radical even for the late nineteenth century, much less for its
midpoint.’’ Gilbert also observes that ‘‘women, especially the suVragists,
6 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

were among Emerson’s earliest and most sympathetic audience’’ because

he ‘‘encouraged women’s intellectual independence and honored their
literary status on fully equal terms with men.’’ JeVrey A. Steele in ‘‘The
Limits of Political Sympathy: Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Woman’s
Rights’’ (pp. 115–35; see also his TransŽ guring America below) acknowl-
edges that Fuller’s in uence was critical to Emerson’s ‘‘public advocacy of
much of the oYcial women’s rights platform,’’ but argues that they held
‘‘competing models of the self ’s motive power.’’ In the early 1840s Fuller
began to envision ‘‘the female psyche in terms of the harmonious balanc-
ing of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ powers found within,’’ a process enabled
by her conception of ‘‘a number of goddess-Ž gures.’’ Emerson, whose
theory of agency remained innately ‘‘masculine,’’ regarded Fuller’s change
as ‘‘strange and uncanny’’ and resisted the claims to spiritual authority
that her new female mythology implied. Steele believes that for this
reason Emerson omitted a call for equality in religious leadership in
‘‘Woman.’’
The most illuminating of the year’s many essays on the political Emer-
son is Len Gougeon’s ‘‘Emerson’s Abolition Conversion’’ (pp. 170–95),
which maps with informative detail the ‘‘conversion’’ that Emerson un-
derwent in preparing his 1844 address on West Indies emancipation. The
address, sponsored by the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, brought
Emerson ‘‘into a cooperative relationship with well-known abolition
leaders’’ and, more important, brought him ‘‘face to face with the truly
terrifying visage of America’s greatest moral aZiction.’’ The ‘‘uniquely
emotional quality’’ of the address signiŽ ed the new depth of his antislav-
ery commitment. In the light of Gougeon’s essay, Emerson’s enraged
reaction to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law seems less a dramatic turnaround
than a steadily building attitude accelerated by national events.
In ‘‘Emerson, Slavery, and the Evolution of the Principle of Self-
Reliance’’ (pp. 139–69) Michael Strysick maintains that Emerson’s anti-
slavery writings re ect his realization that ‘‘self-reliance was hollow if
particular individuals had no access to or concept of their agency.’’ While
William Ellery Channing reinforced Emerson’s early commitment to
abolition through ‘‘moral suasion,’’ the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law
moved Emerson to emphasize ‘‘the association of like-minded selves’’ in
resistance to the law. In ‘‘Emerson, John Brown, and ‘Doing the Word’:
The Enactment of Political Religion at Harpers Ferry, 1859’’ (pp. 197–
217) Harold K. Bush describes Emerson’s characterization of ‘‘Brown as
the incarnation of the American political religion,’’ an action-oriented
David M. Robinson 7

fusion of Puritanism, the Declaration of Independence, and ‘‘the roman-

tic commitment to a gospel of power.’’ As Bush perceptively comments,
Emerson’s growing commitment to action guided by transcendent prin-
ciple complicates the distinction between the ‘‘Transcendental Emerson’’
and the ‘‘social Emerson.’’
My essay ‘‘Emerson’s ‘American Civilization’: Emancipation and the
National Destiny’’ (pp. 221–33) reads ‘‘American Civilization’’ as Emer-
son’s attempt to provide the ‘‘historical framework’’ for ‘‘an argument for
immediate emancipation.’’ Emerson recognized ‘‘the con ict over slav-
ery’’ as ‘‘a historical turning point’’ for ‘‘the progress of human civiliza-
tion.’’ But when he later included the essay in Society and Solitude (1870),
he deleted much of the speciŽ c reference to the slavery crisis, thus obscur-
ing the essay’s place in the framework of his increasing orientation toward
ethical and social engagement. In ‘‘Power, Poise, and Place: Toward an
Emersonian Theory of Democratic Citizenship’’ (pp. 234–54) Stephen L.
Esquith argues convincingly that ‘‘Emerson remains a valuable resource
for democratic theory’’ because of his recognition that ‘‘the desire for
power’’ can play a ‘‘creative and inventive role’’ in mining ‘‘unequally
distributed intellectual and economic resources in the service of a more
inclusive democracy.’’ Esquith recognizes Emerson’s political blind spots
and sometimes con icting values, but emphasizes his understanding of
‘‘poise’’ in the social arena, ‘‘an orientation toward power’’ that ‘‘should
work as a form of collective resistance against the beguiling images of
powerful experts and leaders.’’

c. Other Work on Emerson and Politics Sam McGuire Worley’s Emer-

son, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic (SUNY) presents Emer-
son and Thoreau as ‘‘immanent’’ or ‘‘connected’’ political critics who
understood that ‘‘the sources of political change lie in the very materials
furnished by the inherited tradition.’’ Drawing from Michael Walzer and
Stanley Cavell to provide a communitarian view of Transcendentalist
politics, Worley traces Emerson’s development of a concept of ‘‘leader-
ship through interpretation’’ that allowed a critic of culture to propose
innovations ‘‘without abandoning entirely the authority of inherited
culture.’’ Worley emphasizes Emerson’s often overlooked concern with
social relations in Representative Men and Ž nds that Walden and ‘‘Re-
sistance to Civil Government’’ oVer narratives not of ‘‘an escape from
society but a rebirth or return into it.’’ Worley provides lucid accounts of
the relevance of recent political theory in recovering Emerson and Tho-
8 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

reau as vital political thinkers. Michael Magee also oVers a persuasive

portrait of a progressive and politically engaged Emerson in ‘‘Emerson’s
Emancipation Proclamations’’ (Raritan 20, iv: 96–116), emphasizing
how his consideration of the slave intersected with his concern for Ameri-
can democracy. Emerson ‘‘wanted to convince the nation that words like
‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ had come to signify their opposites’’ and
searched for ‘‘vocabularies which could better serve the principles on
which such words as freedom and democracy were originally based.’’
‘‘Emancipation’’ and ‘‘transition’’ became key terms in Emerson’s remak-
ing of the American political vocabulary, and ‘‘the activities of African
Americans —as fugitives, readers, writers, soldiers —were among Emer-
son’s preferred examples of ‘man in transition.’ ’’ JeVrey B. Kurtz also
describes Emerson’s attempt to reclaim language for political change in
‘‘Condemning Webster: Judgment and Audience in Emerson’s ‘Fugitive
Slave Law’ ’’ (Q JS 87: 278–90). Placing his hearers ‘‘apart from the
conventions of culture,’’ Emerson enabled them to form self-reliant judg-
ments on the slavery issue.
Peter S. Field in ‘‘The Strange Career of Emerson and Race’’ (ANCH 2,
i: 1–32) is less convinced of Emerson’s progressive viewpoint. He de-
scribes him as ‘‘friend of John Brown, associate of Theodore Parker and
the other ‘Secret Six,’ collaborator with Garrison and Phillips, [and]
peripheral participant in the Underground Railroad,’’ but nevertheless
‘‘con icted about many issues relating to race and the character of the
American nation.’’ Field cannot accept Emerson as a racial progressive
because he ‘‘fundamentally failed to imagine a multiracial American
nation,’’ having ‘‘inherited a set of racial assumptions about Saxon genius
that played perfectly into his evolving nationalism.’’ Field seems most
disappointed in the Emerson after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, when
he became an important abolitionist spokesman. ‘‘Emerson powerfully
utilized his talent for public speaking and his estimable fame to speed the
downfall of the Slave Power,’’ Field writes, but he remained ‘‘a reluctant
abolitionist’’ who never expressed ‘‘any vision of a biracial American
future’’ and failed to oVer any ‘‘pronouncement on equality’’ in his 1862
commendation of the Emancipation Proclamation. In ‘‘American Impe-
rialism UnManifest: Emerson’s ‘Inquest’ and Cultural Regeneration’’ (AL
73: 47–83) Jenine Abboushi Dallal discusses the similarities between
Emerson’s emphasis on ‘‘expansion’’ in a theory of ‘‘cultural emergence’’
and the discourse of American expansionism and Manifest Destiny. In
David M. Robinson 9

both forms of discourse, Dallal notes, ‘‘disembodiment’’ plays a key

conceptual role.

d. Emerson’s ‘‘Friendship’’ The year brings two signiŽ cant readings of

‘‘Friendship’’ and its biographical and cultural contexts. In American
Sympathy Caleb Crain provides an observant account of Emerson’s inner
life and its connection to his literary achievement, centered on his epi-
sodes of intense but Ž nally contained attractions for fellow Harvard
student Martin Gay in the early 1820s and Samuel Gray Ward some two
decades later. Crain argues that ‘‘the feelings that came to Emerson
during his crush on Gay provoked metaphors, ideas, and psychological
compromises that became crucial to his mature philosophy and writing’’;
in turning away from that attraction ‘‘Emerson made it a principle to live
his life as a loaded gun.’’ Emerson thus exempliŽ es the American ten-
dency to employ literature ‘‘to exchange emotions between increasingly
separate men.’’ Crain’s perspective yields an insightful new reading of the
social context of ‘‘Friendship,’’ an essay that arose from Margaret Fuller’s
pulling Emerson into her circle of three younger friends, Anna Barker,
Caroline Sturgis, and Ward. This brief moment of apparent utopian
mutuality was broken when Ward and Barker announced their engage-
ment. The devastating impact of this seeming abandonment on Fuller is
well understood, but Crain explains how that abandonment was inten-
siŽ ed when Fuller ‘‘turned to Emerson with the full burden of her emo-
tional needs’’ and ‘‘Emerson retreated.’’ His recoil was in part the result of
his own emotional exposure and sense of loss, especially for Ward, who
‘‘more than any other person’’ was on Emerson’s mind ‘‘as he wrote the
journal passages that became the raw material’’ for ‘‘Friendship.’’ Emer-
son ‘‘channeled his feelings into a work of literature imbuing that work
with special energy and asking it to justify his renunciation.’’ ‘‘Friend-
ship’’ is also central to Frank M. Meola’s ‘‘ ‘In True Relations’: Love,
Friendship, and Alternative Society in Emerson’’ (Prospects 26: 35–60), an
illuminating discussion of ‘‘Emerson’s ongoing attempt to redeŽ ne his
own masculinity’’ and ‘‘deŽ ne a space of freedom for alternative types
of personal relationships’’ such as those that developed brie y within
Fuller’s circle. ‘‘Friendship’’ and ‘‘Love’’ reveal Emerson’s profound dis-
comfort with the rigid codiŽ cation of gender roles that was beginning to
take shape at midcentury, and ‘‘the sort of cross-gender emotionality and
eroticism’’ of these essays must be understood as a form of resistance to
10 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

that narrowing. Meola explains that modern categories of gender and

sexual identity break down as we examine earlier texts or patterns of
behavior; Emerson’s refusal to restrict the possibilities of self-realization
through limiting the forms of relationship was therefore an important
and potentially instructive stance.

e. Emerson’s Religious Contexts In addition to the outpouring of

political analyses, there is also a helpful discussion of Emerson as a
religious thinker that includes, in addition to the works covered in this
section, the works of Guthrie and Versluis discussed below. In Emerson
and Zen Buddhism (Mellen) John G. Rudy perceptively reads Emerson
through the lens of Zen, approaching his essays as exercises in ‘‘the
meditative process of self-emptying.’’ Rudy contrasts ‘‘Experience’’ with
‘‘Circles,’’ believing that the trauma of Waldo’s death forced Emerson to
‘‘relocate himself ’’ in the continuing generation of new thought and
experience. Taking ‘‘Fate’’ as ‘‘the summative achievement of his spiritual
career,’’ Rudy notes the ‘‘generative’’ quality of ‘‘seeking that which can-
not be found’’ and argues that Emerson was moving toward the recogni-
tion that ‘‘thought is not the product of a mind separate from reality, but
the unfolding ‘structural action’ itself of mind as reality.’’ Rudy’s thor-
ough knowledge of Zen provides a fresh and illuminating perspective on
Emerson’s development and achievement. Shanta Acharya’s The In uence
of Indian Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson (Mellen) measures Emerson’s
growing philosophical maturity through his deepening understanding of
Hindu texts and concepts. Beginning as ‘‘a mind in the grip of tradition,’’
Emerson saw India through the distortions of ‘‘European Orientalism’’
but had an important counterin uence in Mary Moody Emerson, who
took with seriousness the idealism of Indian religious texts. Surveys
of intellectual history by Joseph-Marie baron de Gérando and Victor
Cousin reinforced Emerson’s attitude of receptivity in the early 1830s, but
it was not until he studied the Bhagavad Gita and the Vishnu Purana in
the middle 1840s that he grasped Hinduism more deeply, Ž nding rein-
forcement for his philosophy and new vocabulary with which to express
it. Acharya takes up four key themes —self, illusion, evil, and compensa-
tion —as gauges of Emerson’s dialogue with Hinduism and notes that he
was increasingly drawn to ‘‘the awareness of immense human possibili-
ties, the elasticity of Man,’’ through this dialogue. Richard Geldard’s The
Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Lindisfarne), a revised edi-
tion of his The Esoteric Emerson (see AmLS 1994, p. 11), approaches
David M. Robinson 11

Emerson as a spiritual teacher rooted in the Platonic and Neoplatonic

traditions who emphasized the ‘‘authentic’’ life as a central moral aspira-
tion. David Lyttle traces Emerson’s lifelong philosophical engagement
with the problem of evil in ‘‘Emerson and Natural Evil’’ (CS 9: 57–84),
noting how the loss of Ellen and Waldo altered the course of his thinking.

f. Emerson’s Philosophical and Social Contexts David Wittenberg’s

Philosophy, Revision, Critique: Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche,
and Emerson (Stanford) analyzes philosophical ‘‘revision’’ in the work of
Martin Heidegger, Emerson, and Harold Bloom, illustrating how ‘‘philo-
sophical practice is historical’’ and ‘‘philosophy is textual,’’ two premises
that have been heretofore resisted in philosophical discourse. In his
‘‘revision-encounter’’ with Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger claims an elu-
cidation of the essence of Nietzsche’s position that Nietzsche himself was
unable to articulate fully. Wittenberg sees versions of this same dynamic
of critique as displacement and fulŽ llment in Bloom and Emerson, Ž nd-
ing in Emerson an even more aggressive tactic in which ‘‘the revisionist
self-reliant self creates futures, reversing the direction of past in uences
that otherwise would have hampered it.’’ In ‘‘Emerson on Patience’’
(Prism[s] 8 [2000]: 49–66) Didier Maleuvre discusses ‘‘Experience’’ as a
meditation on cognitive and spiritual separation, describing Emerson’s
search for ‘‘a mood of being present that is not exhausted by mere
contemporariness.’’ Such a stance helps translate Emerson’s ‘‘where do we
Ž nd ourselves?’’ into the more socially in ected ‘‘where and how do we
come together?’’ and thus lays ‘‘the foundations of a properly human
community.’’ Kerry Larson’s ‘‘Individualism and the Place of Under-
standing in Emerson’s Essays’’ (ELH 68: 991–1021) explores a tension
between Emerson’s belief that understanding past events requires us ‘‘to
reproduce within ourselves the states of mind of the individuals who
brought them about’’ and his conviction that we must ‘‘detach the act
from the intending agent.’’ The language of ‘‘History’’ is permeated with
‘‘the sensation of possessing, appropriating, acquiring, or owning knowl-
edge,’’ carrying the troubling inference that ‘‘witnessing the failure of
others to control or calculate the signiŽ cance of their own acts’’ can be ‘‘a
kind of freedom.’’ In ‘‘Self-Reliance: Individualism in Coleridge and
Emerson’’ (Symbiosis 5: 51–68) David Vallins links Emerson’s orientation
toward religious quietism with Coleridge’s conversion of ‘‘Romantic in-
dividualism into a willing acceptance of divine fate.’’ But Emerson com-
bined this quietism in ‘‘Self-Reliance’’ with a more determined resistance
12 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

to social norms, suggesting ‘‘the extent to which the intellectual demands

of Coleridgean individualism have been replaced with social and eco-
nomic ones.’’ Naoko Saito’s ‘‘Reconstructing Deweyan Pragmatism in
Dialogue with Emerson and Cavell’’ (Transactions of the Peirce Society
37: 389–406) describes the debate between Cavell and neopragmatists
such as Douglas Anderson over Emerson’s identity as a ‘‘pragmatist.’’
Saito emphasizes the common ground between Cavell’s ‘‘Emersonian
moral perfectionism’’ (‘‘the endless journey of self-overcoming and self-
realization’’) and Dewey’s ‘‘process of ‘the education of the human soul’ ’’
and maintains that Cavell’s representation of Emerson is ‘‘fully participa-
tory and responsive.’’ Jan Stievermann in ‘‘ ‘Man Doing’ and ‘Man Lis-
tening’: A Comparison of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and Novalis’
Der Lehrlinge zu Saïs ’’ (LJGG 42: 125–44) argues that even in 1836 Emer-
son was abandoning a ‘‘philosophy of knowledge’’ for a pragmatic ‘‘phi-
losophy of power.’’ Stievermann maintains that Emerson’s utilitarian
conception of nature ‘‘as a teacher’’ which helps humanity through its
resistance Ž xes a division between mind and nature that contrasts the
reciprocal relationship envisioned by Novalis.
Several essays explore Emerson in his immediate cultural milieu. In
‘‘The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston’s Public Poetry and the
Great Organ, 1863’’ (AmLH 13: 212–41) Mary LoeVelholz compares An-
nie Fields’s ‘‘Ode’’ for the 1863 dedication of the Great Organ in the Music
Hall with Emerson’s ‘‘Boston Hymn,’’ written for the public celebration
of the Emancipation Proclamation. Fields used the occasion to celebrate
a public religion of art that displaced a repressive Puritanism, while
Emerson reached back to ‘‘Puritan militance, severity, iconoclasm, and
singleness of purpose’’ to describe the war eVort. LoeVelholz observes that
‘‘the cultural work of poetry’’ in this period is a promising and largely
untapped resource for ‘‘Americanist cultural studies.’’ John T. Matteson
describes Emerson’s discomfort with the sepulchral veneration of the
heroes of the Revolutionary War in ‘‘Grave Discussions: The Image of the
Sepulchre in Webster, Emerson, and Melville’’ (NEQ 74: 419–46). Citing
Webster’s speech dedicating the Bunker Hill monument as a paradig-
matic instance of such veneration, Matteson reads Emerson’s ‘‘the sepul-
chers of the fathers’’ phrase as part of his resistance to Webster and to ‘‘the
image of a preserved past.’’ Sharon Worley investigates the early reception
of Emerson in ‘‘Mapping the Metaphysical Landscape oV Cape Ann: The
Reception of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism among the
Gloucester Audience of Reverend Amory Dwight Mayo and Fitz Hugh
David M. Robinson 13

Lane’’ (HJM 29: 137–69). With Mayo’s instigation, Emerson made fre-
quent lyceum appearances in Gloucester, where suspicion of his theology
was balanced by receptivity to his aesthetic of nature, also embodied in
the work of Gloucester painter Lane. In ‘‘Savage Daughters: Emma
Lazarus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and The Spagnoletto’’ (ATQ 15: 89–107)
Allison GiVen discusses Lazarus’s frustrating experience as Emerson’s
literary apprentice and Ž gurative daughter. Joseph H. Gardner notes the
scholarly misattribution of a quotation in Nature in ‘‘Emerson, Cole-
ridge, and a Phantom Quotation’’ (ANQ 13, ii [2000]: 32–35).

ii Thoreau
a. Collected Essays and Poems Elizabeth Hall Witherell has given us a
much-needed collection of 27 essays and 162 poems in Henry David
Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (Library of America), a book that will
be important as both a reference work and a classroom text. Witherell
provides a chronological arrangement of all of Thoreau’s well-known
natural history and political essays and lesser-known but valuable works
such as ‘‘Love,’’ ‘‘Chastity & Sensuality,’’ and ‘‘Huckleberries.’’ Of great
value is her complete gathering of Thoreau’s poems, a compilation that
may stimulate further consideration of the place of poetic composition in
his literary development. Witherell also includes a helpful chronology
and extensive informational notes. Every Thoreauvian will Ž nd this an
invaluable book. Also available now is Richard Dillman’s The Major
Essays of Henry David Thoreau (Whitston), providing 14 Thoreau essays
with an index and introductory essay.

b. Two New Portraits Two important new studies of Thoreau’s re-

ligious and ethical orientation oVer instructively contrasting portraits. In
Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (Yale) Alan D. Hodder reminds us that while
Thoreau is known principally as a nature writer, political critic, and
literary artist, his religious sensibility informs all his identities. Thoreau’s
‘‘religion,’’ however, was ‘‘personal, antiinstitutional, experiential, icono-
clastic’’ —traits that made him seem nonreligious or even antireligious in
his own day and that complicate our present recognition of the spiritual
dimensions of his work. Hodder emphasizes the experiential basis of
Thoreau’s religion, the moments of ‘‘ecstatic’’ consciousness that deline-
ated the deepest reality for him, and also explains how his ecstatic con-
sciousness was mediated by moods of plaintive memory, closely akin to
14 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

the elegiac awareness of Wordsworth. Hodder’s cogent account of Tho-

reau’s encounter with Hindu and other Asian religious texts show both
his remarkable openness to their insights and his determined and consis-
tent measuring of all such in uences by his own experience. Hodder’s
most notable contribution is a new framework for reading the Journal of
the 1850s, which has often been taken as a sign of Thoreau’s declension (or
liberation) into a de-transcendentalized empiricism. Hodder Ž nds in-
stead that ‘‘the late journal represents not so much a break with his earlier
Transcendentalist re ections as a development and intensiŽ cation of
them.’’ Finding the Journal a ‘‘record or medium of extraordinary experi-
ence,’’ he shows that Thoreau’s ‘‘greatest ecstasies occurred in moments of
sheerest self-transparency, when nature ran through him like a rushing
stream.’’ His observations of nature, especially its metamorphic energies,
were attempts ‘‘to restore and cultivate’’ through ‘‘attentive meditations’’
the kinds of moments that ‘‘he experienced spontaneously as a youth.’’
Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness will take a permanent place among the impor-
tant studies of Thoreau.
Alfred I. Tauber describes Thoreau’s concern with epistemology in his
construction of a ‘‘moral identity’’ in Henry David Thoreau and the Moral
Agency of Knowing (Calif.). Tauber proposes that precepts of ‘‘virtue
ethics,’’ as most recently articulated by Alasdair MacIntyre, help us un-
derstand Thoreau’s use of nature as ‘‘the moral vehicle by which he
explored his own identity and developed his personhood.’’ For Thoreau
‘‘to live a virtuous life was to live deliberately, or . . . self-consciously,’’ a
task that allied him to Nietzsche’s ‘‘ethics of self-responsibility.’’ Tauber’s
informative discussion of Thoreau’s engagement with science during the
rise of positivism emphasizes his growing realization that ‘‘natural facts
are historical ’’ and ‘‘reside within a conceptual framework,’’ a recognition
that distanced him from the emerging scientiŽ c community and ren-
dered his late works a ‘‘fusion of personal sensibility and scientiŽ c dis-
course.’’ Tauber gives us a quintessentially Romantic Thoreau attuned to
the heroic ideal, whose continuing appeal lies in his ‘‘self-determined
agency . . . guided by a powerful inner sense of himself that brought
coherence to his diverse activities and oVered a singular direction to his
life’s work.’’

c. Thoreau’s Philosophical and Cultural Contexts In Above Time:

Emerson’s and Thoreau’s Temporal Revolutions (Missouri) James R. Guthrie
discusses ‘‘transcendence of temporality’’ as a central concern of Emerson
David M. Robinson 15

and Thoreau. While Emerson conceived time as a sequential progression

of discrete days, he also struggled against the linear quality of this idea,
mediating it through a belief in the agency of the intellect which made
necessary change a creative process. Thoreau’s growing interest in ‘‘tem-
poral cyclicity’’ re ected the scientiŽ c recognition that ‘‘the natural world
moved in vast cycles made feasible by the provision of a virtually inŽ nite
supply of time.’’ Thoreau’s 1860 visit to Inches’ Wood, a mature oak forest
eight miles from Concord, was a revelatory moment in which he was able
to envision an ancient landscape and gain insight into ‘‘the rhythms and
currents of deep time.’’
In ‘‘Thoreau on Democratic Cultivation’’ (Political Theory 29: 155–89)
Brian Walker discusses Walden as an example of ‘‘a speciŽ cally demo-
cratic genre of advice theory,’’ Ž nding Thoreau’s commitment to ‘‘self-
cultivation’’ an important tool of empowerment, ‘‘a source for individual
power to resist invasive systems.’’ Richard Prud’homme explores the
multiple connotations of ‘‘Walden ’s Economy of Living’’ (Raritan 20, iii:
107–31), arguing that Thoreau’s concept of economy as ‘‘a rite of self-
puriŽ cation’’ entails a ‘‘doubleness that undoes the unitary self,’’ thus
rendering his search for certainty endless. In ‘‘Reading on Walden Pond
and TransŽ guring American Manhood’’ (ESQ 46 [2000]: 177–211) Suz-
anne Ashworth examines Thoreau’s strictures on novels and newspapers
in the light of cultural concerns over ‘‘unregulated male consumption’’
and Ž nds a ‘‘kinship between the pathology of onanism and the pathol-
ogy of novel reading.’’ Ashworth links Thoreau’s ‘‘theory of heroic read-
ing’’ of the classics to ‘‘an eVort to regenerate American manhood,’’ but
Ž nds that he has ‘‘fenced his ideal within a masculinity that is seemingly
Ž xed and immutable.’’ In ‘‘Kate Field on Thoreau’’ (CS 9: 141–45) Gary
Scharnhorst discusses one of the Ž rst important woman advocates of
Thoreau’s work and calls for a wider recognition of her literary and
journalistic accomplishments. Field’s ‘‘In and out of the Woods’’ (1870)
was in uenced by ‘‘Walking’’ and she later campaigned to preserve
Yosemite National Park.
In Demon of the Continent Joshua David Bellin Ž nds in Walden a
complex mixture of participation and resistance to the cultural assump-
tions of ‘‘Noble Savagism’’ and portrays Thoreau as a thinker whose
‘‘intercultural vision,’’ though genuine, was not consistently realized in
his work. Neill Matheson in ‘‘Thoreau’s Gramática Parda : Conjugating
Race and Nature’’ (ArQ 57, iv: 1–43) writes that ‘‘the politics of despair
and compromise’’ generated by the slavery crisis ‘‘is a silent backdrop’’ for
16 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

Thoreau’s ‘‘attempt to imagine a life outside the law’’ in ‘‘Walking.’’

Thoreau’s ‘‘reading of travel literature and natural history’’ is part of his
attempt to project ‘‘a new ecology, a new grammar of man’s relation to the
natural world,’’ and ‘‘to imagine a new man, no longer white.’’ Chris L.
Nesmith in ‘‘ ‘Slavery in Massachusetts’ and Mitchel’s Citizen : Rhetoric,
Reform and Reprobates in 1854’’ (CS 9: 41–55) provides information on
the editor of a conservative newspaper to which Thoreau alludes in the
essay. Stephen Hahn’s On Thoreau (Wadsworth, 2000) is a solid critical
overview of Thoreau’s work, oVering informative discussions of Walden
and Thoreau’s political and nature writings. Hahn emphasizes Thoreau’s
engagement with the epistemology of self-observation as the key philo-
sophical context of Walden. Paul Gilmore has incorporated his compara-
tive analysis of Thoreau and Okah Tubbee (see AmLS 1998, p. 22) into
Genuine Article, a study of racial representation that includes chapters on
William Wells Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne. Robert Hubbard’s ‘‘Devis-
ing ‘The Writer’s Soul’ in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s The Night
Thoreau Spent in Jail ’’ (CS 9: 17–38) discusses the play’s presentation of a
Thoreau consonant with ’70s political activism. Cecelia Tichi’s chapter
‘‘Walden Pond: Head Trips’’ in Embodiment describes the ‘‘sacralizing’’ of
Walden Pond by ‘‘the Sixties counterculture’’ and a ‘‘hippie Thoreau’’
whose sand foliage passage seemed ‘‘a singular and supreme moment of
psychedelic transcendental ecstasy.’’

d. The Green Thoreau In No Man’s Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision

for Civilization and Nature (Island) Daniel B. Botkin uses Thoreau’s
nature and wilderness writings to discuss a variety of environmental
issues, advocating an environmental sensibility that ‘‘celebrates the prod-
ucts of civilization as well as the splendor of life on Earth.’’ Botkin’s
keynote address for the Thoreau Society, ‘‘The Depth of Walden Pond:
Thoreau as a Guide to Solving Twenty-First Century Environmental
Problems’’ (CS 9: 5–14), emphasizes Thoreau’s measurement of Walden
Pond as an indication of ‘‘an intrinsic naturalist’s and observer’s inclina-
tion,’’ essential for eVective modern ecological policy. Thomas Claviez
examines the viability of Thoreau’s environmental critique in ‘‘Pragma-
tism, Critical Theory, and the Search for Ecological Genealogies in
American Culture’’ (REALB 15 [1999]: 343–80), linking Thoreau’s ‘‘skep-
ticism about a possible total merger with nature’’ with Theodor Adorno’s
conception of a ‘‘strong and unfolded subject’’ capable of separation from
‘‘the object.’’ Thoreau thus seems useful to Claviez in helping to restore to
David M. Robinson 17

American pragmatism a stronger sense of the social and historical roots of

the environmental crisis. In ‘‘Thoreau, Leopold, and Carson: Toward an
Environmental Virtue Ethics’’ (EnvE 23: 3–17) Philip Cafaro brings these
major environmental thinkers together under the concept of ‘‘virtue
ethics’’ by emphasizing their shared adherence to Ž ve common themes:
the ‘‘desire to put economic life in its proper place’’; ‘‘a commitment to
science, combined with an appreciation of its limits’’; ‘‘nonanthropo-
centrism’’; ‘‘an appreciation of the wild and support for wilderness pro-
tection’’; and ‘‘a bedrock belief that life is good: both human and nonhu-
man.’’ Thomas A. Potter’s ‘‘Kindred Spirits: Edwin Way Teale and Henry
David Thoreau’’ (CS 9: 147–55) describes Thoreau’s deep in uence on
Teale, a prominent 20th-century American nature writer. Bernard A.
Drew’s ‘‘Thoreau’s Tarn IdentiŽ ed: Guilder Pond’’ (CS 9: 127–38) recon-
structs Thoreau’s 1844 Saddleback Mountain hike to identify his remem-
bered mountain tarn.

iii Fuller
a. Letters I am pleased to welcome Robert N. Hudspeth’s ‘‘My Heart Is
a Large Kingdom’’: Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller (Cornell), a volume
distilled from his invaluable six-volume edition of the letters. The vol-
ume includes 171 letters in four contextualized chronological sections,
with useful annotations, biographical sketches, and a bibliographical
essay. It will bring Fuller’s voice, her ‘‘best medium,’’ to a wider range of
scholars, students, and general readers and will contribute further to the
growing recognition of Fuller’s reputation and legacy. Fuller’s letters
contain some of her most engaged and accomplished writings and stand
as an essential body of texts for the study of New England Transcenden-
talism. The letters are of particular value in understanding her experience
in Italy, now a period of central importance to Fuller studies.

b. Fuller’s Development and In uence JeVrey Steele provides an im-

portant new account of Fuller’s development in TransŽ guring America:
Myth, Ideology and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (Missouri).
Steele focuses on Fuller’s prolonged spiritual struggle in the early 1840s,
precipitated in part by her shock and sense of exclusion at the engage-
ment of Samuel Gray Ward and Anna Barker. Pushed back into a period
of re ective self-reexamination, Fuller undertook a ‘‘process of feminist
myth-making’’ informed by a variety of mystical sources and a deepening
18 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

engagement with classical and biblical mythologies. Three important

texts by Fuller in 1840–41 —‘‘Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,’’ ‘‘Yuca
Filamentosa,’’ and ‘‘Leila’’ —helped her explore a mystical feminist sym-
bology and enabled her to begin ‘‘politicizing the materials of her life.’’ In
1844, as she was expanding ‘‘The Great Lawsuit’’ into Woman in the
Nineteenth Century, she wrote a series of poems on the harmony of
feminine and masculine energies, a vision that informs both Woman and
her later work for the New York Tribune. Steele gives us a Fuller who is
more seriously engaged with religious thought than previous scholars
have realized and calls attention to the mystical essays and poems from
the early 1840s that establish the contours of her intellectual and emo-
tional development. The political Fuller, so prominent in contemporary
criticism, thus grows out of the mystical Fuller. The importance of
Fuller’s development of a collection of ‘‘empowering goddess-Ž gures’’ is
also delineated by Kimberly VanEsveld Adams in Our Lady of Victorian
Feminism: The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller,
and George Eliot (Ohio; see also AmLS 1996, p. 21). Adams describes
Fuller’s appropriation of the Ž gure of the Madonna as a symbol of emo-
tional completion and artistic creativity for women.
Phyllis Cole’s ‘‘Stanton, Fuller, and the Grammar of Romanticism’’
(NEQ 73 [2000]: 533–59) is an illuminating account of Fuller’s in uence
on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the early women’s rights movement.
Stanton arrived in Boston in 1842, when ‘‘Fuller’s Conversations stood at
the intersection of the liberal religion and feminist reform that intrigued
Stanton,’’ who was ‘‘still emerging from the Calvinism of youth.’’ Cole
notes that while Fuller and Stanton were not of one mind on all things,
Stanton responded deeply to Fuller’s translation of ‘‘self-reliance, the
key term of Emersonian individualism,’’ into a concept that ‘‘signiŽ es
women’s independence from men.’’ In ‘‘Margaret Fuller’s (Unsuccessful)
Plan for Papers on Literature and Art ’’ (ELN 14: 26–31) Judith Mattson
Bean explains how Fuller’s volume was drastically reduced from its origi-
nal planned length because of economic constraints and the political
resistance of her publisher Wiley and Putnam. The resulting volume
obscured ‘‘her political critique and the range of her work as a critic.’’
Ingrid E. Fry’s ‘‘Elective Androgyny: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and
Margaret Fuller’s Reception of Goethe’’ (GSNA 10: 246–62) makes a
convincing case for Goethe’s formative role in helping Fuller ‘‘Ž nd a new
basis for feminine authority,’’ linking her reconception of female identity
to Goethe’s ‘‘formulation of the concept of Bildung, or in the terminology
David M. Robinson 19

of contemporary New England, self-culture.’’ Elaine Showalter’s Invent-

ing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (Scribner’s) includes
a chapter on Fuller as one of the ‘‘feminist icons’’ that constitute a
‘‘collective memoir’’ of women’s history. Fuller struggled to live the prom-
ise of self-fulŽ llment that she had advocated in her writing and conversa-
tion and she found important guidance from Adam Mickiewicz in her
European transformation. In ‘‘Margaret Fuller’s First Depiction of In-
dians and the Limits on Social Protest: An Exercise in Women’s Studies
Pedagogy’’ (Legacy 18: 1–20) Annette Kolodny argues that Fuller’s ‘‘Ro-
maic and Rhine Ballads’’ reveals her complicity in ‘‘the discourse of the
inevitably vanishing Indian.’’ Kolodny links Fuller’s failure to her ‘‘writ-
ing the review amid the domestic turmoil in the Emerson household,’’ a
situation that ‘‘eviscerated her political will.’’ Unable to condemn Emer-
son’s coldness, ‘‘she acquiesced to what she could only construe as inevita-
ble: Lidian will suVer; the Indians will perish.’’ Michael Cody’s ‘‘ ‘The
Whole of What I Want’: Margaret Fuller on Milton and Marriage’’ (ELN
38 [2000]: 48–61) posits Milton as a source for ‘‘certain of Fuller’s strong-
est ideas of marriage.’’

c. Fuller and Italy Discussions of Fuller’s Italian experiences, now

generally understood as the fulŽ llment of her career, are coalescing
around ways that the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1848–49 Risorgi-
mento galvanized her desire to recover the democratic values lost to 19th-
century America. Annamaria Formichella Elsden’s ‘‘Margaret Fuller’s Tri-
bune Dispatches & the Nineteenth-Century Body Politic’’ (pp. 23–44 in
‘‘The Only EI cient Instrument’’ ) argues perceptively that Fuller’s analyses
of the revolution were ‘‘a lens through which to assess American democ-
racy.’’ Finding shared values in the Italian and American revolutions,
Fuller insisted to her American readers that ‘‘this cause is OURS.’’ Her
dispatches, which mixed reporting, reviewing, and philosophizing, pro-
vided her with a way ‘‘to fuse her feelings as a woman and as a writer-
patriot’’ and thus make the full participation of women essential to a
modern conception of democracy. In ‘‘Fuller, Hawthorne, and Imagin-
ing Urban Spaces in Rome’’ (pp. 175–90 in Roman Holidays ) Brigitte
Bailey also understands the dispatches as ‘‘attempts to revive American
republicanism by means of an identiŽ cation between her readers and the
Italian revolutionaries.’’ Aware that ‘‘the public sphere is discursively
constructed,’’ Fuller represents ‘‘Rome as a polis and as the emerging
capital of the nation-state envisioned by the leaders of the Risorgimento.’’
20 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

Karen A. English (‘‘ ‘Genuine Transcripts of Private Experience’: Mar-

garet Fuller and Translation,’’ ATQ 15: 131–47) emphasizes the formative
quality of Fuller’s early German translations of private, noncanonical
texts such as letters and conversations, which helped her to formulate
both Summer and Woman. These later informed the extensive transla-
tions in her Italian dispatches, which provided ‘‘Ž rst-hand access to
otherwise inaccessible documents and texts.’’

d. Fuller and Italy: Conference in Rome The papers from a Novem-

ber 2000 conference in Rome marking the 150th anniversary of Fuller’s
death (Dimensioni e Problemi della Ricerca Storica [Milan: Angeli]) add
signiŽ cantly to our understanding and appreciation of Fuller’s activities
in Italy. Charles Capper’s ‘‘Margaret Fuller’s American Transnational
Odyssey’’ (pp. 9–28) sets the tone for the collection’s inquiry into ‘‘Ful-
ler’s transnationalist outlook,’’ which Capper shows to be rooted in ‘‘four
transnational American cultural reform sites: New England Transcen-
dentalism, women’s rights discourse, Western settlement, and New York
literary journalism.’’ Capper describes Fuller’s reformulation of the ‘‘cos-
mopolitan mix’’ of Transcendentalist intellectual in uences into ‘‘a re-
ligiously infused national cultural awakening’’ and emphasizes the ‘‘antic-
ipatory radical mood’’ that her Tribune writings generated within her
before she went to Italy. Giuseppe Monsagrati (‘‘Margaret Fuller e i
Modelli Femminili Europei,’’ pp. 29–48) discusses Fuller’s long prepara-
tory immersion in European culture and Ž nds that revolutionary Italy
fulŽ lled her personally and helped restore her belief in an original spirit of
democracy that had been lost in America’s materialistic degeneration.
Her grounding in French socialist thought made her receptive to Giu-
seppe Mazzini’s concept of a nation as a collective eVort for the progress
of all men and women and she learned further lessons on the conduct of
life from her relationships with Europeans such as Adam Mickiewicz,
Costanza Arconati Visconti, and of course Giovanni Ossoli. In ‘‘Mar-
garet Fuller Mazziniana e la Repubblica Romana del 1849’’ (pp. 49–66)
Giuliana Limiti traces the development of Fuller’s relationship with
Mazzini from their 1846 meeting in London to the collapse of the emerg-
ing Roman republic in 1849. Limiti describes the personal aYnities and
shared values that brought them together as devotees of Dante and lovers
of conversation about social progress. Mazzini oVered invaluable help in
introducing Fuller to Italy and also in uenced her with his vision of
‘‘l’Humanità,’’ which transcended the divisions of gender. Francesco
David M. Robinson 21

Guida’s ‘‘La Città, la Democrazia, l’Amore: Le Passioni Romane di Mar-

garet Fuller’’ (pp. 67–81) explains Fuller’s Roman correspondence and
articles as not only essential documents on political events but also the
record of a mind rapidly moving toward an important ideological conver-
sion. Rome embodied for Fuller a new social experiment, and she re-
sponded with a remarkable capacity to understand and evaluate the
events, personalities, and institutions that were being transformed. Rec-
ognizing the links between events in Rome and an America with many
unsolved social problems, Fuller invited American readers to participate
sympathetically in the birth and the demise of the new nation, a narrative
in which the perŽ dy of Pope Pius IX and the heroism of Mazzini play
central roles. In ‘‘Playing the Eclectic: Margaret Fuller’s Creative Appro-
priation of Goethe’’ (pp. 83–92) Joseph C. Schöpp reconŽ gures Fuller’s
relationship with Goethe as an ‘‘active partnership rather than mere
passive discipleship.’’ Noting, as other scholars have before, the impor-
tance of ‘‘self-culture’’ in ‘‘Unitarian and Transcendentalist circles,’’
Schöpp analyzes Fuller’s conceptions of ‘‘the self as daimon, as woman
and as artist,’’ Ž nding in each her ‘‘creative agency’’ in negotiating Goe-
the. Cristina Giorcelli (‘‘A Humbug, a Bounder and Dabbler: Margaret
Fuller and/as Cristina di Belgioioso and/as Christina Casamassima,’’
pp. 93–112) describes Fuller’s friendship with Belgioioso, an intellectual
committed to the Risorgimento who shared much with Fuller. The link
between these powerful and dramatic women did not escape Henry
James, who belittled both in William Wetmore Story and His Friends and
drew on them for the character of Christina Light. In ‘‘Margaret Fuller as
Editor: A European Perspective’’ (pp. 113–21) Elvira Osipova assesses the
‘‘prodigious’’ impact of Fuller’s editorship of the Dial in expanding her
intellectual capacities, orienting her toward social reform, and preparing
her for her late work at the Tribune. Adrianne Kalfopoulou (‘‘Reading the
Italian Margaret Fuller in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Ro-
mance,’’ pp. 123–33) reads Hawthorne’s Ž ctional depictions of ‘‘the un-
disciplined heart of socially radical and sexually unconventional women
like Fuller’’ as ‘‘examples of female eroticism as exoticism’’ in which
representations of the ‘‘foreign’’ and ‘‘gendered unconventionality’’ are
made synonymous with ‘‘disease, contamination, and death.’’ Rosella
Mamoli Zorzi describes the relationship between ‘‘Margaret Fuller and
the Brownings’’ (pp. 135–49), noting Robert’s somewhat higher regard for
Fuller than Elizabeth’s, in part because of the latter’s resistance to Fuller’s
radicalism as a feminist and historian. In ‘‘Margaret Fuller on the Stage’’
22 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

(pp. 151–63) Maria Anita Stefanelli discusses Susan Sontag’s 1993 Alice in
Bed, which portrays ‘‘a multiple, de-centered, ideologically shaped Mar-
garet Fuller that is the theatrical counterpart of a historical, human,
psychologically available subject.’’
Donato Tamblé provides a survey of ‘‘Le Carte su Margaret Fuller
nell’Archivio di Stato di Roma’’ (pp. 165–87), noting that while no Fuller
manuscripts reside there, many papers provide a sense of Fuller’s presence
and experience during the Risorgimento. Tamblé Ž nds two major groups
of papers of interest to Fuller scholars: those concerning the voluntary
hospital work with which she and Cristina Belgioioso were involved and
those of the Ossoli family, which largely concern the aftermath of the
shipwreck and provide some family background. Krzysztof Zaboklicki ¬
discusses ‘‘Le Lettere di Adam Mickiewicz a Margaret Fuller’’ (pp. 189–
202), which establish Mickiewicz’s welcoming recognition of Fuller as a
fellow spiritual quester, his concerned and perceptive sympathy for her
welfare, and his encouragement to take in the life of Italy at every pore.
¬
Zaboklicki stresses the deep bond that the letters reveal (Fuller’s letters to
Mickiewicz have not survived) and even raises (I am not sure how se-
riously) the possibility that Mickiewicz was the father of Angelino.
In an insightful and well-informed appreciation of Fuller’s passion for
Italy, John Paul Russo (‘‘The Unbroken Charm: Margaret Fuller, G. S.
Hillard, and the American Tradition of Travel Writing on Italy,’’ pp. 203–
20) reads Fuller’s Italian writings as part of a long tradition of New
England travel literature on Italy, including her friend George S. Hillard’s
Six Months in Italy (1853). Russo explains the mixture of passion and
reservation which marks this tradition, contrasting it with Fuller’s over-
whelming conversion, a ‘‘pilgrimage’’ marked by a ‘‘loss of self ’’ and an
‘‘ ‘abandonment’ to the ‘spirit of the place.’ ’’ Fuller’s decided preference
for Rome over Florence (Florence is ‘‘a kind of Boston to me’’) suggests
‘‘the profound temperamental and intellectual divide separating her from
so many American travelers’’ and helps explain the covert resentment of
many of her fellow New Englanders. In an insightful consideration of
‘‘Margaret Fuller and the Ideal of Heroism’’ (pp. 221–31) Robert N.
Hudspeth traces Fuller’s development of the idea of ‘‘the hero-genius
[who] will be a reconciler of extremes, a symbol of growth, and an inter-
preter,’’ describing the impact of ‘‘Goethe’s conception of the Dämon-
ische,’’ an essential and mysterious element of the ‘‘magnetic self.’’ Fuller
began to embody these ideas in the historical examples woven into
Woman in the Nineteenth Century and saw them exempliŽ ed in Mazzini,
David M. Robinson 23

‘‘the charismatic, intellectual, spiritual leader she had been trying to

deŽ ne in all of her career.’’ In ‘‘Margaret Fuller and American Responses
to the Roman Republic’’ (pp. 233–41) Larry J. Reynolds helpfully locates
‘‘key sources of [American] agreement and opposition’’ to Fuller’s narra-
tive of the Risorgimento, explaining how she ‘‘evoked massive public
sympathy for the defenders of Rome’’ but also faced resistance from some
of her closest American friends and associates. Emerson, under the sway
of the conservative London Times, could not see Mazzini’s movement as
the democratic fulŽ llment Fuller pronounced, and other Americans were
put oV by Fuller’s willingness to endorse violent means to Italian free-
dom, seeing Italian events through the lens of the French ‘‘Terror.’’
Hawthorne is representative of those who merged Fuller’s revolutionary
politics with her sexuality as knowledge of her relationship with Ossoli
and the birth of her child spread. Bell Gale Chevigny’s discerning ‘‘Mu-
tual Interpretation: Margaret Fuller’s Journey to Rome’’ (pp. 243–57)
describes the process of dialogical observation and self-re ection under-
lying Fuller’s self-discovery in Italy. She found in Italy ‘‘the place and
people most suited for mutual interpretation,’’ the process that became
her fundamental intellectual commitment, and she also realized that ‘‘her
growing Italianization deepened and sharpened her Americanness,’’ al-
lowing her to see America’s wants more clearly. Liana Borghi’s ‘‘Margaret
Fuller: Maps and Patterns of a Transgressive Journey’’ (pp. 259–68) traces
Fuller’s Italian experience as a series of interconnecting narratives united
under ‘‘the trope of the journey.’’ In ‘‘Margaret Fuller e la Ricerca del
Materno’’ (pp. 269–92) Anna Scacchi builds on Adriana Cavarero’s the-
ory of autobiography to construct an account of Fuller’s search for self-
understanding. Fuller’s quest was in Scacchi’s view a search to replace the
absent mother that her powerful father had crowded out of her early life.
Rome became that mother, receiving her as a lost child, allowing her to
give voice to the revolutionary city as ‘‘Mater Dolorosa,’’ and providing
her a con icted but fulŽ lling experience as a mother. Charlotte Nekola’s
‘‘The Weeds of Italy: Margaret Fuller and the Dream of ‘Foreignhood’ ’’
(pp. 293–302) discusses Fuller’s desire for the foreign, a trait she shared
with Emily Dickinson, as a response to her inner con ict between mind
and body. In Rome ‘‘a more sensual, concrete Fuller surfaces,’’ helping
her choose a uniŽ ed rather than a ‘‘partial’’ life. In ‘‘Margaret Fuller and
the Media: Conversations, Salons, and the Press’’ (pp. 303–17) Joan von
Mehren refers to communication theorist Gabriel Tarde to describe
Fuller’s engagement with ‘‘salon culture’’ and the centrality of conversa-
24 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

tion in her developing work. Fuller’s early conversations tallied with ‘‘the
New England–Unitarian enthusiasm for self-culture’’ and helped to
mold her writings for the Dial and her later journalism. She was helped in
Europe by other disciples of the literary salon, Mary Clarke, Costanza
Arconati Visconti, and Cristina Belgioioso.

iv The Transcendentalist Movement

a. Critical Studies Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club will be of
interest to scholars of Transcendentalism for its superb account of the
origins of pragmatism in the violence of the Civil War and the disillu-
sionment that followed. Transcendent ideals seemed absurdly unsustain-
able to the generation that included Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and
William James; even though Holmes and others maintained a measure of
reverence for Emerson, they could not make sense or use of his faith in
the uniŽ ed order of things. Menand’s work is particularly valuable for its
vivid intellectual portraits of Holmes, James, Louis Agassiz, Charles
Sanders Peirce, Chauncey Wright, and others. Like Albert J. Von Frank’s
recent The Trials of Anthony Burns (see AmLS 1998, pp. 3–4), The Meta-
physical Club is that rarity, an intellectually rigorous book that is also a
very engaging read.
Sandra Harbert Petrulionis observes that ‘‘in Concord, a mecca of tran-
scendentalism, abolitionism was predominantly women’s work’’ (‘‘ ‘Swell-
ing That Great Tide of Humanity’: The Concord, Massachusetts, Female
Anti-Slavery Society,’’ NEQ 74: 385–418). Formed in 1837 after an ap-
pearance by abolitionist lecturers Angelina and Sarah Grimké, the society
was led by the determined and resourceful Mary Merrick Brooks and
counted Cynthia, Sophia, and Helen Thoreau; Lidian Emerson; Eliz-
abeth Hoar; and Abigail May Alcott among its active members. As
Petrulionis convincingly shows, ‘‘Henry Thoreau had long been exposed
to the most radical antislavery positions during his formative, young-
adult years’’ through his mother, aunts, and sisters. Emerson, a more
diYcult case, was drafted by the society to make his Ž rst public antislavery
address in 1844, after which ‘‘his commitment to antislavery strengthened
year by year.’’ Petrulionis provides a valuable account of the community
and familial roots of antislavery among the Transcendentalists. Of related
interest are Leslie Perrin Wilson’s ‘‘Mrs. Woodward Hudson’s Memoir of
Mrs. Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar’’ (CS 9: 87–125), with details on one of
Concord’s prominent families; and I. B. Holley Jr.’s ‘‘Schooling Freed-
David M. Robinson 25

men’s Children’’ (NEQ 74: 478–94), with letters from Ellen Tucker
Emerson on the Concord Bible Society’s support of an African American
school in Virginia.
In Esoteric Origins Arthur Versluis describes the currents of spiritual-
ism, mesmerism, millennialism, and other esoteric doctrines that provide
an essential cultural context for the American Renaissance. Versluis
shows that a familiarity with ‘‘Böhmenist mysticism’’ helps one to make
at least some headway in Bronson Alcott’s ‘‘Orphic Sayings’’ and other
works and also explains Alcott’s resistance to Darwinian ideas. While
Emerson’s work also ‘‘re ects esoteric premises,’’ his weaving such authors
as Böhme, Swedenborg, and Thomas Taylor into his message of self-
transformation and social reformulation opens and democratizes the
hermetic ethos of esotericism. Fuller too ‘‘had strong and, one might say,
practical interests in what could well be described as ‘occult’ subjects’’ and
‘‘had since childhood believed that she was psychic.’’ In a discussion that
tallies well with Steele (see above), Versluis describes Fuller’s spiritual
illumination in 1840 and her extensive use of ‘‘Hermetic allusions’’ in her
poetry and traces the ‘‘esoteric vision’’ that informs Woman in the Nine-
teenth Century.
In American Picturesque (Penn. State, 2000) John Conron portrays
Nature as ‘‘a decisive codiŽ cation of the transcendental picturesque’’ in
American painting and provides an impressive appraisal of Emerson’s
painterly eye in ‘‘Beauty.’’ Conron reads Walden as ‘‘a summa of the
picturesque in nineteenth-century American art,’’ exemplifying Tho-
reau’s closely observed ‘‘art of the local.’’ Employing Ž gures of circularity,
 ow, and ascension, Thoreau oVers Walden as a ‘‘sketchbook’’ centered in
three montagelike ‘‘sequences’’: the chapters on ‘‘The Ponds,’’ ‘‘The Pond
in Winter,’’ and ‘‘Spring.’’ Readers who have enjoyed Barbara Novak’s
work on Transcendentalism and the American Luminist painters (see
AmLS 1980, pp. 469–70) will Ž nd Conron’s American Picturesque of real
interest.
Two new essays on Theodore Parker this year by Paul E. Teed, along
with Dean Grodzins’s forthcoming biography, suggest that a long over-
due Parker revival may be in the oYng. In ‘‘ ‘A Brave Man’s Child’:
Theodore Parker and the Memory of the American Revolution’’ (HJM
29: 170–91) Teed discusses Parker’s ‘‘1845 pilgrimage’’ to his boyhood
home in Lexington as a ‘‘deŽ ning moment’’ in his self-understanding.
Hearing then a survivor’s account of his grandfather’s role in the 1775
Battle of Lexington, Parker adopted him as ‘‘the symbol of revolutionary
26 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

manhood’’ and used this family legacy ‘‘in fashioning an individual

activist identity.’’ Parker began to develop this new identity as he battled
ostracism for his radical theology. Teed’s ‘‘The Politics of Sectional Mem-
ory: Theodore Parker and the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 1847–1850’’
( JER 21: 301–29) shows how Parker fostered a ‘‘revitalized, antislavery
New England culture’’ by connecting conservative New England intel-
lectuals to their revolutionary past. In ‘‘Records of the Ministry at Large
in Connection with SuVolk Street Chapel’’ ( JUUHS 28, ii: 92–97) David
Allen Petee describes a newly available manuscript by John T. Sargent
(1807–1877), one of the few Unitarian ministers who continued pulpit
exchanges with Parker after the controversy over his ‘‘Transient and
Permanent’’ sermon. Sargent later became a leader of the Radical Club in
Boston.

b. Resources Conrad Wright’s ‘‘American Unitarian and Universalist

Scholarship: A Bibliography of Items Published 1946–1995’’ ( JUUHS 28,
i) will be a useful tool to those interested in the theological roots of
Transcendentalism. Wright’s exact and discerning scholarship has estab-
lished him as one of our greatest American church historians and this
‘‘omnium gatherum,’’ arranged chronologically and indexed by author,
name, and topic, is a trove of guidance, suggestions, and reference.
Teachers of Emerson will welcome a Norton Critical Edition of his work,
Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris. Porte and
Morris incorporate a generous and well-chosen range of texts, including
more than 80 pages of selections from the journals and letters and a wide
range of contextual material, early reviews, and academic criticism. Now
complete is Wesley T. Mott’s information-rich set of reference volumes in
Gale’s DLB series: The American Renaissance in New England: Second
Series (DLB 223 [2000], Concord writers); The American Renaissance in
New England: Third Series (DLB 235, Boston and Cambridge writers);
and The American Renaissance in New England: Fourth Series (DLB 243,
other New England writers). I contributed the essay on ‘‘Transcendental-
ism’’ (1: 413–26) to Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual
History ; and the four-volume Encyclopedia of American Studies includes
essays on ‘‘Ralph Waldo Emerson’’ by Joseph M. Thomas and ‘‘Transcen-
dentalism’’ by Sam McGuire Worley.
Oregon State University
2 Hawthorne
Brenda Wineapple

A cornucopia of essays on The Scarlet Letter celebrates the 150th birthday

of Hawthorne’s novel as does a special issue of SAF that contains excellent
contributions by T. Walter Herbert and Michael T. Gilmore. Larry J.
Reynolds has Ž nely edited A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne,
and the chapter on The Blithedale Romance in Russ Castronovo’s Necro
Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-
Century United States is a stimulating, well-documented interpretation of
the novel and of American culture. His is historicism at its best. A
number of essays plumb Hawthorne’s work for racial undertones or peer
behind Hawthorne’s authorial mask, and while several critics write in-
advertent biographical criticism, David T. Haberly wisely avoids the
intentional fallacy when speculating about the Province-House legends.
Attempting to excavate similar territory, ESQ presents a special double
issue devoted to a topic trite and true, the friendship between Hawthorne
and Melville.

i Editions and Bibliography

Although editions of The Scarlet Letter abound, Rita Gollin has concisely
edited the new Riverside Edition (Houghton MiZin) in a three-part
format: pertinent primary source material and reprints of scholarly arti-
cles, all historically oriented; the novel itself; and a selection of early and
recent responses to the novel ranging from Evert Duyckinck’s to T. Wal-
ter Herbert’s, each introduced by Gollin. Solid and sensible, the edition is
geared for a high-school or introductory college market. Modern Library
has also reissued The Scarlet Letter with a blithe introduction by Kathryn
Harrison as well as a ‘‘Commentary’’ section that presents Hawthorne’s
own comments on the novel; a similar format is followed in its The House
28 Hawthorne

of the Seven Gables, with an introduction by Mary Oliver. I wrote the

afterword for The House of the Seven Gables anniversary edition (Signet),
and the recent reissue of The Blithedale Romance (Modern Library) con-
tains an inspirited introduction by John Updike, who recommends the
novel to those ‘‘who wish to see the novelist’s acute if diYdent sensibility
operating in relative freedom from his compulsive symbolism.’’
Though Hawthorne’s novel Fanshawe has not been reissued recently,
D. T. Stallings provides a list of extant Ž rst editions in ‘‘Fanshawe: A
Revised List’’ (NHR 27, ii: 14–15) that updates previously published
catalogues of Hawthorne’s novel.
Todd Rozell provides an annotated listing of the Hawthorne scholar-
ship published between 1990 and 2000 in his ‘‘Current Hawthorne
Bibliography’’ (NHR 27, i: 56–84), which also includes several entries
for items published before 1990 as well as a listing of bibliographies,
reprints, some reviews, and dissertations. Sampling recent publications as
well as some that appeared between 1996 and 2000, Richard M. Clark’s
comprehensive array of Hawthorne scholarship, ‘‘Current Bibliography’’
(NHR : 27, ii: 36–65), is far more extensive than bibliographies pre-
viously published in the NHR. And referring to the bibliography of
women’s scholarship on The Scarlet Letter in Jamie Barlowe’s The Scar-
let Mob of Scribblers (see AmLS 2000, pp. 30–32) Kimberly Free Muir-
head warns readers to ‘‘Beware of Barlowe’s Bibliographies!’’ (NHR 27, ii:
16–18). Barlowe’s bibliography evidently contains many unreliable or
bizarre entries that contain passing reference, if that, to Hawthorne’s
novel.
Despite the conscientiousness of the editors who gathered Haw-
thorne’s correspondence for the Centenary Edition of the Works of Na-
thaniel Hawthorne, new letters still inevitably  oat to the surface, such as
the one he wrote to David Roberts in 1861, as William T. La Moy reports
in ‘‘An Unrecorded Letter Is Acquired by the Peabody Essex Museum’’
(NHR 27, ii: 12–13).

ii Books
The intended purpose of the Historical Guides to American Authors (Ox-
ford) is to produce an ‘‘interdisciplinary, historically sensitive series that
combines close attention to the United States’ most widely read and
studied authors with a strong sense of time, place, and history.’’ True to its
mission, Larry J. Reynolds has expertly edited A Historical Guide to
Brenda Wineapple 29

Nathaniel Hawthorne to target readers unfamiliar with Hawthorne or his

work and supply them with a sense of the milieu in which he wrote. In his
introduction to the volume (pp. 3–12) Reynolds further retails the social,
historical, and cultural purposes of this installment of the series in the
image he Ž ttingly borrows from Hawthorne: ‘‘Hawthorne relates the
eVect of gazing upon the Cathedral of LichŽ eld, which becomes ‘a kind
of kaleidoscopic mystery, so rich a variety of aspects did it assume from
each altered point of view,’ and the same can be said about many of his
works.’’ The volume even contains a well-illustrated, pertinent chronol-
ogy of Hawthorne’s life (pp. 166–81) and a bibliographic essay by Le-
land S. Person on ‘‘Hawthorne and History’’ (pp. 183–209).
The Guide opens with the biographical essay on Hawthorne that I
wrote (pp. 13–45) in which I call Hawthorne a ‘‘home-grown expatriate,’’
specifying how he was alienated from American life and conventional
deŽ nitions of manhood while immersed in them, both in his Ž ction and
in his fraught political allegiances. The volume then presents a series of
four essays under the rubric ‘‘Hawthorne in His Time,’’ beginning with
Samuel Chase Coale’s ‘‘Mysteries of Mesmerism: Hawthorne’s Haunted
House’’ (pp. 49–77). Documenting Hawthorne’s ambivalent response to
mesmerism, one of the spiritualist fads of the antebellum era, Coale
encapsulates the argument of his recent book, Mesmerism and Hawthorne
(see AmLS 1997, pp. 32–33) to argue persuasively that mesmerism is a
practical metaphor for Hawthorne’s work, ‘‘conjured up to ensnare the
reader in a kind of dark trance as he created the dark domain of Gothic
Ž ction and the barely discovered subconscious depths of his characters.’’
With a helpful bibliography and Ž ne overview of how and why mesmer-
ism was transported to America, Coale aptly summarizes Hawthorne’s
view of the spiritualism racket: ‘‘I should be glad to believe in the gen-
uineness of these spirits, if I could. . . . ‘There remains, of course, a great
deal for which I cannot account, and I cannot suYciently wonder at the
pig-headedness both of metaphysicians and physiologists, in not accept-
ing the phenomena so far as to make them the subject of investigation.’ ’’
Gillian Brown provides a historical yardstick for measuring Haw-
thorne’s Ž ctional children —moral touchstones all —in her ‘‘Hawthorne
and Children in the Nineteenth Century: Daughters, Flowers, Stories’’
(pp. 79–108). Setting stories like the tale of King Midas, ‘‘The Golden
Touch’’ (from The Wonder-Book), ‘‘The Gentle Boy,’’ and ‘‘Rappaccini’s
Daughter’’ next to Alcott, Dickens, 19th-century temperance literature,
and 17th-century children’s literature, Brown shows how Hawthorne
30 Hawthorne

capitalizes on the paradigm of the morally superior child while providing

his Ž ctional children with the ability to assert themselves in spite of their
ancestral inheritance. Although these interesting aspects of her argument
are hastily summarized at the essay’s end, Brown provocatively asserts
that Hawthorne’s Ž ctional daughters—not, one suspects, his Ž ctional
sons —are ‘‘emblematic of the literary techniques of recitation and revi-
sion, which makes all story-telling, even of the most ancient stories,
retelling.’’ It is an excellent point, sophisticated enough to warrant fur-
ther commentary.
In ‘‘Hawthorne and the Visual Arts’’ (pp. 109–33) Rita K. Gollin
carefully inventories Hawthorne’s long-standing interest in portraits and
portraiture as evinced in ‘‘The Prophetic Pictures,’’ ‘‘Sylph Etherege,’’
and The House of Seven Gables. She brie y outlines the condition of art in
early America as well as Hawthorne’s experience of its techniques and
moral eVect, especially during his exposure to the Manchester Exhibition
of Art in 1857 and his residence among Italian art the following year and a
half. Documenting in succinct form Hawthorne’s ruminative response to
Raphael, Michelangelo, Praxiteles, and work of American contempo-
raries like William Wetmore Story, Gollin comments that Hawthorne
responded most deeply to art that ‘‘conŽ rmed his own deep-seated if
provisional faith that this world is a place of grief and guilt.’’ And while he
may have seemed typically Victorian in much of his taste, by the time he
wrote The Marble Faun he confronted ‘‘one of the primary problems of
any aesthetics of representation: how much of the art being seen is created
by the perceiver?’’
Updating her censorious 1989 essay on Hawthorne and slavery, ‘‘Haw-
thorne and the American National Sin,’’ Jean Fagan Yellin in ‘‘Haw-
thorne and the Slavery Question’’ (pp. 135–64) rebukes Hawthorne for
not exhorting ‘‘his readers to act to end human bondage, as William
Lloyd Garrison had been doing in his newspaper the Liberator every
Friday since 1831’’ —even though Hawthorne did not share Garrison’s
views, to say the least; he regarded Garrison’s abolitionism as likely to
perpetuate the system of slavery rather than to end it. Condemning
Hawthorne’s political position, as well she might, Yellin does little
to understand its complexity or distinguish the range of responses —
proslavery, colonization, secession, antislavery, abolition —available to
him. Instead, she oVers a scattershot of racial incidents taking place in
Salem along with an interesting list of the antislavery societies formed in
the city; she also reports on well-publicized acts of violence, such as
Brenda Wineapple 31

those perpetrated against the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1835,

and shows that Hawthorne was ‘‘informed about African slavery’’ —
how not? —during his lifetime. Her essay does discern how Hawthorne
wielded an ‘‘abolitionist discourse’’ to talk about his own situation, and
yet Yellin concludes (somewhat in deŽ ance of her own evidence) that
‘‘Hawthorne deliberately avoided thinking about black slavery in ante-
bellum America,’’ a denial she ultimately links with the ‘‘strategy of
avoidance’’ considered by her to be the hallmark of his romances. The
intriguing comment is made, unfortunately, without elaboration.
Kathleen P. Colgan also writes about Hawthorne’s political aYliations
in The In uence of Political Events and Ideologies on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
Political Vision and Writings (Mellen). Colgan’s book begins with a good
survey of the critical and biographical material that renders Hawthorne a
legendary recluse with little relation to politics and, conversely, a man of
various public and social interests. After this comprehensive bibliograph-
ical introduction, Colgan asks whether Hawthorne should be considered
a conservative political thinker, deŽ ned broadly vis-à-vis the work of
Edmund Burke as well as a number of contemporary political theorists as
a belief in the fallibility of human beings and their institutions, a rever-
ence for the past and tradition, and a disdain for naive interpretations of
history or historical progress.
Colgan then tries to reconcile Hawthorne’s preoccupation with hu-
man fallibility —whether in ‘‘Fancy’s Show Box,’’ ‘‘Dr. Heidegger’s Ex-
periment,’’ ‘‘The Birth-Mark,’’ The Scarlet Letter, or The Blithedale
Romance —with his commitment to the democratic politics of Andrew
Jackson. ‘‘If, as Hawthorne’s works argued, sin is a universal human
condition, then that fact precludes the assumption of authority by one
man over another,’’ she claims. Yet Colgan never pushes her hypothesis
very far and Hawthorne’s intellectual relation to realpolitik remains
undeveloped.
Nonetheless, Colgan analyzes Hawthorne’s work in terms of the world
of political philosophy that he presumably inhabited, and her juxtaposi-
tion of Hawthorne and Burke is particularly good, especially when she
attends to the way both men distinguished between the American and
French Revolutions. Like Burke, ‘‘Hawthorne lent his strongest support
to the American Revolution,’’ Colgan summarizes, ‘‘because it was en-
acted as a conservative defense of American liberty.’’ From this perspec-
tive, she looks at ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’’ ‘‘Howe’s Masquer-
ade,’’ and ‘‘Lady Eleanore’s Mantle.’’ But though her examination of
32 Hawthorne

Enlightenment optimism or Comtean positivism on Hawthorne’s vari-

ous Ž ctional reformers or scientists does not extend beyond the reach of,
say, ‘‘the dangers associated with the deiŽ cation of science and the apo-
theosis of the scientiŽ c man,’’ her application of Burke’s Re ections of the
Revolution in France to ‘‘Earth’s Holocaust’’ refocuses her claim that
Hawthorne repudiated Comtean positivism without irony or regret.

iii General Essays

Three essays by the late Michael Davitt Bell on Hawthorne are collected
in Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation (Chicago, pp. 15–64): ‘‘Nathaniel
Hawthorne,’’ ‘‘Arts of Deception: Hawthorne, ‘Romance,’ and The Scar-
let Letter,’’ and ‘‘The House of the Seven Gables.’’ Though each has been
previously published, together they provide a comprehensive introduc-
tion to Hawthorne’s work and his place in the American canon. Bell
reconceives Hawthorne’s deŽ nition of romance —‘‘a devious strategy for
concealing or evading the more subversive implications of being a ro-
mancer, the implications Melville, to his peril, proclaimed’’ —to parse it
according to the use 20th-century critics have made of it, particularly
after World War II. Further, Bell expertly distinguishes among various
trends in Hawthorne criticism, including New Historicism.
Deriving some of his arguments from Bell as well as Bakhtin, Steven
Frye in Historiography and Narrative Design in the American Romance
(Mellen) discusses Hawthorne’s historical Ž ction in the sixth chapter of
his book, underscoring ‘‘Alice Doane’s Appeal’’ and The Scarlet Letter, to
declare Hawthorne a practitioner of ‘‘negative romance.’’ By ‘‘negative
romance’’ Frye means the epistemological uncertainty evinced through
Hawthorne’s ironies, skepticism, and signature ambiguity. To Frye ‘‘Alice
Doane’s Appeal’’ demonstrates the diYculty inherent in historical repre-
sentation, and a proto-Nietzschean Scarlet Letter suggests that the uni-
verse is ultimately unknowable. Frye concludes that ‘‘Hawthorne’s fore-
shadowing of Nietzschean historiographic perspectivism points in two
directions: to the author as progenitor to modern and postmodern narra-
tive form and to the author as Calvinist, as one who apprehends painfully
the innate limitations of the human intellect.’’
In ‘‘Fictions of the Panopticon: Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent
in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne’’ (AL 73: 121–45) E. Shaskan
Bumas understands the relation between the prison and utopia in Haw-
thorne’s Ž ction as a paradigm for American society. Highlighting The
Brenda Wineapple 33

Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Ro-
mance —although all of Hawthorne’s romances and many of his tales deal
with prison, prisoners, and imprisonment —Bumas skillfully reads Haw-
thorne’s work in the context of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish,
the religious discourse underlying the architecture of incarceration, and
early 19th-century prison-reform ideology. Like Foucault, Hawthorne
‘‘was wary of the state’s power and skeptical about relying on its judge-
ments for enforcing morality.’’ As a consequence, Hollingsworth does not
go to a penitentiary for his crime but is instead made penitent. Similarly,
as if anticipating Foucault’s central metaphor in Discipline and Punish
(the panopticon), Hawthorne emphasizes the voyeurism of Coverdale in
The Blithedale Romance, which Bumas associates with Hawthorne’s puta-
tive criticism of the novel as a genre of tyrannical omniscience.
John Dolis’s sharply playful ‘‘Domesticating Hawthorne: Home Is for
the Birds’’ (Criticism 43: 7–28) traces Hawthorne’s ‘‘gourmandizing bird
talk’’ from ‘‘The Custom-House,’’ where the Inspector recollects his good
dinners (an emblem of custom serving ‘‘only what culture cooks up: that
is, [good] taste itself ’’), to the birds of The Scarlet Letter, the hens in The
House of the Seven Gables, and the doves in Blithedale and The Marble
Faun, all of which suggest that home in Hawthorne is no place of
sentimental repose. Since Dolis’s pastiche of Freudian, Lacanian, and
Derridaean perspicacity (‘‘jouissance’’) depends on his verbal dexterity,
he needs to speak his argument for himself: ‘‘Home knows simply the
shortest way to a man’s heart(h). Forget the head.’’ ‘‘The Custom-House
both stages and (re)enacts this scene: domestication in ‘Hawthorne,’ the
oeuvre as a (w)hole, a headless corpse. Its domesticated fowl know
nothing of the wild, care only for security, the lethargy of the next,
the indolence of incubation.’’ Intensely inventive as prose while some-
what derivative as criticism, Dolis’s essay steers its readers through
Hawthorne’s work with amusing  air.
SuperŽ cially more straightforward is the special double issue of ESQ
(46, i–ii [2000]), originally inspired by the special session of the Ameri-
can Literature Association conference (2000) featuring three papers
about the friendship between Melville and Hawthorne. Robert Milder’s
‘‘ ‘The Ugly Socrates’: Melville, Hawthorne, and Homoeroticism’’ (pp. 1–
49) is a complex psychoanalytic reading of Melville’s attachment to
Hawthorne in which Milder acknowledges that ‘‘there is no solid bio-
graphical basis for [Edwin] Miller’s conjecture’’ that Melville made sexual
overtures toward Hawthorne, although, for Milder, Hawthorne’s hasty
34 Hawthorne

departure from the Berkshires clearly ‘‘reawakened the trauma of Allan

Melville’s death’’ for Melville.
The other two essays look more directly at Hawthorne. Thomas R.
Mitchell’s ‘‘In the Whale’s Wake: Melville and The Blithedale Romance ’’
(pp. 51–73) eVectively suggests that Melville and speciŽ cally Moby-Dick
inspired Hawthorne to ‘‘put an extra touch of the devil’’ in his new book,
The Blithedale Romance. He had not been entirely satisŽ ed with The
House of the Seven Gables, Mitchell cogently argues, having read Melville’s
grand book; Hawthorne’s choice of a Ž rst-person narrator may even have
been in uenced by Melville’s Ishmael. Similarly, my essay ‘‘Hawthorne
and Melville: or, The Ambiguities’’ (pp. 75–98) reminds readers that the
Hawthorne and Melville friendship has been good copy ever since Cor-
nelius Mathews Ž rst publicized the writers’ meeting in 1850. Further,
most of the speculation centers on Melville, with Hawthorne typically
cast as a rejecting father-Ž gure, unwilling love-object, or insensible male
(despite his close attachment to other men); but ‘‘whatever Melville
symbolized for Hawthorne —that, like the whiteness of the whale, as yet
remains unsaid.’’ Following Mitchell, I suggest how Melville may have
in uenced Hawthorne’s work. To conclude the issue, the ESQ editors
commissioned an afterword, ‘‘Missing Letters: Hawthorne, Melville, and
Scholarly Desire’’ by Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person (pp. 99–
122), that recapitulates a portion of the foregoing arguments, summarizes
scholarship on the friendship, and acknowledges the authors’ own wish-
ful ‘‘desire’’ for a ‘‘queer alternative to the scenario sketched out by Edwin
Miller,’’ which ‘‘sends chills up’’ their collective spines.
Although Tracy Daugherty’s ‘‘Old Haunts: The Fall of America and Its
Fictions’’ (GaR 55: 121–45) does not exclusively deal with Hawthorne, the
author’s praise for the literature of haunted houses —American litera-
ture —places Hawthorne’s work next to that of Upton Sinclair in its
condemnation of social injustice. But as he rightly observes, Sinclair’s
work, unlike Hawthorne’s, is not haunted; it is topical. Like Poe’s or John
Cheever’s stories (or Wharton’s House of Mirth and William Goyen’s
House of Breath ) Hawthorne builds wrongdoing into public buildings
and private places —customhouses and the interiors of hearts —where the
romancer evocatively joins ‘‘his voice to the long sonata of the dead.’’
Arthur Versluis in Esoteric Origins includes a chapter on Hawthorne
(pp. 81–90) in which he asserts that Hawthorne distrusted the various
currents of Western esotericism, especially spiritualism. Although Ver-
sluis brings little new to the table, his treatment of Hawthorne, alchemy,
Brenda Wineapple 35

and spiritualism moves beyond predictable tales like ‘‘Dr. Heidegger’s

Experiment’’ or novels like Blithedale to Hawthorne’s Elixir of Life manu-
scripts, which still receive scant attention, especially the Septimius Nor-
ton manuscript, which blends Native American legends into the al-
chemical tradition of Europe.

iv Essays on the Novels

a. The Scarlet Letter Eight essays on The Scarlet Letter, previously
delivered as papers at the meeting of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society
(2000) or at the Hawthorne session of the American Literature Associa-
tion (2000), are collected in The Scarlet Letter after 150 Years: A Special Issue
(SAF 29: 3–128), ed. Teresa A. Goddu and Leland Person. Claiming to
‘‘re ect the increasing eVorts of Hawthorne scholars to situate The Scarlet
Letter within nineteenth-century conversations about many cultural is-
sues and practices,’’ the editors launch the volume with Michael Win-
ship’s ‘‘Hawthorne and the ‘Scribbling Women’: Publishing The Scarlet
Letter in the Nineteenth-Century United States’’ (pp. 3–11). Winship
nicely compares the publishing history of Hawthorne’s novel with that of
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin throughout the 19th century to
show that while The Scarlet Letter may have earned far less in the Ž rst years
of its appearance, by 1878 the stereotyped plates of Hawthorne’s novel
were valued at $4,792.38 and those of Stowe’s novel at $4,524.60. Sim-
ilarly, Lesley Ginsberg in ‘‘The ABCs of The Scarlet Letter’’ (pp. 13–31) is
concerned with publishing history. She, however, emphasizes Haw-
thorne’s familiarity with and use of antebellum children’s books and
ingeniously proposes that The Scarlet Letter, like these books, ‘‘achieves
the curious feat of being both revolutionary and non-revolutionary at the
same time: while these literatures promote the progressive and reformist
goals of literacy and self-determinism, they are also remarkably tentative
in their advocacy for social change.’’ Distinguishing her argument from
that of Patricia Crain’s The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from
The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (see AmLS 2000, p. 36)
Ginsberg understands Hawthorne’s novel as a ‘‘model of pedagogical
practices’’ that instruct the Pearl-like reader in language that conceals as
much as it reveals.
Two subsequent essays on The Scarlet Letter interpret the novel racially.
Person’s ‘‘The Dark Labyrinth of Mind: Hawthorne, Hester, and the
Ironies of Racial Mothering’’ (pp. 33–48) makes use of Toni Morrison’s
36 Hawthorne

Playing in the Dark before describing Hester Prynne as a 19th-century

‘‘deviant’’ mother —which is to say, a kind of slave woman. ‘‘While Hes-
ter’s motherhood, constructed discursively and intertextually, does link
her with slave mothers,’’ Person also admits that she ‘‘enjoys some priv-
ileges by virtue of her white racial identity.’’ Identifying all white men
(patriarchs) as slave owners, Person contends that ‘‘Hester’s abject depen-
dence upon patriarchal suVerance for her mothering rights links her to
her slave sisters.’’ By novel’s end, Hester ‘‘considers a kind of Under-
ground Railroad journey to freedom from white men’s power.’’
Intending to demystify the relation between art and commerce, or
more speciŽ cally, authorship and the slave economy, Goddu in ‘‘Letters
Turned to Gold: Hawthorne, Authorship, and Slavery’’ (pp. 49–76)
rightfully remarks that Hawthorne’s work as an editor still remains cor-
doned oV from his ‘‘canonical identity’’ as an artist. Through his so-called
menial work as editor, cutting and pasting the work of others, Haw-
thorne managed to craft a successful authorial identity: ‘‘The romancer is
an editor, a man of business, who traYcs in other people’s property —and
people as property —in order to proŽ t from a ‘rich theme.’ ’’ Made cred-
ible through reference to Hawthorne’s edition of Horatio Bridge’s Journal
of an African Cruiser and his ‘‘Custom-House’’ essay, Goddu’s thesis
occasionally fails to reckon with Hawthorne’s ironic tone in the Journal
and in his letters about it. But she carefully interprets Hawthorne’s sense
of the ‘‘author and his art as operating within a commercial market
economy Ž gured in relation to slavery’’ —a point adumbrated to some
extent by reference to Salem’s commercial history. And by connecting
Hawthorne’s sense of authorship with two Ž gures, the slave and the sailor,
Goddu also notes that ‘‘the author is property to be traded in the mar-
ketplace; however, like the sailor, the author can traYc in the com-
modities issuing from the slave trade in order to make a proŽ t.’’
Authorship is understood in diVerent ways by another pair of essays,
Bryce Traister’s ‘‘The Bureaucratic Origins of The Scarlet Letter ’’ (pp. 77–
92) and Ellen Weinauer’s ‘‘Considering Possession in The Scarlet Letter’’
(pp. 93–112). Traister regards Hawthorne’s stint as surveyor at the Salem
Custom House as a sojourn in public life that coincided with the emer-
gence of an ideology of civic service wherein the ‘‘bureaucratic ideal’’ is
politically neutral. As a result, Hawthorne’s insistence that his literary
vocation exempted him from political partisanship, to say nothing of
political gerrymandering, ‘‘brings Hawthorne and his authorship closer
to a developing bureaucratic ideal.’’ Bringing together this notion of civic
Brenda Wineapple 37

neutrality with antebellum social protest movements, even Transcenden-

talism, Traister also shows how Hawthorne disingenuously aVected his
supposedly apolitical authorship in politically motivated terms, and not
just in ‘‘The Custom-House’’ but in the body of The Scarlet Letter, espe-
cially when the ‘‘shirking diYdence’’ of the narrator ‘‘recalls the carefully
mapped unavailability of the author.’’
Weinauer’s ‘‘Considering Possession in The Scarlet Letter ’’ canvasses
metaphors of witchcraft and demonic possession in ‘‘The Custom-
House’’ to assert how ‘‘dangerously powerful and dangerously disem-
powering’’ Hawthorne considered literary authorship. By correlating ec-
clesiastical trials (such as that of Anne Hutchinson) and 17th-century
witchcraft hysteria with male anxiety about changing economic relations,
and then correlating these events with the antebellum debate about the
distribution of property in marriage, Weinauer regards The Scarlet Letter
as a mediation on ‘‘the threat one individual woman poses to the cove-
nant of marriage and (male) property.’’ Weinauer’s proŽ cient discussion
of Hutchinson, Katherine Harrison, and Anne Hibbins (the latter two
were substantial property owners indicted for witchcraft) presages her
analysis of Hawthorne’s complex relation to Hester Prynne in the after-
math of Seneca Falls: ‘‘For having begun ‘The Custom-House’ with an
assertion regarding his own passive experience of dispossession (the
writer has been ‘taken possession of ’ by an ‘autobiographical impulse’),
Hawthorne ends with an assertion of his own proprietorship over the
materials of his narrative.’’
Manhood —or what T. Walter Herbert calls ‘‘an emerging genre of
manhood’’ —is the subject of his stimulating essay ‘‘Pornographic Man-
hood and The Scarlet Letter ’’ (pp. 108–20), in which he argues that the
genre of pornography emerging in antebellum America (the word ‘‘por-
nography’’ entered the English language in 1850) ‘‘discloses and serves the
sexual consternations of an emerging genre of manhood.’’ In particular,
The Scarlet Letter begins with ‘‘the eroticized punishment of Hester,’’
drawing the reader into a ‘‘hall of mirrors that endlessly replicates the
drama of male-on-female sexual cruelty.’’ Yet the violence perpetrated by
Dimmesdale on himself, argues Herbert, is a kind of self-rape. Dimmes-
dale’s secret self-loathing is Dimmesdale’s secret desire. In other words, he
detests the feminine side of himself, which he both condemns and Ž nds
arousing. Chillingworth operates in a parallel manner, reconstructing
Dimmesdale as ‘‘a ‘woman,’ upon whom to project his disavowed emo-
tional torments, and a pornographic enchantment with the troubled
38 Hawthorne

clergyman soon overcomes him.’’ The novel thus depicts a society of

manhood divided against itself, which happens to be the subject of
Herbert’s forthcoming book about sexual violence and its invisible, abu-
sive logic.
Michael T. Gilmore’s clever, informed ‘‘Hidden in Plain Sight: The
Scarlet Letter and American Legibility’’ (pp. 121–28) concludes the vol-
ume. To Gilmore, Hawthorne’s novel withstands popular pressure to
make all things visible —whether by means of the daguerreotype or a
spiritual world made manifest —and instead encourages an indirect mode
of disclosure that respects both the truth and the need for privacy. Placing
the novel between the culture of the Puritans, who held up life to public
scrutiny, and that of an invasive, pitiless modernity obsessed by revela-
tion, Gilmore suggests that Hawthorne ‘‘overstates seventeenth-century
Boston as an intimate community or gemeinschaft in order to better
discriminate it from the more impersonal society of gesellshaft that was
materializing as he wrote.’’ Dimmesdale’s confession parallels Haw-
thorne’s authorial solution: tell the truth but tell it slant. ‘‘Even though he
[Dimmesdale] acknowledges his sinfulness and does so directly in his
own voice, and in the presence of a thousand witnesses,’’ Gilmore point-
edly observes, ‘‘he manages to achieve the absent position of every writer
who ever addressed an audience on the page.’’ Hawthorne’s vaunted
authorial reticence is but the obverse of his dissection of the human heart,
Gilmore shrewdly adds. ‘‘He can aVord to be candid because he has
averted his face’’ —a position, Gilmore concludes, not unlike that of
psychoanalysis or the cinema, two modes of partial disclosure and partial
anonymity integral to the celebrity culture that Hawthorne’s novel
anticipates.
Like Gilmore, Brook Thomas in ‘‘Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as
Civic Myth’’ (AmLH 13: 181–211) is concerned with the public sphere, but
more in terms of the 19th-century phrase ‘‘good citizenship,’’ which
Hawthorne’s novel conjugates. Set in the 17th century, The Scarlet Letter
‘‘sees US citizenship as an outgrowth of citizenship developed in colonial
New England.’’ Thomas demonstrates that this interpretation depends
on construing the Puritan past teleologically, a project made easier during
the antebellum period of George Bancroft’s American history, and such a
teleological reading of the Puritans is precisely what Hawthorne satirizes.
However, by telling ‘‘the tale of how a ‘fallen woman’ Ž nds redemption by
helping to generate within a repressive Puritan community the begin-
nings of an independent civil society,’’ Hawthorne actually formulates an
Brenda Wineapple 39

exceptionalist myth of America, folding his political vision —a civil au-

thority tempered by the power of sympathy —into a powerful love story.
This aspect of Thomas’s argument reŽ nes the views of Sacvan Bercovitch,
though like Bercovitch Thomas shows how Hawthorne dramatizes the
making of a liberal democracy ‘‘where the voluntary associations located
in civil society exist according to principles of equity and fairness’’ —as
long, of course, as one is not African American.
Thomas considers Chillingworth an asocial villain. By contrast, Beth-
any Reid in ‘‘Narrative of the Captivity and Redemption of Roger
Prynne: Rereading The Scarlet Letter ’’ (SNNTS 33: 247–67) interprets
Chillingworth as a viable ‘‘alternative for Pearl’s social father.’’ To arrive at
her conclusion, Reid insists that Hawthorne presents Chillingworth am-
bivalently, mainly because he, like Pearl, suVers from ‘‘fatherlessness and
its inherent result, a vaguely menacing multiplicity of fathers.’’ Rife with
psychological assumptions —the shipmaster who appears during the
Election Day scene is a ‘‘ghost speaking out of Hawthorne’s personal
past’’ —and biographical misinformation, this essay does at least propose
a reconsideration of Roger Prynne/Chillingworth.
Dorena A. Wright reconsiders Dimmesdale in ‘‘Old Corrupted Faith
of Rome: Arthur Dimmesdale, John Newman, and the Oxford Move-
ment’’ (NHR 27, ii: 1–11) in light of John Henry Newman, later Cardinal
Newman. It is a fortuitous comparison. By extending the insights of
Frederick Newberry and Jenny Franchot about Dimmesdale’s ‘‘Anglo-
Catholicism,’’ Wright reasonably suggests that Hawthorne was likely
aware of the Tractarian controversies roiling the periodicals he typically
read. Plus Newman’s physical fragility, spiritual ardor, and masochistic
asceticism coalesce in Hawthorne’s ambiguous portrait of the Puritan
minister who prefers the outward show of piety to piety itself.
Finally, David S. Reynolds drafts a response to The Scarlet Letter (Novel
History, pp. 229–34), declaring that Hawthorne sensationalized Puritan-
ism for his audience, appealing to the prejudices of his contemporaries by
drawing on the stock characters (clergymen rakes, fallen women, illegiti-
mate children) common in such popular antebellum Ž ction as Sylvester
Judd’s Margaret, George Thompson’s The Countess, and George Lippard’s
The Quaker City. Yet Hawthorne treated his characters and situations
without the ‘‘mechanical prurience and shallow irreverence’’ rife in sensa-
tional literature, and in addition gleaned from Puritanism the impor-
tance of structure and symbol, arranging his plot scrupulously and
thereby reanimating the signiŽ cance of the Puritans.
40 Hawthorne

Essays about Hawthorne’s in uence on contemporary writing con-

tinue to concentrate on Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World. In ‘‘Purloin-
ing The Scarlet Letter : Bharati Mukherjee and the Apocryphal Imagina-
tion’’ (pp. 253–66 in He Said, She Says ) Christian Moraru proposes that
Mukherjee’s novel is an ‘‘apocryphal’’ response to The Scarlet Letter that
manipulates ‘‘the textual and ideological structure of the Hawthornian
‘matrix’ and, through it, a whole paradigm of power, cultural authority,
and representation.’’ But the dense prose never makes clear what is meant
by the Hawthornian ‘‘matrix,’’ and as a result Moraru’s persistent refer-
ence to the ‘‘whole paradigm of Hawthorne’s world’’ takes much about
Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter for granted.
Tom Matchie, on the other hand, Ž nds traces of Hawthorne in the
novels of Louise Erdrich. His ‘‘Tales of Burning Love: Louise Erdrich’s
‘Scarlet Letter’ ’’ (pp. 153–68 in Telling the Story) states that Erdrich
explores ‘‘such Hawthorne-like themes as the mystery between the sexes,
the inner and outer worlds through which it is manifested, the dubious
connection of sexuality to religion, and how various types of personalities
enter into and aVect a marriage or lovers’ union.’’ Hawthorne scholars
will likely dispute Matchie’s depiction of Hawthorne as a romantic or The
Scarlet Letter as a romantic novel, but readers of Erdrich may Ž nd the
essay meaningful.

b. The House of the Seven Gables In ‘‘Inward Criminality and the

Shadow of Race: The House of the Seven Gables and Daguerreotypy’’ (pp.
125–50 in Genuine Article ) Paul D. Gilmore discovers in Ned Higgins,
Matthew Maule, and JaVrey Pyncheon a hypermasculinity that Haw-
thorne relates not just with moral depravity (or ‘‘blackness’’) but with
‘‘racial blackness.’’ In a sinuous if sometimes poorly written argument
Gilmore asserts that for Hawthorne ‘‘race becomes the mode through
which he can imagine moral judgments of manhood’’; and moreover,
Hawthorne fantasizes the moral cleansing ‘‘of middle-class and literary
manhood through the disappearance of racial diVerence.’’ Though his
discussion of race and class resembles David Anthony’s ‘‘Class, Culture,
and the Trouble with White Skin in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven
Gables ’’ (see AmLS 1999, pp. 46–47) Gilmore does attend to Alice
Pyncheon, herself enslaved by Matthew Maule. However, Holgrave es-
capes his racial heritage. He chooses not to enslave Phoebe, and as a
daguerreotypist he is something of a slave himself, imprisoned by a
marketplace that ‘‘potentially enslaves both the writer and intended femi-
Brenda Wineapple 41

nized audience in an economic transaction.’’ But since daguerreotypy

helps convert the racially marked Pyncheons and Maules into a white,
bourgeois family, ‘‘daguerreotypy functions to register and combat the
commercial and sexual dangers of the marketplace and false identity.’’ A
brisk account of daguerreotypy and middle-class respectability concludes
this ambitious chapter. Here Gilmore convincingly limns the elements of
race, class, gender, and literary production troubling to recent critics of
the novel.

c. The Blithedale Romance Devoting the third chapter of Necro Cit-

izenship to The Blithedale Romance, Russ Castronovo enlarges an already
thoughtful thesis about the way liberal, democratic American culture
tends to be preoccupied with psychic health. Using health as a category of
political analysis, he perceives how Blithedale equates mesmerists and
other ‘‘violators of individual privacy’’ with reformers of every stripe. And
since the vogue of mesmerism and spirit-rapping in the 1840s and 1850s
served as a distraction from social injustices and material inequities,
Hawthorne’s exemplary tale of community becomes a narrative ‘‘about
the death of political life’’ which ‘‘condenses the narrator’s anguished
unconscious with the dystopic functioning of a national public sphere.’’
Castronovo’s chapter might usefully be read in conjunction with the
anniversary essays about The Scarlet Letter in SAF by Gilmore and
Weinauer. In addition, his suggestion that Coverdale’s attachment to
passive women is a ‘‘desire to be like these girls, protected from labor and
alienated from heterogeneous participation in the community’’ could be
proŽ tably compared with Herbert’s remarks on masculinity and The
Scarlet Letter in the same issue. But Castronovo contends that ‘‘girlhood
provided male citizens with models of public transparency,’’ a point that
diVers in scope from Herbert’s.
Castronovo’s rich, amply documented cultural thesis is deepened by
his conception of the Veiled Lady not merely as a displacement of ‘‘so-
ciopolitical agitation into a psychospiritual realm of eternal consensus’’
but as the female Ž gure of passivity whose alleged passivity and virginal
incorporeality make the displacement possible. Castronovo points out
that Coverdale rejects the gender and economic issues identiŽ ed with a
womanly, unruly Zenobia; in fact, all Blithedalers do. They ‘‘feign un-
consciousness and sleepwalk past historical conditions that create social
division.’’ And thus Priscilla’s pallid Ž gure ultimately suggests death,
‘‘her public performance as a corpse dramatizes citizenship as an act of
42 Hawthorne

political necrophilia’’ in which citizens turn away from dissension and

unpredictability.
One of the several virtues of Castronovo’s analysis is that by eschewing
contemporary responses to the novel that excoriate Hawthorne for his
conservatism, he can forcefully argue that Blithedale, documenting the
culture’s fascination with ‘‘ghostly disembodiment,’’ indicates how pri-
vate and public life merge in such a way as to make emancipation —and
reform —a personal rather than a political aim. Coverdale’s confession
that he loves the ethereal, almost disembodied Priscilla allows him to
substitute ‘‘individual but still universal feelings of love for materially
speciŽ c (and often messy) understandings of the world.’’ Naturally,
Coverdale remains a bachelor, devoted to himself alone.
In ‘‘Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance’’ (Expl 59: 128–31) Magnus Ullen
alleges that Hawthorne’s source for Coverdale may not have been himself
but Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose poem ‘‘Goodbye, Fair World’’ is
reprinted in Rufus Griswold’s anthology Poets and Poetry of America (1842
edition), to which Coverdale refers at the end of Blithedale. As Coverdale,
Emerson might represent what would have happened to ‘‘an idealist of
Emerson’s ilk’’ had he signed on to the community at Brook Farm.

d. The Marble Faun In ‘‘Miriam and the Conversion of the Jews in

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun’’ (SNNTS 33: 430–43) Au-
gustus Kolich discusses an incident that may reveal another dimension of
Hawthorne’s novel. The seizure of a six-year-old Jewish boy from the
home of his parents by papal soldiers on the grounds that the boy had
been secretly baptized by a house servant and should be raised a Catholic
caused an international brouhaha that permeates Hawthorne’s novel,
suggesting ‘‘the mystery and danger of surviving in the Papal States in the
1850s.’’ Kolich’s fascinating history of Jews in Catholic Rome and their
connection to the republican movement helps him account for Miriam’s
ambiguous character. Miriam ‘‘displays the courage and shrewdness to do
what is necessary to remain alive and free,’’ because for Hawthorne ‘‘she
may be someone who has experienced the trials of conversion, succumb-
ing in name only to the Christian/Catholic hegemony while retaining
connections to her Jewish heritage.’’
The Marble Faun is the subject of Deborah Barker’s ‘‘Cultural Repro-
duction and the Female Copyist,’’ pp. 27–38 in Aesthetics and Gender in
American Literature (Bucknell, 2000), in which she considers The Marble
Brenda Wineapple 43

Faun an illustration of ‘‘nineteenth-century ambivalence about women’s

relation to high culture.’’ Juxtaposing a female copyist (Hilda) with a
female artist (Miriam), Hawthorne presumably prefers the former to the
latter; the female artist is a seductress who beguiles rich patrons. By
contrast, as a handmaiden to the Great Masters, the copyist circulates
their grand work among the ‘‘uninitiated.’’ The submissive woman as
good democrat, she perpetuates the sublime values of a male-dominated
society. Despite such signiŽ cant observations, however, Barker’s in-
terpretation of the novel cannot brook subtlety in the book’s female
characters.
In Ivory Leg Thomas Cooley writes of Donatello’s ‘‘moral rise’’ as a
‘‘fortunate fall into the anxieties of ‘whiteness’ from a blissfully instinctual
state of ‘blackness’ ’’ (pp. 155–77). His argument shares the perspective of
Paul D. Gilmore, except that Cooley renders the house of the seven gables
into a ‘‘house of madness,’’ a place of danger where the dark and regres-
sive past unbalances the sunshiny (white) present, with degeneracy ascen-
dant. Psychologists such as Dugald Stewart, whose work Hawthorne
studied in college, believed the mind to be inherently segregationist, its
attributes divided and hierarchical. Indeed, Cooley’s arguments about
antebellum Ž ction depend on his deŽ nition of antebellum moral and
mental psychology. ‘‘In American Ž ction before 1865,’’ Cooley introduces
his précis of The Marble Faun, ‘‘characters are types because they are
based on a psychology of inborn capacity or faculty.’’ Actually, Cooley’s
argument about Victorian America depends a good deal on Hawthorne,
whose sketches, like ‘‘The Haunted Mind,’’ contain ‘‘tropes of white-
ness’’ —a color that wards oV evil, madness, and the threat of miscegena-
tion —and whose Donatello and Miriam are rescued from ‘‘being slaves to
the ‘base’ or ‘animal’ or ‘savage’ aspects of their natures.’’
A medley of historical, psychological, biblical, and biographical crit-
icism, Cooley’s broad project does not signiŽ cantly alter our sense of The
Marble Faun. And it shares the perspective of many scholars writing
about the novel, such as Monika Müller in her ‘‘Nineteenth-Century
Constructions of Race: Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet
Beecher Stowe’’ (pp. 191–203 in Holding Their Own). Müller juxtaposes
The Marble Faun with Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes and Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin as instances of 19th-century anxieties about race, exempliŽ ed
by the polygenetic race theory of such writers as Josiah Nott. Not surpris-
ingly, Müller asserts that Hawthorne’s Marble Faun is a tale of deter-
44 Hawthorne

ministic racial degeneration, with Donatello more or less doomed from

the start.

v Essays on the Tales and Sketches

David T. Haberly’s ‘‘Hawthorne in the Province of Women’’ (NEQ
74: 580–621) examines the four interrelated ‘‘Legends of the Province-
House’’ from the vantage point of Hawthorne’s life, incorporating histor-
ical analyses of the tales into a biographical one. Haberly quickly sketches
the framework of Hawthorne’s life in the late 1830s, beginning with his
sojourn in Boston as editor of the American Magazine of Useful and Enter-
taining Knowledge when he likely met some of the individuals depicted in
the tales, such as Thomas Waite. Proceeding to an analysis of each
individual tale, Haberly then uses biography to good purpose, focusing,
for example, on a heretofore neglected character, Miss JolliVe in ‘‘Howe’s
Masquerade,’’ whom Haberly links to the working women described in
Hawthorne’s notebooks to suppose that she ‘‘may be read as a represen-
tation of Hawthorne’s ambiguous views about women’s role in society.’’
Even more convincingly, Haberly also argues that she likely represents
Hawthorne himself and the ‘‘representative of post-Revolutionary Amer-
ica and its potential.’’
Haberly elucidates the other three Province-House stories with similar
sophistication. In ‘‘Edward Randolph’s Portrait’’ ‘‘Hawthorne seems to
suggest that the aesthetic act —whether pictorial or literary —has the
potential to re-create and, thereby, illuminate the past.’’ Yet the story
‘‘becomes an aesthetic act that itself denies the potential of such acts,’’
leading Haberly to suppose Hawthorne planned no sequel to it. Circum-
stances in his life changed, according to Haberly, and prompted Haw-
thorne to use the last two Province-House tales, diVerent in tone from the
preceding, to explore ‘‘personal matters involving the real women in his
life.’’ Haberly’s suggestive interpretations of ‘‘Lady Eleanore’s Mantle’’
and ‘‘Old Esther Dudley’’ demonstrate how responsible biographical
criticism can augment the historical, cultural, and formal explications of
such oft-neglected tales.
In ‘‘Bela TiVany, I Presume: Reality and Fiction in ‘Legends of the
Province-House’ ’’ (NHR 27, i: 1–16) Haberly supposes that Bela TiVany,
the internal narrator of the tales, may have been drawn from a living
model, as Thomas Waite, proprietor of the Province House Inn, was.
Unearthing a historical Bela TiVany who may have visited Boston while
Brenda Wineapple 45

Hawthorne lived there, Haberly guesses that Hawthorne used living

sources in this particular interlocking set of tales because his experiences
at the Province-House actually provided him with the structure that
eluded him earlier (although no one actually knows what the structure of
‘‘Seven Tales’’ or ‘‘The Story-teller’’ might have been). But like most
writers Hawthorne frequently did use living sources, albeit amply dis-
guised; the diVerence here seems to be that in the Province-House tales,
he named them, and in doing so brought fact and Ž ction into high relief,
the point well taken though in need of development.
Shifra Hochberg heeds the literary, not historical, roots of another
Hawthorne story in ‘‘The Romance of the Rose as a Possible Source for
Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ ’’ (ELN 39: 48–58), where she ob-
serves that the central metaphor in Hawthorne’s tale is reminiscent of
the analogy of a beautiful young woman and a lovely rose in The Romance
of the Rose. Moveover, the enclosed garden, the fountain of Narcissus,
the deployment of scent, and several comparable themes —including
the celebration of ideal love (Guillaume de Lorris’s portion of The Ro-
mance of the Rose ) with a misogynistic view of women ( Jean de Meun’s
portion of the text) —connect Hawthorne’s story with the medieval
French poem.
Pursuing the Vergilian origins of the American self in American Aeneas
(pp. 297–310) John C. Shields argues in ‘‘The Persistence of the Ameri-
can Aeneas in Hawthorne’’ that ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’’ like
‘‘Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent,’’ reveals just how conversant Haw-
thorne was with Vergil. In fact, in the former story Hawthorne sends
Robin, a perverse Aeneas, into the underworld in what Shields proposes
as a ‘‘dialectic of Adam and Aeneas’’ in which Major Molineux emerges as
the story’s implicit hero, a startling conclusion that deserves further
commentary. So too Colin D. Pearce’s interpretation of the story. In
‘‘Hawthorne’s ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’ ’’ (Expl 60: 19–22) Pearce
regards the tale as an allegory of the changes taking place in New England
during Hawthorne’s lifetime, though without suYcient ampliŽ cation.
But in ‘‘The Black Veil Lifted: A Note on Eliot and Hawthorne’’ (CLAJ
44: 383–90) Ronald E. Sheasby perceptively hears echoes of Hawthorne’s
‘‘The Minister’s Black Veil’’ in George Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil,
though he sensibly notes the diVerences between the two stories. Bruce R.
Magee’s ‘‘ ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and Pilgrim’s Progress ’’ in Essays
(pp. 143–81) revisits the matter of Bunyan’s in uence on Hawthorne,
asserting that ‘‘Young Goodman Brown’’ and the story of ‘‘Little-Faith’’
46 Hawthorne

parallel each other closely and help delineate the puzzling character of
Brown’s wife.
Robert O. Goebel’s ‘‘Film Versions of Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s
Daughter’ ’’ (WVUPP 47: 63–68) is more concerned with Hawthorne as
a source. In this case, Goebel looks at the nine musical, seven dramatic,
and three cinematic adaptations of ‘‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’’ Examining
the Ž lm versions of the tale, Goebel discovers that none of them oVers any
equivalent to the story’s layered preface; that they use scant dialogue from
the tale and almost none of the narration; and that all three prefer
cinematic certainty over Hawthornean ambiguity. However, Goebel con-
cludes warily that all three adaptations do ‘‘purport to convey some
notion of the original,’’ and if we could combine the strengths of each of
them ‘‘the result would probably be respectable.’’

vi Essays on the NonŽ ction

Grace E. Smith’s ‘‘ ‘Chie y about War Matters’: Hawthorne’s Swift Judg-
ment of Lincoln’’ (ATQ 15: 149–61) contemplates the in uence of
Jonathan Swift, particularly Gulliver’s Travels, on Hawthorne’s essay. Ar-
guing that James T. Fields excised Hawthorne’s depiction of Lincoln as
‘‘backwoods humorist’’ from the Atlantic Monthly, she assumes that the
omission inspired Hawthorne to write the series of editorial notes he
included with the essay. But Smith accounts for the essay’s composition
without suYcient awareness of its history. She does not seem to know
that many of the notes were part of Hawthorne’s original plan, and she
derives much of her argument from generalization: ‘‘Hawthorne and
Lincoln were on diVerent sides of the slavery issue and were members of
diVerent parties’’; ‘‘Hawthorne was among many Ž gures, political as well
as literary, who criticized Lincoln.’’ Though Smith’s essay begins with the
reminder, always appropriate, that the voice in Hawthorne’s letters is as
artful as the voice in his tales, she reads many of his letters as if they were
transparent, or as if their political context were clear. And she concludes
that Hawthorne’s editorial notes were more ‘‘damaging’’ —to Lincoln? to
Fields and the Atlantic Monthly ? —than the original passages themselves.
Scott E. Caspar intelligently places Hawthorne’s biography of Franklin
Pierce in a context of several overlapping biographical forms in ‘‘Haw-
thorne, Sparks, and Biography at Midcentury,’’ pp. 193–201 in Construct-
ing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America
(No. Car., 1999). Having been accused (by the Democratic Review, inter
Brenda Wineapple 47

alia) of misrepresenting George Washington in his famous biography of

the Ž rst president, the genteel Jared Sparks defended his tampering with
Washington’s letters as his editorial prerogative. Yet when Hawthorne
published his campaign biography of Pierce, the Democratic Review at-
tacked Sparks in order to elevate Hawthorne’s book and its so-called
literary character, which, as Caspar rightly notes, jibed with the maga-
zine’s political ideology. But in so doing, it altered the deŽ nition of
biography as a literary art.
Rupert Holman’s ‘‘Nathaniel Hawthorne at Greenwich’’ (Symbiosis 5:
69–76) locates Hawthorne’s essay ‘‘A London Suburb’’ (collected in Our
Old Home) within a ‘‘mini-genre of nineteenth-century writings on
Greenwich Fair’’ that includes the work of Dickens and Bayard Taylor as
well as an anonymous London Times reporter who, unlike Taylor, regards
the fair with contempt, especially as it portends a certain degree of sexual
license. Not as comfortable at the fair as Taylor, Hawthorne is not as
condescending as the Times reporter. Rather, he displays, according to
Holman, ‘‘a tendency towards an open, mutually challenging, and re-
sponsible dialogue with the other,’’ whether that ‘‘other’’ be construed in
terms of an English working girl or perhaps a Southern black woman.
And in ‘‘Hawthorne’s Hannah Dustan and Her Troubling American
Myth’’ (NHR 27, i: 17–35) Cynthia Brantley Johnson traces the evolution
of the Hannah Duston myth and its typological signiŽ cance in order to
propose why Hawthorne’s retelling of the story diVers radically in tone
and intent from Cotton Mather’s rendering of it in Magnalia Christi
Americana. Johnson indicates Hawthorne’s ‘‘rage’’ against Duston may be
motivated in part by his ‘‘disapproval of female agency’’ and, less convinc-
ingly, by his inability to ‘‘control’’ the vengeful Duston (as he controls a
Ž ctional character). Certainly, his Hannah Duston diVers from the Ž gure
drawn by Timothy Dwight, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Tho-
reau. But since Hawthorne repudiates the Hannah Duston extolled by
Mather above all, Johnson suggests a case of the anxiety of in uence. No
matter the incarnation, ‘‘Hannah is Mather’s creation and Mather’s sym-
bol, used for Mather’s ends,’’ which means, according to Johnson, that
Hawthorne ‘‘wishes that her story had never been told ’’ (italics hers), at
least not by this most powerful of American mythmakers. Johnson’s
concluding terms are strong, if not as illuminating as one would like even
though her argument is unassailable. In any event, Hawthorne got his
wish, she remarks; the Duston story is now seldom heard.
48 Hawthorne

vii Note
C. E. Frazer Clark Jr. founded the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society with
David B. Kesterson, who writes a moving tribute to Clark, ‘‘In Memo-
riam’’ (NHR 27, ii: 33–35). I too should like to pay tribute to this generous
man, an inspired collector, a scholar, a prince among men and of invalu-
able and kindly assistance to me, always ready to answer a question, oVer
his encouragement, or share what he loved so well.
Union College
3 Melville
John Samson

Though the early works, the short stories, and The ConŽ dence-Man were
largely ignored by critics this year, Moby-Dick continued to receive its
usual large body of criticism, and Pierre, ‘‘Bartleby, the Scrivener,’’ the
poetry, and Billy Budd, Sailor were the focus of substantial critical atten-
tion. Two notable collections appeared: a special double issue of ESQ (46,
i–ii [2000]) on ‘‘The Hawthorne-Melville Relationship,’’ ed. Robert K.
Martin and Leland S. Person; and Melville ‘‘Among the Nations’’: Proceed-
ings of an International Conference, Volos, Greece, July 2–6, 1997 (Kent
State), ed. Sanford E. Marovitz and A. C. Christodoulou. The latter, in its
focus on Melville in international contexts, adds to the developing trend
of seeing Melville comparatively and globally.

i General
Essays concerning Melville’s biography include Mary K. Bercaw Ed-
wards’s ‘‘Melville’s Whaling Years,’’ pp. 27–37 in Melville ‘‘Among the
Nations,’’ which argues for the importance of Wilson L. He in’s un-
published manuscript, ‘‘Herman Melville’s Whaling Years,’’ the result of
extensive research into ships’ logs and other documents. Bercaw gives
several examples of He in’s scholarship, dwelling most fully on the Lucy
Ann mutiny, which formed the basis of the beginning of Omoo. Ekaterini
Georgoudaki’s ‘‘Herman Melville in Thessaloniki: Following the Steps of
European Travelers,’’ pp. 85–107 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ sum-
marizes Melville’s journal entries on the Greek city and compares his
views with those of other visitors. Georgoudaki says that ‘‘Melville’s
moments of pleasure were spoiled by his obsession with metaphysical
speculation’’ and that his complaints about overcrowding and dirtiness
exemplify the stereotyping that Western Europeans tended to practice in
50 Melville

the eastern Mediterranean. Also summarizing Melville’s Greek experi-

ences is Marovitz’s Humanizing the Ideal: Melville and the Greeks (Kent
State University Libraries and Media Services), a short chapbook that
also discusses references to Greece in Melville’s works. Marovitz con-
cludes that ‘‘in Greece, Melville saw the landscape, architecture, and even
the sculpture of the country chie y as line and outline, as matters of
formal composition, rather than as Ž nished works of a fuller, more lifelike
kind.’’ In ‘‘Hawthorne and Melville: or, The Ambiguities’’ (ESQ 46, i–ii
[2000]: 75–98) Brenda Wineapple discusses their relationship and sur-
mises that the Agatha story has little to do with Hawthorne but is
‘‘Melville’s story of abandonment, taken from a chapter in his own psy-
chic history and written from the vantage point of the one left behind at
Hawthorne’s headlong  ight.’’ Wineapple also speculates that the adven-
turous Melville ‘‘was the kind of lad Hawthorne dreamed of being.’’
Christodoulou’s ‘‘The ‘Tragicalness of Human Thought’: An Introduc-
tion to Melville’s Theory of Knowledge,’’ pp. 159–74 in Melville ‘‘Among
the Nations,’’ analyzes the passage on thought from an 1851 letter to
Hawthorne and concludes that Melville is rejecting Aristotle and con-
ceiving of man as a ‘‘double-natured’’ being and of reality as ‘‘nothing but
the mind’s own masks.’’
Two reference works may be useful to Melville scholars. A. Robert Lee’s
four-volume collection, Herman Melville: Critical Assessments (Helm),
reprints selected reviews and critical essays on the body of Melville’s
works. Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock’s Herman Melville A to Z: The
Essential Reference to His Life and Work (Facts on File) may not be essential
to Melville scholars, but it is an accessible introductory reference tool that
includes a dictionary of people, terms, titles, and so on, along with a
chronology, a genealogy, and a ‘‘Categorical Index.’’
Part reference work, part biography, part literary analysis, part cultural
criticism is Clare L. Spark’s huge Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological
Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent State). It centers on her contention
that ‘‘the example of the Melville Revival irradiates an overarching and
hitherto mostly invisible sub-rosa culture war, an upper-class project in
the humanities that took aim at the unpredictable political imaginations
of the newly emancipated lower orders, including those hired to teach
them.’’ Thoroughly grounded in archival research (some of which she
reprints in a 100-page appendix), in cultural and psychoanalytic theory,
and in Melville family biography, Spark’s book begins with a discussion of
the lineage of the radical and conservative Enlightenments, then exam-
John Samson 51

ines Herman Melville’s life, his art, and the in uence of 17th- and 18th-
century libertarian thought, ‘‘restoring faded colors, most particularly the
burnt sienna of Paradise Lost. Newly available evidence for Melville’s
covert and hesitant alignment with the radical Puritans of the Devil’s
Party, long suppressed, urgently requires that interpretations of Captain
Ahab as destructive tyrant be reconsidered.’’ In substantiating this thesis,
Spark provides a thorough and detailed analysis of Moby-Dick, Pierre,
Clarel, and other works. Her main focus, though, is on how early
biographer-critics of the Melville revival tended, for reasons personal and
political, to suppress or repress Ahab-centered readings of the texts and
the more Ahab-like qualities in Melville’s biography. Spark has done
considerable research into the papers of Raymond Weaver, Charles
Olson, Henry A. Murray, Jay Leyda, and others, and she relates their
Melville projects, their lives, and their cultural milieus in interesting
detail documented with copious notes and bibliographical entries.
Several other studies range over a number of Melville’s works. Chris-
topher Sten in ‘‘Melville’s Cosmopolitanism: A Map for Living in a
(Post)Colonialist World,’’ pp. 38–48 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’
argues that Melville’s discovery of the value of other cultures —during his
travels to the South Seas —instilled in him a cosmopolitanism which
‘‘doesn’t simply attempt to ‘reify’ [others’ ] local identities. . . . [N]either
does he advocate the construction of a single, monolithic world culture.’’
Sten traces this attitude through Melville’s novels, focusing mainly on
The ConŽ dence-Man’s cosmopolitan, a character whose ‘‘job in the narra-
tive is to test the faith of the other characters.’’ Sten concludes that
cosmopolitanism is ‘‘a deŽ ning activity of the imagination for Melville.’’
Bryan C. Short’s ‘‘Melville’s Memory,’’ pp. 299–309 in Melville ‘‘Among
the Nations,’’ discusses the novels through Moby-Dick as involving a
memory of adventures that allows a character to establish an authoritative
selfhood; Pierre, though, ‘‘can be read as a primer on the pitfalls of
associationism.’’ Looking more extensively at The ConŽ dence-Man, Short
shows how the discontinuity of the title character undercuts memory as a
source of stability. As Short concludes, ‘‘It is not by leaving memory for
transcendental meanings that we reach a vision of enduring truth but
rather by opening ourselves to the shared witness which selfhood enjoys
as it carves its future out [of ] the interplay between remembered ap-
pearances, imaginative interpretations, and its inward looking awareness
of its response patterns.’’ Timothy Marr’s ‘‘Melville’s Ethnic Conscrip-
tions’’ (Leviathan 3, i: 5–29) shows Melville in his early novels using
52 Melville

ethnic diVerence for his own narrative ends and for expanding the reach
of democracy. SpeciŽ cally, in Typee ‘‘Melville was able to use his charac-
terization of Kory-Kory to naturalize his renegade fabrications and to
personify his textual informants by embodying both through the comic
authority of a ludicrous savage.’’ By the time of Moby-Dick, Marr argues,
Melville had changed his use of ethnic minorities, who now ‘‘act as
representations of forces that resist conscription.’’ Marr discusses Quee-
queg and Fedallah in these terms, then oVers a more extensive analysis of
Babo, who ‘‘represents Melville’s own mutinous attempt to free his own
creative authority from the tyranny of the text.’’ John Peck’s ‘‘Herman
Melville,’’ pp. 107–26 in Maritime Fiction, discusses Typee, White-Jacket,
Moby-Dick, and Billy Budd, Sailor in the context of sea Ž ction and
maritime history. Melville and Joseph Conrad, Peck says, ‘‘are alert to
those aspects of our perception of the sea and the experience of going to
sea that bring to life the implicit tensions of the adventure narrative they
are constructing.’’ Peck’s analysis stresses how Melville challeged conven-
tions and received structures; for example, Moby-Dick particularly strains
the limits of the sea story at a time when ‘‘maritime activity started to lose
its central position in the American imagination.’’ Peck locates Billy
Budd, Sailor in the context of end-of-the-century psychology, again link-
ing Melville with Conrad as progenitors of modernism. James Emmett
Ryan’s ‘‘Melville in the Brotherhood: Freemasonry, Fraternalism, and the
Artisanal Ideal,’’ pp. 71–84 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ begins
by outlining the history of freemasonry in America, then argues that
‘‘Melville’s themes of fraternalism and craft were dovetailed with the
fraternal concerns held by large numbers of nineteenth-century Ameri-
can men and expressed through the literature of freemasonry.’’ Ryan then
examines these ideas in Moby-Dick, ‘‘The Paradise of Bachelors,’’ and
‘‘The Bell-Tower.’’
John D. Reeves’s Windows on Melville (Rutledge) is neither scholarly
nor critically sophisticated and adds little to the body of criticism. Dis-
cussing ‘‘philosophical themes’’ in Moby-Dick, Reeves argues that ‘‘Mel-
ville’s thought touched at more points the re ections of Baruch Spinoza
(1632–77) than those of any other.’’ Typee and Omoo he sees as ‘‘a breath
of fresh air’’ that demonstrates Melville’s ability to be a captivating story-
teller, while Billy Budd, Sailor evinces Melville’s awareness of Guert Gan-
sevoort’s ‘‘troubled conscience’’ over the Somers mutiny. Identifying Mel-
ville with his narrator, Reeves stresses Melville’s conservative respect for
authority. In ‘‘Melville’s Medusas,’’ pp. 287–96 in Melville ‘‘Among the
John Samson 53

Nations,’’ Dennis Berthold supplements an earlier essay on the subject

(see AmLS 1997, p. 58). Here he shows that throughout his works ‘‘Mel-
ville’s web of Medusa allusions helps explain his evolving politics and the
contradictory tendencies they held in tension.’’ Berthold traces the his-
tory of the Medusa image, full of ambivalences, then discusses Melville’s
use of it in ‘‘At the Hostelry’’ and ‘‘Naples in the Time of Bomba.’’ Finally,
MSEx (121: 7–11) includes three brief notes on pedagogy: Patricia S.
Rudden’s ‘‘Bartleby on the Ferry: Teaching Melville in Brooklyn,’’ Mark
Dunphy’s ‘‘Viewing Melville Through Bifocals: An Interdisciplinary
Look at Moby-Dick,’’ and Richard King’s ‘‘The ‘Line’ Between Lath and
Plaster.’’
A number of essays compare Melville to other writers. Marovitz in
‘‘Shakespearean Resonance in Moby-Dick and Pierre,’’ pp. 267–76 in
Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ uses David Young’s work on Shakespearean
tragedy to examine the fusion between style and structure. Marovitz
discusses Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth with regard to Moby-Dick and
Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and particularly Measure for Measure with
regard to Pierre. This comparison ‘‘helps to illuminate Melville’s com-
positional method as well as thematic and structural matters in the
Ž ction.’’ Maryhelen C. Harmon’s ‘‘Ideality, Reality, and Inspiration:
Melville and Wordsworth in Rome,’’ pp. 108–18 in Melville ‘‘Among the
Nations,’’ notes a number of biographical similarities between the two
authors, then argues that ‘‘Wordsworth’s central poetic theme of the
correspondence of stimulation and deferred sensation (‘emotion recol-
lected in tranquility’), his word choice (‘the language really used by men,’
‘a man speaking to men’), as well as the British poet’s concept of artistic
creation (‘the spontaneous over ow of powerful feelings’) . . . are embed-
ded in Melville’s Italian journal’’ and in his lecture ‘‘Statues in Rome.’’ In
‘‘Currents in Common: Christianity in Selected Writings of Melville and
Kierkegaard,’’ pp. 188–97 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ Hendrika
Klijn Neuburger argues that ‘‘albeit from diVerent perspectives and in
dissimilar contexts, both authors expose the spiritual poverty and dearth
of compassion in the general avowal of traditional Christian faith.’’ Pierre
has a ‘‘Kierkegaardean voice,’’ and the title character exhibits what
Kierkegaard calls ‘‘a self-consuming despair.’’ In short, both Melville and
Kierkegaard attacked 19th-century Christianity to ‘‘help instigate a Moral
Rebirth.’’ Glen Robert Gill’s ‘‘ ‘The Sea Has Many Voices’: Robert
Lowell’s ‘The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket’ and the in uence of T. S.
Eliot’’ (YER 17, iv: 8–22) brie y discusses how Lowell used Moby-Dick
54 Melville

and Battle-Pieces in composing his poem. Melville ‘‘Among the Nations’’

includes a section on ‘‘Melville and the Visual Arts’’ (pp. 409–84) in
which Elizabeth Schultz, Wyn Kelley, Robert K. Wallace, Charles Watts,
Dorsey Kleitz, and Timothy Marr relate Melville to European artists,
William Kienbusch, Frank Stella, Beatrice Cenci, orientalism, Elihu Ved-
der, J. M. W. Turner, and Islamic architecture.

ii Early Works
Milton Riegleman in ‘‘Looking at Melville’s First Hero Through a Ho-
meric Lens: Tommo and Odysseus,’’ pp. 201–08 in Melville ‘‘Among the
Nations,’’ sees Melville’s narrator, like Odysseus, as essentially a wanderer
‘‘radically unconnected . . . tetherless, unattached to place or family.’’
Randall CluV ’s ‘‘ ‘Thou Man of the Evangelist’: Henry Cheever’s Review
of Typee ’’ (Leviathan 3, i: 61–71) identiŽ es the author of an in uential and
vituperative review in the New York Journal. Cheever himself had been in
Hawai’i visiting the missionaries at the time Melville was there, and his
knowledge of the islands and his evangelical bias made Melville’s state-
ments in Typee all the more incendiary. John Bryant’s ‘‘The Native Gazes:
Sexuality and Self-Colonization in Melville’s Typee,’’ pp. 234–42 in
Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ discusses three kinds of gazes Melville
attributed to the natives: the gaze of wonder, the gaze of control, and the
gaze of sympathy. For Melville, ‘‘the act of writing Typee was the enact-
ment of a gaze of control over himself, his past, and his emergent art.’’
Bryant examines references to ‘‘gaze’’ in the text and uses the manuscript
fragment to show how Melville developed Fayaway’s ‘‘feminized gaze of
sympathy.’’ Ben Rogers in ‘‘The Name ‘Mardi’ and Seventeenth-Century
Maps’’ (ANQ 14, i: 23–24) argues that Melville may have gotten his title
from Italian maps: Mar di for ‘‘Ocean of.’’ In ‘‘The American Character,
the American Imagination, and the Test of International Travel in Red-
burn,’’ pp. 49–60 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ Marvin Fisher sees
Melville as a subversive writer whose criticism is directed at ‘‘those
qualities in the American character that abetted the moral hypocrisy and
an impoverished imagination.’’ Fisher identiŽ es this character in Cotton
Mather, Ben Franklin, and the Connecticut Wits, all of whom contrib-
uted to the attitude of Redburn, who, ‘‘tested by the novelty of foreign
travel, . . . denies the lessons of his own experience and maintains the
Ž xed ideas or ideological preconceptions of his puritan forebears, his pro-
vincial upbringing, and his patriotic clichés.’’ Gail H. CoZer’s ‘‘Greeks
John Samson 55

and Romans in White-Jacket : The Politics of Melville’s Classicism,’’

pp. 209–17 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ is an insightful, thoroughly
researched historical study. She argues that ‘‘in the politics of Melville’s
own time and place, ‘Roman’ meant conservative, that is ‘Whig,’ while
‘Greek’ signiŽ ed liberal or ‘Democrat,’ ’’ terms carried over to the literary
war between the Knickerbocker group and Young America. CoZer de-
scribes Melville’s commentary on this situation in White-Jacket, where
the oYcers are described as Roman and the men as Greek. Thus, on a
deep level ‘‘Melville’s book is a satire of literary politics and publishing.’’

iii Moby-Dick
Several studies make good use of historical materials to examine the
novel. Tom Quirk’s ‘‘The Judge Dragged to the Bar: Melville, Shaw, and
the Webster Murder Trial,’’ pp. 81–96 in Nothing Abstract, describes the
famous 1850 trial of a Harvard professor accused of murdering a Boston
Brahmin and the resulting public outcry against Melville’s father-in-law,
who had given the jury an instruction that many saw as a demand for
conviction. As Melville was working on Moby-Dick, Quirk says, he ‘‘was
intensely interested in the sorts of issues the case raised —the nature of
innocence and guilt; the determination of malice and malicious intent;
the fate of murderers; or the incompatibility of divine judgments, abso-
lute and incontrovertible, and human judgment,  awed and contin-
gent.’’ Quirk notes several references to the case in the novel, then shows
how Melville re ected again, in Billy Budd, Sailor, on Shaw’s role in the
case. In ‘‘The Style of Lima: Colonialism, Urban Form, and ‘The Town-
Ho’s Story,’ ’’ pp. 61–70 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ Wyn Kelley
examines ‘‘three dimensions of the Ž gure of Lima: Ž rst as an urban form
containing a plaza capable of openly enacting cultural con ict, second as
a site from which to engage romantic American historiography, . . . and
third as a model for a distinctive ‘style’ of narrative which stages con ict
as a monumental national drama while at the same time revealing the
more sordid operations of colonial power.’’ Kelley shows Ishmael’s narra-
tive recognizing and overturning these qualities, which Melville would
again challenge in ‘‘Benito Cereno.’’ Yukiko Oshima in ‘‘The Red Flag of
the Pequod/Pequot: Native American Presence in Moby-Dick,’’ pp. 254–
66 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ argues that ‘‘Tashtego plays substan-
tial roles’’ in a number of scenes. Melville juxtaposes him with images of
whiteness, indicating that Melville sided with the Native Americans
56 Melville

against the encroaching and destructive white culture. Using the history
of the Pequot war, Oshima likens Ahab to Amerindians and writes that
‘‘it is as if Melville were to raise the ghost of the Pequot through Ahab of
the Pequod.’’ In ‘‘Pythagoras and Nonduality: Melville among the Pre-
Socratics,’’ pp. 140–58 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ Rachela Permen-
ter uses the Pythagorean concept of ‘‘(non)duality to indicate ‘the two-
and-the-one,’ . . . the coexistence of ‘two’ and ‘one.’ ’’ This concept also
includes a view of the world as a  uid mixture or mingling, a concept that
Permenter sees informing the ‘‘Loomings’’ chapter, which exhibits the
(non)duality of Truth and which makes references to Pythagoras. The
ultimate tragedy of the novel is that ‘‘the truth is in forms of (non)duality,
but a sustained perception of it by mortals is fatal.’’ Thomas R. Mitchell’s
‘‘In the Whale’s Wake: Melville and The Blithedale Romance ’’ (ESQ 46, i–
ii [2000]: 51–73) recounts the Hawthorne-Melville friendship and Haw-
thorne’s reactions to Moby-Dick and argues that Blithedale ‘‘bears impor-
tant traces of [Melville’s] in uence.’’ Its Ž rst-person narrative, its water
imagery, and its character Hollingsworth may have been spurred by
Moby-Dick.
Frank Lentricchia in his novel Lucchesi and the Whale (Duke) includes
a section, ‘‘Chasing Melville’’ (pp. 43–81), in which his narrator discusses
Moby-Dick, ‘‘which is nothing less than an abandoned son’s . . . Ž nal
retort to the voids of the Father God.’’ Locating this sense of abandon-
ment in Melville’s and Ishmael’s biography, Lucchesi sees writing as a
counterforce. ‘‘Melville’s is a miraculous, nearly triumphant eVort to
avoid the dull depth of deep meaning,’’ he says; ‘‘to stay at the thin
variegated surface of sensuous life and Ž gurative play, he cherishes that
thinness of textual tissue, only domain of the aesthetic impulse.’’ Most
important to Melville’s novel, Lucchesi argues, are the elements he calls
‘‘antistory,’’ where Melville, anticipating Joyce, celebrates writing for
itself as opposed to moving the plot forward. Through these elements of
antistory Melville not only confronts the void but also produces an
aYrmation of art, ‘‘the mortal yes of metaphor against the metaphysics of
nihilism.’’
The relation of Melville’s novel to the visual arts is a major concern of
several critics. In Floodgates of the Wonderworld: A Moby-Dick Pictorial
(Kent State) Robert Del Tredici reproduces his pen-and-ink and silk-
screen responses to Melville’s text. In his postscript Del Tredici recounts
his engagement with the novel: Melville’s ‘‘way of viewing life from the
brink, through a lens darkly, not assuming happy endings, not yielding to
John Samson 57

despair, helped me a hundred and Ž fty years afterward to better navigate

my own late great American century.’’ The volume also includes intro-
ductions by Elizabeth Schultz, Jill B. Gidmark, and Robert K. Wallace
discussing Del Tredici’s art and its impact on teaching the novel. In
‘‘Visualizing Race: Images of Moby-Dick ’’ (Leviathan 3, i: 31–60) Schultz
discusses how racial minorities are depicted in illustrations and other art
works concerning Melville’s novel. From the 1920s to the present, Schultz
says, ‘‘these images substantiate a national movement toward multi-
culturalism, [but] they also show the egregious persistence of racial and
racist readings of Moby-Dick ’s characters of color.’’ Schultz provides
detailed descriptions and readings of these images of Queequeg, Fedal-
lah, and so on, giving Melville scholars a lively and fully illustrated
account. Steven Zucker in ‘‘Confrontations with Radical Evil: The Am-
biguity of Myth and the Inadequacy of Representation’’ (Art History 24:
379–400) concludes his analysis of 1940s and 1950s abstract expression-
ism by presenting Moby-Dick as a literary model that painters such as
Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and William Baziotes followed. As
Zucker says, ‘‘the story functions as a condemnation of that aspect of
myth-making which creates an entity of primordial evil as the Nazis
would deŽ ne the Jews in the next century . . . [and] relocates the seed of
evil in the self.’’ Terry W. Thompson in ‘‘Melville’s Moby-Dick ’’ (Expl 59:
130–32) identiŽ es the painting in the Spouter Inn as depicting Golgotha
and the cruciŽ xion, to which Melville again refers with the three masts of
the Pequod. Anna Hellén in ‘‘Melville and the Temple of Literature,’’
pp. 329–44 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ uses the metaphor of the
romantic temple to argue that in Moby-Dick Melville attempts ‘‘to estab-
lish a temple of literature set apart from the reductive Grub-Street aspects
of literary production,’’ while later in his literary career he turned from
the market to the ‘‘museum space’’ of poetry. Finally, Leviathan devotes a
special issue (3, ii) to ‘‘Artists after Moby-Dick,’’ which contains descrip-
tions and samples of three exhibitions: ‘‘Chasing Moby-Dick Across Paper
and Canvas: Five Decades of Free-Floating Literary Art,’’ curated by
Robert K. Wallace; ‘‘ ‘The Common Continent of Men’: Visualizing
Race in Moby-Dick,’’ curated by Elizabeth Schultz; and ‘‘Moby-Dick :
History of a Loose-Fish: Manuscript, Print, and Culture,’’ curated by
John Bryant.
Several shorter essays deal with more limited aspects of the text. Eric C.
Brown in ‘‘Shakespeare’s Richard III and the Masthead in Melville’s
Moby-Dick ’’ (ANQ 14, i: 3–5) identiŽ es a speech by Hastings (act 3, scene
58 Melville

4) as a major source for the conclusion of chapter 35. Bernard J. Lyons and
Thomas F. HeVernan’s ‘‘Dutch Pipes and Stubb’s Pipe’’ (MSEx 121: 1–2)
describes a link between Melville and Irving. Inger Hunnerup Dalsgaard
in ‘‘ ‘The Leyden Jar’ and ‘The Iron Way’ Conjoined: Moby-Dick, the
Classical and Modern Schism of Science and Technology,’’ pp. 243–53 in
Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ uses these two characterizations of Ahab to
show how he embodies a key problem in 1850s America, where there was
‘‘a growing gap in understanding between the learned scientists and the
practical engineers.’’ Ahab is a Promethean scientist and ‘‘a master of
practical engineering’’ whose single-minded pursuit destroys ‘‘good re-
publican values.’’ In ‘‘Esotericism, SacriŽ ce, Democracy: Alternative Pol-
itics of Tragedy in Nietzsche and Melville,’’ pp. 310–28 in Melville ‘‘Among
the Nations,’’ Andreas Kriefall uses René Girard’s theory of scapegoating
to discuss the political and religious elements of Ahab’s quest. He argues
that we can see ‘‘the forms of esoteric, sacriŽ cial thinking exposed in
Moby-Dick ’s portrayal of Ahab. In other words, the moral and political
catastrophe warned against in Melville’s tragic, philosophical art is ac-
tively pursued in Nietzsche’s artistic philosophy of tragedy.’’

iv Pierre through The ConŽ dence-Man

William V. Spanos in ‘‘Pierre’s Extraordinary Emergency: Melville and
‘The Voice of Silence’ ’’ (Boundary II 28 ii–iii: 105–31, 133–55) uses post-
modern theory to situate Melville in a global perspective as critic of the
myth of American exceptionalism. When Pierre’s world is overturned by
Isabel, ‘‘the de-centering that Pierre undergoes is essentially ontologi-
cal . . . [but] it is also sociopolitical.’’ Melville exposes the artiŽ ciality
of American discourse, which Spanos says is best articulated by An-
tonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, a society’s truth discourse. More
speciŽ cally, Melville reveals ‘‘the American cultural memory’s will to
monumentalize the American past in its excessive eVort to annul —to
silence —the ambiguities that would undermine its authority.’’ Pierre’s
abandonment of this discourse leads to the various crises he subsequently
experiences. A counterpart of the crisis of hegemony, Spanos argues, is
the pervasive presence of silence in the novel: ‘‘this voice of silence —this
‘saying’ of what the thinking of the dominant American culture renders
unsayable . . . constitutes Melville’s most revolutionary legacy to the
postmodern occasion.’’ In ‘‘ ‘The Ugly Socrates’: Melville, Hawthorne,
and Homoeroticism’’ (ESQ 46, i–ii [2000]: 1–49) Robert Milder uses the
John Samson 59

concept of love from Plato’s Symposium to argue that ‘‘what Melville was
conscious of Ž nding in and through Hawthorne was the Ž gurative ‘other’
who drew forth and completed his fragmented self.’’ Hawthorne’s with-
drawal from the Berkshires, though, aVected Melville profoundly, as
expressed in the ‘‘mourning and melancholia’’ in Pierre. Milder uses the
theories of Freud and John Bowlby to discuss these issues in Melville’s
novel, whose title character is a ‘‘parodic Ž ctionalization of his younger
self.’’ Milder’s informed and insightful essay includes not just Pierre but
also the later poetry; he concludes that Melville ‘‘himself did not know’’ if
he was homoerotic in his relationship with Hawthorne. Sianne Ngai in
‘‘Moody Subjects/Projectile Objects: Anxiety and Intellectual Displace-
ment in Hitchcock, Heidegger, and Melville’’ (Qui Parle 12, ii: 15–55)
compares Pierre with Vertigo and Being and Time and asserts that each
presents a concept of anxiety that qualiŽ es Freud’s theory of anxiety as
projection. Ngai connects two locations of Pierre’s anxiety, women and
writing, which are ‘‘consolidated in the Ž gure of Isabel herself.’’ Melville
presents further anxiety-producing negativity spacially in the Terror
Stone, in Pierre’s writing, and in his dream of Enceladus. This last part of
book 25 Ngai sees as a redoubling of projection that counters Pierre’s
initial anxiety occasioned by Isabel’s foreign femininity. Thus ‘‘anxiety
nonetheless comes to assume its prominent role in structuring the ‘philo-
sophically stylized’ quests for truth, knowledge, and masculine agency.’’
In ‘‘Melville’s Post OYce: A Possible Model for the Church of the Apos-
tles’’ (MSEx 120: 1–5) Patricia Spence Rudden discusses how the former
Middle Dutch Church became the uptown post oYce in 1845 and thus
may have been a model for the setting in Pierre. Rudden speculates that
the change in the building ‘‘may have seemed to him an especially appro-
priate metaphor for his own soul’s abandonment of his childhood Cal-
vinist faith.’’ She also sees the Postmaster, who could literally look over
the other workers, as a model for Plinlimmon, who is a ‘‘Hawthorne
surrogate.’’
‘‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’’ continues to receive sound critical attention.
In ‘‘Melville’s Wall Street: It Speaks for Itself ’’ ( JSSE 36: 9–24) Matthew
Guillen discusses the story in the context of the social conditions in lower
Manhattan in Melville’s day. It is ‘‘the moral insularity of a Ž nancial com-
munity anent the social ills accompanying New York’s diverse and sud-
den population growth during the Ž rst half of the nineteenth century —
the Ž rst strains of urban blight and personal alienation —which lies at the
center of Melville’s tale.’’ Guillen traces the development of the New York
60 Melville

slums, noting how close Melville and Wall Street were to this blight, yet
Melville’s narrator, like Wall Street itself, remains oblivious to the urban
poor, represented by Bartleby. Finally, Guillen examines a possible source
for the postscript: an essay, Ž rst published in the Albany Register, concern-
ing the Dead Letter OYce and revealing that many of the dead letters
were addressed to Irish immigrants to New York. Basem L. Ra’ad’s ‘‘Un-
easiness in ‘Bartleby’: Melville and Lockean Philosophy,’’ pp. 175–87 in
Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ notes that in An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding Locke conceives that uneasiness is ‘‘the chief spur to hu-
man industry and action.’’ Ra’ad traces the prevalence of this and related
terms in the story, suggesting that ‘‘what is particularly portentous about
uneasiness is that it represents a set of emotions and priorities to which
only the lawyer and other characters become subjected —whereas Bar-
tleby does not feel uneasiness at all.’’ Ra’ad also shows that Locke’s
concept of preference indicates that Bartleby is asserting freedom in
preferring not. Jane Desmarais in ‘‘Preferring Not To: The Paradox of
Passive Resistance in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ ’’ ( JSSE 36: 25–39)
attempts to Ž nd ‘‘a way of transcending the distinction between a politi-
cal and a psychological reading’’ of the story. The former sees Bartleby as a
hero of passive resistance, the latter as a victim of neurotic vulnerability.
Applying psychological theories of eating disorders to Melville’s repeated
images of eating and walls, Desmarais identiŽ es Bartleby’s behavior as
typical of anorexics/bulimics. He ‘‘cannot move beyond a state of self-
denial . . . [for] he would have to dissolve some of the boundaries and
walls and admit (in both senses of the word) assistance (and existence).
He is concerned most of all to protect himself from invasion.’’ Robert
Weisbuch in ‘‘Dickens, Melville, and a Tale of Two Countries,’’ pp. 234–
54 in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre
David, discusses how Bleak House may have been in uenced by The
House of the Seven Gables, a fact that Melville may have noticed in
reviews. Melville’s response was ‘‘Bartleby,’’ ‘‘a rejoinder to Dickens’s
apparent appropriation of Hawthorne.’’ The story’s de ation of Adamic/
Edenic myths, its references to Chancery, and its characters all show
Melville responding to Dickens’s novel. Haskell Springer’s ‘‘A Web for
‘Bartleby’ for Teachers, Students, and Scholars’’ (Kairos 6, i: n. p.) de-
scribes his Web site, which contains the Putnam’s and Northwestern-
Newberry versions of the text, explanatory notes, a history of the text,
sources and analogues, and an extensive bibliography (with many items
linked to full-text essays). For scholars, Springer says, ‘‘this edition pro-
John Samson 61

vides you with a number of time- and money-saving resources for your
investigations.’’
Scott A. Kemp in ‘‘ ‘They But Re ect the Things’: Style and Rhetorical
Purpose in Melville’s ‘The Piazza Tale’ ’’ (Style 35: 50–78) examines what
he calls ‘‘arguably the most stylistically embellished tale in the Melville
oeuvre.’’ Analyzing the 1856 reviews of The Piazza Tales, Kemp notes that
reviewers comment on the volume’s peculiar style, an issue recent crit-
icism has tended to avoid. He then looks at Mardi and Moby-Dick as
precursors to the style of Melville’s tale. There ‘‘the stylistic excess of the
narrator’s sentences illustrates at once his Old World preoccupations and
his unwillingness directly to confront reality, a reality materially deŽ ned
by economic deprivation.’’ In opposition to the narrator’s antirepublican
stance is Marianna, representing a New World reality. Kemp provides a
thorough and detailed analysis of the narrator’s syntax and diction, con-
trasting them to Marianna’s less baroque style. Melville’s lesson is that ‘‘we
must actively, consciously engage others in such a way that communal
interests are upheld, and the republic that America is supposed to be is
maintained.’’
Three comparative essays deal with ‘‘Benito Cereno.’’ In ‘‘Babo’s
Great-Great Granddaughter: The Presence of Benito Cereno in Green
Grass, Running Water’’ (AICRJ 25, iii: 27–46) Robin Riley Fast sees
Melville’s tale and Thomas King’s 1993 novel in a revealing dialogue that
is ‘‘both theoretic/political and generic/structural’’ or ‘‘a collaborative
engagement . . . that honors Melville’s perceptions and his art while it
critically reimagines their possibilities.’’ King’s project, Fast argues, in-
volves restoring Babo’s voice, silenced by his execution at the tale’s end,
and establishing the possibility of hope for American minorities’ voices.
R. Bruce Bickley Jr. in ‘‘John, Brer Rabbit, and Babo: The Trickster and
Cultural Power in Melville and Joel Chandler Harris,’’ pp. 97–109 in
Trickster Lives, argues that Babo has aYnities with two Ž gures from
African American folklore, John-the-slave and Brer Rabbit. The former
plays on his master’s gullibility to evade work or gain a modicum of
freedom, while the latter is of small stature and uses his wits to achieve his
goals. Bickley, however, provides no evidence of Melville’s knowledge of
these traditions. John D. Cloy’s ‘‘Fatal Underestimation —Sue’s Atar-Gull
and Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ ’’ (SSF 35 [1998]: 241–49) presents the
similarities between Eugène Sue’s title character and Babo, both of whom
use intelligent strategies to dupe whites and gain revenge.
John T. Matteson in ‘‘Grave Discussions: The Image of the Sepulcher
62 Melville

in Webster, Emerson, and Melville’’ (NEQ 74: 419–46) shows that ‘‘in
the struggle to shape public memory, the need for cultural continuity and
a stable concept of national identity contended against the impulses
toward revision and reinterpretation that are essential to art.’’ He exam-
ines Daniel Webster’s speech at the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monu-
ment and Emerson’s recognition of ‘‘what Webster had not paused to
consider: that the artifacts of memory —relics, monuments, even written
texts —freeze and distort memory even as they appear to preserve it.’’
Matteson brie y discusses Melville’s reaction to the Revolutionary tradi-
tion in Israel Potter, but he focuses more extensively on monuments and
memory in Moby-Dick, which ‘‘refuses to eulogize.’’ Instead, the images
of sepulcher that Melville presents in the novel are deceptive and com-
plex, raising problematic issues concerning death, burial, and commem-
oration. Hennig Cohen’s ‘‘Melville and Diogenes the Cynic,’’ pp. 131–39
in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ discusses the possible sources, mainly
Diogenes Laertius and Pierre Bayle, of Melville’s knowledge of Diogenes.
Cohen notes that ‘‘as Melville matured, Diogenes reference became one
way of voicing the con ict between acceptance and skepticism, trust
and no trust, heart and head.’’ Cohen uses the character Pitch in The
ConŽ dence-Man as his primary example of one who ‘‘assumes the role of
misanthropic cynic to protect himself.’’ He concludes by examining the
references to Diogenes in Melville’s late poem ‘‘The Apparition.’’ In
‘‘Melville,’’ pp. 91–104 in Esoteric Origins, Arthur Versluis begins by
examining Melville’s reference to Rosicrucianism in his poetry and in The
ConŽ dence-Man. Versluis concludes, though, that Melville is more con-
cerned with another form of esotericism: Gnosticism. As Versluis writes,
Melville’s ‘‘works remain ultimately as a testimony to what must be called
modern, essentially areligious or existentialist Gnosticism.’’ He sees Ahab
and Ishmael as overtly Gnostic and argues that Gnostic thought forms
the center of Moby-Dick. He then turns to Clarel, where he Ž nds that the
sections ‘‘The Dominican’’ and ‘‘In ConŽ dence’’ show further evidence
of Melville’s engagement with Gnosticism.

v Poetry and Late Works

In The Poems of Herman Melville (Kent State) Douglas Robillard reprints
Battle-Pieces, John Marr and Other Sailors, and Timoleon, Etc., along with
some selections from Clarel. His introduction (pp. 1–49) provides a
detailed summary of these volumes and relates the poems to Melville’s
John Samson 63

journals and his unpublished poetry. Robillard sees Battle-Pieces as care-

fully arranged but uneven, with ‘‘some of the weaker poems composed to
Ž ll in an idea, a theme, a sense of direction.’’ He then summarizes the
main characters in Clarel, which ‘‘is about aspects of landscape, religious
feeling, and cultural and historical labyrinths.’’ John Marr is also tightly
organized around the title character’s search for ‘‘the catharsis of sea
memories.’’ Timoleon, like Clarel, centers on ‘‘the pilgrim who ceaselessly
attempts to gain . . . knowledge of the world.’’ Mustafa Jalal in ‘‘ ‘Battle-
Pieces and Aspects of the War’: The Novelist as Poet: A Study of the
Dramatic Poetry of Herman Melville’’ (ASInt 39, ii: 71–85) discusses how
Melville ‘‘created a poetry of multiple genres, diVerent from lyric poetry,
in the sense that it is a fundamentally polyphonic or dramatic poetry
which adopts, in its basic technique, the creation of characters and
dramatic voices.’’ It is this focus on character and drama that Jalal calls
novelistic, and he devotes most of the essay to explicating these qualities
in ‘‘The Con ict of Convictions.’’ The poem ‘‘is a manifestation of the
universal idealism which Melville imagines at the heart of things.’’ Jalal
concludes that the poem in its dialogic form, its treatment of good and
evil, and its idea of history ‘‘might stand as an epitaph for the temper of
the entire collection.’’ In ‘‘Clarel and Omeros, ‘Odes’ with a Grecian
Turn,’’ pp. 549–57 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ Jill B. Gidmark sees a
‘‘deep kinship’’ between Melville’s poem and the epic by Derek Walcott,
which is ‘‘a mythical extension of what Clarel might have become in a
more intentionally multicultural milieu.’’
Three studies examine the classical roots of Melville’s poetry. Richard
Hardack’s ‘‘ ‘Pan and the Pagan Oracles’: Greek Nature and American
Identity in the Writings of Herman Melville,’’ pp. 218–33 in Melville
‘‘Among the Nations,’’ discusses the importance of Pan and pantheism in
the American Renaissance, where ‘‘transcendental American nature is
expressed as an incarnation of a pagan Greek cosmology.’’ Melville’s
pantheism comes not only from Emerson but also from Goethe, Native
American belief systems, and especially Polynesia. Hardack sees Pan and
pantheism in many of Melville’s protagonists, who ‘‘to overcome their
mortal, male nature . . . seek the divine diVusion of Pan’s animated
 owers and trees.’’ However, Hardack Ž nds ‘‘the best and most con-
densed example’’ of these references in Melville’s poetry, and he traces Pan
and pantheism in ‘‘The Parthenon,’’ ‘‘The Archipelago,’’ Clarel, and
other verses. Lyon Evans Jr. in ‘‘The SigniŽ cance of Melville’s Greece
Poems,’’ pp. 119–28 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’ argues for the signiŽ -
64 Melville

cance of the ‘‘Fruit of Travel’’ sequence in Timoleon, for it shows that

‘‘Melville, still searching for something that might win his ‘soul’s alle-
giance,’ was also increasingly preoccupied with intimations of mortality.’’
Employing a thorough close-reading of the sequence, Evans also argues
that these poems are a critique of the classical ideal and that they appro-
priately end with a recoil from ‘‘the Grampian-like Great Pyramid and all
its represents.’’ Robillard’s ‘‘ ‘Magian Wine’ and Melville’s Art of Revi-
sion’’ (Leviathan 3, i: 73–81) begins by arguing that Melville’s books of
shorter poems are carefully organized and that Timoleon is no exception.
Seeing the ‘‘patterned concern for knowledge and belief ’’ as central to the
volume, Robillard shows that the revisions to ‘‘Magian Wine’’ illustrate
the idea that ‘‘all that [Melville] does is the result of lengthy meditation
upon the materials of his art and upon their most forceful presentation in
the context of his overarching desire to research the sources of knowl-
edge.’’ In ‘‘Aging with the Antonines,’’ pp. 277–86 in Melville ‘‘Among the
Nations,’’ Stanton Garner reads ‘‘The Age of the Antonines’’ in light of
the furor over the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. The poem
‘‘contrasts Melville’s America unfavorably with the Roman era of the
Antonine emperors,’’ when men of natural ability rather than political
in uence ruled. This context also enables us to see that in Billy Budd,
Sailor Melville favors characters such as Billy and Nelson over Vere and
Claggart.
The year produced three strong readings of Melville’s Ž nal novel,
perhaps the best of which is Caleb Crain’s ‘‘The Heart Ruled Out: Mel-
ville’s Palinode,’’ pp. 238–70 in American Sympathy. He begins by analyz-
ing ‘‘the new gay consensus on Billy Budd,’’ which involves a sentimental
identiŽ cation with Billy and Claggart and a condemnation of Vere.
Crain, however, believes that Melville’s references to homosexual feelings
must be more carefully examined in the context of the American literary
tradition of sympathy and friendship. Through a detailed reading of
Melville’s allusions, Crain identiŽ es the homosexual feelings in Melville’s
main characters. Particularly insightful is his analysis of ‘‘Upon Appleton
House’’ in reference to Vere, who is named after ‘‘a matron in charge of a
sanctuary from sin.’’ Crain concludes that ‘‘like Marvell’s Mary Fairfax,
Captain Vere reacts to Budd’s sexual appeal with a prudish hardness of
heart.’’ He also discusses Alexander Slidell Mackenzie’s narrative of the
Somers mutiny as a model for Vere’s Burkean ‘‘literary sin’’ of believing in
forms so blindly that he can separate sympathy ‘‘from the fate of the
human beings who trigger it.’’ Crain’s conclusion is that the novel ‘‘tells
John Samson 65

the truth by palinode —setting out all the lies that love must take back.’’
In ‘‘The Persistence of the American Aeneas in Melville,’’ pp. 311–33 in
American Aeneas, John C. Shields argues that in Billy Budd, Sailor ‘‘the
heretofore unacknowledged American Aeneas persists in dialectical ten-
sion with the generally acknowledged American Adam.’’ Billy himself
best represents the fusion of these two traditions, which Shields traces
through Melville’s Christian and classical allusions. Melville turns to the
classical source to indicate Claggart’s unredeemable nature, while in Vere
he portrays one who embodies the Aeneas myth to the exclusion of the
Adamic. Each of these characters lacks balance, Shields says, but ‘‘Mel-
ville knew that the American character was not Adamic, nor was it
classical. It resided, and continues to live, in the tension obtaining be-
tween the two.’’ Marovitz’s ‘‘Melville among the Realists: W. D. Howells
and the Writing of Billy Budd ’’ (ALR 34: 29–46) parallels Howells’s
interest in the Haymarket riot in writing A Hazard of New Fortunes with
the contemporary debate over capital punishment in the Somers case. He
then discusses Melville’s knowledge, through his association with Ed-
mund and Arthur Stedman, of the Realism/Romanticism of the 1880s
and 1890s. From them Melville also likely learned about Howells the
man, and Marovitz notes the in uence of Hazard and The Shadow of a
Dream, both of which Melville read in 1890, on the Ž nal stages of writing
Billy Budd, Sailor. The former may have reinforced Melville’s sense of a
father’s guilt and the tragic death of a son, while the latter may have
deepened Melville’s use of a complex, ironic narrative form. Marovitz
concludes ‘‘that Melville and Howells alike were attuned to contempo-
rary issues and moved by them to the extent that such matters were
incorporated into their Ž ction . . . [and that] important parallels in
theme, character, and narrative method occur between’’ Howells’s novels
and Melville’s. Attilio Favorini’s ‘‘The Euthanasia of Narrative: Multiple
Endings in Billy Budd,’’ pp. 394–406 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations,’’
examines sources for the novel in Douglas Jerrold’s Black Ey’d Susan and
The Mutiny at the Nore, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and Shakespeare’s Measure
for Measure and concludes that Billy Budd is at once tragedy, comedy,
irony, and romance.
Texas Tech University
4 Whitman and Dickinson
M. Jimmie Killingsworth

Whitman scholars were especially active this year in bibliography and

historicist criticism. An annotated bibliography by Brent Gibson ex-
tends previously published reference guides to Whitman scholarship,
and Mark Maslan’s critical study Whitman Possessed explores the intersec-
tion of poetics, politics, and culture —areas also covered in several major
essays dealing with issues of gender, race, and national identity. Impor-
tant new work on Whitman’s reception in England appeared as well.
Dickinson scholarship enjoys a surge of interest in biography with the
publication of My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickin-
son by Alfred Habegger as well as a book by Marietta Messmer that
consolidates and extends criticism of Dickinson’s letters. Other works
focus predominantly on topics in poetics, culture, and literary history.

i Walt Whitman
a. Bibliography and Editing An Annotated Walt Whitman Biography,
1976–1985 (Mellen) by Brent Gibson builds on the reference guides of
Scott Giantvalley and Donald D. Kummings, whose books (and supple-
mentary articles) in the early 1980s provided annotated bibliographies for
works about Whitman from his lifetime up through 1975. Gibson covers
the next decade, during which, among other developments, critical ap-
proaches diversiŽ ed in a Ž eld formerly dominated by biography and the
New Criticism. Psychoanalytical studies in particular  ourished. Like the
works of Giantvalley and Kummings, Gibson’s book is dependable in its
coverage, brief but clear and informative in its introduction and annota-
tions, and overall usable, though the lack of running heads hampers
navigation because the index gives citations by year and item number
rather than by page number.
68 Whitman and Dickinson

WWQR editor Ed Folsom continues to produce benchmark work in

‘‘Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography,’’ published in each issue of the
journal (18: 156–62, 200–205; 19: 56–62, 114–18; available in an online
version reformatted as an annual bibliography from 1975 to the present).
WWQR also provides the best forum for articles on Whitman bibliogra-
phy and textual criticism. This year’s oVerings include Gary Wihl’s ‘‘The
Manuscript of Walt Whitman’s ‘Sunday Evening Lectures’ ’’ (WWQR 18:
107–33), which documents a discovery in the Hanley Collection at the
University of Texas overlooked by previous bibliographers. The lectures,
which focus on the German idealist philosophers, were Ž rst published by
Richard Maurice Bucke in 1902. Wihl’s transcriptions call into question
some of Bucke’s interpretations and decisions about how to arrange the
text. In ‘‘ ‘Ashes of Soldiers’: Walt Whitman and C. H. Sholes, a New
Letter and a Newspaper Article’’ (WWQR 18: 186–87) Ted Genoways
provides transcriptions and tells the story of Whitman’s correspondence
with Sholes, a contemporary admirer of the poet’s work in the hospitals
and his accounts of the Civil War. Another ardent defender of the poet
was the sales agent E. C. Walker of Norway, Iowa, whose promotion of
Leaves of Grass comes to light in Ed Folsom’s ‘‘ ‘The Suppressed Book!’: A
Previously Unreported Whitman Broadside’’ (WWQR 18: 188–89 and
back cover). Folsom reproduces another recent discovery in ‘‘A Manu-
script Draft of Whitman’s Preface, 1876’’ (WWQR 19: 63 and back cover).
In ‘‘A Sheaf of Uncollected Nineteenth-Century Whitman Notices and
Reviews’’ (WWQR 19: 108–10) Gary Scharnhorst gives transcriptions of
eight items published between 1841 and 1882 ranging in length from one
sentence to two paragraphs and ranging in opinion from condemnations
of Whitman’s ‘‘ravings’’ and ‘‘absurd theories of composition’’ to praise of
Leaves of Grass as ‘‘an American classic.’’ In ‘‘A Newly Discovered Walter
Whitman, Sr., Document’’ (WWQR 19: 111–12) Joann P. Krieg reports on
a bill dated 1834 that was submitted by the poet’s carpenter father for the
construction of a Methodist church on Long Island.
Whitman scholars will welcome an important new edited collection,
Gary Schmidgall’s Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman’s Conver-
sations with Horace Traubel, 1888–1892 (Iowa). Traubel’s multivolume
work With Walt Whitman in Camden, based on almost daily interviews
with Whitman in old age, has long been recognized as an essential source
for understanding the poet’s attitudes toward his life, times, and writing.
But the complete work is in many ways inaccessible. The nine volumes
were issued over the course of a century by diVerent publishers. In
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 69

addition to the expense of the full collection and the tedium required of
even patient readers (Traubel, who wrote down everything, had no heart
for making selections of his own), the early volumes provide no index.
Schmidgall’s topically arranged, well-indexed selection with thematic
headings on every page represents a Ž ne contribution (though perhaps a
stopgap measure on the way to what we really need: online access to the
whole Traubel canon, fully searchable). Schmidgall’s introduction, sec-
tion headnotes, and the selections themselves capture the alternately
funny, heart-wrenching, and intellectually challenging interplay of the
old poet with the young admirer who, for all his worshipful attitude, still
aspired to be a tough social and literary critic. Traubel responded with
candor to the poet’s questions and prodded Whitman toward new in-
sights and trenchant accounts of his work and the public response to it.
The selections achieve a nice balance between social commentary and
literary or philosophical musings —a balance that adequately represents
the emphases of the full work. In addition to re ections on Whitman’s
life and poetry, sample topics include sex and gender, city life, music,
race, war, politics, and famous authors. The only major drawback of the
work is that the principles for using quotation marks and the occasional
introduction of the editor’s paraphrases within the text, though consis-
tently applied, can lead to confusion.
A short collection, Earth, My Likeness: Nature Poems of Walt Whitman,
ed. Howard Nelson (Wood Thrush), re ects the growing interest in
Whitman among ecocritics and students of nature writing (one topic
missing in Schmidgall’s selection from the Traubel conversations). Allud-
ing to ‘‘Song of the Redwood-Tree’’ as ‘‘one of the most awful nature
poems ever written . . . a pure dose of 19th Century boosterism,’’ Nelson’s
introduction admits that Whitman was no conservationist but goes on to
appreciate the poet’s ‘‘amazement and gratitude’’ in the face of nature, his
love of the outdoors, and his treatment of the animal foundation of
human life. The selections include very brief excerpts from longer poems
such as ‘‘Song of Myself ’’ and ‘‘This Compost,’’ a prose paragraph on
nakedness from Specimen Days, and full texts of a few short poems such as
‘‘The Dalliance of Eagles’’ and ‘‘Wood Odors.’’
The economy of electronic publication is the topic of Kenneth M.
Price’s ‘‘Dollars and Sense in Collaborative Digital Scholarship: The
Example of the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive’’ (Documentary Edit-
ing 23, ii: 29–33). Price details the costs of producing such a site in time
and money and argues that the Whitman Archive, often described as
70 Whitman and Dickinson

‘‘free’’ from the perspective of users, does not in the Ž nal analysis oVer a
good economic model for sustainable online publication, citing the gen-
erous grants and goodwill of libraries, universities, and publishers that
have graced the project, not to mention the energy and commitment of
the editors (Price and Folsom), who were beyond the tenure struggle
when they took up the work.
Megan L. Benton blends the main streams of this year’s scholarship —
historicist criticism and bibliography —in ‘‘Typography and Gender: Re-
masculating the Modern Book,’’ pp. 71–93 in Illuminating Letters: Typog-
raphy and Literary Interpretation, ed. Paul C. Gutjahr and M. L. Benton
(Mass.). Whitman’s 1855 and 1860 Leaves of Grass appear as examples of
the ‘‘feminine printing’’ from which the Englishman William Morris and
the American printer Theodore Low De Vinne recoiled in their calls for a
return to the premechanical book, the ‘‘masculine printing’’ exempliŽ ed
in Renaissance books. Grounding her analysis in Jerome McGann’s con-
cept of bibliographical codes, Benton argues compellingly that ‘‘in exalt-
ing preindustrial type forms and production methods,’’ the late-century
reformers ‘‘were also implicitly invoking the superiority of a past in which
men (not machines, and not women) dominated book culture.’’

b. Books Mark Maslan’s Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality, and Popu-

lar Authority (Hopkins) oVers a provocative new approach to some well-
known but still unsolved diYculties in Whitman’s poetics. Maslan argues
that Whitman drew heavily on the theory of poetic inspiration, a tradi-
tion running from Plato to the British Romantics, particularly Shelley.
One key feature of this tradition conceives inspiration as an external force
that possesses the poet rather than as arising from within the self. Whit-
man’s key trope for inspiration was, in Maslan’s view, something like rape,
an aggressive overwhelming of mind and body, followed by submission
and ecstatic enlightenment. Sexual desire itself appears in Whitman as an
external in uence that overtakes the self. Figuring in both Ž rst-person
and third-person narratives in Leaves of Grass (such as the soul’s posses-
sion of the body in section 5 of ‘‘Song of Myself ’’ and the sexual inspira-
tion of the female observer in section 11), this treatment of desire is
consistent with the commentary on erotic health and hygiene in Whit-
man’s day. Nineteenth-century medical writers understood sexual energy
not as arising from within (as an instinct or a drive) but rather as resulting
from social and cultural in uences. In acknowledging the reality of the
desire that infuses him, the poet does not so much assert his individuality
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 71

against the restrictive norms of his society (as previous readers tend to
claim), but embraces external factors that actually threaten the integrity
of individual life. By submitting to this violation of self, the transformed
poet comes to represent the forces that overwhelm him, and through this
inspiration he discovers the source of his authority. Thus ‘‘for Whitman
the decentering of the subject is dictated by a speciŽ cally literary logic —
that of poetic inspiration —whose purpose is not to subvert authority but
to establish it.’’ Ultimately, in a blend of Federalist and Romantic cri-
tiques of the self, reinforced by the contemporary hygienic commentary
on sexual desire, Maslan’s Whitman ‘‘sees in erotic and poetic possession
not a means of liberation from an oppressive system of political authority
but rather a means of authorizing literature as a representative institution
by liberating representation from the problems of personal, party, and
regional interests that threaten to destroy representative government.’’ As
for homosexuality, it becomes not an issue in its own right but ‘‘a token
for the sacriŽ ce of individuality upon which [Whitman] believes legiti-
mate authority depends.’’ The poststructuralist theories that inform re-
cent readings of Whitman’s homoeroticism are challenged by Maslan’s
interpretation of Whitman in light of British Romantic poetics. Post-
structuralism, he argues, bears ‘‘a striking resemblance to the theory of
poetic inspiration’’ since like the inspired poet ‘‘the poststructuralist sub-
ject is an instrument of forces external to itself.’’ Instead of acknowledg-
ing this ‘‘distant echo’’ from Romanticism, poststructuralist concepts
such as writing (for Derrida), power (for Foucault), and performance (for
Judith Butler) reenact the kind of personiŽ ed abstractions that Words-
worth and Whitman in their respective prefaces rebelled against as mon-
sters of Western poetics. The poststructuralists merely replace the agency
of Romantic subjectivity with a form of abstract agency, employing a
kind of reiŽ cation that the Romantics themselves had rejected. With this
Ž nal step into the theoretical arena Maslan shows the full range and
signiŽ cance of his revisionist project. Subtle and systematic, the book’s
argument is impressive, unsettling, and for the most part convincing. A
few readings of individual passages and poems (section 5 of ‘‘Song of
Myself ’’ and ‘‘When I Heard at the Close of the Day,’’ for example), as
well as some accounts of other scholars’ work, suVer from Maslan’s zeal
for his own argument. He also ignores some relevant criticism, notably
that of George Hutchinson and Lewis Hyde, which might be hard to Ž t
into his narrative of how the concept of poetic inspiration has been
neglected in Whitman studies. Even so, the entire work deserves careful
72 Whitman and Dickinson

attention, especially the critique of poststructuralist agency; the newly

reinforced appreciation of Whitman’s Civil War writings, which builds
on the work of Robert Leigh Davis; and the challenge to scholars who
overemphasize the native originality of Whitman’s work (ignoring his
dependence on popular science and culture) or who use Whitman in an
argument for American exceptionalism (ignoring the in uence of Ro-
mantic poetics).
Whitman’s place in cultural history, as understood from an interna-
tionalist perspective —the topic of a number of Ž ne articles this year —has
always had a spiritual as well as a literary dimension. Extending the
tradition of reading that begins with Richard Maurice Bucke and Wil-
liam James, Robert C. Gordon’s Gospel of the Open Road According to
Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau (iUniverse) traces the current interest in
New Age perennialism to the Transcendentalists with a particular em-
phasis on Whitman. According to Gordon, the tradition was transmitted
from the ancient East through Emerson to Whitman and Thoreau and
then developed in successive stages, Ž rst with such thinkers as Bucke,
James, and Jung; followed by the Beat poets; and culminating in the
‘‘post-’60s Aquarians’’ and ‘‘practitioners of Transpersonal Psychology.’’
While ignoring scholarly developments in Whitman studies and oVering
few new critical insights into Leaves of Grass, Gordon’s book stands as an
example of a remarkably persistent trend in the reception of Whitman’s
poems, one that partly accounts for the poet’s widespread popularity and
global reach. The book is also well written and avoids the gratuitous
appeals to the ineVable and the dismissive attitude toward academic
scholarship that marred Raymond P. Tripp’s perennialist treatment of
Dickinson (see AmLS 2000 ), pp. 79–80.

c. Articles and Individual Chapters The nexus of poetics, culture, and

politics invoked in Maslan’s book is also addressed in a number of major
articles dealing with sexuality, gender, and national or racial identity. In
‘‘Debating Manliness: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Sloane
Kennedy, and the Question of Whitman’’ (AL 73: 497–524) Robert K.
Nelson and Kenneth M. Price reproduce and discuss a manuscript essay
from 1908 written by one of Whitman’s staunchest and earliest defenders,
William Sloane Kennedy. The essay, titled ‘‘Euphrasy and Rue for T. W.
Higginson’’ and left unpublished with instructions that it be kept secret
for two generations, takes issue with Higginson’s campaign to dishonor
the poet in numerous reviews and articles published over a period of
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 73

almost 50 years in various magazines and journals. Nelson and Price

provide a thorough and psychologically astute analysis of how Higginson
tried to rescue the concept of manliness from Whitman. Distinguishing
between true manliness and what he called ‘‘Boweriness,’’ Higginson
attacked Whitman’s public persona by discrediting his wartime service in
the hospitals with implications of cowardice, eVeminacy, and homosex-
uality. The Kennedy essay is interesting not only for its defense of Whit-
man’s ‘‘phallicism’’ but also for the animosity the author reveals toward
fellow Whitman defenders Horace Traubel and Richard Maurice Bucke.
As Nelson and Price justly claim, Kennedy’s essay ‘‘illuminates in stark
fashion the politics of late-nineteenth-century criticism,’’ particularly the
way ‘‘literary judgments intervened in and were in uenced by . . . gender
identity, sexual predilections, and class status.’’ The construction of iden-
tity through style and ideological alignment also occupies the central
focus of Peter Coviello’s ‘‘Intimate Nationality: Anonymity and Attach-
ment in Whitman’’ (AL 73: 85–119), which contends that ‘‘virtually every
strand of Whitman’s utopian thought devolves upon . . . an unwavering
belief in the capacity of strangers to recognize, desire, and be intimate
with one another.’’ Looking for ‘‘rhetorical collapses’’ in Whitman’s idio-
syncratic development of persona (and political character) through the
quirkiness of his style, Coviello shows how the poet failed in an eVort to
adapt the discourse of race to the task of communicating a ‘‘quality of
attachment—potentially, of intimacy —between a dispersed and anony-
mous population.’’ Unable to overcome conventional racial categories,
Whitman had more success with the (overlapping) discourse on sex. In
particular, ‘‘Calamus,’’ even with its ‘‘double movements of occlusion and
suggestion’’ that ‘‘test . . . the expressive possibilities of inspeciŽ city and
postponed disclosure,’’ gives a portrait of lovers who by ‘‘mutual ano-
nymity . . . exemplify not merely the enviably avaricious quality of
American sexual appetites but by their cruising . . . perform as well the
utopian relation of citizen to citizen.’’ Whitman’s ideas on race and
homoerotic attachment are precisely those that, according to Vivian R.
Pollak’s ‘‘Poetic Value and Erotic Norms: A Response to Helen Vendler’’
(WWQR 18: 134–46), the poet felt he had to suppress in his Civil War
poems and elegies on Lincoln. As Pollak shows, the poet wanted none of
the ‘‘perturbations’’ (his code word for homoerotic desire) that distin-
guished earlier poems, including ‘‘Calamus,’’ to intrude on the ‘‘puriŽ ed
and whitened’’ texts of Drum-Taps and ‘‘When Lilacs Last in the Door-
yard Bloom’d.’’ On these grounds Pollak objects to Helen Vendler’s lec-
74 Whitman and Dickinson

ture ‘‘Poetry and the Mediation of Value: Whitman on Lincoln’’ (see

AmLS 2000, pp. 72–73) as a ‘‘formalist and broadly humanist reading of
value’’ that following the poet himself represses ‘‘the particulars of Whit-
man’s Americanness, of his radicalized politics, and of his sexuality’’ and
fails to account for ‘‘the relationship between subduing symbols and
subduing races and minority cultures.’’ Another instance of such silenc-
ing is documented and discussed in Gary Schmidgall’s ‘‘Suppressing the
Gay Whitman in America: Translating Thomas Mann’’ (WWQR 19: 18–
39). A passage in Mann’s 1922 speech ‘‘On the German Republic’’ that
invokes Whitman’s ‘‘manly love of comrades’’ in claiming Eros as ‘‘the
Ž gurehead of his democratic republic’’ was omitted in Helen Tracy Lowe-
Porter’s English translation of the speech. Schmidgall restores the Ger-
man original and provides a translation. Yet another perspective on
Whitman and Lincoln, which appears to deny the repressive hypothesis,
is found in ‘‘Lincoln’s Body’’ (MStrR 14: np), in which Shirley Samuels
treats Whitman’s style of mourning in ‘‘When Lilacs Last in the Door-
yard Bloom’d’’ as ‘‘synaesthetic remembering,’’ an act that celebrates
sensory response through language. She contrasts this approach with the
body-denying and thus melancholic practices of notable contemporaries,
including Mary Todd Lincoln.
On the question of race and poetic form, Jack Kerkering’s essay ‘‘ ‘Of
Me and of Mine’: The Music of Racial Identity in Whitman and Lanier,
Dvor̀ák and DuBois’’ (AL 73: 147–84) compares the 1876 centennial
writings of Whitman and the Georgia poet Sidney Lanier (the former
Confederate soldier whose literary criticism, as Nelson and Price indi-
cate, was enlisted by the veteran Union oYcer T. W. Higginson in his
attacks on Whitman’s manliness). Whitman’s treatment of American
progress as a ‘‘narrative of maturation’’ and Lanier’s ‘‘narrative of perpetu-
ation,’’ based in the concept that Anglo-Saxon culture endures despite
the war and the hardships of Reconstruction, form a contrasting pair of
perspectives reproduced in the late-century works of the immigrant mu-
sician Antonin Dvor̀ák and the great champion of African American
culture W. E. B. Du Bois. Ironically, Kerkering argues, Dvor̀ák’s progres-
sive optimism matches Whitman’s while Lanier and Du Bois end up
sharing the more static view, subordinating national citizenship to racial
identity: ‘‘their respective commitments to Anglo-Saxon and Negro mu-
sic together inscribe within literary form what would become ‘the prob-
lem of the Twentieth Century,’ the problem of the color line.’’ In ‘‘ ‘A
Long Missing Part of Itself ’: Bringing Lucille Clifton’s Generations into
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 75

American Literature’’ (MELUS 26, ii: 47–64) Edward Whitley shows

how the African American writer uses quotations from ‘‘Song of Myself ’’
as chapter epigraphs to position her own life as an artist against a pro-
totype of male autobiography and a key representative of (white) Ameri-
can literature. Clifton’s response to Whitman, Whitley argues, ‘‘speaks
with a double voice as she embraces the Whitmanian spirit of inclusion
and celebration, but replaces the autonomous individuality informing so
much of ‘Song of Myself ’ with a collective, generational sense of self.’’
Michael Bennett follows a similar line of argument in ‘‘Frances Ellen
Watkins Sings the Body Electric,’’ pp. 19–40 in Recovering the Black
Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, ed. Ben-
nett and Vanessa D. Dickerson (Rutgers, 2000). Whitman also appears as
a key point of reference on questions of self-deŽ nition in Maxine Hong
Kingston’s 1989 novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, whose protago-
nist is named Wittman Ah Sing. Kingston is not trying to write an immi-
grant novel or to imitate white cultural models, according to Elliott H.
Shapiro’s ‘‘Authentic Watermelon: Maxine Hong Kingston’s American
Novel’’ (MELUS 26, i: 5–28), but rather to participate in a redeŽ ned
novelistic citizenship. ‘‘Like Whitman’s poetry, Kingston’s Authentic
American Novel is a communal choir,’’ writes Shapiro, and ‘‘her coalition
is a coalition of many voices.’’
On the question of gender, Beth Jensen’s ‘‘Ambiguous Struggle: Ab-
jecting the M/Other in ‘As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life’ ’’ (WWQR 18:
167–85) oVers a counterbalance to the emphasis on male sexuality in
Whitman studies since the 1970s. Drawing on the psychoanalytical theo-
ries of Julia Kristeva, especially the idea that as a child develops it experi-
ences abjection in attempts to separate from the generalized life shared
with the (ungendered) m/other Ž gure, Jensen provides a careful analysis
of the ‘‘intense maternal presence’’ that D. H. Lawrence hints toward in
his famous claim that ‘‘Everything was female to [Whitman]: even him-
self ’’ as well as the equally intense and even morbid preoccupation with
gruesome images in many of the poems. Maire Mullins’s ‘‘ ‘I bequeath
myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love’: The Whitman-Cather
Connection in O Pioneers! ’’ (TSWL 20: 123–36) considers not only Whit-
man’s in uence on Cather’s novel but also ‘‘the dynamic that is created
when a female writer looks back to male precursors for models.’’ Accord-
ing to Mullins, Cather was most aVected by the ‘‘meditative, re ective,
visionary’’ aspects of Whitman’s writing as well as his sensitivity to nature
(a kind of erotic ecology) rather than the jingoistic and uncritical accep-
76 Whitman and Dickinson

tance of westward expansion that predominates in the most immediate

source for the novel’s title, Whitman’s poem ‘‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’’ In
‘‘The Untold Want: Representation and Transformation: Echoes of Walt
Whitman’s Passage to India in Now, Voyager ’’ (LFQ 29: 43–52) M. Lynda
Ely argues that in the 1942 Warner Bros. Ž lm starring Bette Davis, an
adaptation of Olive Higgins Prouty’s popular 1941 novel, the allusion to
Whitman’s poem points toward problems with the representation of the
strong female character. The Ž lm shares with the poet an inclination
toward attenuated or partial liberation for women, a view that performed
a serious ideological function in wartime America, when women were
asked to defer but not give up their dependence on men.
The increasing ecocritical interest in Whitman is attested by several
works. In Lawrence Buell’s second major contribution to this critical
genre, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environ-
ment in the U.S. and Beyond (Harvard), Whitman appears with Frederick
Law Olmstead as an exemplar, indeed a founder, of ‘‘Romantic urban-
ism,’’ his treatments of the city ranging from naive boosterism to lyrical
celebrations of a self embedded in the sense of place. Buell resolves a
nagging problem in Whitman studies by suggesting that, at least on the
topic of urban development, the ‘‘reformist emphasis of Whitman’s jour-
nalism and the idealizing emphasis of Whitman’s poetry are symbiotic.
Both express commitment to the ideal of a city sweet and clean.’’ A brief
excerpt from Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person by John Bur-
roughs, a pioneering nature writer as well as Whitman’s friend and early
biographer, is included in the chapter ‘‘John Burroughs on Walt Whit-
man, Gilbert White, and Henry David Thoreau,’’ pp. 33–47 in A Century
of Early Ecocriticism, ed. David Mazel (Georgia), in which Whitman’s
poetry serves as a corrective to the treatment of ‘‘what is technically called
Nature’’ in the literature of ‘‘Wordsworth and his school,’’ signifying
‘‘some  ower bank, or summer cloud, or pretty scene.’’ ‘‘None of this,’’
says Burroughs, ‘‘is in Walt Whitman.’’ Whitman is ‘‘not merely an
observer of nature, but is immersed in her, and from thence turns his gaze
upon people, upon the age, and upon America.’’ A close reading of this
very passage (along with other writings by Burroughs) appears in Jim
Warren’s ‘‘Whitman Land: John Burroughs’s Pastoral Criticism’’ (ISLE 8:
83–96). In the ‘‘green’’ revision of literary history, Warren suggests, Bur-
roughs may have been more important as an ecocritic than as a nature
writer, thanks largely to his link with Whitman. In Burroughs’s view,
Whitman discovered the key to a healthy human relationship to nature,
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 77

as well as a nature-based aesthetic, in poetic acts of ‘‘passionate aYliation

and identity’’ expressing ‘‘a spiritual kinship’’ with the processes and
objects of the earth. Using the metaphor ‘‘pregnable’’ to describe the
poet’s sensitivity to natural in uences, Burroughs was one of the Ž rst
critics to comprehend the  uidity of Whitman’s gender identity. Ac-
knowledging that Whitman edited and revised an early draft of the Notes,
Warren discusses the interplay of Whitman’s and Burroughs’s voices as an
example of the ‘‘corresponsiveness’’ between reader and writer that repli-
cates the sensitivity of the poet to the natural world.
The cultural contexts of Leaves of Grass are illuminated in several
essays. In Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino
Writing (Princeton) Kirsten Silva Gruesz devotes an insightful chapter
(pp. 121–36) to ‘‘resituating Whitman both biographically and ideologi-
cally in the Hispanized realm of midcentury New Orleans,’’ where in the
late 1840s the poet, still at the time primarily a journalist, went to serve on
the staV of the New Orleans Crescent. The sentimental ‘‘exaggeration and
eroticization of the time he spent in New Orleans in his later eVorts at
self-fashioning,’’ his mix of antislavery but otherwise racist attitudes, his
reputed regret over his early advocacy of the Mexican War, and his
curious comment in November Boughs that ‘‘the Latin race contributions
[sic] to American nationality in the south and southwest will never be put
with sympathetic understanding and tact on record’’ are likely all rooted
in his encounter with New Orleans. According to Gruesz, the city was ‘‘a
polyglot, circum-Caribbean capital’’ at the center of a body of land and a
people that ‘‘the Mexican War and the Ž libustering eVorts of the moment
had rendered open and vulnerable.’’ Of particular interest is Gruesz’s
analysis of Whitman’s ambivalence toward the desire for ‘‘the subjugated,
racialized body —both the enslaved black one and the conquered brown
one.’’ In an essay on a very diVerent city, Paul W. Schopp celebrates the
return of the Mickle Street Review (revived as an online journal) with
‘‘Camden and Mickle Street: A Cultural History’’ (MStrR 14: np), which
tells the story of the poet’s home in his old age, also an auspicious site of
urbanization during the postwar years.
Historicist criticism this year gives special attention to the topic of
Whitman’s self-promotion and marketing of Leaves of Grass. Edward
Whitley’s ‘‘Presenting Walt Whitman: ‘Leaves-Droppings’ as Paratext’’
(WWQR 19: 1–17) discovers in Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext a
theoretical framework for understanding Whitman’s famous campaign of
self-promotion. Whitley applies the theory to an analysis of the notorious
78 Whitman and Dickinson

appendix to the 1856 Leaves, in which Whitman included Emerson’s

private letter praising the 1855 edition as well as an open letter giving
Whitman’s response. The story and the analysis illustrate con icts over
the status of authorship in democratic society and print culture. A more
speciŽ c account of Whitman’s place in U.S. print culture is the story of his
reception at the Atlantic Monthly, as told brie y by Erin Rogers in ‘‘Amer-
ica’s Bard’’ (Atlantic Online 7 Nov.: np). Brady Earnhart’s ‘‘Peddling
Whitman: Leaves of Grass and the American Marketplace’’ (MStrR 14: np)
argues that ‘‘the poet’s unusually close involvement in the sale of his
writing . . . helped determine what and how he wrote.’’ Earnhart argues
that ‘‘Whitman saw bookselling as both a necessity and an act of self-
betrayal.’’ One consequence of his engagement with ‘‘the hawker’s art’’
was the ‘‘ uid sense of identity’’ that is not only evident in the protean
persona of Leaves of Grass but also a ‘‘hazard among early advertising
men.’’ According to David Haven Blake’s ‘‘Public Dreams: Berryman,
Celebrity, and the Culture of Confession’’ (AmLH 13: 716–36), ‘‘the
peculiar fusion of intimacy and publicity that has been central to the
modern era of advertising’’ was also central to the work of late-20th-
century confessional poets, such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and
particularly John Berryman, who found in Whitman an authorizing
precedent for the self-validation, self-promotion, and predictions of his
own success.
Other aspects of the cultural context are treated in this year’s in uence
studies. In ‘‘When Time and Place Avail: Whitman’s Written Orator
Reconsidered’’ (WWQR 19: 90–107) Jake Adam York suggests the possi-
ble in uence of 19th-century newspapers that routinely printed the texts
of important speeches after they were delivered. Orators as famous as
Daniel Webster became familiar to most Americans through the print
medium. York suggests that Whitman’s hope of creating a written litera-
ture with the power (or ‘‘presence’’) of oral discourse —a hope derided
by deconstructionists but praised by admirers of Whitman’s dramatic
techniques —might be founded in concrete cultural practices. Leaves of
Grass could thus be interpreted as simulating reprinted oratory. In ‘‘Cul-
ture and Antipathy: Arnold, Emerson, and Democratic Vistas ’’ (Symbiosis
5: 77–84) Ian McGuire identiŽ es Matthew Arnold and Emerson as the
sources of the ‘‘combative tone’’ with which Whitman engaged unnamed
exponents of high culture in developing his own notion of democratic
culture —‘‘neither as an historically sanctioned set of values nor as the
pursuit of individual perfection . . . but rather as a future-oriented bio-
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 79

social ‘programme,’ a ‘democratic ethnology of the future.’ ’’ Arthur Ver-

sluis considers possible sources for Whitman’s ‘‘new religion’’ in a chapter
(pp. 157–70) of Esoteric Origins, which depends to a great extent on
secondary works, notably the books of David Kuebrich and Harold
Aspiz. Ultimately Versluis favors such popular purveyors of arcane doc-
trine as Emanuel Swedenborg and Thomas Lake Harris in this sketchy
claim for ‘‘Whitman’s Americanization of European esoteric currents as
they were Ž ltered through the popular movements and Ž gures of his day.’’
The highlight of the 2001 reception studies is Andrew Elfenbein’s
‘‘Whitman, Democracy, and the English Clerisy’’ (NCF 56: 76–104),
which clariŽ es the role that Edward Carpenter played in the ‘‘great
unintended outcome of nineteenth-century literary history’’: ‘‘the poet
who strove for a quintessentially American voice spoke most eloquently
to the English.’’ In Elfenbein’s view, Carpenter rescued Whitman from
the aesthetic elite that Ž rst brought him to England (represented pri-
marily by the Rossettis and their circle) and rehabilitated him for the
expanding number of new intellectuals from diverse class backgrounds.
Elfenbein provides new historical contours to earlier accounts of Whit-
man’s English appeal which were based on oversimpliŽ ed notions of
homosexuality and the middle class. He also restores Carpenter’s status as
a central Ž gure on the late-century literary scene rather than a mere
admirer, imitator, or ‘‘comrade’’ of Whitman. In the key work Towards
Democracy, Carpenter did not so much imitate as ‘‘translate’’ Whitman,
substituting a mild middle style for Whitman’s wild ‘‘creole’’ and a gentle
tone for Whitman’s ‘‘bossiness,’’ on the way to revising Coleridge’s old
hierarchical concept of a ‘‘clerisy’’ (university professors, pastors, and
schoolmasters) at the center of English intellectual life. While retaining
the Romantic emphasis on the ‘‘vital warmth of education,’’ Carpenter
‘‘rewrites the Victorian intellectual tradition by replacing culture with
nature, the mind with the body, philosophy with love, the national with
the universal, and hierarchy with democracy.’’ Carpenter also takes a key
role in the story of a late-century group of ‘‘self-cultivated’’ English
intellectuals who gathered to discuss the works of Whitman, largely
because of their attraction to his treatment of comradeship and mysti-
cism. The story is told in Harry Cocks’s ‘‘Calamus in Bolton: Spirituality
and Homosexual Desire in Late Victorian England’’ (G&H 13: 191–223),
an essay which, like Elfenbein’s, adds new layers of historical depth and
new subtlety to interpretations of Whitman’s reception in England and
the various critical constructions of ‘‘homosexuality’’ and ‘‘cosmic con-
80 Whitman and Dickinson

sciousness’’ during a time when the limits of male love and spirituality
were unsettled and hotly debated. Drawing on the diaries and letters of
the Bolton Whitman fellowship, Cocks illuminates ‘‘the fascination with
homosexual desire, understood and represented as ineVable.’’ Cocks ar-
gues that ‘‘passionate attachments . . . could develop without their being
rendered erotic . . . through the substitution of inexpressible, spiritual
communion for ‘unspeakable’ physical possibilities.’’ The Bolton group,
through their own conversations and their interactions and correspon-
dence with the likes of Carpenter, Richard Maurice Bucke, and the
composer Philip Dalmas, represents, for Cocks, ‘‘both the limitations
upon, and the opportunities available to those men outside metropolitan
or bohemian cultures who were both attracted and repelled by the pros-
pect of homosexual desire,’’ which could be ‘‘rationalized in the lives of
‘ordinary’ men’’ and could ‘‘inform utopian vistas of selfhood and con-
sciousness.’’ On the American front, new light on the reception of Whit-
man’s work appears in the letters of the Episcopal minister and mission-
ary George L. Chase of Washington, D.C., who not only defended the
poet against charges of immorality but also used Whitman’s ideas and
language in epistles to his future wife. The letters are reproduced and dis-
cussed by Jon Miller in ‘‘ ‘Dear Miss Ella’: George L. Chase’s Whitman-
Inspired Love Letters’’ (WWQR 19: 69–89). As Miller notes, Chase pro-
vides an important touchstone for contemporary reaction to Whitman’s
sexual themes and an equally important literary historical source because
of his frequent references to other writers on ethics, mysticism, and love.
In a brief chapter on ‘‘Walt Whitman and Early Twentieth-Century
American Art,’’ pp. 11–25 in Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century
America (Cambridge), Matthew Baigell acknowledges the in uence of
Whitman, and Emerson before him, in the critical understanding of
energetic American selfhood, particularly important in expressionism,
but goes on to argue that Whitman’s actual in uence on artists may have
been overstated by art critics in the 1920s and 1930s. Ed Folsom provides
insights into Whitman’s reception among contemporary American poets
in ‘‘Philip Dacey on Whitman: An Interview and Four New Poems’’
(WWQR 19: 40–51). Picking up a key theme in Whitman scholarship
from 1999 and 2000, Stephen Connock traces the poet’s in uence on
modern musicians in ‘‘From Down Ampney to Paumanok: Delius,
Vaughan Williams and Walt Whitman’’ (Delian: Newsletter of the Delius
Society June: 9–11), which argues that ‘‘for Whitman, exploration was a
mode of existence and this sense of a great spiritual journey is pro-
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 81

nounced in the musical settings of [Frederick] Delius and [Ralph]

Vaughan Williams.’’
Articles on how to teach Whitman to undergraduates and younger
students include Patricia S. Rudden’s ‘‘Bartleby on the Ferry: Teaching
Melville in Brooklyn’’ (MSEx 121: 7), which recommends comparing and
contrasting Melville’s ‘‘Bartleby’’ with Whitman’s ‘‘Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry’’; Helen McKenna-UV ’s ‘‘Teaching House Museums’’ (MStrR 14:
np), which reports on the beneŽ ts of learning about poetry in conjunc-
tion with visits to places like the Whitman House in Camden and the
Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site; Bill Zavatsky’s ‘‘Poets to Come:
Teaching Whitman in High School,’’ pp. 80–109 in The Teachers &
Writers Guide to Classic American Literature, ed. Christopher Edgar and
Gary Lenhart (Teachers & Writers Collaborative), which argues for a
wider use of Whitman in the classroom and a stronger representation of
his works in high school textbooks; and Jordan Clary’s ‘‘Three Voices:
Teaching Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman,’’ pp. 2–
13 in The Teachers & Writers Guide, an essay on teaching poetry in prison
and in programs for juvenile oVenders, which locates Whitman’s popu-
larity among teenagers in his ‘‘profusion and spontaneity’’ and his popu-
larity among adult learners in his ‘‘introspection’’ and ‘‘visionary spirit.’’
Whitman (and other poets) can also be useful in teaching disciplines as
seemingly unrelated as geography. Daniel P. Donaldson’s ‘‘Teaching Ge-
ography’s Four Traditions with Poetry’’ ( Journal of Geography 100: 24–31)
recommends Whitman’s poems as examples for three of the four research
traditions within geography —the Spatial Tradition (‘‘Passage to India,’’
‘‘Prayer of Columbus’’), the Area Studies Tradition (‘‘I Hear America
Singing’’), and the Human-Environment Interaction Tradition (‘‘Pi-
oneers! O Pioneers!’’ and ‘‘Song of the Redwood-Tree’’), with only the
Earth Science Tradition left unrepresented (Adrienne Rich’s ‘‘Storm
Warnings’’ and Emerson’s ‘‘The Snowstorm’’ Ž lling the gap). Donaldson’s
classiŽ cation of these poems also speaks strongly to the favored themes of
ecocriticism, which promises a reconsideration of poems sometimes ne-
glected by other approaches.
Finally, in ‘‘Whitmanian Cybernetics’’ (MStrR 14: np), an essay in cul-
tural criticism (and a sort of virtual geography) growing out of dissatisfac-
tion with current spatial metaphors for computer-mediated communi-
cation, Paul H. Outka argues that ‘‘Whitman’s complex understanding of
subjectivity’’ —which emerged during the 19th-century version of the
information revolution, to which the poet was a witness and contribu-
82 Whitman and Dickinson

tor —‘‘oVers a sorely needed way to understand cyberspace’s own tangled

negotiations of identity, textuality, landscape, and democratic politics.’’

ii Emily Dickinson
a. Bibliography and Editing Though bibliographical and textual schol-
arship subsided somewhat this year, interest in the material conditions of
Dickinson’s productivity, particularly the relationship of manuscripts
and printed editions, continues to arouse interest and controversy. In
‘‘The Grammar of Ornament: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts and Their
Meanings’’ (NCF 55: 479–514) Domhnall Mitchell takes a hard look at
‘‘claims about aspects of Dickinson’s attention to what had previously
been thought of as the accidentals of manuscript production, such as the
size and shape of paper[,] the physical direction and placement of the
writing,’’ as well as ‘‘patterns of spacing between letters and lines, and
habits of chirographic inscription.’’ Mitchell suggests that a great deal of
critical interpretation involving these textual factors —notably among the
group he calls the ‘‘manuscript school’’ of Dickinson scholars (led by
Ellen Hart, Martha Nell Smith, and Marta Werner) —often fails to ac-
count for 19th-century conventions and contexts, along with ‘‘the various
levels of Dickinson’s work, both poetic and epistolary,’’ and ends up with
interpretations that are fanciful and gratuitous. He argues that context-
sensitive historical scholarship ‘‘may con ict with the aims of those critics
for whom an autograph is primarily a playground for performative inge-
nuity.’’ At the same time, in applying a hands-oV approach to editorial
practice, ‘‘manuscript criticism’’ may severely bind ‘‘creative responsible
editing,’’ which like writing itself ‘‘necessarily involves choices.’’
Controversies surrounding issues of intellectual property, such as per-
mission fees and copyright protection as they aVect the publication,
ownership, and citation of Dickinson’s works, are the topic of Elizabeth
Rosa Horan’s ‘‘Technically Outside the Law: Who Permits, Who ProŽ ts,
and Why’’ (EDJ 10, i: 34–54). Horan provides a detailed chronicle of the
ownership of manuscripts and publication rights from the poet’s own
lifetime (when she complained that she was ‘‘robbed,’’ that is, published
without permission) to the present, when online publication complicates
the picture.
In ‘‘An Emily Dickinson Manuscript (Re)IdentiŽ ed’’ (EDJ 10, ii: 43–
51) Morey Rothberg and Vivian Pollak reproduce and discuss a short
‘‘letter-poem’’ signed by the poet and originally intended to accompany a
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 83

gift to her neighbor John Franklin Jameson. Though the discovery of the
manuscript was Ž rst announced in 1991, it has not yet caught the atten-
tion of bibliographers despite its interest as a biographical curiosity and
striking use of color imagery.

b. Books Alfred Habegger’s My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of
Emily Dickinson (Random House) gives us the most scrupulously docu-
mented and chronologically arranged critical biography of the poet to
date. Building on the bibliographical work of Ralph W. Franklin, espe-
cially the new dating of the poems, as well as a solid factual base —an
exhaustive scouring of letters and other writings by the poet and her
family, friends, neighbors, and contemporary historical Ž gures; news-
papers, diaries, and journals; church, court, and medical records; and
other archival materials —Habegger gives us an authoritative life of the
poet that stresses her individuality. He steers a middle course between the
recent social view that places the poet in the center of a primarily female
web of love and letters and the romantic view of her as an eccentric
recluse, heroic neurotic, or even pathetic psychopath (see Marianne
Szegedy-Maszek’s ‘‘ ‘Much Madness Is Divinest Sense’: Was Emily Dick-
inson a Genius or Just Bonkers?’’ U.S. News and World Report 21 May: 52).
Empiricist care and caution guide every step in the book, an accomplish-
ment of which the author is obviously proud, as we see in his occasionally
dismissive treatment of other scholars’ more speculative readings ( Jay
Leyda, Cynthia WolV, and Martha Nell Smith suVer perhaps the strong-
est blows), an overrating of some new Ž ndings (such as the fact that
Dickinson and her mother had the same schoolteacher), and a few self-
congratulatory phrases, such as the characterization of his own method as
‘‘gimlet-eyed scrutiny and an insistence on plausible evidence.’’ Regard-
less of what we may think about the appropriateness of the tone and the
hardheadedness of the method, however, the results stand on their own
merit. Reviewing the tendency of Dickinson biography to organize
around particular relationships —with her mother, her father, Susan
Gilbert Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, various candidates
for ‘‘Master,’’ or a series of family and friends (as in Richard Sewall’s
biography) —Habegger writes in his introduction, ‘‘If biography is a
narrative that integrates everything, no matter how complex, into a single
life’s forward-moving braid, it would seem that the biography of Emily
Dickinson has yet to be attempted.’’ Habegger has Ž lled the gap with
what promises to be the standard biography for the foreseeable future, a
84 Whitman and Dickinson

book suitable for both general and specialist readers, rich in literary,
historical, and psychological insights but written in a jargon-free, highly
readable style. No one relationship dominates the life of the individual as
presented here. No single psychological diagnosis or cultural trend is
allowed to account for too much. Habegger’s treatment of the poet’s
relationship with her father, Edward Dickinson, nicely illustrates the way
the biographer prefers the middle course. ‘‘It misses the point to think of
Edward as a tyrant,’’ he writes, providing instead a closely detailed read-
ing of how Edward, the last ‘‘squire’’ of Amherst, created a ‘‘walled
patriarchy’’ and protective gentility that ‘‘conspired to both energize and
silence Dickinson.’’ While there can be little doubt that the closely
protective atmosphere that Edward created at home contributed strongly
to Emily’s fear of public exposure and her decision not to publish, Habeg-
ger reveals that her social views, notably her aristocratic bearing and
occasional lack of sympathy or coolness toward people with diVerent
social and ethnic standings, also derived from her father’s opinions and
attitudes. Ultimately, ‘‘her way of living with Father was to create a
private domain of friendship, thought, and art that he could not enter.’’
Her tendency to present herself to male Ž gures of authority (and to the
various audiences, Ž ctional or real, in her poems) as alternately ‘‘childish
and subservient, or childish and disobedient’’ derived from her dealings
with her father, but so did ‘‘her way of pulling down the mighty.’’ Her
impatience with him, her enduring pride in him, and her occasional
condescending humor toward him get equal treatment in this narrative.
Her grief at his death receives close attention in a moving passage late in
the book. In light of recent scholarship, Habegger seems at times to slight
the relationship with Susan and other women friends. But his decision is
consistent with his method, which keeps the narrative detailed and on
track, the emphasis on diVerent topics balanced. Some readers will sigh
over the designation of Rev. Charles Wadsworth as ‘‘Master,’’ but Habeg-
ger makes the identiŽ cation with great reluctance and only after carefully
weighing every available fact; and even then he argues that much of the
relationship was a product of fantasy and one-sided infatuation. The
realism of this book prohibits any one love or dominant emotion to color
more than a part of the poet’s life. Everything has its place, but no simple
explanation receives too much emphasis in what becomes the most com-
plex portrait of Dickinson we have. The portrait, Ž lled out with brief but
revealing readings of many poems and letters, is ultimately heroic. De-
spite a tendency to withdraw (a tendency that makes sense in light of
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 85

attitudes toward women at home and in society, according to Habegger),

to wear others out with her intensity and her demands, and to brood over
dark fantasies, the poet emerges from this narrative not only the consum-
mate creative artist-in-the-garret on the Romantic model, but also a
unique woman who worked through emotional and physical pain at
every stage of her life, producing poetry that re ected her passions and
varying states of mind —the early onset of inspiration; the period of
personal ‘‘war’’ and powerful productivity in the early 1860s; and the last
years, a time of increasing stability, family commitment, self-realization,
and hard-won wisdom. In Habegger’s story, Dickinson’s life and work
stand as a lesson of how art modiŽ es hurt and how creativity can arise
from and sometimes overcome adverse conditions.
Although in many ways Habegger’s book and Marietta Messmer’s A
Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence (Mass.) stand on
opposite sides of the current critical divide in which the realism of
empirical work (increasingly limited to biography and traditional bibli-
ography) stubbornly confronts the abstract textualism of ‘‘theory’’ (in-
creasingly narrowed to an elite pursuit), they share a suspicion of psycho-
analytical readings and an appreciation of Dickinson as a deliberate artist.
From there, they diverge in just about every way. Indeed, one of Mess-
mer’s key aims is to rescue Dickinson’s letters from biography and from
‘‘poetocentric’’ criticism that treats the correspondence as mere back-
ground to the poems and gives priority to the fascicles, which Messmer
sees as ‘‘scrapbooks’’ of draft poems never intended for readers other than
the poet herself. By contrast, the letters, poems, and letter-poems she sent
to a wide variety of correspondents (friends and family to be sure, but also
editors, public intellectuals, and literary Ž gures) constitute, in Messmer’s
view, the only form of publication that Dickinson herself authorized. Her
‘‘letters to the world’’ thus become the true corpus of her public work,
‘‘her major form of artistic expression.’’ Moreover, they represent the one
mode of sociability that Dickinson engaged in regularly throughout her
life —‘‘a highly popular nineteenth-century form of social exchange: letter
writing.’’ Rather than giving insights into the ‘‘real’’ Emily Dickinson,
according to Messmer, the letters reveal ‘‘strategies of self-fashioning . . .
adapted to individual correspondents in order to interrogate various
addressee-speciŽ c gender-inscribed power relations’’ from the perspective
of ‘‘a wide range of (largely Ž ctional, highly gendered) identities mostly
identiŽ able by name and taken from a variety of literary, biblical, or
historical contexts.’’ In addition to analyzing the multiplicity of voices by
86 Whitman and Dickinson

applying poststructuralist theories of polyvocality and textuality, Mess-

mer discusses the context of epistolary conventions in the 19th-century,
oVers a critique of the editing of Dickinson’s correspondence, and gives a
thematic analysis in two chapters of how ‘‘the ‘female’ world of love and
duty’’ and ‘‘the ‘male’ world of power and poetry’’ are represented in the
letters.
The center of Dickinson’s life and work, her New England home,
provides the focus of another book, The Dickinsons of Amherst (New
England) with contributions by Jerome Liebling, Christopher E. G.
Benfey, Polly Longsworth, and Barton Levi St. Armand. This beautifully
produced large-format book includes archival illustrations but is built
around the remarkable color photographs of the Dickinson estate by the
noted photographer Jerome Liebling. The only surviving dress of Emily
Dickinson (white, of course), the window from which she lowered bas-
kets of gingerbread to children in the garden, the garden itself full of
summer  owers, her simple bedroom with the narrow bed and the small
polished writing desk by the window, even a lock of her chestnut hair
appear in the sharp relief of Liebling’s compositions, recalling image after
image from her poems and letters. Above all, the con icts and drama of
Dickinson’s life come alive in the visual contrast between the simple
appointments of the Homestead and the decaying brilliance next door in
the Austin Dickinson family home, the Evergreens, with its fading reds,
William Morris wallpaper pulling loose from the wall, and the room of
Emily’s eight-year-old nephew Gib, sealed at the time of his tragic death.
Longsworth’s essay ‘‘The ‘Latitude of Home’: Life in the Homestead and
the Evergreens’’ (pp. 15–106), perhaps the best short biography of Dick-
inson currently in print, serves as a commentary on that key drama and
the sources of family con ict. As Benfey notes in his ‘‘Introduction: A
Lost World Brought to Light’’ (pp. 1–13), the essays are intended pri-
marily to illustrate the photographs rather than vice versa, and both the
writing and the book’s design succeed on these grounds, giving the
general reader open access to the physical space of Dickinson’s world.
In ‘‘Keeper of the Keys: Mary Hampson, the Evergreens, and the Art
Within’’ (pp. 107–67) St. Armand picks up the drama, beginning with a
comparison of the Dickinson real estate with the ‘‘archetypal dwell-
ings . . . rooted in the material base of American dynastic possession’’
found in the works of Hawthorne, Poe, and Faulkner. He also brings to
bear a gothic-tinged eloquence of his own in an engaging narration of his
dealings with Mary Landis Hampson, the last Dickinson heir, ‘‘a tireless
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 87

crusader for the Dickinson family honor’’ who remembered the old Ž ghts
well enough to resent Richard Sewall for allowing his biography to be
in uenced by the heirs of Mabel Loomis Todd. She also refused to go
again to the Amherst bookstore where Polly Longsworth signed copies of
her 1984 book Austin and Mabel. She welcomed St. Armand and opened
the rich biographical Ž eld of the house to him (which he in turn opens to
readers of this essay), but she bristled when he dared even to cite Sewall in
footnotes to his articles. The story is a fascinating account of how scholars
struggle to remain respectful of the heirs and surviving friends of literary
Ž gures and at the same time tell the truth. Combining an exploration of
the cultural history of photography (and the photographing of history)
with an analysis of Liebling’s work, Benfey’s essay ‘‘ ‘Best Grief Is Tongue-
less’: Jerome Liebling’s Spirit Photographs’’ (pp. 169–209) discusses how
the photographer remains true to the tradition of documentary pho-
tography while yet strongly invoking the gothic qualities —the ‘‘ghostly or
uncanny,’’ the ‘‘afterlife of things’’ —that adhere to the pictures of old
clothes without their owners in them and the long-sealed bedrooms of
dead children. To emphasize the haunting gothic quality of this work
may suggest that it is dark and dreary, but such is not the case. As Benfey
suggests, Liebling’s photographs bring light and color to the black-and-
white world that 19th-century photography gave us. The images, like the
essays that accompany them, form a kind of running dialogue with
Dickinson’s poems, which are quoted prominently and at some length in
this handsome and provocative book.
The historical, social, and cultural contexts of Dickinson’s writing —
her ‘‘home’’ in the larger sense of 19th-century America and general
literary history —provide the focus for Emily Dickinson at Home: Proceed-
ings of the Third International Conference of the Emily Dickinson Interna-
tional Society in South Hadley, Mount Holyoke College, 12–15 August 1999,
ed. Gudrun M. Grabher and Martina Antretter (Wissenschaftlicher).
The volume includes essays that broaden the feminist perspective on
Dickinson’s sense of identity and authority, both historically and theoret-
ically, in Shira Wolosky’s ‘‘Modest Selves: Dickinson’s Critique of Ameri-
can Identity’’ (pp. 1–11); Helen Shoobridge’s ‘‘Dickinson the Mysterique:
A Revision of the Anxiety of In uence and Authority’’ (pp. 13–33); and
Sylvia N. Mikkelsen’s ‘‘Emily Dickinson, Two Twentieth-Century ‘Sis-
ters’ and the Problem of Feminist Aesthetics’’ (pp. 89–102), the ‘‘sis-
ters’’ being Marguerite Duras and Sylvia Plath, the informing critical per-
spective being that of Julia Kristeva. Dickinson’s theological musings as
88 Whitman and Dickinson

informed by the contexts of biblical interpretation and contemporary

revivalism occupy Richard S. Ellis in ‘‘ ‘A Little East of Jordan’: Human-
Divine Encounter in Dickinson and the Hebrew Bible’’ (pp. 123–42),
Daniel H. Strait in ‘‘Emily Dickinson and the ‘Balsam Word’ ’’ (pp. 143–
151), and Jane D. Eberwein in ‘‘Aaron Colton’s Ministry to a Poet’’
(pp. 153–68). Thematic studies that link critical insights to biographical
and social contexts include Nancy Johnston’s ‘‘The Loaf and the Crumb:
Dickinson’s Aesthetics of Bread-Making’’ (pp. 35–49), a topic also treated
with fascination in Habegger’s biography; Daneen Wardrop’s ‘‘ ‘The
Ethiop Within’: Emily Dickinson and Slavery’’ (pp. 71–88); and Caro-
lyn S. Moran’s ‘‘ ‘September’s Baccalaureate’: Emily Dickinson on the
Philosophy of Aging’’ (pp. 103–21). Applications of new methodologies
to problems in Dickinson scholarship appear in Susanne Shapiro’s ‘‘Se-
crets of the Pen: Emily Dickinson’s Handwriting’’ (pp. 223–38), which
uses handwriting analysis to argue for dividing the poet’s life into distinct
periods, and John F. McDermott’s ‘‘A Computerized Word Analysis of
the Master Letters’’ (pp. 239–47, published previously and cited in AmLS
2000, p. 84). In uence and reception studies or those that situate the
poet in literary history include Brad Ricca’s ‘‘Emily Dickinson: Learn’d
Astronomer’’ (pp. 169–77, also previously published and cited in AmLS
2000, p. 87), Thomas Gardner’s ‘‘Enlarging Loneliness: Marilynne Rob-
inson’s Housekeeping as a Reading of Emily Dickinson’’ (pp. 51–70; rpt. in
EDJ 10, i: 9–33); Masako Takeda’s ‘‘The Belle of Japan: The Popularity
of Emily Dickinson in Japan’’ (pp. 187–99); Eleanor Heginbotham’s
‘‘ ‘Whatever It Is, She Has Tried It’: Contemporary Poets on Editing —
and Dickinson’s Fascicles’’ (pp. 267–87); and Rolf Amsler and Mar-
garet H. Freeman’s ‘‘Emily Dickinson’s Double Language: An Introduc-
tion to the Writings of Hans W. Luescher’’ (pp. 249–66), which oVers to
public scrutiny excerpts from the extensive unpublished manuscripts of a
late Swiss author who thought he had discovered the ‘‘key’’ to Dickinson’s
‘‘esoteric’’ poems, which constituted, in his view, an extensive narrative of
actively sexual encounters with Samuel Bowles and Kate Scott Anthon.
Cynthia L. Hallen provides a useful survey of the poet’s wide-ranging
stylistic techniques in ‘‘At Home in Language: Emily Dickinson’s Rhetor-
ical Figures’’ (pp. 201–22). Finally, Chanthana Chaichit’s ‘‘Emily Dickin-
son at Home: The Paradox of the Wandering Mind’’ (pp. 179–85) con-
siders the ironically broad geographical reach of the ‘‘reclusive’’ poet’s
knowledge and imagination.
Two books published in 2000 but inadvertently neglected in last year’s
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 89

chapter deserve mention. Domhnall Mitchell’s Emily Dickinson: Mon-

arch of Perception (Mass.) anticipates this year’s interest in the immediate
social and larger historical contexts of Dickinson’s work. Rejecting the
notion that Dickinson’s reclusive life implies an ignorance or innocence
of historical conditions, Mitchell sets out to show how Dickinson ‘‘nego-
tiated with the historical, even when the historical appears to be absent
from the writing’’ by oVering a series of ‘‘case studies that . . . chart the
interaction between the writer and a range of institutions, ideologies, and
practices represented by the railway, domesticity, and horticulture,’’
among other themes. A detailed reading of ‘‘I Like to See It Lap the
Miles,’’ for example, considers the tensions between nature and technol-
ogy, the old and the new, the urban and the rural, the mythic and the real,
in light of the Dickinson family’s interests in developing the local railroad
and the rapid industrial growth of the times. In ‘‘Publication —Is the
Auction’’ Mitchell sees the fears of bankruptcy and insolvency that
haunted the Dickinson family, so that for the poet, ‘‘publication is the
equivalent to a bankruptcy auction, in the sense that it calls into question
the social or literary status of the person doing the publishing.’’ Accord-
ing to this reading, a refusal to publish becomes, ironically, ‘‘a way of
authorizing one’s work, imparting to it a kind of stability and perma-
nence at a period when power and in uence of established New England
families were beginning to decline . . . and when the reputation of a writer
was in part dependent on a volatile economy.’’ The book also includes
Mitchell’s critique of the ‘‘manuscript school’’ of Dickinson bibliography,
a study of the poet’s style in light of Bakhtin’s theories, and observations
on the poet’s biography. A tight focus is lacking in this study, which seems
a compendium held together loosely by a concern with the theme of
power, a theme that associates this work strongly with that of Messmer
and particularly Habegger. Mitchell quotes from Habegger’s manuscript,
and Habegger acknowledges Mitchell’s help. Together they represent a
strong move in Dickinson studies toward close-reading bolstered by
documentary evidence and exhaustive contextualization, a sort of deep
historicism.
The other book from 2000, Visiting Emily: Poems Inspired by the Life
and Work of Emily Dickinson, ed. Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro
with a foreword by Robert Bly (Iowa), gives a lively sense of the depth and
breadth of Dickinson’s in uence on American poetry from Hart Crane to
Amy Clampitt and Ray Young Bear. Arranged alphabetically, the poets
speak in a hauntingly transhistorical unison of their careful reading and
90 Whitman and Dickinson

special understandings; but in style and perspective they range widely,

in uenced no doubt by the bold idiosyncrasy of Dickinson herself. Billy
Collins gives us the poet naked in ‘‘Taking OV Emily Dickinson’s
Clothes’’ (pp. 13–14) and Maxine Kumin imagines her updated and
extraverted in ‘‘After the Poetry Reading’’ (p. 54). A surprisingly apt
Whitmanian note sounds in Galway Kinnell’s ‘‘The Deconstruction of
Emily Dickinson’’ (pp. 51–52) —written in the spirit of ‘‘When I Heard
the Learn’d Astronomer’’ —and Barton Levi St. Armand playfully con-
siders the possibility of ‘‘Emily Dickinson Reading Walt Whitman’’
(pp. 91–92): ‘‘The bearded rapist lurking in those folds / of velvet mossy-
green, the Gift Book’s gilt.’’ Words and images from Dickinson’s poems
abound, as do famous phrases from her life and letters; ‘‘half-cracked’’
attracts both Joyce Carol Oates and Adrienne Rich. The 78 poets deserve
to be named individually here, but since space forbids we can say that the
table of contents reads like an anthology of poets chosen not for topic but
for sheer skill and distinguished reputation. The editors discuss their
project only brie y in the introduction but expand somewhat in a 2001
essay: ‘‘Emily Who?’’ (Chronicle of Higher Education 22 June: B16–B17).

c. Articles and Individual Chapters Biography takes center stage again

in a few shorter works, including articles by Messmer and Habegger. An
excerpt from Messmer’s book appears as ‘‘Emily Dickinson’s Love Letters
to Sue’’ (GLR 8, v: 16–19). Here Messmer argues that Dickinson’s ‘‘loss’’
of Susan Gilbert Dickinson to both marriage and the church can be
positively interpreted as a transformational event in which the poet
replaced ‘‘a passionate love relationship’’ with an ‘‘idealized yet per-
petually inaccessible textual construct.’’ Though methodologically (not
to mention stylistically and temperamentally) distant from Habegger,
Messmer makes a point similar to the biographer’s central claim that
Dickinson’s greatness lies in her ability to transform personal loss into
high art. An excerpt from Habegger, which appears as ‘‘A Glimpse into
Emily Dickinson’s Reading’’ (NER 22, iv: 96–99), shows us Dickinson as
a novel-reader in the 1840s, a habit she shared with her brother Austin
(against their father’s wishes), documented by the distinctly diVerent
marks the siblings left in Dickinson family copies of such books as
Longfellow’s Kavanagh and in letters she wrote about Brontë’s Jane Eyre,
among other books. Dickinson’s class-consciousness and questions of
ethnic identity, which Habegger treats with unblinking realism in his
biography, also concern Lori Lebow in ‘‘Emily Dickinson: ‘She Don’t
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 91

Go Nowhere,’ or A Nineteenth-Century Recluse’s Guide to Cross-

Culturalism’’ (WW 8: 441–55.) Admitting that Dickinson’s general ‘‘atti-
tudes suggest a callous disregard for the disadvantaged,’’ re ecting ‘‘the
circumstances of a wealthy family’s eldest daughter who enjoyed the
gentry’s privileges,’’ Lebow considers the poet’s interactions with two
women —a brief encounter with a Native American who comes to the
kitchen door and delights the poet with her ‘‘jargon’’ and appreciation of
nature, and a long-term relationship with the Dickinsons’ Irish servant
Margaret Maher, which viewed within the context of contemporary class
tensions illustrates both conventional elements and ‘‘the richness of a
close relationship between women in the domestic sphere.’’ The bio-
graphical question of Dickinson’s awareness of the Civil War and its
in uence on her poems comes up in Lawrence I. Berkove’s ‘‘ ‘A Slash of
Blue’: An Unrecognized Emily Dickinson War Poem’’ (EDJ 10, i: 1–8).
Using Franklin’s redating of the poem (Fr233) to support his case,
Berkove reads it as a ‘‘bitterly ironic’’ and ‘‘realistic’’ response to the
Union defeat at First Bull Run.
Issues involving Dickinson’s in uences, reception, and position in
literary history attract a great deal of attention. In ‘‘Because I, Per-
sephone, Could Not Stop for Death: Emily Dickinson and the Goddess’’
(EDJ 10, ii: 22–42) Ken Hiltner questions the commonly accepted view
that the poet made little use of classical sources and mythology in her
poems. He argues for a reading of ‘‘Because I Could Not Stop for Death’’
as ‘‘a new and startling version of the myth of Persephone’’ which ‘‘framed
a devastating critique of patriarchal exogamy,’’ revealing an attitude that
accounts for many of her ‘‘life decisions, not the least . . . being her
reluctance to publish.’’ In Esoteric Origins Arthur Versluis attempts to
account for the presence of esoteric themes in Dickinson’s work despite
our knowing little about her reading and the absence of any sure evidence
of her familiarity with writings on such topics as alchemy and mysticism.
He argues that ‘‘her poetry reveals a highly literary form of what emerged
elsewhere in American society as spiritualism, as well as what we might
call a spontaneously auto-initiatic spirituality.’’ Versluis considers the
Book of Revelation and the writings of Sir Thomas Browne as possible
sources. The Book of Revelation also Ž gures signiŽ cantly in a brief survey
of the poet’s biblical references provided by CliV Edwards in ‘‘The Bible
Through a Poet’s Prism: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Poems as Revelation
Continued’’ (Bible Review 17, ii: 38–42). Adam Frank considers a dif-
ferent kind of in uence in ‘‘Emily Dickinson and Photography’’ (EDJ 10,
92 Whitman and Dickinson

ii: 1–21). He contends that ‘‘Dickinson’s writing . . . registers and theorizes

experiences of looking conditioned by photographic materials’’ and
‘‘shaped by U.S. sentimentalism, especially in its . . . attempts to make
outer appearance and inner character correspond.’’ The detailed argu-
ment pieces together comments from Dickinson (notably her substitu-
tion of a written self-portrait for a photograph in the famous letter to
Higginson), readings from the poems, contextual sources such as Oliver
Wendell Holmes’s essays on photography, and theoretical materials on
the iconicity versus the indexicality of photographs. In ‘‘Emily Dickin-
son’s Place in Literary History; or, The Public Function of a Private Poet’’
(EDJ 10, i: 55–69) Heinz Ickstadt reevaluates recent possibly in ated
claims for the poet’s ‘‘greatness’’ in light of three poetical movements since
her time: French symbolism in the late 19th-century, modernism in
American poetry, and ‘‘the intellectual climate of postmodernism and
poststructuralist theory.’’ Considering points of connection and disjunc-
tion in each case, Ickstadt concludes that Dickinson’s writing holds ‘‘an
appeal beyond the esoteric’’ in ‘‘shared experience’’ —‘‘the need to con-
front and to transcend mere self in the very knowledge of the inevitability
of our dying.’’ The appeal of Dickinson’s life and poetry for the British
novelist A. S. Byatt becomes clear in her admission that Dickinson came
to replace the original inspiration of Elizabeth Barrett Browning as the
model for her poetic heroine in the novel Possession. Nancy Chinn con-
siders some details of this in uence in ‘‘ ‘I Am My Own Riddle’ —A. S.
Byatt’s Christabel LaMotte: Emily Dickinson and Melusina’’ (PLL 37:
179–204). In ‘‘Keeping Her Distance: Cisneros, Dickinson, and the
Politics of Private Enjoyment’’ (PMLA 116: 1334–48) GeoVrey Sanborn
takes up the vexed question of private enjoyment versus public respon-
sibility in art, asserting that Sandra Cisneros, partly through negotiating
the in uence of Dickinson, discovers in ‘‘solitary pleasure’’ (sexual and
textual) ‘‘not the end of interpersonal commitments and socially transfor-
mative acts but the beginning of alliances on new grounds.’’ Invoking
again the ghost of Dickinson’s Irish housemaid Margaret Maher, ‘‘Cis-
neros revises Dickinson’s relatively elitist conception of privacy in two
ways: by insisting on its contingency and by opening it to nonelite
practices of identiŽ cation.’’ Ultimately, ‘‘Dickinson is for Cisneros both
an inspiration and a cautionary example. To ‘pull an Emily D.’ is to risk
becoming one of those people who . . . ‘sleep so close to the stars they
forget those of us who live too much on earth.’ ’’
Similar themes come under consideration in Daneen Wardrop’s
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 93

thoughtful contribution to this year’s rich outpouring of articles on

Dickinson’s poetics —‘‘The Poetics of Political Involvement and Non-
Involvement’’ (EDJ 10, ii: 52–67). Starting with the poet’s apparent lack
of concern with the Civil War, Wardrop suggests that Dickinson’s rela-
tionship to her culture was richer and more complex than current critical
methods can quite fathom. We are limited by ‘‘the extremely extroverted’’
model of political involvement currently embraced, especially in Amer-
ica. Wardrop proposes and brie y illustrates a new model, more sympa-
thetic to introversion and based on the concept of ‘‘intussusception, a
process by which Dickinson draws into herself the cultural and historical
Ž eld of events, later to emerge in refracted and apolitical syntax and
language, subject to the rules of fortuitous accident that guide the lyric
impulse.’’ In Vered Shemtov’s ‘‘Metrical Hybridization: Prosodic Ambi-
guities as a Form of Social Dialogue’’ (PoT 22: 65–87) Dickinson and
Guillaume Apollinaire serve as cases demonstrating ‘‘the simultaneous
existence of several voices represented by a mixture of multiple prosodic
structures, each referring to a diVerent set of poetic and ideological
conventions.’’ In this ambitious study blending formalist and historicist
methodology and questioning the suitability of applying Bakhtin’s theo-
ries to poetics ‘‘literary voice’’ is considered as ‘‘the audible aspect of the
text . . . forming an identity, a subject with certain characteristics and
social aYliations’’ rather than a ‘‘metaphor for the discursive rendition of
a particular consciousness.’’ Building on Cristanne Miller’s work, Shem-
tov argues that Dickinson carries on ‘‘hidden dialogues’’ in a meter that is
‘‘hybrid in the sense that it merges a feminine voice with a voice of the
common people in its prosodic roots in the ballad, and with a childish
voice in its intertextual relations to the meter of children’s songs.’’ Against
these blended voices, remaining roughly within the hymn meter, she
opposes the ‘‘rejected pentameter’’ as the voice of the ‘‘male tradition,’’
the ‘‘ ‘deep trace’ of the other’s voice,’’ which she allows to intrude on the
poems to ‘‘confront it directly.’’ Rejecting claims of Dickinson’s metrical
innocence or her lack of training, Christine Ross studies the poet’s inno-
vations against the background of 19th-century textbooks in ‘‘Uncom-
mon Measures: Emily Dickinson’s Subversive Prosody’’ (EDJ 10, i: 70–
98). Ross argues that the poet ‘‘used her textbooks to create a uniquely
expressive metric . . . to subvert the totalizing assumptions about lan-
guage that she inherited.’’ Ross’s detailed analysis of Dickinson’s experi-
ments with developing nonstandard but distinct rhythmic patterns con-
cludes that ‘‘her imitations of spoken rhythms are too regulated to count
94 Whitman and Dickinson

as natural expression; her metrical designs, while highly patterned, are

too irregular to count as reason.’’ She thus ‘‘exposes the illusion of repre-
sentivity that both expressive and rationalist theories assume.’’ The study
of Dickinson’s textbooks also informs Michael Theune’s ‘‘ ‘One and One
Are One’ . . . and Two: An Inquiry into Dickinson’s Use of Mathematical
Signs’’ (EDJ 10, i: 99–116). Theune argues that the poet employed mathe-
matical signs (including the minus sign —one way of looking at her
famous dashes) that mingled visual and verbal elements and functioned
as ‘‘signiŽ ers of an ongoing . . . metaphysical inquiry’’ representing a ‘‘pro-
found skepticism regarding the integrating tendencies’’ of both Chris-
tianity and Transcendentalism. In ‘‘Emily Dickinson Thinking’’ (Par-
nassus 26: 34–56) Helen Vendler analyzes Dickinson’s attempts to ‘‘plot
temporality’’ as an exhaustive, ‘‘chromatic’’ scheme that sounds every
note in the scale of a progression of events, the disruption of which,
especially as dramatized in the poems of the 1860s, indicates periods of
epistemological crisis. In ‘‘A New Redemption: Emily Dickinson’s Poetic
in Fascicle 22 and ‘I Dwell in Possibility’ ’’ (SoAR 66, i: 50–83) A. James
Wohlpart shows how Dickinson’s poems (not only the content but also
the physical makeup of the fascicles, with their links to sewing and
botanical collection or gardening) explore the limits of creativity and
transform ‘‘the home and the activities of the home into a poetic force
that undermined nineteenth-century [patriarchal] culture.’’ In fascicle 22
the metaphorical house of poetry ‘‘oVers a re-valuation of domesticity
and a new redemption through interconnectedness’’ while contesting
‘‘the dominant house of prose, with its conŽ nement and oppression,’’
illustrating in Dickinsons’ work the ‘‘dialectical relation . . . between
constraint and liberation, between prose and poetry.’’
The perennial interest in teaching Dickinson’s poetry is pursued in
Jordan Clary’s ‘‘Three Voices: Teaching Stephen Crane, Emily Dickin-
son, and Walt Whitman,’’ pp. 2–13 in The Teachers & Writers Guide,
which also draws on the themes of constraint and liberation. Clary tells
of her success in using Dickinson, with her ‘‘rich inner life’’ and sensi-
tivity to conŽ nement and limitation, to teach creative writing in prison
classrooms.
Explication and close-reading, another perennial activity in Dickinson
scholarship, appear as the main concern in Tom Hansen’s ‘‘Dickinson’s
‘What Inn Is This’ ’’ (Expl 59: 185–87), seen here as a riddling poem about
death from the perspective of a naive persona, and Collamer M. Abbott’s
‘‘Dickinson’s Letter 814’’ (Expl 59: 79–80), a brief look at the Ž g image in
M. Jimmie Killingsworth 95

Dickinson’s references to George Eliot’s biography, an image for poetry as

well as life that applies to Dickinson’s own artistic (and possibly erotic)
experience. Dickinson’s treatment of the night in ‘‘We Grow Accustomed
to the Dark,’’ a characteristic theme among New England poets, is com-
pared with similar treatments in Emerson and Edwin Arlington Robin-
son, among others, in Wesley McNair’s ‘‘Places in the Dark’’ (SR 109:
102–07).
Texas A & M University
5 Mark Twain
Alan Gribben

A short story that Mark Twain set aside Ž nally sees print, his collected
editions receive analysis, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher returns to print,
the illustrations from four of Twain’s books go under a magnifying glass,
two important editions of Huckleberry Finn earn augmented versions, the
disagreements resume over Huckleberry Finn’s language and what his
book signiŽ es in American culture, a collection of essays pays tribute to
Hamlin Hill’s foray against conventional scholarship, and another in-
stance of Albert Bigelow Paine’s textual tampering is detected. In addi-
tion, an update on the books and articles about Twain comes to hand, a
major study of Twain’s short works makes its appearance, his last visit to
Missouri is chronicled, and Ken Burns’s documentary about Twain’s life
(which spun oV its own Twain biography) draws comment. Add to those
developments various mopping-up operations devoted to individual
works, and the year seems briskly productive if occasionally contentious.

i Editions
Louis J. Budd’s lively introduction and notes for The Gilded Age: A Tale of
To-Day (Penguin) make this paperbound edition well worth acquiring.
Budd explicitly charts what the novel does (‘‘the most insightful novel
about the public life of the 1870s’’) and does not do (‘‘The Gilded Age
ignored the bottom-scale workers’’). The introduction deftly sketches out
the advantages and disadvantages of Charles Dudley Warner’s coauthor-
ship with Twain, observing, ‘‘That Warner decided to collaborate is
genuinely surprising. . . . By the time that sales agents delivered The
Gilded Age door-to-door, he felt regrets.’’ In a fascinating little tangent,
Budd delves into the origin and longevity of the title of the novel, The
98 Mark Twain

Gilded Age. Budd speciŽ es the second printing of the Ž rst edition as his
copy-text.
Determining the authorship of the individual parts of this jointly
written novel has proven tricky. Carl Pracht sheds new light on the matter
in ‘‘The Original Preface to The Gilded Age Resurfaces’’ (MissQ 54: 59–
68). Pracht locates a Ž ve-page, handwritten preface that was tipped into a
Ž rst-edition copy of The Gilded Age presented to the Reverend Joseph
Twichell, the Clemenses’ friend and neighbor. The fact that the manu-
script is in Mark Twain’s hand indicates that he may well have written the
entire preface, which contradicts Ernest E. Leisy’s deduction in ‘‘Mark
Twain’s Part in The Gilded Age ’’ (AL 8: 446). Pracht transcribes and
reproduces a photographic facsimile of the blue-ink paragraphs and their
black-ink revisions. The document was donated to Southeast Missouri
State University in 1944.
Roy Blount Jr. provides an introduction and an afterword to a long-
forgotten short story Mark Twain left behind, ‘‘A Murder, a Mystery, and
a Marriage’’ (Atlantic Monthly 288, i: 49–81). With the exception of an
unauthorized and quashed private edition in 1945, no attempt was made
to publish this tale that Twain concocted in 1876 as the literary model for
a never-realized Atlantic series to be written, he hoped, by a ‘‘good &
godly gang’’ of distinguished authors. Only Laurence McClain’s ‘‘ ‘A
Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage’: Mark Twain’s Hannibal in Transi-
tion’’ (LCUT 37 [1986]: 52–75) had ever studied the work to any extent.
As a result of its impulsive discarding by Twain, the suppression of any
subsequent publication by the Mark Twain Estate, and its relative neglect
by scholars, this story, one of several that Twain based on balloon travel,
made its eventual appearance amid a  urry of publicity that would have
delighted the author. Luckily, the tale does have some noteworthy fea-
tures. For instance, one of Mark Twain’s many mysterious strangers
makes a showy entrance on the scene, this time in the person of a
Frenchman named Jean Mercier whose balloon lands near Deer Lick,
Missouri, a village depicted as uninviting. But the realistic details about
the setting and its inhabitants are at war with Twain’s consuming desire to
burlesque (and, within the plot of the story, blame) the celebrated science
Ž ction author Jules Verne. The narrative is simultaneously pulled in the
directions of several literary genres, including detective Ž ction and senti-
mental romance, before collapsing into a ridiculous indictment of Verne
for supposedly sending surrogates abroad to experience adventures he
could then recount (as Twain himself had tried to do with John H. Riley
Alan Gribben 99

in 1871, by the way). The ungainly combination of authorial purposes

and writing techniques produces a strange literary mishmash, but since
nearly all of the incidents evoke passages in Twain’s other works, Twain-
ians will Ž nd that ‘‘A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage’’ rewards a
perusal.
Blount’s introduction points out a large error about the story in the
usually infallible Mark Twain A–Z (see AmLS 1995, p. 94). Then in a
substantive afterword Blount humorously likens the potential Atlantic
contributors (Lowell, Holmes, Aldrich, Howells, Harte, Trowbridge,
Warner, James) to Twain’s fantasy of an adult version of Tom Sawyer’s
gang, sketches out salient biographical facts about Twain’s life in 1876,
mulls over the reasons behind Twain’s wish to pair himself with Henry
James, assesses the vital element of innocence that Twain worshipped,
and links elements of the story to the disputed Tilden-Hayes election and
the failures of Reconstruction politics. In Blount’s words, ‘‘Hayes cam-
paigned for reconciliation, which meant letting the North and South get
together again on grounds of white supremacy.’’ Blount gives Twain
credit for sensing this shift: ‘‘In 1876, as a national consensus sloshed a
reconciliationist glaze over the issues left unresolved in the aftermath of
slavery, Mark Twain’s writing began to grow darker —in ‘A Murder, a
Mystery, and a Marriage.’ ’’
When the Ž rst half of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn manu-
script turned up, almost miraculously, in a Hollywood attic in 1990, it
seemed inevitable that the Mark Twain Project would revise and reissue
the erudite edition of the novel it had released in 1985. Walter Blair,
arguably the leading scholar on that literary work, lived to witness the
hoopla over the amazing discovery, but his death in 1992 meant that
others would apply themselves to transcribing and interpreting the 664
pages that eventually joined the 697 pages already housed in the BuValo
and Erie County Public Library. Accordingly the Mark Twain Library
Series edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, described on its dust
jacket as ‘‘the only authoritative text based on the complete original
manuscript with all the original illustrations,’’ is credited to Victor Fischer
and Lin Salamo, longtime members of the Mark Twain Project staV, who
dedicate the volume to Blair. The editors reveal that the newly found
leaves necessitated approximately 100 departures from the wording of the
1985 edition, along with nearly 1,100 changes in spelling, punctuation,
and other details. Random House had earlier rushed out an edition based
on the new manuscript leaves and reinserted three passages Twain even-
100 Mark Twain

tually omitted (see AmLS 1995, pp. 82–83); making a crucial editorial
decision, the Mark Twain Project edition (Calif.) elects instead to reprint
these passages, including Jim’s ghoulish ‘‘ghost’’ story, merely as an appen-
dix. (Perhaps contradictorily, but in a shrewd and justiŽ able move, the
editors choose to reintegrate the once-discarded but magniŽ cent raftsmen
passage back into chapter 16.) One measure of the care invested in this
new edition: the previous Mark Twain Library version of Huckleberry
Finn contained 451 pages; this time around, the volume has 561 pages,
with fuller notes and expanded references. An explanatory note glossing
the Ž rst appearance of the oVensive term ‘‘nigger,’’ to take an example, is
now four times its length in the earlier edition and pointedly records that
not ‘‘a single newspaper reviewer, north or south,’’ objected to this word
when the novel was initially published. Many of these notes could almost
merit separate publication in academic journals. The editors let readers
peer over their shoulders by reproducing 16 pages of Twain’s manuscript
in facsimile to show his methods of composition and revision. It would be
hard to fault this impressively improved book from any perspective. And
since there are now no more missing sections of Twain’s manuscript to be
unearthed, presumably this edition —along with an anticipated compan-
ion volume in the Works of Mark Twain Series —now becomes the
standard against which all rivals will be compared.
After a 20-year interval since the Ž rst edition of Michael Patrick
Hearn’s gargantuan The Annotated Huckleberry Finn (see AmLS 1981,
p. 98), a revision (480 pages versus 378 in the earlier version) endeavors to
answer every question that conceivably might occur to an educated
reader. Although the index has now regrettably vanished and the bibli-
ography of general works about Mark Twain is not much changed,
despite the amount of scholarship that has reached print since 1981, the
bibliography section devoted to Huckleberry Finn itself is more ade-
quately enlarged. In the original edition E. W. Kemble’s illustrations were
reproduced in black ink; here they are printed in dark brick red. The
biggest change occurs in Hearn’s introduction: originally it ran 50 pages;
here it is a 165-page disquisition, with a 12-page segment devoted to the
controversy over the alleged racism detectable in Twain’s novel. (As might
be expected, Hearn mounts a spirited defense, noting that ‘‘one conse-
quence of reading Huckleberry Finn is that the book may actually dis-
courage racism.’’) But it is the running annotations on nearly every page
that have caused both editions to be so frequently consulted, and here the
expansions are quite noticeable. To take an example, chapter 12, in which
Alan Gribben 101

Huck boards a wrecked steamboat, formerly carried 28 such notes in its

margins; this time it has 34. And they are often much, much lengthier. A
gloss on Huck’s observation that ‘‘you can’t learn a nigger to argue’’
originally amounted to two sentences; now it occupies the better part of
an entire page and cites several works in examining the irony of Huck’s
tone, including Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua’s The Jim Dilemma: Reading
Race in Huckleberry Finn (see AmLS 1998, p. 92). A simple translation of
Huck’s attempt to speak French (‘‘Polly-voo franzy’’) in the 1981 edition
now leads into a note about Twain’s ‘‘A Murder, a Mystery, and a Mar-
riage.’’ Hearn continues to express disappointment in the ‘‘evasion’’ por-
tion of Twain’s novel: ‘‘It goes on too long, and seems mere padding to
make the story a proper subscription book.’’
One problem emerges: it is never quite clear which text Hearn has
chosen in preparing his edition, though he acknowledges the 2001 Cal-
ifornia edition of the classic and thanks its editors for assistance. What-
ever the case, Hearn parts company with the Mark Twain Project and
other recent editions by relegating the superb raftsmen passage to appen-
dix B, explaining that ‘‘this lengthy, highly detailed account . . . is perhaps
more suited to Life on the Mississippi than to Huckleberry Finn. ’’ Hearn
went on to edit The Annotated Wizard of Oz after completing his original
edition of Twain’s classic, but it is likely to be this return to an enhanced
version of The Annotated Huckleberry Finn that will hold a respected
place in both the trade book market and the scholarly world.
The Library of America series is selectively repackaging some of its
major texts and reprinting them as paperbound Library of America
College Editions. One of the latest entries in this latter format is Mark
Twain: Huck Finn; Pudd’nhead Wilson; No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger;
and Other Writings (2000). (Does anyone else Ž nd the abbreviation Huck
Finn to be a mite overly familiar in a scholarly edition?) These works were
compiled from the Library of America’s Mississippi Writings, ed. Guy
Cardwell, and from Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, a two-
volume compendium ed. Louis J. Budd. The timing is a bit awkward, for
the editors assert that the Ž rst American edition of Huckleberry Finn ‘‘is at
present the best available text’’ while admitting lamely that ‘‘most of the
missing manuscript was recently discovered.’’ But at least the basis for
each text is speciŽ ed. Though somewhat minimal, the notes are superior
to those available in most paperbound editions. The weakest point has to
be the barely suggestive list of background readings; the strongest feature
is the unusual conŽ guration of this collection of Twain’s writings, which
102 Mark Twain

brings together two of Twain’s major novels; a respected novelette; and

nearly a dozen of his often-requested stories and sketches, including ‘‘Jim
Smiley and His Jumping Frog,’’ ‘‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary OVences,’’
‘‘How to Tell a Story,’’ ‘‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,’’ ‘‘The
War Prayer,’’ and ‘‘The United States of Lyncherdom.’’
‘‘The United States of Lyncherdom’’ has often been reprinted and
quoted since its Ž rst appearance nearly 80 years ago. L. Terry Oggel,
however, turns up yet another glaring instance of Albert Bigelow Paine’s
textual tampering and blows the whistle on these corruptions in ‘‘Speak-
ing Out about Race: ‘The United States of Lyncherdom’ Clemens Really
Wrote’’ (Prospects 25 [2000]: 115–38). Oggel catalogs the biographical,
textual, printing, and reception history of Twain’s denunciation of Amer-
ican lawlessness. We learn that he wrote an ‘‘acidic’’ essay in 1901 for the
North American Review, pigeonholed it to wait for an opportune moment
for its publication, then presumably forgot about the manuscript, only to
have Paine include an altered version of it in Europe and Elsewhere (1923).
Oggel proves that Paine made numerous deletions, including Twain’s
reference to a recent New Jersey court case, and even changed Twain’s
word for white lynchers (‘‘assassins’’) to soften the tone. Oggel laments
that Twain’s polemic did not see print, for ‘‘in its time the true essay
would have been a powerful statement by an outspoken writer of interna-
tional authority against the atrocity of lynching and the horror of rule by
force at the turn of the century.’’ Even today, writes Oggel, the ‘‘true’’ text
‘‘packs considerable power’’ and ‘‘oVers more insight about Mark Twain’s
ideas on race than can be found anywhere else.’’ Oggel then reprints the
exact text as it exists (in three states) in the Mark Twain Papers at Berkeley
(Box 27). Of considerable interest and importance is ‘‘Afterword: Mark
Twain and the Sense of Racism’’ (pp. 151–58), a searching essay by Louis J.
Budd appended to Oggel’s two-part article. Budd concedes that ‘‘Twain’s
attitude toward African Americans seldom got more perceptive than
empathetic paternalism, especially in his private behavior and casual
comments.’’ Moreover, ‘‘as a rule he tacked rather than bucked strong
head winds of opinion.’’ On the other hand, remarks Budd, Guy A.
Cardwell’s The Man Who Was Mark Twain: Images and Ideologies (see
AmLS 1991, pp. 88–89) tends to ‘‘overstate’’ when it ‘‘grows contemp-
tuous, then condemnatory.’’ Whatever his faults, Mark Twain ‘‘never
deserved’’ the horrid label of ‘‘rabid racist.’’ Budd’s piece is remarkable for
its candor and incisiveness regarding a sensitive topic.
John Cooley’s How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson and Other Tales
Alan Gribben 103

of Rebellious Girls and Daring Young Women (Nebraska) compiles Twain’s

stories about girls and independent, unmarried young women. ‘‘They
re ect changing ideas in his culture about gender and the rapidly evolv-
ing roles of women in American society,’’ writes Cooley. Inasmuch as
critics have often faulted Twain for an inability ‘‘to create authentic
portraits of young women,’’ Cooley predicts that his volume ‘‘should help
remap the female presence in Twain’s literary landscape. . . . He experi-
mented boldly with a wide range of unconventional, even socially unac-
ceptable female personalities, and he placed his girl characters in chal-
lenging plots that required unexpected skills and daring actions.’’ The
collection’s main problem is that it must pull together such disparate
pieces; they range from the silly ‘‘Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man’’
(1864) to the sentimental ‘‘A Horse’s Tale’’ (1905) and ‘‘Saint Joan of Arc’’
(1906) and the bizarre ‘‘HellŽ re Hotchkiss’’ (written 1897), ‘‘Wapping
Alice’’ (written 1897), and the title story, ‘‘How Nancy Jackson Married
Kate Wilson’’ (written circa 1902). Cooley’s introduction, headnotes, and
afterword—paying homage to Susan Gillman, Laura Skandera Trombley,
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and other ‘‘feminist and gender-related’’ schol-
ars —take stock of Twain’s evolving attitudes and integrate his fondness
for the young girls who joined his ‘‘Angel-Ž sh Aquarium’’ into his lifelong
views of females.
But an eye-opening book review by Robert Sattelmeyer (SoAR 67, ii
[2002]: 108–09) reminds readers that it was actually Sattelmeyer who in
1987 supplied a title for Mark Twain’s untitled and incomplete manu-
script, ‘‘How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson,’’ the tale of a girl
compelled to pretend she is a man. Sattelmeyer questions why Cooley
elected to bestow an invented title on a miscellany of Twain’s stories about
females and why he then compounds his error by deconstructing ‘‘the
idea of a lesbian marriage the title certainly suggests to contemporary
readers.’’ The carelessness re ected in Cooley’s unfortunate choice of a
title for his book is likely to undermine the long-term credibility and
stature of his collection.
An unŽ nished and undated manuscript about Jane Austen in the Mark
Twain Papers at Berkeley has often been quoted but never published.
Emily Auerbach’s ‘‘ ‘A Barkeeper Entering the Kingdom of Heaven’: Did
Mark Twain Really Hate Jane Austen?’’ (VQR 75 [1999]: 109–20) rectiŽ es
that deŽ ciency by transcribing the entire seven-and-a-half-page frag-
ment, in which Twain avers that Austen ‘‘makes me detest all her people,
without reserve,’’ critiques scenes in Sense and Sensibility, and expresses
104 Mark Twain

disgust that ‘‘great critics’’ purport that Austen ‘‘draws her characters with
sharp discrimination and a sure touch.’’ Twain scholars will be annoyed
by three of Auerbach’s decisions: she repeatedly interrupts Twain’s narra-
tive to insert her own commentary, instead of placing these summaries
and remarks at the beginning or the end; she blithely declines to cite the
scholars who have sought to interpret Twain’s animadversions; and she
expends valuable space ferreting out the views of Jane Austen held by TV
curmudgeon Andy Rooney and newspaper humorist Dave Barry. At the
conclusion she devotes several pages to speculating about whether Twain
and Austen might have liked one another if they had been contempo-
raries (both used humor to attack the ‘‘humbug’’ in the world around
them, she deduces). It is good to have this little manuscript in print, but
the format irritates.
In an ingenious but formerly overlooked article (‘‘Mark Twain’s Books
Do Furnish a Room: But a Uniform Edition Does Still Better’’ (NCP 25
[1998]: 91–102) Louis J. Budd takes up the various collected editions from
which students of Twain may ‘‘choose, uneasily.’’ Budd reminds us that ‘‘a
collected edition is momentous for the author’’ if undertaken during his
lifetime, as Twain’s was. Although such an edition ‘‘hints of looming
mortality,’’ these concerns are ‘‘eased by a promise of immortality.’’ Budd
surveys the collected editions of British authors Scott and Dickens and
such American writers as Irving and Cooper to show the practices that
prevailed in preparing sets. In the 1890s, Twain, ‘‘bruised by his defeats as
an investor and increasingly certain he did not get enough respect as a
literary presence, . . . needed and wanted the psychological reassurance
and the visible, substantial badge of a collected edition.’’ Budd makes a
good case that Twain was still competing in his mind with Bret Harte,
whose collected works had started appearing in the 1880s and who at-
tained a 14-volume Standard Library Edition in 1896–97. But the eVorts
of Twain’s publishers to conceive and execute a uniform edition proved to
be complicated and Ž lled with setbacks, as Budd documents. Eventually
Twain had several lucrative editions to his name, and in 1919 Harper’s
would pay his estate almost $100,000 for the year’s royalties on the
Hillcrest Edition. Budd wittily compares the ‘‘symmetry’’ of Twain’s
uniform sets with the ‘‘boisterous’’ and ‘‘lumbering subscriptions books’’
with which Twain was formerly identiŽ ed. Numerous authorities in the
19th century, Budd notes, encouraged homeowners to acquire deluxe sets
of favorite authors as colorful interior decorations —in other words, as
Alan Gribben 105

furniture. This sort of advice boosted the sales of expensive uniform

editions of Twain and his contemporaries.

ii Biography
Loren Glass (‘‘Trademark Twain,’’ ALH 13: 671–93) maintains that ‘‘no
American writer more completely and enthusiastically embodied this
overlap between the cultural performance of authorial personality and
the generic reliance on authorial autobiography than the man known as
Mark Twain. . . . And yet, ironically, his actual autobiography was never
completed, never fully published, and has received little critical apprecia-
tion.’’ Glass steps back to give an overview of Twain’s importance: ‘‘Part
protomodernist genius, part populist icon, Twain’s syncretic public im-
age illuminates the autobiography’s reception problems, as well as Twain’s
intentions to publish it posthumously. . . . This decision to bequeath the
voluminous autobiographical dictations to his editors reveals how celeb-
rity makes authorship a corporate aVair. Thus . . . Twain’s attempts to
trademark his pen name [constitute] a new model of American author-
ship, one that legitimates literary property less as a mark of the author’s
intellectual labor than as an index of the public’s cultural recognition.’’
Glass’s essay focuses on Twain’s interest in the memoirs of U. S. Grant, the
message embedded in Twain’s ‘‘Is He Living or Is He Dead?’’ (1893), the
contents of his Autobiography, his formation of the Mark Twain Com-
pany, his composition of the ‘‘Lyon-Ashcroft Manuscript’’ in 1909, and
his attempts to register his name as a trademark. Only one of Michael J.
Kiskis’s several probings of Twain’s Autobiography is cited, and an ob-
viously relevant study, ‘‘Autobiography as Property: Mark Twain and His
Legend’’ (The Mythologizing of Mark Twain [Alabama, 1984], pp. 39–55),
is silently omitted, even though it advances several similar arguments.
‘‘Critics have long recognized the appropriateness of understanding the
name Mark Twain as a trademark, but few have bothered to analyze fully
the fundamental transformation this implies in our basic understanding
of literary property,’’ Glass concludes.
Joining the ranks of coVee-table trade books on Twain pioneered by
Milton Meltzer’s venerable Mark Twain Himself (1960) and followed by
Justin Kaplan’s Mark Twain and His World (1974) and Dennis Welland’s
The Life and Times of Mark Twain (1991), GeoVrey C. Ward, Dayton
Duncan, and Ken Burns’s Mark Twain (Knopf ) emphasizes its connec-
106 Mark Twain

tions with Burns’s four-hour documentary of the same name. Their

collaboratively compiled volume contains fewer images and more prose
than Meltzer’s proliŽ cally illustrated tome. In a preface, Burns credits the
fact that Twain ‘‘endures: as a gifted, continuously hilarious and accurate
humorist (where most of his contemporaries are simply no longer funny);
as a devastatingly truthful social critic . . . ; and as the apotheosis of what it
means to be an American, courageously searching for personal, indeed
spiritual, redemption and national self-deŽ nition.’’ A prologue by the
editors recalls Twain’s nostalgic visit in 1902 to his hometown: ‘‘He, too,
had changed almost beyond recognition since he’d Ž rst left Hannibal,
and he had crowded into the intervening Ž ve decades enough experiences
for half a dozen ordinary lifetimes.’’ By and large, the illustrations are
telling and manage to eschew most of the traditional favorites decorating
nearly every Twain publication. There is a picture of him sitting for the
Viennese sculptor Theresa Fedorowna Ries in 1897, a color reproduction
of a Mark Twain Cigars boxtop from 1877, and an unusual photograph of
rugged Carson City in 1865. A snapshot of his body lying in a coYn at the
Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City closes the volume. As might
be deduced from a viewing of the Burns documentary Ž lm, Ž ve and a half
of the 13 chapters chart the progression of Sam Clemens’s despair and
frustration as bankruptcy loomed, Livy’s health failed, and the beloved
Hartford house was boarded up. At the end of his life, ill and depleted,
he complained to a friend that he was ‘‘losing enough sleep to supply
a worn-out army.’’ Twain enthusiasts of all stripes will enjoy leaŽ ng
through these pages, and even the best-read scholar is likely to Ž nd
pleasure in these scenes and phrases.
In ‘‘A Coda to the Twain-Harte Feud’’ (WAL 36: 81–87) Gary Scharn-
horst ‘‘vigorously disputes’’ Bret Harte biographer Axel Nissen’s claim
(see AmLS 2000, p. 256) that ‘‘Harte appears never to have given his lost
friend so much as a passing thought after they parted forever in 1877.’’
Scharnhorst goes on to describe the cold shoulder Twain turned to eVorts
in 1907 to rescue Harte’s daughter Jessamy from a poorhouse. Scharn-
horst previously contributed a series of three excellent additions to our
picture of this con icted relationship —in San Francisco in Fiction (see
AmLS 1995, p. 85), ‘‘The Bret Harte-Mark Twain Feud: An Inside Narra-
tive’’ (see AmLS 1994, p. 96), and Bret Harte: Opening the American
Literary West (see AmLS 2000, p. 256) —and this current article is as
indispensable as the others.
What is likely to become the deŽ nitive appraisal of a famous event in
Alan Gribben 107

the last decade of the author’s life —Paul Sorrentino’s ‘‘Mark Twain’s 1902
Trip to Missouri: A Reexamination, a Chronology, and an Annotated
Bibliography’’ (MTJ 38, i [2000]: 12–45) —re-creates the emotionalism of
Twain’s visit to his native state and hometown. ‘‘For Twain, the trip to
Missouri was a painful reminder that time does not stand still.’’ He
intended to revisit these scenes again, but his wife’s deteriorating health
prevented his return for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. The multi-
tudinous reports Sorrentino turns up relating to Twain’s 1902 activities
are almost staggering. Every future biographer must consult this lengthy
and illustrated article.
A glimpse of Mark Twain’s painful Ž nal days is aVorded by ‘‘Mark
Twain at Bermuda: The Venerable Prince of Humorists Who Has Been
Seeking Rest and Seclusion in the English Isles’’ (MTJ 38, i [2000]: 10–
12), a reprinting of Mildred Champagne’s interview that appeared in
Human Life in 1910. Twain ‘‘held his hand on his chest’’ and initially
protested, ‘‘I can’t talk to anybody. . . . Mind you, I didn’t get this cough in
Bermuda.’’ Champagne persisted, obtained a relatively jovial interview,
and then noted that when Twain excused himself, ‘‘again and again I
heard him cough. . . . All I heard was that pitiful cough in the next room.’’
When she later saw him, brie y, ‘‘his face was paler. . . . I inquired
solicitously after his health. . . . ‘I suppose I am as well as could be
expected of a man of my age and circumstances. Fairly well —but not
extravagantly well.’ ’’ He would die only weeks later.

iii General Interpretations

Peter Messent begins The Short Works of Mark Twain: A Critical Study
(Penn.) by observing how little has been written on Twain’s shorter
works, specifying James D. Wilson’s Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of
Mark Twain (1987) and my own Clemens entry in American Short Story
Writers Before 1880 (1988), but overlooking William M. Gibson’s The Art
of Mark Twain (1976), which contains a chapter on ‘‘Short Fictions,’’ and
The Mark Twain Encyclopedia (1993), with its detailed synopses of Twain’s
short Ž ction, replete with individual bibliographies, prepared by nu-
merous scholarly contributors. Messent’s ‘‘critical target’’ is ‘‘the collec-
tions of short writings that Twain issued during his own lifetime.’’ As
Messent observes, ‘‘Twain’s short pieces have previously been approached
from the individual point of view’’ and thus ‘‘no critics . . . have looked to
see if there is any thematic coherence or other logic . . . to the collections
108 Mark Twain

as a whole.’’ Messent’s intention is to examine ‘‘thematic concerns, liter-

ary techniques, and forms of humor.’’ In the Ž rst volume dissected, The
Celebrated Jumping Frog, and Other Sketches, Messent shows how ‘‘Twain’s
humor . . . strongly depends on the use of contrasting voices to create
comic eVect.’’ Messent then takes up four other collections and half a
dozen stories —including ‘‘A True Story,’’ ‘‘The Stolen White Elephant,’’
‘‘The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,’’ and ‘‘The Man That
Corrupted Hadleyburg’’ —that were published separately, endeavoring
not to ‘‘weigh . . . down’’ elements that Twain intended to function as ‘‘the
playful, the spontaneous, and the unexpected.’’ Portions of one chapter
appeared in Messent’s ‘‘Carnival in Mark Twain’s ‘Stirring Times in
Austria’ and ‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg’ ’’ (SSF 35 [1998]:
217–32). In Messent’s handling, even a relatively slight piece like ‘‘About
Play-Acting’’ leads to discussions about how ‘‘Twain is unable to forget
the (metaphorical) skeletons in his own closet, among which were bank-
ruptcy, family ill health, and the death of Susy.’’ Twain’s ‘‘A Double-
Barreled Detective Story’’ interests Messent because ‘‘issues of false iden-
tity and disguise pervade the narrative.’’ Everywhere Messent tries to
outline the prevailing critical opinions before undertaking his own read-
ings. His book confers fresh dignity on Twain’s sometimes slighted
shorter works and opens up opportunities for other commentators to
concur with or dispute Messent’s ideas. The Short Works of Mark Twain
must be seen as among the signal events of the year.
By a coincidence, the proliŽ c Tom Quirk reprints ‘‘Mark Twain in His
Short Works,’’ the introduction to Selected Tales, Essays, Speeches, and
Sketches of Mark Twain (1994), in Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the
American Literary Imagination (Missouri), a collection of Quirk’s mis-
cellaneous essays. This indexed format allows another opportunity for
those who might have underestimated the pungency of Quirk’s easygoing
generalizations on Mark Twain: ‘‘Unlike, say, Herman Melville, . . . there
is nothing especially deep about Twain. Like the Mississippi River itself,
he is intricate, shifty, and sometimes treacherous, driven by some strong
current of earnestness or indignation; he is complicated, but he is not
profound.’’ Quirk recommends that readers not ‘‘assume that the mark of
a writer of distinction resides chie y in the capacity to produce the
novel. . . . Mark Twain’s imagination was constitutionally unruly and
eruptive. . . . He often worked most coherently if not most memorably in
short compass.’’
In another fortuitous development, the unfolding Mark Twain and
Alan Gribben 109

His Circle Series, edited by the same Tom Quirk, reprints Louis J. Budd’s
groundbreaking Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (1962). Twain specialists
can consequently stop poking around the bottom shelves of used book
stores in hopes of Ž nding a dog-eared copy of Budd’s study and instead
order a new paperback copy of this survey of Twain’s political thought
and literary satires, which has held up notably. From Sam Clemens’s
earliest writings for the Journal [Hannibal] to the many phases of Mark
Twain’s views of his country and his world, Mark Twain: Social Philoso-
pher follows his recorded statements until the last decade of his life when,
‘‘just getting used to Twain as a crusader, the public had little idea of his
nihilistic moods.’’ Budd is allowed to add a new preface to this edition in
which he humorously assesses the strengths and shortcomings of his
(unaltered) analysis of Twain’s sociopolitical ideas, comments wryly on
the academic fashions that have overtaken his four-decades-old venture,
and ponders whether the current obsession with ‘‘multiculturalism’’ may
eventually ‘‘diminish Twain’s iconic power.’’
The eminent literary historian Larzer ZiV devotes one of his Ž ve
chapters to Mark Twain in Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing
1780–1910 (Yale, 2000). (Two of the other chapters look at Bayard Taylor
and Henry James.) ZiV takes a long (41-page) relaxed gaze at the entirety
of Twain’s travels, although most of what he says has a familiar ring to it.
He traces Twain’s fondness for travel narratives in part to their sheer
salability: ‘‘When in need of funds Twain fell back upon the genre time
and again, producing within his massive, shaggy volumes narratives of a
quality equal to all but a few of his works of Ž ction.’’ But Twain also
found he liked the form itself: ‘‘He appears at his happiest —and his
narratives are often at their best —not when he is at a site but when he has
nothing to do but lie back in stagecoach or steamship and drawl on as he
awaits an arrival he more than half-wishes will never come. . . . A journey’s
serial progress from place to place stimulated his mind’s parallel excursion
along a path of linked memories. . . . Travel writing was a perfect vehicle
for Twain’s imagination.’’ The Innocents Abroad ZiV calls ‘‘a book about
touring, not traveling, and that is its strength.’’ ZiV is particularly alert to
Twain’s maturing attitudes toward race, colonialism, and American im-
perialism. ‘‘Throughout Following the Equator Twain is enthralled by
people of color. Earlier . . . his customary response had been to see their
divergence as a sign of their inferiority.’’ Aside from citing several after-
words in the Oxford edition of Twain’s works, ZiV ’s Return Passages
credits only two secondary sources —Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and
110 Mark Twain

Mark Twain (see AmLS 1966, pp. 50–52) and Richard Bridgman’s Travel-
ing in Mark Twain (see AmLS 1987, pp. 86–87). As a consequence of this
thin preparation for a formidable task, ZiV ’s book is apt to seem superŽ -
cial to most Twain specialists.
By far the most diYcult book to categorize—or to estimate its probable
impact —is Constructing Mark Twain: New Directions in Scholarship, ed.
Laura E. Skandera Trombley and Michael J. Kiskis (Missouri), a collec-
tion of 13 essays that the editors intend as a salute to Hamlin Hill’s 1974
challenge to scholars (titled by Hill ‘‘Who Killed Mark Twain?’’). Some of
the contents are biographical, at least in part: Kiskis on Twain’s familial
relationships and depictions of literary domesticity, Victor A. Doyno on
parenting and family dynamics in the Clemens home, J. D. Stahl on the
unwonted minimization of Mary Mason Fairbanks’s role in Twain’s life,
JeVrey Steinbrink on Twain’s love of technology, Robert Sattelmeyer on
Twain’s rewriting of his own early years, and Jennifer L. Zaccara on
Twain’s dependence on Isabel V. Lyon for an audience. However, there
are also essays by Henry B. Wonham, James S. Leonard, David L. Smith,
and Ann M. Ryan on issues of ethnicity and race discernible in Twain’s
writings. Tom Quirk oVers a stimulating essay on Twain’s willingness to
become, Ž guratively at least, lost in space. John Bird examines the types
of metaphors that literary critics have enlisted in book-length studies
published within a single decade. In a concluding duet of voices, Skan-
dera Trombley and Gary Scharnhorst bat around some ideas about recent
trends in Twain scholarship, ponder the long-term eVects of Hill’s ‘‘ven-
omous’’ attack on ‘‘humorless, dull pedants,’’ and recommend recent
books meeting the criteria for courage and iconoclasm that Hill was
espousing. Despite its unsettlingly miscellaneous nature, anyone engaged
in Twain scholarship really should obtain and read the deliberately
provocative Constructing Mark Twain.

iv Individual Works Before 1885

The long-awaited sequel to Beverly R. David’s Mark Twain and His
Illustrators, volume 1 (1869–1875), Ž nally arrives in the form of Mark
Twain and His Illustrators, volume 2 (1875–1883), also published by
Whitston. Volume 1 opened with Twain’s praise for the ‘‘truly gorgeous
gold frog’’ that decorated the front cover of The Celebrated Jumping Frog,
and Other Sketches (1867) and probed the circumstances and artists be-
hind the engravings for The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, The Gilded
Alan Gribben 111

Age, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This second volume retains the
best feature of David’s preceding study —the numerous full-size repro-
ductions of the illustrations under discussion, many of which were per-
sonally commissioned and critiqued by Twain himself —and examines
the visual humor achieved in Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, A
Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, and Life on the Mississippi.
David usefully reprints complete lists of the individual illustrations, and
her elucidations introduce many curious facts about Twain’s eVorts to
improve their pictorial quality. He bragged about the ‘‘high-priced artists
& engravers’’ at work on The Prince and the Pauper, for instance, and only
reluctantly gave up his idea for inserting a large-scale 20-page map of the
Mississippi River into his account of returning to the scenes of his pilot-
ing days (his publisher, James R. Osgood, vetoed this costly scheme). All
in all, David’s two volumes now seem irreplaceable for those wanting to
understand the rapid-Ž re production decisions behind Twain’s published
works, and one can only wish Godspeed to David in her eVort to com-
plete the remaining three volumes of her projected (Ž ve-volume!) study
of Twain’s illustrations. Her scholarship has already succeeded in calling
attention to an aspect of Twain’s books too long taken for granted.
An unusual slant on Mark Twain’s Ž rst travel book sets apart Eric Carl
Link’s ‘‘The Structure of Memory in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad ’’
(EAS 30: 1–16). Link maintains that Twain’s ‘‘comically frustrated search
for a meaningful past’’ in eVect asks, ‘‘Where could America locate its
own cultural heritage?’’ Twain’s answer resides in ‘‘the power of memory
and retrospection to create and maintain the idea of America’’ rather than
to worship a cultural vision rooted in artifacts like tombs, ruins, and
castles. He held that ‘‘American culture is based on life, not death, resur-
rection, not decay.’’ Twain’s contempt singles out the misguided Ameri-
cans who pursue ‘‘the decayed relics of European culture.’’ Link argues
that, contrary to the views of scholars such as Henry Nash Smith, The
Innocents Abroad does possess ‘‘some overall narrative design,’’ including a
‘‘ ‘memory and retrospection’ theme’’ evident within the structure of ‘‘a
spiritual journey.’’ Twain emphasizes ‘‘what is forgotten at the end of the
European excursion and what is remembered at the end of the Holy Land
excursion.’’ Link accomplishes a close-reading of the book to support his
contentions. ‘‘The Pilgrims attempt to manufacture a cultural past for
America out of the valueless leftovers of the Old World, but not the
narrator.’’ In other words, ‘‘while . . . the other Pilgrims revel in their
physical —but valueless —relics of the past, the narrator recaptures his
112 Mark Twain

spiritual past through memory and retrospection. . . . America may not

maintain its permanence in stony relics, like Pompeii, but its past lives
and breathes in the memory of its citizens.’’ The ageless stone Sphinx
‘‘was memory—retrospection—wrought into visible, tangible form.’’
Link’s article has the virtue of taking very seriously a travel narrative too
often alluded to only lightly.
Brigham Young’s endorsement of polygamy —spoofed in Twain’s
Roughing It by an engraving of Young’s wives sharing a huge bedstead and
a joking reference to the ‘‘deafening noise’’ of 72 women snoring —
receives scrutiny in Eric A. Eliason’s ‘‘Mark Twain, Polygamy, and the
Origin of an American Motif ’’ (MTJ 38, i [2000]: 2–6). Apparently
Roughing It ‘‘contains the Ž rst known graphic and written representation
of this visual stereotype of the Mormon Bed.’’ Accordingly, ‘‘the motif ’s
entry into the American popular culture is a tribute to his comic genius
worth noting.’’
A more comprehensive article —Joseph L. Coulombe’s ‘‘Go East,
Young Man: Class Con ict and Degenerate Manhood in Mark Twain’s
Early Writings’’ (WAL 36: 233–57) —notes a shift in Twain’s comic poses.
‘‘From 1862 to 1866, when Twain writes for Nevada and California news-
papers, he targets a predominantly working-class western male audience,
and he manipulates regional stereotypes, class prejudices, and gender
roles to create the image of a hard-drinking, low-living straight talker. In
1870–71, . . . he adopts various strategies to smooth the rough edges of
this early persona.’’ In Roughing It the narrator ‘‘may smoke a pipe or laze
about, but he usually mentions alcohol only in connection to others, a
signiŽ cant departure from his Nevada and California sketches, where his
alcohol consumption becomes an inherent part of his western persona.’’
Twain’s attitudes toward wealth and the exploitation of labor also have
undergone a reversal. To Coulombe’s eyes, ‘‘Twain seems to have divided
his [class] loyalties, and the results tend to fracture his own perspective
and persona. . . . Such irregularities . . . [suggest] Twain’s inability to deal
consistently with themes of money, manhood, and class.’’
Mark Twain had at least one blind spot as a racial progressive —his
fondness for the gross caricature of Chinese coolies in the play Ah Sin
(1877), which he and Bret Harte collaborated in writing. Gary Scharn-
horst’s ‘‘Mark Twain on Charles Parsloe: An Early Interview’’ (MTJ 38, i
[2000]: 6–7) picks up the unpalatable comments that Twain made in a
curtain speech about the comic actor employed to impersonate a Chinese
gambler: ‘‘Whoever sees Mr. Parsloe in this piece sees as good and natural
Alan Gribben 113

and consistent a Chinaman as he could in San Francisco. . . . The

Chinaman is going to become a very frequent spectacle all over America
by-and-bye and a diYcult problem, too. Therefore it seems wise enough
to let the people study him a little on the stage beforehand.’’

v Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

James S. Leonard treads delicately through an area of pedagogical land
mines in ‘‘Racial Objections to Huckleberry Finn ’’ (EAS 30: 77–82).
Leonard relates his own personal journey from the position he took in the
early 1980s that there simply could not be anything ‘‘racially problematic’’
about the novel to a more conciliatory view that the racist language and
demeaning stereotypes of African American characters ‘‘are real problems.
The trauma that arises even from a misreading may be nonetheless a real
trauma.’’ Although Leonard assures us that he discerns a growing matu-
rity in Huck’s narrative voice, he has developed a mounting patience with
those who cannot: ‘‘We must see the text of the misreading as just as real as
the text of Huck’s true voice.’’ With its summary of earlier commentary
on the issue and its valuable list of works cited, Leonard’s brief essay
becomes the latest and most clarifying statement on this festering contro-
versy. In an addendum of sorts, Thomas A. Tenney produces an il-
luminating note about what Huck Finn actually calls Jim (‘‘Man Jim?
Friend Jim?’’ MTJ 38, ii [2000]: 4). As Tenney makes clear, some critics
clearly did not even read the novel before castigating Twain’s terminology.
Stacey Margolis sets out to achieve an overview of the ‘‘forceful po-
lemics against the continued investment in Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn as an American classic’’ in ‘‘Huckleberry Finn; or, Consequences’’
(PMLA 116: 329–43). She takes as her starting point the inclination of two
recent detractors of Twain’s book, Jane Smiley (see AmLS 1996, pp. 99–
100) and Jonathan Arac (see AmLS 1996, p. 100, and AmLS 1997, pp. 94–
96), ‘‘to shift the focus of critique away from the novel to the social
consequences of its canonization.’’ Smiley and Arac, she claims, are less
interested in interpreting the literary work than in addressing ‘‘the way it
has been used and the ‘cultural work’ it continues to perform.’’ By a
complex route of reasoning, Margolis proposes that ‘‘Huckleberry Finn
represents Twain’s way of rewriting history or, more accurately, of fan-
tasizing a new racial history of postwar America.’’ She urges us to recog-
nize ‘‘Twain’s equivocations on the subject of race: he was both a critic of
political discrimination and a fan of minstrel shows and ‘darky jokes.’ . . .
114 Mark Twain

Smiley and Arac ask us to absolve the man by blaming the book.’’ Twain
should be given credit for noticing the futility of ‘‘treating racial justice as a
question of sentiment (requiring a ‘change of heart’) instead of as a ques-
tion of structure (requiring new political policies).’’ Margolis concludes
that ‘‘one of Twain’s implications is that no reading of the novel can put an
end to the debate it has engendered.’’ Her list of works cited will be useful
to future participants in what she terms the ‘‘continuing controversy.’’
One omission is striking, however: she entirely ignores in both her
discussion and her bibliography Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua’s The Jim Di-
lemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn, the most eloquent and ringing
defense of Twain’s novel yet undertaken from a racial perspective. That
reluctance to take on Chadwick-Joshua’s arguments —or even to acknowl-
edge their existence —vitiates the plausibility of Margolis’s predictions.
In a related article, ‘‘Huck Finn: Born to Trouble’’ (EJ 89, ii [1999]: 55–
60), Katherine Schulten, an experienced English teacher ‘‘who had
taught Huck Finn many times,’’ explores the implications of the ‘‘year of
emotional debate’’ that ensued in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, after an 11th-
grade teacher tried to assign Twain’s novel to a racially mixed English class
in 1995. Three years later a public television station in Boston featured the
Cherry Hill episode in Culture Shock, a documentary series about contro-
versial art. Although African American students testiŽ ed that ‘‘reading
Huck Finn made them feel conspicuous and ashamed,’’ Schulten is re-
lieved to learn that ‘‘no one wanted to ban the book.’’ The outcome
pleases her: a new curriculum was written and ‘‘all Cherry Hill teachers
wishing to teach the novel in the future would be required to attend a
one-day workshop given by . . . Villanova professors.’’ Especially prob-
lematical was the charge that Jim ‘‘does not resist slavery’’ and that ‘‘he is
being controlled by a white boy.’’ Schulten reproduces excerpts from the
revised curriculum, which caused one student to declare that ‘‘Huck Finn
is perfect to read if it’s taught correctly. In this class we learned through
sympathy.’’
Leland Krauth sets out to verify Huckleberry Finn ’s taken-for-granted
indebtedness to certain older traditions in ‘‘Mark Twain: The Victorian
of Southwestern Humor,’’ pp. 222–35 in Humor of the Old South. This
collection gathers essays on many of the Southern frontier humorists
whose sketches formed a tradition that Twain inherited, among them
A. B. Longstreet, William Tappan Thompson, Joseph G. Baldwin, and
J. Ross Browne. By ‘‘Victorianism’’ Krauth has in mind Twain’s propri-
ety. ‘‘Writing as a Victorian,’’ he Ž nds, ‘‘Twain reformed Southwestern
Alan Gribben 115

humor.’’ Krauth cites Twain’s alterations in Johnson J. Hooper’s depic-

tion of the backwoods camp meetings as one example. ‘‘Twain’s expurga-
tion . . . is representative of the way he Victorianizes the material of
Southwestern humor. He eVects similar changes in presenting his con
men, the circus, and the Royal Nonesuch.’’ Furthermore, Huck Finn’s
condemnation of the ‘‘ignorantest’’ graYti on the walls of the  oating
house ‘‘is indicative of the delicacy in Huck that leads him to keep his
own narrative language free from crudity. . . . Huck’s rejection of the
pornographic is tantamount to a rejection of the world of his father at its
deepest core.’’ An ‘‘authentic gentleman,’’ Huck transforms ‘‘the crude,
violent, and amoral hero of Southwestern humor.’’ The consequence is ‘‘a
radical novel’’ by a ‘‘man who contained within himself so many contrary
selves.’’ Krauth’s is a trenchant essay.
Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and
Myth is invoked in JeVrey J. Folks’s ‘‘Twain and the Garden of the World:
Cultural Consolidation on the American Frontier’’ (SQ 39, iii: 82–95). So
are the opinions of Sacvan Bercovitch, Forrest G. Robinson, H. Bruce
Franklin, Jonathan Arac, Walter Benn Michaels, and others who have
touched on the ‘‘cultural mythologies of American freedom and oppor-
tunity[,] . . . the frontier ethos of radical freedom in nature and the
southern ethos of plantation aristocracy and genteel agrarianism.’’ Tak-
ing his examples principally from Huckleberry Finn but also from A
Connecticut Yankee, Folks demonstrates that ‘‘Twain dismisses the agri-
cultural dream of the garden, centered in the vast developing basin of
the Mississippi River,’’ and begins to explore ‘‘an updated American
Dream. . . . The new nation . . . was dramatically more urban, industrial,
and corporate; less rural, agrarian, and individualistic.’’ Twain’s Ž ction of
the 1880s, Folks writes, ‘‘has been termed nostalgic, elegiac, and pastoral,
but also technocratic, futuristic, and modern.’’ Folks postulates a contra-
diction. Twain was ‘‘employing an outdated morality of individualism
more suitable to the frontier mythology of the past than to amoral
structures of capital and production.’’ In terms of his artistic practice,
Twain proves ‘‘stubbornly resistant to programmatic and redemptive dis-
courses. . . . Mark Twain as artist is liminal and indecisive by intention.’’

vi Individual Works after 1885

An important footnote to previous studies, Quimby Melton IV’s ‘‘The
British Reception of A Connecticut Yankee: Contemporary Reviews’’
116 Mark Twain

(MTJ 39, i: 2–24) lists and summarizes book reviews from Pall Mall
Magazine, Canadian Magazine, the Herald [Glasgow], the Guardian
[Manchester], the Scots Observer, Review of Reviews, and other news-
papers and journals. The responses to Twain’s novel ranged from the
London Quarterly Review ’s scathing denunciation of ‘‘a mad travesty’’ to
the Bulletin ’s [Sydney] praise for ‘‘a most moving sermon against the
oppression of the many by the few.’’ The vast majority of the reviews have
already been reprinted, digested, or quoted elsewhere, but it is very
convenient to have descriptions of them gathered here. Most helpful of
all, an appendix transcribes seven reviews of A Connecticut Yankee not
available in other collections.
Judie Newman cannot establish that Twain deŽ nitely owned or read a
copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp,
but in ‘‘Was Tom White? Stowe’s Dred and Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson ’’
(Soft Canons [Iowa, 1999], pp. 67–81) Newman proposes a ‘‘case for a
direct relationship’’ hinging on internal textual evidence. She marshals
compelling indications of ‘‘Twain’s rivalry with Stowe’’ as well as various
correspondences: similar attorney Ž gures and overriding ‘‘legal em-
phasis,’’ snobbery of FFVs in both novels, strong single black women
characters, slaves who pass as whites, ‘‘doubling’’ of characters, temper-
ance themes. In Newman’s words, ‘‘Some of the problems . . . with the
question of Tom’s innate evil are dissipated if we consider it the product
not of his racial inheritance but of his literary descent —from Stowe’s
white character. It is not so much a case of ‘Was Huck Black?’ as ‘Was
Tom White?’ . . . Many of the peculiar features of the plot are the result
not of two muddled Twain novels but of intertextual reference to Stowe.’’
Any reader must admit that Newman compares a lengthy series of arrest-
ing parallels.
Perhaps the most thoughtful analysis since John S. Tuckey’s readings of
a philosophical dialogue Mark Twain mostly wrote in 1898 and anony-
mously published in 1906, Chad Rohman’s ‘‘What Is Man? Mark Twain’s
Unresolved Attempt to Know’’ (NCS 15: 57–72) concurs with those who
have noted his ‘‘ambivalent and sometimes contradictory thinking.’’
However, ‘‘if we are willing to read What Is Man? through the lens of
Twain’s epistemological skepticism, his uncertain position on knowing
truth, the book does prove consistent as the re ections of an unresolved
thinker.’’ Employing a Socratic method, ‘‘the book demonstrates that, at
the time of its composition, Twain was more in control of his writing
(and thinking) than has been acknowledged, although he was now less
Alan Gribben 117

interested in and capable of making despairing metaphysical statements

on man’s moral nature.’’ Rohman quotes a letter that Twain wrote to
Howells: ‘‘What I have been wanting was a chance to write a book
without reserves —a book which should take account of no one’s feelings,
no one’s prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, illusions, delusions; a book
which should say my say, right out of my heart, in the plainest language
& without a limitation of any sort.’’ In sum, Rohman states, ‘‘What it says
is that, even late in life, Mark Twain was still seeking truth and that his
unresolved dialogue on man’s moral nature constitutes his futile search
for an answer to the unanswerable question, What is man?’’ Inasmuch as
Twain’s colloquy has often been dismissed as unsystematic and inarticu-
late, Rohman’s defense of it will likely be debated in the coming years.

vii Guides to Criticism

A troublesome trend in Mark Twain scholarship is for books and articles
to ignore previous work that duplicates virtually the same area of study. It
is obviously essential for faculty, students, and independent scholars to
have convenient access to recent as well as past studies of an author as
widely written about as Twain has been. Thomas A. Tenney’s valuable
Mark Twain: A Reference Guide (see AmLS 1977, pp. 87–88) solved the
diYculty for a time, but his periodic updates to that book have had a
tangled if tenacious history. The Ž rst supplements appeared in ALR
(1977–83), then moved to the Mark Twain Circular until they began to
appear in MTJ in the Fall 1997 issue. A bumper crop of these entries now
Ž lls most of the Fall 2000 issue of that latter journal (38, ii), adding a few
more Mark Twain items from the 1980s and going up to 2001. Each
published item is meticulously cited and described. The only deŽ ciency
is the lack of an index, a tool that made the original Mark Twain: A
Reference Guide doubly useful.
Two chapters in Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, ed.
Stuart Hutchinson (Columbia, 1998), summarize and quote the contem-
porary and 20th-century critical responses to Tom Sawyer, and three other
chapters then examine the composition and reviews of, and recent com-
mentaries on, Huckleberry Finn. Generous selections of the chosen critics
are provided in this handy little compendium. Hutchinson’s reactions to
the criticism he quotes are opinionated (for example, he energetically
disputes Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s thesis about Huck’s alleged blackness as
‘‘anything but convincing’’). The usual scholars that one might expect
118 Mark Twain

are here, but so are a host of creative writers, including Hemingway,

Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison; rather notably Hutchinson
also gives his own work —Mark Twain: Humor on the Run (1994) —more
space at 11 pages than other guides have accorded it.

viii Newspaper Articles

An unusually detailed feature piece written by Martin GriYth of the
Associated Press and published widely under various headlines (for exam-
ple, ‘‘Twain letters fetch plenty although they’re many,’’ News [Birming-
ham, Alabama], 9 Dec.: F-1, 4) reports that Mark Twain conceivably
penned 50,000 letters during his lifetime —sometimes dashing oV as
many as three dozen in a day —that two or three such missives enter the
rare manuscript market every month, and that his individual letters can
command sums of $30,000 or more. ‘‘Herman Melville and Edgar Allan
Poe letters fetch higher prices, but only because there are far fewer
of them,’’ according to rare book seller Kevin MacDonnell. Also quoted
are memorabilia dealer Robert Slotta and Mark Twain Project editor
Robert H. Hirst. The article ends with 11 pungent extracts from Twain’s
letters, including his quip to Howells: ‘‘A successful book is not made of
what is in it, but what is left out of it.’’

ix Topics
Siva Vaidhyanathan no longer gives the impression of having discovered
the Twain manuscript titled ‘‘The Great Republic’s Peanut Stand’’ (writ-
ten in 1898) after an exchange on the Mark Twain Forum challenged
Vaidhyanathan’s original report of his supposed Ž nd in the Mark Twain
Papers. Now he terms it ‘‘a recently reexamined Twain manuscript’’ that
‘‘lay largely ignored.’’ But Mark Twain still Ž gures prominently, and is the
sole subject of one of the Ž ve chapters, in Vaidhyanathan’s Copyrights and
Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Cre-
ativity (NYU). His larger concern is that ‘‘concurrent with the triumphs
of black expression in the last half of the twentieth century,’’ culminating
in the ‘‘sampling’’ technique of rap artists, ‘‘a technological boom fostered
a true democratization of expression. Photocopy machines, cheap cam-
eras, Ž lm, video tape, and digital and computer technology have allowed
almost any person to distribute a facsimile of almost anything to almost
Alan Gribben 119

anywhere.’’ By Vaidhyanathan’s reasoning, ‘‘copyright should be about

policy, not property. Many recent trends and changes in copyright
laws . . . are bad policy. These changes threaten democratic discourse,
scholarly research, and the free  ow of information. The goal of the entire
copyright system should be to recognize the pernicious repercussions of
restricting information, yet to reward stylistic innovation. . . . Using
someone’s idea does not diminish its power.’’ Vaidhyanathan traces the
contours of Twain’s shifting attitudes toward copyright protection, con-
cludes that ‘‘he maintained healthy distinctions between piracy and pla-
giarism and between ideas and expressions,’’ and scoVs at federal legisla-
tion that ‘‘jeopardized the idea/expression dichotomy, public domain,
fair use, open access to information, and the ability to freely satirize,
parody, or comment on an existing work.’’ Especially troubling, accord-
ing to Vaidhyanathan, is ‘‘corporate legal intimidation’’ that has ‘‘chilled
political speech.’’ Copyrights and Copywrongs demonstrates anew how
relevant Twain continues to be in the midst of 21st-century controversies.

x Opinion Pieces and Interviews

Sandy Bradley reveals the discouraging scenario confronting indepen-
dent Ž lmmakers who might wish to produce and air a documentary in
the wake of Ken Burns’s massive biographical project, and those chal-
lenges seem formidable indeed (‘‘Too Much Mark Twain?’’ MTJ 38, ii
[2000]: 34–35). In a personal essay written for The Chronicle of Higher
Education (11 Jan.: 18) Laura E. Skandera Trombley shares the impres-
sions of a scholar who was involved with Burns and his staV in the
making of his Ž lm. Watching a preview screening at Elmira College, ‘‘I
hear my voice before my face appears. I’m just confounded, for lack of a
better word. . . . Friends come over to tease and congratulate me. . . . I
walk over, greet Burns, and tell him that the experience of seeing myself
was startling. He cheerfully responds, ‘Wait until 40 million people see
you.’ ’’ Skandera Trombley Ž nds the four-hour documentary to be ‘‘visu-
ally stunning, informative, moving, and —dare I say it? —scholarly.’’ As
for criticism that the second half is overly sad, she counters that ‘‘if the
Ž lmmakers had desired, they could have made the documentary much
darker.’’
The author of a series of historical mysteries set in the 1890s and
featuring Samuel L. Clemens as a detective is interviewed by Pat Gates in
120 Mark Twain

‘‘The Mark Twain Mysteries: An Interview with Peter J. Heck’’ (MTJ 39,
i: 25–28). ‘‘One of the things that attracted me to him as detective,’’
explains Heck, ‘‘was that he had a skeptical attitude that I think is
necessary for a good detective. He didn’t take people at face value.’’
Auburn University Montgomery
6 Henry James
Sarah B. Daugherty

The year’s work on James re ects recent trends while oVering the pros-
pect of further scholarly and critical studies. As we await the publication
of the complete letters, a new volume of James’s correspondence with
younger men conŽ rms his playful homoeroticism and his literary profes-
sionalism: the ‘‘queer monster’’ is indeed ‘‘the artist.’’ Also welcome are
contributions by historians of British culture, notably Clair Hughes and
Pamela Thurschwell. Another development is increased attention to
James’s short Ž ction, especially previously neglected later tales. An am-
bitious book by Donatella Izzo advances a feminist and Foucauldian
critique of these narratives, while a festschrift from Purdue in memory of
the distinguished James scholar William T. StaVord highlights the diver-
sity of the stories and their accessibility to general readers. Moral and
ethical critics (now at least as numerous as poststructuralist skeptics)
include James Duban, whose study focuses on the author’s response to his
father’s theology, and contributors to an HJR special issue on ‘‘James and
the Sacred.’’

i Editions, Letters, Biographical Studies

Selected Tales, ed. John Lyon (Penguin), anthologizes 19 stories, including
some rediscovered texts (‘‘The Pension Beaurepas,’’ ‘‘Julia Bride’’) as well
as the perennial favorites. Lyon’s introduction presents the tales as jokes at
the expense of analysts obsessive in their pursuit of meaning. Hortense
Calisher’s preface to The Turn of the Screw & In the Cage (Modern
Library) also emphasizes James’s humor and generic range: ‘‘What to say
of the writer who can  oat a surreal balloon across the haunted Ž elds of
Bly, only to warm us up at Crockers’ emporium?’’
122 Henry James

A book designed for participants in Britain’s Open University is The

Nineteenth-Century Novel: Identities, ed. Dennis Walder (Routledge).
Two chapters on The Portrait of a Lady and one on ‘‘The Art of Fiction’’
by Delia da Sousa Correa feature reading exercises along with discussions
of political issues and literary contexts.
Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men, ed.
Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe (Michigan), complements Gunter’s
collection of letters to women (see AmLS 1999, p. 124). This volume
contains 166 letters (95 of them previously unpublished) to Hendrik
Andersen, Jocelyn Persse, Howard Sturgis, and Hugh Walpole. Though
more often ‘‘adhesive’’ than erotic, the correspondence supports the view
that James allowed himself increased sexual frankness after the turn of the
century. Wisely, the editors underscore the professional advice oVered
to —and resisted by —his supposed disciples. ‘‘Stop your multiplication of
unsaleable nakednesses for a while,’’ he urged Andersen, in favor of ‘‘the
vendible, the placeable small thing.’’ The letters also express James’s anx-
ieties over the aVairs of Edith Wharton, John Addington Symonds, and
other contemporaries.
Gunter’s ‘‘ ‘You Will Fit the Tighter into My Embrace!’: Henry James’s
Letters to Jocelyn Persse’’ (GLQ 7: 335–54) reprints and analyzes 13 letters
more explicitly passionate than those to James’s other correspondents. Yet
James’s rhetorical disregard for gender boundaries was checked by his
literal reluctance to cross them. ‘‘I will send you any underclothing but
female . . . !’’ he exclaimed to the young serviceman in 1914.
Quite conventional are the recently discovered social notes in Ed-
ward L. Tucker’s ‘‘Three Henry James Letters’’ (ANQ 14, i: 24–26). The
recipients are Lady Grace Baring, George Herbert Thring of the Society
of Authors, and the sculptress Clare Frewen Sheridan.
James Ž gures prominently in Pamela Thurschwell’s Literature, Tech-
nology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge). This is an absorb-
ing study of ‘‘real and fantasized connections between the occult world,
innovative technologies of communication and intimate bonds between
people’’ that in turn fostered ‘‘an expanding sense of sex and gender
 exibility.’’ Two chapters revise earlier essays. One treats James’s homo-
erotic identiŽ cations with soldiers and national leaders (see AmLS 2000,
pp. 108–09); the other links his interest in the telephone and the type-
writer with his concern for intersubjectivity (see AmLS 1999, p. 125). Also
revealing are chapters on the Society for Psychical Research, on the
popular demonization of Oscar Wilde, and on the emergence of Freud-
Sarah B. Daugherty 123

ian psychoanalysis. ‘‘James’s magical faith in the eYcacy of his own

consciousness is sometimes painful to witness,’’ notes Thurschwell, yet
his writings furthered ‘‘recognition of what was already a queer nation.’’
A related study, Christopher Keep’s ‘‘Blinded by the Type: Gender and
Information Technology at the Turn of the Century’’ (NCC 23: 149–73),
likewise deals with the role of Theodora Bosanquet as James’s ‘‘priestess of
the Remington.’’ Although James believed dictation allowed him to
capture the fullness of his own thoughts and preferred an amanuensis
without ‘‘too much Personality,’’ Bosanquet was ‘‘a canny and often
critical observer’’ who pursued her own career as diarist, essayist, and
Ž ction writer.
Authorial control is again an issue in ‘‘Three Interviews of Henry
James: Mastering the Language of Publicity’’ by Olga Antsyferova (HJR
22: 81–92). This essay analyzes a ‘‘chat’’ with the ‘‘comically unprofes-
sional’’ Florence Brooks, a piece by Witter Bynner that was in fact com-
piled from notes, and one by New York Times correspondent Preston
Lockwood publicizing the volunteer ambulance corps in France. James
conveyed the message that his persona as ‘‘enemy of the press’’ was ‘‘just
one facet of his multifarious cultural identity.’’
In ‘‘A Hero of Culture’’ (NewC 18, x [2000]: 12–20) Joseph Epstein
reviews Philip Horne’s Henry James: A Life in Letters (see AmLS 1999,
p. 124), which remains the most valuable compendium. As Epstein notes,
Horne rescues the author from ‘‘thick-Ž ngered interpretations’’ and re-
covers the enduring values in his life and writings: his good humor, his
moral imagination, and his ‘‘abiding courage in loneliness.’’

ii Sources, In uences, Adaptations

Especially useful for ethical critics is James Duban’s The Nature of True
Virtue: Theology, Psychology, and Politics in the Writings of Henry James,
Sr., Henry James, Jr., and William James (Fairleigh Dickinson). This
intellectual history traces the in uence of Jonathan Edwards, whose
treatise of 1765 is invoked by the title. The Ž rst six chapters discuss Henry
Sr.’s belief in ‘‘disinterested benevolence,’’ a Calvinist concept ampliŽ ed
and liberalized by Swedenborg in a manner compatible with socialism;
and they also examine the rejoinders of William, whose attention to
‘‘interest’’ corrects such idealizations. The remaining four chapters treat
Henry Jr.’s narratives as ‘‘anatomies of selŽ shness’’ that re ect, yet revise,
his father’s ideas. What Maisie Knew and The Wings of the Dove celebrate
124 Henry James

spontaneous virtue yet also reveal the greed caused by a lack of familial
aVection, while The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima conŽ rm
‘‘the practical irreconcilability of aesthetic and socialistic temperaments.’’
More questionable is Duban’s ironic reading of The Ambassadors, accord-
ing to which Strether remains duped by his supposed disinterestedness.
Then, too, skeptics may wonder about the depth of the novelist’s engage-
ment with the theologians. But this book responds eVectively to critics
who exaggerate the son’s aYliation with the father: ‘‘don’t bet your inheri-
tance or hard-earned royalties on society’s providing the redeemed form
of man.’’
Two source studies support the ironic interpretation of The Turn of the
Screw. ‘‘Psychical Research: A Possible Source for ‘The Turn of the
Screw’ ’’ by Elisabeth Wadge (N&Q 48: 162–64) cites Edward Gurney’s
paper on hypnotic memory in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research (1886–87). Even ‘‘honest persons,’’ wrote Gurney, could be de-
ceitful ‘‘during that temporary dislocation of the mental machinery
which the turning of the hypnotic screw involves.’’ ‘‘Folklore in James’s
Fiction: Turning of the Screw’’ by Steven Swann Jones (WF 60: 1–24)
argues that the society ‘‘unwittingly tapped into a tradition of personal
experience ghost narratives’’ parodied by James. The story is also a mock
fairy tale with the governess incongruously cast in the role of heroine.
Then again, the portrayal of the governess may not have been James’s
primary concern. Alternative possibilities are suggested by David Ket-
terer in ‘‘ ‘GriYn’: One-Upping and an H. G. Wells Allusion in The Turn
of the Screw ’’ (ESC 26 [2000]: 185–92). The protagonist of The Invisible
Man may have inspired James’s creation of a socially invisible woman —
but more important, James dramatized the superiority of his own aes-
thetic, supplanting the initial reference to ‘‘GriYn’s ghost’’ with the
extended narrative of Douglas. Caroline Levander proposes a broader
context in ‘‘ ‘Informed Eyes’: The 1890s Child Study Movement and
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw ’’ (CMat 12, i–ii [2000–01]: 8–25).
The ghosts represent the real dangers to adolescents described by William
James and G. Stanley Hall, though the uncertainty of the governess casts
doubt on the theories and their eVects.
Mary Behrman’s ‘‘Grasping the Golden Strand in James’s The Ambas-
sadors’’ (HJR 22: 59–66) cites book 2 of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene as a
key source of the novel, which features counterparts of the Ž gures in the
Bowre of Bliss and represents Mrs. Newsome as a parodic Gloriana. But
Sarah B. Daugherty 125

unlike Guyon, who destroys the Bowre, Strether appreciates Paris and
tries to preserve its values.
In Novel Art Mark McGurl contributes provocatively to the ongoing
discussion of James’s role as a modernist, presenting him as an exemplary
(if problematic) Ž gure for Stephen Crane, Wharton, Faulkner, Stein, and
Djuna Barnes. Despite the authors’ claims to elite status, class boundaries
were permeable at a time when the audience for Ž ction actually increased.
In his revisions for the New York Edition James depicts himself as a
strong reader, yet the novels themselves (particularly The American and
The Golden Bowl ) signal the power of the rising middle class as they
become objects of competing interpretations. McGurl’s second chapter
revises an earlier essay on The Princess Casamassima (see AmLS 1999,
p. 127) which explains how hierarchical distinctions are ultimately an
eVect of the mass culture James tried to reject.
In ‘‘Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and James’s The Ambassadors’’
(HN 20, ii: 90–98) Peter L. Hays explores the parallels between the novels
as the characters, on discovering the inadequacy of their moral codes,
learn to live pragmatically. ‘‘[M]aybe I’ll turn out to be the Henry James
of the people,’’ predicted Hemingway in 1943.
A feminist defense of a controversial adaptation is Jamie Barlowe’s ‘‘On
Which [We] Looked Up at Her: Henry James’s and Jane Campion’s
Portrait(s) of a Lady,’’ pp. 221–37 in He Said, She Says. Especially during
the Ž lm’s opening sequence, multiple voices challenge the Ž xed position
of the viewer, though some of the women express the ‘‘romanticized
notions’’ of love and duty that entrap Isabel Archer.
Britten’s Musical Language by Philip Rupprecht (Cambridge) includes
a chapter on Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw that may
interest connoisseurs despite its technicality. A musical ‘‘screw theme’’
independent of persons and events becomes more ghostly than Quint or
Jessel. Further, the songs sung by Miles and Flora shift the main source of
ambiguity from the governess’s perceptions to doubts arising from the
performative nature of childhood.

iii Critical Books and Collections

Henry James and the Art of Dress by Clair Hughes (Palgrave) succeeds in
illuminating the novels and tales despite its limited topic. For James,
notes Hughes, costume functioned as both a Hawthornesque indicator of
126 Henry James

moral meaning and a Balzacian means of social power. With its nu-
merous illustrations from popular literature and advice books, this study
provides a context for received interpretations (Madame de Vionnet’s
seduction of Strether in an era when evening gowns ‘‘aspired to the
condition of underwear’’) and for decodings of James’s reversals of con-
vention (Catherine Sloper’s wearing a white dress, not the garish red one,
as she dismisses Morris Townsend). To American readers, the most infor-
mative chapters are those explaining the subtleties of British fashion. In
The Princess Casamassima hats are social signs used to manipulate the
hapless (and ultimately hatless) Hyacinth; and in The Wings of the Dove
Milly’s outlandish ‘‘New York mourning’’ diVerentiates her from the
well-dressed Kate Croy and aYliates her, surprisingly, with Howells’s
Dryfoos sisters.
A far more theoretical study is Donatella Izzo’s Portraying the Lady:
Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James (Nebraska). This
book uses Foucauldian and narratological analysis to counter the sim-
pliŽ cations of political feminists, who have focused on the theme of
women’s victimization, and of poststructuralists, who have neglected
women as historical subjects in favor of ‘‘the feminine’’ as a linguistic
principle. Izzo seeks the middle ground of gender, constructing a frame-
work for a range of tales spanning nearly the whole of James’s career. ‘‘The
Gaze: In the Museum of Women’’ deals with the asetheticization of
female Ž gures, often in stories representing them as art objects. ‘‘The
Voice: Discourses of Silence’’ explains how women, subjected to highly
codiŽ ed speech acts, may reverse the relations of power by refusing to
verbalize their knowledge. This structure highlights the centrality of
many neglected stories. The obsessions of the characters in ‘‘Rose-
Agatha’’ and ‘‘Glasses,’’ for example, are signiŽ cant because they are
culturally shared, while ‘‘Georgina’s Reasons’’ is no mere potboiler but a
conscious experiment in the sensational mode of Mary Elizabeth Brad-
don. Discussions also elucidate the feminist potential in readings of
familiar tales, including J. Hillis Miller’s deconstruction of ‘‘The Last of
the Valerii’’ and Eve K. Sedgwick’s homoerotic interpretation of ‘‘The
Beast in the Jungle.’’ Izzo acknowledges that her conclusion (in which
Mora Montravers emerges as the New Woman) is utopian, like most
political readings of James; and as one reviewer said of James’s own prose,
the vocabulary of theory may tax the reader’s attention like metaphysics.
But these nuanced analyses constitute a real advance in feminist critique.
A more accessible if somewhat uneven book is ‘‘The Finer Thread, the
Sarah B. Daugherty 127

Tighter Weave’’: Essays on the Short Fiction of Henry James, ed. Joseph
Dewey and Brooke Horvath (Purdue). Whereas the ‘‘threads’’ treat indi-
vidual stories, the ‘‘weaves’’ develop larger themes; but more signiŽ cant
are the divisions between ethical readers, who seek truths beneath mis-
perceptions, and poststructuralists, who interpret the tales as fables of
indeterminacy. Horvath’s ‘‘ ‘A Landscape Painter’ and ‘The Middle Years’:
Failures of the Amateur’’ (pp. 181–99) argues for a reading of the later
story in the context of the earlier one, with its less ambiguous presenta-
tion of a dilettante suVering from a threadbare romanticism. Dencombe,
too, has little art to show for his sacriŽ ces and turns to Doctor Hugh for
sympathy. In ‘‘All about ‘Author-ity’: When the Disciple Becomes the
Master in ‘The Author of BeltraI o ’ ’’ (pp. 30–41) Jeraldine R. Kraver
contends that the Ž rst-person narrator is an agent, not the observer or
follower whom others have described. When he gives Ambient’s wife the
manuscript, he sets in motion the tragedy that kills the child. Rory
Drummond’s ‘‘The Spoils of Service: ‘Brooksmith’ ’’ (pp. 69–81) likewise
questions the reliability of the narrator, whose eulogy for the silent butler
reinforces class distinctions and maintains the status quo.
Another ironic interpretation is Molly Vaux’s ‘‘The Telegraphist as
Writer in ‘In the Cage’ ’’ (pp. 126–38). Despite this protagonist’s growth
in linguistic power, her failure to recognize a similar capacity in Everard
‘‘leads eventually to the collapse of her Ž ctional world.’’ Less persuasively,
Lomeda Montgomery’s ‘‘The Lady Is the Tiger: Looking at May Bartram
in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ from the ‘Other Side’ ’’ (pp. 139–48) presents
May as a ‘‘lamia Ž gure’’ who devours Marcher’s identity. A complemen-
tary piece is Michael Pinker’s ‘‘Too Good to Be True: ‘Mora Montravers’ ’’
(pp. 169–78), which interprets this tale as a comedy exposing the delu-
sions of a male romantic charmed by his niece’s lascivious behavior.
Joseph Wiesenfarth’s ‘‘MetaŽ ction as the Real Thing’’ (pp. 235–51) oVers
a general defense of ethical reading. Citing ‘‘The Story in It’’ as a parable,
the essay characterizes James’s Ž ction as ‘‘more nearly about the Maud
Blessingbournes than about the Colonel Voyts —more . . . about limited
blessings than about voids and die-outs.’’
Predictably, other contributors focus on James’s anticipations of post-
structuralist theory. Karen Scherzinger’s ‘‘The (Im)Possibility of ‘The
Private Life’ ’’ (pp. 82–104) treats the tale as a Derridean fable in which
Clare Vawdrey’s public and private personae are constituted by negation
and lack. For Daniel Wong-gu Kim in ‘‘The Shining Page: ‘The Altar of
the Dead’ as MetaŽ ction’’ (pp. 105–16) the altar functions as an interpre-
128 Henry James

tive object frustrating Stransom’s desire for accurate, exhaustive represen-

tation. The best of the deconstructions is veteran critic Earl Rovit’s ‘‘The
Language and Imagery of ‘The Jolly Corner’ ’’ (pp. 160–68), which traces
the unstable oppositions between soft and hard, round and angular, femi-
nine and masculine. But Brydon, as a timid reader, ‘‘softly collapses . . . in
a textual world demanding more courage than he can muster.’’ A Laca-
nian reading with an ethical turn is Phyllis van Slyck’s ‘‘Trapping the
Gaze: Objects of Desire in James’s Early and Late Fiction’’ (pp. 217–34).
In the early tales the object functions as a necessary ideal for a perceiver
committed to his or her own vision, but in the later Ž ction characters
discover their personal deŽ ciencies and the claims of others’ subjectivity.
Among the strongest essays are those contextualizing the stories, at-
tributing their ambiguities to the aesthetic and ethical problems that
puzzled James himself. ‘‘The Ineluctability of Form: ‘The Madonna of
the Future’ ’’ (pp. 15–29) by Adam Bresnick treats this paradigmatic tale
as a representation of James’s dilemma in coming to terms with Balzac.
Theobald’s ‘‘wish to avoid vulgarity leads him to forgo aesthetic formal-
ization altogether,’’ the result being a blank canvas. Patricia Laurence’s
‘‘Collapsing Inside and Outside: Reading ‘The Friends of the Friends’ ’’
(pp. 117–25) describes the uncertainties of a male narrator contemplating
the publication of a diary by a woman who also remains obscure to
readers. This narrator’s ‘‘thin blank-book’’ may allude to James’s own
ignorance of ‘‘a woman’s unrevealed psychic life.’’ In ‘‘ ‘Some Pantomimic
Ravishment’: ‘Broken Wings’ and the Performance of Success’’ (pp. 149–
59) Annette Gilson notes James’s eVorts to appeal to wealthy consumers
of art, attempts likewise made by his Ž ctional male painter and female
novelist. SigniŽ cantly, however, the characters free themselves by em-
bracing each other and their commitment to their work. Kristin Bou-
dreau’s ‘‘A Connection More Charming than in Life: The Refusal of
Consolation in ‘The Altar of the Dead’ ’’ (pp. 200–216) explains the
Emersonian (and Jamesian) lesson learned by Stransom: because grief is
private and noumenal, it cannot be fully translated or shared.
The collection also includes two republished pieces: Jeanne Campbell
Reesman’s ‘‘ ‘The Deepest Depths of the ArtiŽ cial’: Attacking Women
and Reality in ‘The Aspern Papers’ ’’ (pp. 42–68; see AmLS 1998, p. 110),
and a revised version of Daniel R. Schwarz’s ‘‘Manet, ‘The Turn of the
Screw’ and the Voyeuristic Imagination’’ (pp. 252–80; see AmLS 1997,
p. 107).
AYrmative readings of the Ž ction emphasizing the characters’ imag-
Sarah B. Daugherty 129

inative growth are the central feature of S. Selina Jamil’s monograph

Jamesian Centers of Consciousness as Readers and Tellers of Stories (Univ.
Press). The protagonist of ‘‘In the Cage,’’ says Jamil, achieves a limited
degree of control as she frees herself from sentimental narratives, while
Brydon of ‘‘The Jolly Corner’’ fulŽ lls himself through his aesthetic quest
and his confrontation with the actual world. In the novels Maggie Verver
and Lambert Strether are notable for their assumption of authority even
as they face change and uncertainty. This study, which builds on the
phenomenological criticism of Paul Armstrong and the rhetorical analy-
ses of Sheila Teahan, might be more persuasive if Jamil engaged further
with the ironists and poststructuralists. But her chapters highlight the
subtle distinctions between James’s narrators and his re ectors, the latter
frequently being superior in their power to develop coherent images.

iv Criticism: General Essays and Book Chapters

This year’s special issue of HJR (22, iii) deals with James’s transmutations
of Christianity in the context of an increasingly secular and pluralistic
culture. Robert Weisbuch’s ‘‘James and the American Sacred’’ (pp. 217–
28) describes the author’s civic faith in ‘‘the sanctity of other people, the
rich solidity of the world, and equal . . . participation in social life.’’
Whereas Winterbourne and the governess ‘‘drown reality in psyche,’’
Isabel Archer chooses responsibility while rejecting ‘‘the biblical and
Miltonic lexicon’’ as too restrictive. In ‘‘James and the Originary Scene’’
(pp. 229–38) Kevin Kohan cites the theories of anthropologists René
Girard and Eric Gans, who propose that art reenacts the scapegoating
ritual marking the diVerence of human beings from other animals. But
James departs from this model by insisting on pragmatic response, not
aesthetic deferral. Strether is exemplary because he acts on his knowledge,
whereas Densher is immobilized by Milly’s sacriŽ ce and Maggie Verver
wrongly obliterates ‘‘the chain of relation and responsibility.’’
Two essays compare James’s views with those of his brother William,
especially in The Varieties of Religious Experience. ‘‘James’s Sick Souls’’ by
Pericles Lewis (pp. 248–58) distinguishes the Catholic Maggie from the
novelist’s gallery of anxious Protestants: her healthy-mindedness enables
her to save her marriage. Ultimately, however, Henry was less idealistic
than William, since ‘‘shared illusion’’ is represented as ‘‘the only faith on
which an action can be based.’’ In ‘‘Immaculate Conceptions: Henry
James and the Private Sphere’’ (pp. 239–47) Marcia Ian contrasts the
130 Henry James

author with a range of philosophers and theologians who sought ‘‘conti-

nuity’’ —the connection of the individual with a higher power. Despite
his characters’ ‘‘Catholic envy’’ James’s narratives illustrate the dangers of
losing the boundaries of the discontinuous self.
A complementary essay highlights the persistent in uence of Henry
Sr., for whom self-annihilation was the prelude to ecstatic transfor-
mation. In ‘‘ ‘A Secret Responsive Ecstasy’: James and the Pleasure of
the Abject’’ (HJR 22: 163–79) Ann-Marie Priest examines the ‘‘sub-
limatedly sexual’’ bonds between Isabel Archer and Madame Merle,
Milly Theale and Kate Croy, and Maggie Verver and Charlotte Stant.
Particularly in The Golden Bowl, the discourse turns sinister when it
celebrates humiliation.
As in recent years, a number of studies describe James’s role in shaping
the canons of modernism. One of the best analyses is Barbara Hochman’s
Getting at the Author. Though she presents James as an advocate of
impersonal narration, Hochman also comments on the ambivalence
toward self-eVacement projected in ‘‘The Figure in the Carpet’’ and The
Aspern Papers. Even in The Tragic Muse, James’s ‘‘swan song to the idea of
reading and writing as proto-personal exchange,’’ the disappearance of
Gabriel Nash parodies the writer’s own theories of impersonality. Nota-
ble as well was his respect for Owen Wister, H. G. Wells, and other
‘‘friendly’’ authors disparaged by academic critics.
Another important book is Jesse Matz’s Literary Impressionism and
Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge), which treats James among contempo-
raries (Pater, Proust, Conrad, and Woolf ) who attempted to create a
mode mediating between thought and sense. In ‘‘The Art of Fiction’’ the
‘‘woman of genius’’ seems to reconcile Stevenson’s romantic abstraction
with Besant’s realistic observation, but James’s narratives dramatize the
instability of his syntheses. The Portrait of a Lady allegorizes ‘‘the problem
of marrying brilliant female receptivity to exploitative male sophistica-
tion,’’ while What Maisie Knew suggests that impressionability opens the
way to child abuse. Finally, The Ambassadors and the Prefaces abandon
the ‘‘collaborative solution’’ in favor of the modernist position that ‘‘art
makes life.’’ Although Matz is tentative in outlining the stages of James’s
development, he establishes a crucial link between the author’s feminist
concerns and his theoretical understanding. Especially in his later writ-
ings, James critiqued the tendency of sentimental Ž ction to ‘‘make an
aesthetic strength of woman’s weakness.’’
Other critics likewise chart the growth of James’s interest in language,
Sarah B. Daugherty 131

often at the expense of realistic representation. Textuality subverts geog-

raphy, according to Roxana Pana-Oltean in ‘‘ ‘The Extravagant Curve of
the Globe’: Refractions of Europe in Henry James’s ‘An International
Episode’ and The Ambassadors’’ (HJR 22: 180–99). The trope transmutes
the international theme into ‘‘a drama of indistinctions . . . signifying in
translations, echoes, and mutual projections.’’ Linguistic play is also the
subject of Alexander Gelley’s ‘‘Idle Talk: Scarcity and Excess in Literary
Language,’’ pp. 49–61 in Talk Talk Talk: The Cultural Life of Everyday
Conversation, ed. S. I. Salamensky (Routledge). Invoking Gérard Gen-
ette, Gelley argues that linguistic ‘‘noise’’ becomes ‘‘a means of generation
and continuance’’ for the telegraphist of ‘‘In the Cage’’ and the narrator of
The Sacred Fount. The latter’s speculations, ‘‘despite their lack of sub-
stance, attest to his very existence.’’ In ‘‘Henry James and the Unutterable
Past’’ (SELL 50 [2000]: 1–19) Peter Rawlings notes the skepticism im-
plied by the author’s dismissive comment on ‘‘the fatal futility of Fact.’’
Even in his nonŽ ction, James dissented from 19th-century empiricism
and aYliated himself with such modernists as F. H. Bradley.
Through the elaboration of his style James distanced himself from his
audience. Eric Leuschner describes this process in ‘‘ ‘Utterly, Insur-
mountably, Unsaleable’: Collected Editions, Prefaces, and the ‘Failure’ of
Henry James’s New York Edition’’ (HJR 22: 24–40). By 1908, says
Leuschner, ‘‘the market for deluxe editions was all but gone’’; and the
Prefaces, which privilege the author in his various roles, withdraw the
hand earlier proVered to the reader.
The contradictory political implications of James’s late writings are the
subject of a chapter in Jessica Berman’s Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitan-
ism, and the Politics of Community. Like the authors in Cosmopolitan
magazine James sought to distinguish between false sophistication and
the balance of assertion and conciliation he hoped to hear in the speech of
American gentlewomen. The Ambassadors rejects ‘‘the perpetually deter-
mined and uniŽ ed nation’’ in favor of its ‘‘ideally feminized counterpart,’’
but The Golden Bowl reasserts nativism in its characterization of Maggie.

v Criticism: Individual Novels

A study linking James’s revisionary process with his secularization of
Christian themes is ‘‘Between Communion and Renunciation: Revising
The American ’’ by Naomi E. Silver (HJR 22: 286–96). Especially in the
New York Edition, the novel shifts its focus from ritual sacriŽ ce to a more
132 Henry James

ethical mode of relationality, as the characters engage in ‘‘a kind of round-

robin that distributes the roles of victim, sacriŽ cer, and even deity, liber-
ally and interchangeably.’’
The Portrait of a Lady remains a key text for analysts measuring the
scope and limits of James’s feminism. In ‘‘Jamesian Gossip and the Seduc-
tive Politics of Interest’’ (HJR 22: 10–23) Ned Schantz defends the open
ending of the novel as a strategy to frustrate voyeuristic readers, who may
err in assuming Isabel’s return to Osmond. Though Henrietta’s role
seems crucial (especially if she is hiding her friend), a less ambiguous
characterization may have been beyond James’s imaginative reach. A
complementary article is Carolyn Mathews’s ‘‘The Fishwife in James’
Historical Stream: Henrietta Stackpole Gets the Last Word’’ (ALR 33:
189–208). Noting the emergence of motion photography, Mathews con-
trasts the static portraiture of Isabel with the dynamic representation of
Henrietta, whose agency increases in the New York Edition. And coun-
tering Alfred Habegger, this essay argues persuasively that the novelist’s
gender politics were far more liberal than those of his father. Historical
evidence is provided by Gary Scharnhorst in ‘‘James and Kate Field’’
(HJR 22: 200–206). A well-known journalist and frequent visitor to
Newport, Field was the likely model for Henrietta, whose experience,
biography, and views on women’s rights were identical with those of the
actual New Woman. But in marrying Henrietta to Bantling, James sug-
gets an alternative to the celibacy chosen by Field while oVering a critique
of Henry Sr.’s idealizations.
The sense of tragedy shadowing the author’s progressive politics is
emphasized by Jean Gooder in ‘‘Henry James’s Bostonians: The Voices of
Democracy’’ (CQ 30: 97–115), a reading of the novel in the context of
Whitman’s Drum Taps. Despite Basil’s strategies, North and South re-
main locked in con ict as James adopts a perspective similar to that of
Henry Adams or the later Whitman.
‘‘Philanthropy, Desire, and the Politics of Friendship in The Princess
Casamassima’’ by Carolyn Betensky (HJR 22: 147–62) is a lively treat-
ment of James’s satire on the Victorian practice of ‘‘friendly visiting.’’ As
in the Ž ction of Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, the sincere gentlewoman,
Lady Aurora, appears to be the foil of the insincere Princess; but Hya-
cinth, Paul, and Rosy remind visitors and readers alike that good inten-
tions hardly eliminate socioeconomic diVerences. A less ironic, more
conventional reading is oVered by James Seaton in ‘‘Henry James’ The
Princess Casamassima: Revolution and the Preservation of Culture,’’
Sarah B. Daugherty 133

pp. 15–25 in The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public Ethics, ed.
Henry T. Edmondson III (Lexington, 2000). Guided by Mr. Vetch and
enlightened by his journey to Europe, Hyacinth learns that great works of
art ‘‘ameliorate life for all, not just for the rich.’’
A nuanced discussion of the balance between homophobia and homo-
philia is Eric Haralson’s ‘‘The Elusive Queerness of Henry James’s ‘Queer
Comrade’: Reading Gabriel Nash of The Tragic Muse,’’ pp. 191–210 in
Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago, 1999). Tak-
ing issue with those who allegorize Nash as an ‘‘Oscar Wilde Ž gure,’’
Haralson describes him as ‘‘a proto-gay character’’ who aVronts the het-
erosexual order yet remains under erasure. But the novel raises a larger
question: what if ‘‘the (re)productive gentleman’’ is a mere ‘‘construct
manufactured in performance’’ and therefore subject to ‘‘sudden rupture
and self-emptying’’?
Eric Savoy’s ‘‘The Jamesian Thing’’ (HJR 22: 268–77) treats The Spoils
of Poynton as a precursor of Antiques Roadshow in its con ation of material
and sacred values. On this reading, Mrs. Gereth deserves more sympathy
than she receives from those disinclined to preserve objects as holy relics.
‘‘Not an Error, but a Revision in The Spoils of Poynton (a Reply to Adeline
Tintner)’’ by Jean Braithwaite (HJR 22: 93–94) unscrambles a convoluted
sentence.
What Maisie Knew has been scrutinized as a pivotal text in James’s turn
toward modernism, political and literary. In ‘‘Marginalized Maisie: Social
Purity and What Maisie Knew ’’ (VN 99: 7–15) Christine DeVine dis-
agrees with John Carlos Rowe’s view of James as an apologist for the
bourgeoisie. The novel undermines the platitudes of Victorian reformers,
and Maisie’s gain in moral sense depends on her awareness of sexuality.
Kendall Johnson’s ‘‘The Scarlet Feather: Racial Phantasmagoria in What
Maisie Knew ’’ (HJR 22: 128–46) argues that the novel disrupts the catego-
ries of the 1890s, especially in its representation of the American countess
(a ‘‘brown lady’’ with a red plume) and its Ž guration of Maisie as an
Indian being held captive and as a ‘‘little feathered shuttlecock’’  own
between her parents. Another study of metaphor, ‘‘Technologies of Vi-
sion in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew ’’ by Christina Britzolakis (Novel
34: 369–90) explains how the author’s tropes —especially that of the
magic lantern —signal his ‘‘increasingly anti-mimetic late style.’’ Maisie
becomes an object as much as a subject, and her cerebral adventures are
shadowed by a fable of brute power. A complementary article on narra-
tive technique is Susan E. Honeyman’s ‘‘What Maisie Knew and the
134 Henry James

Impossible Representation of Childhood’’ (HJR 22: 67–80). Through his

‘‘unique combination of externalized focalization, visual objectivity, and
dramatic irony,’’ James anticipated the poststructuralists’ challenge to
stable identity.
‘‘Homo-Formalism: Analogy in The Sacred Fount ’’ by Stacey Margolis
(Novel 34: 391–410) contrasts the novelist’s theories with those of his
brother William, in that the narrator establishes his selfhood by perceiv-
ing the similarities, not the diVerences, between himself and his double,
Ford Obert. According to the ‘‘anti-introspective model,’’ the logic of
same-sex desire comes to represent that of identity in general. Like Ha-
ralson, Margolis emphasizes the  uidity of gender rather than overtly
homosexual themes.
Elaine Pigeon adopts a similar approach in ‘‘The Legacy of the ‘Un-
speakable Father’ in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove,’’ pp. 143–68 in
Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealogies, and Explorations of Fatherhood in
Modern and Contemporary Literature, ed. Eva Paulino Bueno and Terry
Caesar (Lexington, 2000). Arguing that the model for Lionel Croy was
John Addington Symonds (a homosexual who maintained the conven-
tions of middle-class family life), Pigeon also notes James’s ‘‘elaborate
evasiveness’’ and cites Priscilla Walton’s astute observation: ‘‘there is eVec-
tively nothing about this novel on which everyone agrees.’’ Linda S.
Raphael’s Narrative Skepticism: Moral Agency and Representations of Con-
sciousness in Fiction (Fairleigh Dickinson) treats Wings as a pivotal text in
a tradition including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.
Raphael’s ethical reading is focused on Kate and Densher’s eVorts to
avoid shame and guilt, yet she underscores the ambiguities arising from
James’s refusal to deŽ ne standards and his ‘‘reluctance to place full knowl-
edge in one voice or vision.’’ Phillip Barrish invokes a more modern,
pragmatic context in American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and In-
tellectual Prestige. Conceding (but in my view underestimating) Jamesian
irony, Barrish treats Densher as a Ž gure who acquires ‘‘realist prestige’’
through his ‘‘tastefully self-denigrating regret’’ in the face of Milly’s
doom. It is interesting that this discussion highlights Densher’s resem-
blance to Howells’s Basil March.
The Golden Bowl likewise remains controversial, inviting analyses of
James’s modernist techniques and arguments among critics with diver-
gent philosophies. Dorrit Cohn’s ‘‘ ‘First Shock of Complete Perception’:
The Opening Episode of The Golden Bowl, Volume 2’’ (HJR 22: 1–9) is a
narratological study of the chapters in which Maggie becomes aware of
Sarah B. Daugherty 135

the adultery. Unusual features include the absence of dialogue, ‘‘psycho-

narration’’ marked by extravagant metaphors, and analeptic prolepsis
(‘‘Such things . . . were to come back to her’’) suggesting the need for
temporal delay before the acceptance of a disturbing insight. Then again,
metaphor may obscure both character and plot —or so argues Theo Davis
in ‘‘ ‘Out of the Medium in Which Books Breathe’: The Contours of
Formalism and The Golden Bowl ’’ (Novel 34: 411–33). As manner eclipses
matter, the novel ‘‘repeatedly abandons its subject’’; and unlike Colvin’s
photographs, it ‘‘pictorially represents nothing.’’ Defenders of positive
and negative readings usually rely on context. In ‘‘Why R. P. Blackmur
Found James’s Golden Bowl Inhumane’’ (ELH 68: 725–43) Quentin An-
derson reiterates the view that the novelist, like his father, believed in the
absolute opposition between divine and selŽ sh love: ‘‘Adam and Maggie
have been granted a certainty appropriate to gods.’’ Michael Reid’s ‘‘The
Aesthetics of Ascesis: Walter Besant and the Discipline of Form in The
Golden Bowl ’’ (HJR 22: 278–85) cites Besant and James Rice’s The Golden
Buttery (1876) as a source of James’s novel —perhaps the one alluded to
when Maggie hands Charlotte the right volume. Through Maggie, James
revises the novel of adultery and consecrates the marriage of form and
ethics. A skeptical interpretation is Gregory Erickson’s ‘‘The Golden Bowl,
A/theology, and Nothing’’ (HJR 22: 259–67). From this perspective the
bowl itself may be a metaphor for the ‘‘non-totalizing theology’’ sought
by Heidegger and others.
The re-publication of The Whole Family has prompted discussion of
James’s chapter, ‘‘The Married Son.’’ In Publishing the Family June
Howard notes the author’s deep interest in ‘‘the workings of a compan-
ionate marriage’’ —and his pained surprise at ‘‘how unassimilable his
virtually modernist text would be.’’ Susanna Ashton’s ‘‘Veribly a Purple
Cow: The Whole Family and the Collaborative Search for Coherence’’
(SNNTS 33: 51–79) quotes another contributor, Alice Brown, who lik-
ened James to ‘‘Dr. Johnson at a village sewing circle.’’

vi Criticism: Shorter Fiction

An important study of Daisy Miller is Sarah A. Wadsworth’s ‘‘Innocence
Abroad: Henry James and the Re-invention of the American Woman
Abroad’’ (HJR 22: 107–27). Reading James’s narrative as a response to a
tradition of women’s travel writing and Ž ction, Wadsworth cites Mary
Murdoch Mason’s Mae Madden (1876) as a likely source. Mason’s tale ad-
136 Henry James

heres to the conventions of romantic comedy and domestic Ž ction, end-

ing with its heroine’s marriage to her American suitor despite her compro-
mising adventure with a Piedmontese oYcer; but James, scrutinizing this
young woman through the eyes of Winterbourne, adopts a more critical
view to reclaim writing as ‘‘a gentlemanly pursuit.’’ Another useful ac-
count of James’s ambivalence is Dennis Pahl’s ‘‘ ‘Going Down’ with Henry
James’s Uptown Girl: Genteel Anxiety and the Promiscuous World of
Daisy Miller ’’ (LIT 12: 129–64). Linking the tale with The American Scene,
Pahl argues that Daisy’s ‘‘new money’’ causes James’s characterization to
be uncertain and indirect. His 1908 Preface aestheticizes Daisy but repeats
Winterbourne’s contradictions. Less historically informed is Lisa John-
son’s ‘‘Daisy Miller: Cowboy Feminist’’ (HJR 22: 41–58), a polemic urging
rejection of Winterbourne’s ‘‘regulatory categories.’’
James’s belief in dynamic interpretation is the focus of Mihály
Szegedy-Maszák’s ‘‘Henry James and Reader-Response Criticism (The
Figure in the Carpet ),’’ pp. 181–88 in Under Construction: Links for the Site
of Literary Theory: Essays in Honour of Hendrik Van Gorp, ed. Dirk De
Geest et al. (Leuven, 2000). Whereas the narrator views the text as an
object and asks the author for its message, the novelist Vereker knows that
his meaning depends on acts of imaginative appropriation.
Tomas Pollard’s ‘‘Telegraphing the Sentence and the Story: Iconicity in
In the Cage by Henry James’’ (EJES 5: 81–96) demonstrates how the style
and structure of the tale imitate telegraphic transmission. The 27 brief
chapters may represent the alphabet, plus a period, in Morse code. Jill
Galvan’s ‘‘Class Ghosting ‘In the Cage’ ’’ (HJR 22: 297–306) describes the
telegraphist’s eVorts to escape social debasement through her role as
‘‘spirit medium’’ to the rich. Ultimately, however, the aristocrats possess
her rather than vice versa, and she must marry Mr. Mudge to preserve
what remains of her dignity.

vii Criticism: NonŽ ction

The American Scene is the subject of four chapters in Jeremy Tambling’s
Lost in the American City: Dickens, James, and Kafka (Palgrave). As in the
critic’s earlier monograph (see AmLS 2000, p. 113), the discussion empha-
sizes James’s break from Victorian tradition and his development of a
modern —or even postmodern —sensibility. Tambling is given to hyper-
bole, especially when he writes of the Lacanian trauma of the author’s
‘‘missed encounter with the real’’ and subsequent belief that his years
Sarah B. Daugherty 137

abroad were ‘‘wasted.’’ But the book demonstrates James’s preference for
New York over the more traditional cities of New England and the South,
also drawing valid contrasts between Jamesian receptiveness and the
Dickensian desire for regulation. Amusingly, Tambling records James’s
mundane enthusiasms, as in a letter calling the American bathroom
‘‘really almost a consolation for many things.’’
A related study of the author’s modernism is ‘‘Henry James’s Oblique
Possession: Plottings of Desire and Mastery in The American Scene ’’ by
Gert Buelens (PMLA 116: 300–313). Applying queer theory, Buelens
argues that self-possession occurs in the act of submitting to another’s
erotic power. This thesis rightly mediates between Mark Seltzer’s focus on
‘‘mastery’’ and Ross Posnock’s on ‘‘surrender.’’ Yet the use of sadomasoch-
ism as an interpretive model creates an incongruity with the letters,
which document James’s kindness and humor.
Wichita State University
7 Wharton and Cather
Elsa Nettels

Critical interest in Wharton and Cather remains strong. The year’s schol-
arship includes six books, more than 50 articles and chapters in books,
and a special issue of ALR on Cather as a realist writer. Both the Wharton
and Cather reviews continue to serve their readers well, publishing some
of the year’s most noteworthy scholarship. New editions of the best-
known novels —e.g., The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and My Ántonia —
continue to multiply. Almost all Wharton’s short stories are now in print
again in the Library of America’s two-volume edition, with bibliograph-
ical references by Maureen Howard. With a few exceptions, however, the
short Ž ction of both writers remains a neglected area of study, Wharton’s
stories having received even less attention than usual in 2001.

i Edith Wharton
a. Critical Books A highlight of the year’s scholarship, Deborah Lindsay
Williams’s Not in Sisterhood is an engrossing study of literary relationships
based on correspondence that Wharton and Cather maintained for more
than a decade with Zona Gale, a well-established writer in the 1920s now
virtually erased from American literary history. Williams attributes the
literary fates of the three novelists to their diVerent views of themselves as
artists, as revealed in their letters. While Gale, who initiated the corre-
spondence with both Cather and Wharton, championed sisterhood and
sought community with other women, Wharton and Cather, fearing that
identiŽ cation with women writers and feminist causes would threaten
their status as literary artists, held themselves aloof, although they ap-
peared to welcome literary exchange with Gale and to value her admira-
tion: ‘‘Desire and recoil are the two movements of the letters,’’ Williams
states. In writing to Wharton, Gale at Ž rst assumed the role of worshipful
140 Wharton and Cather

disciple, but Williams treats the three writers as literary equals in chapters
on their best-known works: The House of Mirth, My Ántonia, and Miss
Lulu Bett; and on their war novels: A Son at the Front, One of Ours, and
Heart’s Kindred. One may question whether ‘‘the consequences of choos-
ing sisterhood as a model for literary authority’’ so fully account for Gale’s
obscurity as Williams maintains. But her book is important for its many
astute insights and for bringing to light signiŽ cant correspondence, which
none of the biographers of Wharton or Cather even mentions.
In Mysteries of Paris: The Quest for Morton Fullerton (New England)
Marion Mainwaring presents the results of three decades of research into
the career of the American journalist William Morton Fullerton, a pro-
liŽ c writer she describes as ‘‘a strangely hollow man,’’ who now owes his
place in literary history primarily to his three-year love aVair with Edith
Wharton, long kept secret. Many of Wharton’s letters to Fullerton have
been published, and the main outlines of the relationship are now well
known. But Mainwaring gives the most detailed account of the vicissi-
tudes of the aVair —the meetings, the correspondence, and the role of
Henry James as the friend and conŽ dant of both lovers. Mainwaring
constructs her book as a narrative of her search for information in librar-
ies, newspapers, archives, letters, and interviews, seeking not only to
recapture the suspense and excitement of the quest, but also to establish
the extent of her contribution as a research assistant to R. W. B. Lewis
(referred to throughout as ‘‘the biographer’’), who, she claims, mispre-
sented the results of her work.
In The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton (Camden House) Helen
Killoran surveys a century of criticism in chapters on The House of Mirth,
Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer, The Age of Innocence,
and Ghosts. Beginning with the contemporary reviews, she identiŽ es the
main trends in the criticism of each work, the salient issues and points of
controversy, and the eVects of national politics and literary theories on
the Ž ction, as seen in representative books and articles. In an introduc-
tory chapter and elsewhere she emphatically rejects the familiar view of
Wharton as the disciple of Henry James. She sides with critics who
question whether Wharton is accurately described as a ‘‘feminist’’ but
maintains that feminist theory has shaped criticism of Wharton since the
1970s. Killoran stops short of a full survey: her bibliography includes only
four works published after 1998, but her book is valuable for its detailed
deŽ nitions of the major periods of Wharton criticism and for its sum-
maries of the most in uential critical books and articles.
Elsa Nettels 141

b. Criticism: General Essays Ellen Dupree’s ‘‘ ‘Usually the Reward of

Tosh’: Edith Wharton’s Business Education’’ (EWhR 17, ii: 1–13) makes an
important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Wharton’s
engagement in the process of publication and marketing. Drawing on
Wharton’s correspondence (most of it unpublished) with editors at
Scribner’s and D. Appleton, Dupree dispels the common assumption
that Wharton initially resisted writing for the mass market and shows
that from the beginning she sought to in uence editorial decisions and to
promote the commercial success of her work while preserving her reputa-
tion as a serious artist.
The year’s only essay on the travel writing, Spencer D. Segalla’s ‘‘Re-
inventing Colonialism: Race and Gender in Edith Wharton’s In Mo-
rocco ’’ (EWhR 17, ii: 22–30), argues persuasively that Wharton subverts
rather than endorses the French idea of colonization as a mission civil-
isatrice. Fearing the eVects of racial miscegenation and believing cultures
to be racially determined, Wharton argued that colonizers should keep
the races separated and not attempt to Westernize the peoples they
conquered. Segalla contrasts the portrayals of Arab women in In Morocco
and Pierre Loti’s Au Maroc (‘‘the strongest in uence’’ on Wharton’s book)
to highlight her view of the harem as ‘‘an archetype of women’s oppres-
sion’’ rather than ‘‘a place of erotic energy.’’
Frederick Wegener reŽ nes the deŽ nition of Wharton’s feminism in an
informative essay, ‘‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, and the
Divided Heritage of Feminism,’’ pp. 135–59 in The Mixed Legacy of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider
Zangrando (Delaware, 2000). Seeing the two writers as ‘‘almost comple-
mentary opposites’’ despite the many similarities in their careers, he
compares their views on such subjects as utopian communities, marriage,
child-rearing, and women’s clubs and he contrasts Wharton’s The Decora-
tion of Houses (1897) with Gilman’s The Home (1903) to illustrate the
diVerences between Gilman, who valued Ž ction as an instrument of
social reform, and Wharton, who (like Cather) disparaged ‘‘the novel
with a purpose.’’
Another comparative essay, Stuart Hutchinson’s ‘‘ ‘Beyond’ George
Eliot? Reconsidering Edith Wharton’’ (MLR 95: 942–53), derives Lily
Bart from Gwendolen Harleth and Undine Spragg from Rosamond
Vincy to argue for George Eliot as ‘‘a formative in uence’’ on Wharton.
Most interesting are the connections developed between Romola and The
Touchstone, one of Wharton’s lesser-known works, which Hutchinson
142 Wharton and Cather

believes ‘‘derives its moral structure from George Eliot’s pronouncements

about the determining power of deeds.’’
Several of Wharton’s best-known novels are analyzed in books on
themes and ideas in American Ž ction. In Tracing Arachne’s Web: Myth and
Feminist Fiction (Florida) Kristin M. Mapel Bloomberg analyzes the
protagonists of The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country as
contrasting exemplars of the ‘‘modern Aphrodite,’’ whom patriarchy
seeks to control and commodify. Bloomberg sees Lily Bart as ‘‘Androm-
eda in chains,’’ a powerless sacriŽ cial victim whose death, ‘‘ultimately a
determined fate,’’ oVers the only escape from forces she cannot control.
Undine Spragg is Aphrodite become water sprite, who pitilessly sacriŽ ces
others in her pursuit of power.
Barbara Hochman discusses The House of Mirth and The Age of Inno-
cence in Getting at the Author (pp. 74–79), a study of the ways realist
writers distance themselves from their texts. Developing analogies be-
tween the readers of a novel and characters observing themselves and
others within the novel, Hochman sees re ected in the diVerent re-
sponses to Lily Bart’s tableau Wharton’s own ambivalence about self-
disclosure. In The Age of Innocence May Welland Archer, ‘‘an authorial
Ž gure’’ who exerts power and controls action through silence and ab-
sence, ‘‘demonstrates Wharton’s own disembodiment in the text.’’
Diane McGee illuminates a familiar subject in her analyses of The
House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence,
pp. 38–80 in Writing the Meal. Noting that dinner parties mark turning
points in all three novels, she emphasizes the importance of ‘‘dining
customs’’ in maintaining boundaries between insiders, such as the New-
land Archers, whose social rituals preserve stability and their sense of
security, and characters on the margins, such as Lily Bart and Undine
Spragg, who struggle to remain or to become insiders and are always
guests, never hostesses, at dinner parties where characters enact the rituals
of acceptance and exclusion.
In Novel Art Mark McGurl analyzes The House of Mirth as an example
of the pastoral, which, like the Ž ction of Stephen Crane and O. Henry,
presents urban poverty from the perspective of the social elite and invests
scenes of low life with the aesthetic values of high culture.

c. Fiction: Individual Works As the works cited above indicate, critics’

interest in The House of Mirth shows no signs of waning. This year’s
Elsa Nettels 143

scholarship adds eight essays to the extensive bibliography of Wharton’s

most exhaustively studied novel, now available in more than 25 editions.
New Essays on The House of Mirth, ed. Deborah Esch (Cambridge),
contains four hitherto unpublished essays and Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s
‘‘The Conspicuous Wasting of Lily Bart,’’ pp. 15–41 (see AmLS 1992,
p. 221), which applies the ideas of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class to
characters and scenes in the novel. Of the new essays, Mary Nyquist’s
‘‘Determining In uences: Resistance and Mentorship in The House of
Mirth and the Anglo-American Realist Tradition’’ (pp. 43–105) is out-
standing for its illuminating comparison of Wharton’s novel with George
Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Jane Austen’s Emma. Establishing The House
of Mirth in the 19th-century tradition of realist novels of ‘‘male mentor-
ship,’’ Nyquist compares the roles of the mentors —Knightly, Deronda,
and Selden —and the heroines —Emma, Gwendolen, and Lily, who are
linked by their ‘‘limited options,’’ self-dramatizing impulses, need of
protection, and dependence on the mentor’s approval. Nyquist takes the
controversial view of Selden as a masculine ideal who represents for the
reader, as well as for Lily, ‘‘an ethically superior standard,’’ but she also
argues that his self-protectiveness and readiness to believe the worst of
Lily make The House of Mirth a ‘‘subversion of mentorship,’’ the Ž rst
novel in the tradition to expose the double sexual standard which protects
Selden but condemns Lily for the appearance of impropriety. Thomas
Loebel in ‘‘Beyond the Self ’’ (pp. 107–32) analyzes Lily Bart using con-
cepts of the self, identity, and the soul developed in the philosophy of
Emmanuel Levinas. Loebel deŽ nes the action in The House of Mirth as ‘‘a
radical destabilization of Lily’s identity,’’ which results when her search to
gain a soul or ‘‘alterity’’ beyond her status as a commodity in a market
economy leads to her social exclusion and death. Lynne Tillman in ‘‘A
Mole in the House of the Modern’’ (pp. 135–58) is interested in the
importance of architectural structures and spaces to deŽ ne stages in Lily’s
social decline and psychological development. The essay is not a tightly
structured argument but contains good insights into the causes of Lily’s
fate. In a concise introduction (pp. 1–13) Deborah Esch also summarizes
the history of The House of Mirth —its composition, serial publication,
popular success, critical reception, and trends in later criticism. Her
observation that the novel cannot be reduced to a single story but yields a
‘‘multiplicity of stories’’ helps to explain its enduring interest to critics.
In ‘‘Spectacular Homes and Pastoral Theaters: Gender, Urbanity and
144 Wharton and Cather

Domesticity in The House of Mirth ’’ (SNNTS 33: 322–50) Nancy Von

Rosk examines the many ways that domestic interiors and public spaces
deŽ ne Lily Bart in relation to the transformations of city life at the turn of
the century. The essay portrays Lily as both a commodity and a moral
being, a ‘‘sentimental heroine’’ as well as a New Woman, who is regarded
as either ‘‘endangered or dangerous’’ in urban settings.
Another valuable essay, Laura K. Johnson’s ‘‘Edith Wharton and the
Fiction of Marital Unity’’ (MFS 47: 947–76) compares The House of
Mirth with The Glimpses of the Moon to show that Wharton rejected
‘‘marital contract’’ as tantamount to a commercial exchange but could
not oVer a satisfactory alternative as the basis for marriage. By refusing to
close a deal in the marriage market, Lily Bart renders herself powerless, as
Johnson observes, but Wharton’s attempt in the later novel to portray a
marriage based on a ‘‘unity of interest’’ reveals that only by legal contract
could women protect their interests.
David Herman’s ‘‘Style-Shifting in Edith Wharton’s The House of
Mirth ’’ (Lang&Lit 10: 61–77) emphasizes Lily Bart’s responses to the
diVerent speech patterns of the characters, from the substandard dialect
of the charwomen, to whom Lily speaks in her most formal style, to the
crude slang of male characters such as Trenor and Rosedale, which most
threatens Lily’s sense of power and control.
In ‘‘Gambling Against the House: Anglo and Indian Perspectives on
Gambling in American Literature’’ (Mosaic 34, i: 137–52) Paul Pas-
quaretta compares Lily Bart, whose gambling debts lead to her ruin, with
the heroine of Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, the Half-Blood, who is rescued
from a predatory speculator by a community in which gambling, ac-
cepted as part of ceremonial tradition, ‘‘functions as a comic trope of
resistance and survival.’’
Although overshadowed by The House of Mirth, Wharton’s next novel,
The Fruit of the Tree, continues to generate good criticism. Mary V.
Marchand in ‘‘Death to Lady Bountiful: Women and Reform in Edith
Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree ’’ (Legacy 18: 65–78) shows that in her
portrayal of the Amherst marriages Wharton rejects the ‘‘social femi-
nism’’ implicit in earlier ‘‘reform novels,’’ which portray women able to
eVect social reform without sacriŽ cing the role and ‘‘womanly virtues’’ of
traditional wives and mothers.
Ethan Frome is the subject of three essays this year. In a provocative
reading, ‘‘Under the Granite Outcroppings of Ethan Frome ’’ (LI 2: 320–
34) Helen Killoran defends Zenobia as ‘‘morally correct’’ in acting to save
Elsa Nettels 145

her marriage, credits her with ‘‘the principle of the Stoics,’’ and argues
that she, not Ethan, becomes the ‘‘moral center’’ of the novel. In ‘‘ ‘The
Absorbed Observation of Her Own Symptoms’: Ethan Frome and Anne
Sexton’s ‘The Break’ ’’ (EWhR 17, ii: 14–22) Joanna Gill argues for Whar-
ton’s novel as the ‘‘necessary foundation’’ of Sexton’s poem. Gill notes the
importance in both works of the imagery of fracture, shattered glass, the
winter season, silences, and the themes of duty, trauma, and mental
breakdown. In a persuasive essay, ‘‘Cross Talk: Edith Wharton and the
New England Women Regionalists’’ (WS 30: 369–95), Marchand argues
that Wharton wrote Ethan Frome as an ‘‘act of cultural criticism’’ to
protest the spread of middle-class culture and inferior art, which she
linked with the female values aYrmed by regionalists, notably Sarah
Orne Jewett. Marchand observes that the deŽ ning conventions of Jew-
ett’s Ž ction, such as the female narrator, the ‘‘benevolent rural matri-
archy,’’ and the benign powers of the woman healer and herbalist, are all
subverted in Ethan Frome in the male narrator’s vision of rural stagnation,
mental starvation, and female pathology.
Readings on Ethan Frome, ed. Christopher Smith (Greenhaven, 2000),
contains 16 selections on a variety of topics from works previously pub-
lished by Susan Goodman, R. W. B. Lewis, Blake Nevius, and Lionel
Trilling, among others.
Three essays from diVerent perspectives give new insight into The
Custom of the Country. William R. MacNaughton’s ‘‘The Artist as Moral-
ist: Edith Wharton’s Revisions to the Last Chapter of The Custom of the
Country ’’ (PLL 37: 51–63) compares Wharton’s revised version of chapter
46 with the original draft to show how Wharton highlights the loneliness
of Undine’s neglected child and thereby registers more clearly her disap-
proval of Undine’s conduct. Carole M. ShaVer-Koros in ‘‘Edgar Allan Poe
and Edith Wharton: The Case of Mrs. Mowatt’’ (EWhR 17, i: 12–16)
argues that Wharton found one source for The Custom of the Country in
Anna Cosa Mowatt’s play Fashion, or Life in New York (1845), a comedy,
reviewed by Poe, in which parvenu parents, like the Spraggs, use their
daughter as ‘‘a medium of social exchange.’’ Undine and Emerson seem
an unlikely pair, but Julie Olin-Ammentorp and Ann Ryan in ‘‘Undine
Spragg and the Transcendental I’’ (EWhR 17, i: 1–9) develop a convinc-
ing analysis of Wharton’s protagonist as a radical parody of the self-
conŽ dent, self-reliant hero extolled by Emerson. Observing that, unlike
Elmer MoVatt, Undine becomes grotesque, almost monstrous, in the
quest for freedom and power, the authors conclude that for Wharton
146 Wharton and Cather

Emersonian freedom was a masculine privilege, that ‘‘female transcen-

dence can only be a product of female transgression.’’
Two of the three essays on The Age of Innocence deal with the novel and
the Ž lm. Sarah KozloV ’s ‘‘Complicity in The Age of Innocence ’’ (Style 35:
270–88) shows how the camera suggests the ‘‘rich ambiguities’’ of the
novel by manipulation of time, lighting, and shifts in perspective that
create ‘‘visual correlations’’ of the characters’ views. A. Robert Lee praises
the Ž lm for its authentic settings and music and its success in representing
Wharton’s ‘‘world of gaze and predatory watchfulness’’ in ‘‘Watching
Manners: Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s The
Age of Innocence, ’’ pp. 163–78 in The Classic Novel from Page to Screen, ed.
Robert Giddings and Erica Sheen (Manchester, 2000).
Wharton’s preference for 18th-century French design over the ‘‘truly
American style’’ favored by many American architects is Cynthia Falk’s
starting point in ‘‘ ‘The Intolerable Ugliness of New York’: Architecture
and Society in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence ’’ (AmerS 42, ii: 19–
43). Describing the novel as a critique, not a panegyric, Falk argues that
the characters favored by Wharton (e.g., Ellen Olenska and Catherine
Mingott) prove their superiority to the Archers and Wellands in their
choice of European models of architecture and decoration.
Some of the year’s best criticism deals with novels published after The
Age of Innocence. Edie Thornton’s compelling essay ‘‘Selling Edith Whar-
ton’’ (ArQ 57, iii: 29–59) examines the serialization of The Mother’s
Recompense in the Pictorial Review to show how illustrations, advertise-
ments, and promotion copy guided readers’ interpretation of the novel
and induced them to buy the magazine and the products it advertised.
Thornton’s analyses of illustrations showing Kate Clephane looking al-
ternately mature and youthful, resembling women in ads for corsets and
cold cream, underscore the irony that Wharton, the critic of standardiza-
tion and mass production, was promoted in magazines that viewed
readers as consumers and packaged her work like any other product.
Phillip Barrish gives a powerful reading of Twilight Sleep in ‘‘What
Nona Knew,’’ pp. 97–127 in his book American Literary Realism, Critical
Theory, and Intellectual Prestige. He locates the moral center of the novel
in the awareness of Nona Manford, a ‘‘conscious bearer of catastrophic
knowledge’’ who watches, but cannot avert, the violence caused by her
father’s incestuous desire for his daughter-in law —a breakdown of pater-
nal authority and the social order that produces the ‘‘most relentless and
devastating reality in the novel’s world.’’
Elsa Nettels 147

In a widely perceptive essay, ‘‘ ‘Too Young for the Part’: Narrative

Closure and Feminine Evolution in Wharton’s ’20s Fiction’’ (ArQ 57, iv:
89–119), Melanie V. Dawson analyzes the plight of the adolescent girl or
young woman in The Glimpses of the Moon, The Mother’s Recompense,
Twilight Sleep, and The Children. Dawson argues that characters such as
Susy Lansing, Anne Clephane, Nona Manford, and Judith Wheater not
only assume ‘‘onerous family roles’’ that preclude personal growth and
fulŽ llment, they are ‘‘willing participants’’ in a repressive system which,
in Wharton’s view, ensured racial progress and social stability at the price
of women’s freedom.

ii Willa Cather
a. Critical Books A welcome resource for scholars, Willa Cather: The
Contemporary Reviews, ed. Margaret Anne O’Connor (Cambridge), sam-
ples the response in English-language newspapers and periodicals to 18
volumes of Cather’s works, from April Twilights (1903) to The Old Beauty
and Others (1948). In her introduction O’Connor surveys Cather’s career
as a reviewer, deŽ nes trends in the criticism spanning more than four
decades, and notes that the reviews of Cather’s most harshly attacked
work, One of Ours, ‘‘record a public debate’’ that took place in the 1920s
over the role of the United States in the First World War.
Jonathan Goldberg develops concepts of queer theory in his ambitious
and wide-ranging Willa Cather & Others (Duke), which proceeds from
the premise that Cather’s ‘‘sexuality is implicated in her writing’’ and thus
informs the meaning of her characters’ relationships. Taking as his start-
ing point the famous phrase in ‘‘The Novel Démeublé,’’ ‘‘the inexplicable
presence of the thing not named,’’ Goldberg sees Cather’s texts as ‘‘sites of
dense transfer points’’ where race, gender, and class intersect, and dis-
placements and occlusions occur. In his reading of the novels, from
Alexander’s Bridge to Sapphira and the Slave Girl, characters’ desires are
rarely what they seem on the surface but mask, translate, or substitute for
the unnamed, which often turns out to be ‘‘lesbian desire masquerading
as heterosexuality.’’ One need not embrace assumptions that turn reading
into decoding to Ž nd stimulating insights in Goldberg’s association of
Cather’s novels with the Ž ction of other writers: e.g., Pat Barker’s World
War I trilogy compared with One of Ours and Blair Niles’s 1931 novel
Strange Brother paired with The Professor’s House. Juxtapositions are most
illuminating in the chapter on The Song of the Lark, ‘‘Cather Diva,’’
148 Wharton and Cather

which compares Thea Kronborg’s career with Olive Fremstad’s, Cather’s

novel with Marcia Davenport’s Of Lena Geyer (also based on Fremstad’s
life), and Edith Lewis’s Willa Cather Living with The Rainbow Bridge
(1954), the biography of Fremstad by her companion Mary Watkins
Cushing. Here and elsewhere Goldberg recognizes the importance of
Cather’s relation to Lewis as a ‘‘sustaining condition’’ of both Cather’s life
and writing.

b. Criticism: General Essays The year’s scholarship is especially strong

in essays connecting Cather’s Ž ction to persons, subjects, and projects
important in her professional life and artistic development. Robert
Thacker argues eVectively for the importance of Cather’s collaboration
with S. S. McClure as a ‘‘crucial step’’ in her career in ‘‘ ‘It’s Through
Myself That I Knew Her and Felt Her’: S. S. McClure’s My Autobiography
and the Development of Willa Cather’s Autobiographical Realism’’ (ALR
33: 123–42). In Cather’s writing of McClure’s life Thacker sees ‘‘the gen-
esis’’ of an ‘‘emotive relation’’ between a storyteller and a sympathetic
listener that informs My Ántonia and is realized most fully in The Pro-
fessor’s House in the narration of ‘‘Tom Outland’s Story.’’
Merrill M. Skaggs establishes the importance of a friend and colleague
of Cather’s on the staV of McClure’s Magazine in ‘‘Viola Roseboro’: A
Prototype for Cather’s My Mortal Enemy ’’ (MissQ 54: 5–21). Skaggs
makes a good case for Roseboro’ as the model for Myra Henshawe, noting
many similarities between them: their promotion of young artists; their
adoration of the actress Helen Modjeska; their traits of theatricality,
violence in anger, and cruel wit; their impoverishment and turn to Ca-
tholicism at the end of their lives.
Rebecca Roorda’s informative and well-documented essay, ‘‘Willa
Cather in the Magazines: ‘The Business of Art’ ’’ (WCPMN 44, iii: 71–
75), examines Cather’s dealings with three periodicals —The Smart Set,
The Century, and Woman’s Home Companion —to show the inconsisten-
cies in Cather’s responses to the demands of the marketplace on the artist.
Drawing extensively on unpublished correspondence of Cather, Dorothy
CanŽ eld Fisher, and their agent Paul Reynolds, Roorda shows that
Cather cared more for the reputation of magazines than the prices they
paid and that she suVered Ž nancial loss when she sold her work directly to
editors instead of letting Reynolds negotiate for her.
Two essays eVectively refute the commonly held view that Cather was
hostile to science and technology. Mary K. Ryder in ‘‘Ars Scientiae: Willa
Elsa Nettels 149

Cather and the Mission of Science’’ (WCPMN 45, i: 11–16) documents

Cather’s early interest in scientiŽ c experimentation; notes her portrayal of
engineers and inventors, such as Bartley Alexander and Tom Outland,
who unite the achievements of science with the imagination of artists;
and stresses that for Cather ‘‘the enemy’’ was not science but the misuse of
science for proŽ t at the expense of others’ welfare. Ryder sees Cather’s
ideal artist-scientist represented in Shadows on the Rock in the herbalist
Euclide Auclair, whose ‘‘deep spirituality’’ infuses his ‘‘keen sense of
inquiry.’’
In ‘‘Willa Cather and American Plant Ecology’’ (ISLE 8, ii: 1–12)
Cheryl C. Swift and John N. Swift compare O Pioneers! with Sapphira
and the Slave Girl to illustrate ‘‘two modes of botanical thinking’’ domi-
nant in the early 20th century. They see exempliŽ ed in Alexandra Berg-
son’s successful cultivation of the land a paradigm of community ad-
vanced by the botanist Frederic Clements (Cather’s classmate at the
University of Nebraska), who posited systems of interdependent organ-
isms participating in orderly cycles of growth. In contrast, the abundance
of detail in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, in which Cather names dozens of
 owers and trees, recalls the taxonomist’s methods of classiŽ cation and
suggests that, for Cather, Clements’s holistic vision by then belonged to
‘‘an irretrievable past.’’
In ‘‘Seeing and Believing: Willa Cather’s Realism’’ (ALR 33: 168–80)
Janis P. Stout analyzes book 6 of Sapphira and the Slave Girl to illustrate
two aspects of Cather’s Ž ction that deŽ ne her as a realist: ‘‘visual ac-
curacy,’’ seen in the detailed descriptions of nature, and ‘‘an honest and
unvarnished view of life’’ that exposes the falsity of sentimental depic-
tions of love and marriage.
The connections between Cather’s early fascination with the theater
and actors and her creation of her own public image are explored by
Michael Schueth in ‘‘Cather and Her Stars: Negotiating a Culture of
Celebrity in the 1890s’’ (WCPMN 45, ii: 33–37). He illuminates the
paradox of celebrity, observing that Cather in creating a public self
shaped by childhood experience gave to her readers ‘‘a sense of personal
relationship’’ and at the same time protected her privacy by diverting
attention from other parts of her life.
Barbara Hochman’s discussion of Cather, pp. 83–92 in Getting at the
Author, also focuses on the importance of stage performers in Cather’s
aesthetic. Hochman appreciates the complexity of Cather’s view, arguing
that the novelist achieved distance between herself and her reader by
150 Wharton and Cather

imagining the author as an actress ‘‘whose mask completely covers her

face,’’ while at the same time the meaning of the artist’s performance in
stories such as ‘‘Nanette’’ and ‘‘Eden Bower’’ depends on the response of
the spectator.
Unlike Wharton, who has long been identiŽ ed as a novelist of man-
ners, Cather has yet to be established in a tradition. Instead, she is once
again paired with a surprising variety of writers. In ‘‘ ‘I bequeath myself to
the dirt to grow from the grass I love’: The Whitman-Cather Connection
in O Pioneers! ’’ (TSWL 20: 123–36) Maire Mullins compares Alexandra
Bergson, ‘‘both pioneer and poet,’’ with the speaker of Song of Myself and
argues for Whitman as Cather’s ‘‘muse and model’’ in celebrating west-
ward expansion.
An interesting connection between writers is developed by Evelyn
Haller in ‘‘Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock and Ezra Pound’s Daugh-
ter, Mary,’’ pp. 187–99 in Ezra Pound and Poetic In uence, ed. Helen M.
Dennis (Rodopi, 2000). Drawing on her conversations in 1994 with
Pound’s daughter, Haller compares Cather’s ideal of the ‘‘novel déme-
ublé’’ with Pound’s ‘‘method of Luminous Detail’’ and notes Pound’s
approval of Cather, their mutual reverence for the classics, their interest
in the transplantation of cultures, and their respect for sacred places,
domestic order, and the household arts, as celebrated in Cather’s novel
Shadows on the Rock, which Pound gave to his daughter when she was 16.
WCPMN publishes several articles on Cather and her contemporaries.
Nancy Chinn in ‘‘ ‘My Six Books Would Be’: The Cather-Hurston Con-
nection’’ (44, iii: 76–79) cites a letter in which Zora Neale Hurston
named My Ántonia as one of her half dozen favorite novels and proposes
Cather’s use of landscape, memory, and the oral tradition as reasons for
Hurston’s choice. In ‘‘Empire-Building and Empire-Writing: A Reading
of Rudyard Kipling and Willa Cather’’ (45, ii: 17–21) Satarupa Sengupta
quotes from Cather’s favorable review of Kipling’s The Day’s Work (1898)
but argues that Cather’s support of ‘‘the imperial project’’ was qualiŽ ed by
her ideal of America as a ‘‘pluralist community’’ coexisting with ongoing
processes of assimilation. Richard C. Harris in ‘‘Willa Cather, D. H.
Lawrence, and the American Southwest’’ (45, ii: 5–10) begins with the
meeting of the two writers in New York in 1924 and in Taos the following
year. Harris stresses the writers’ attachment to the Southwest as a place of
great natural beauty and spiritual regeneration, an antidote to the ugli-
ness and decay of urban wastelands. He Ž nds that they diVer primarily in
their view of Native American culture —Lawrence feeling in Indian rit-
Elsa Nettels 151

uals the power of a primordial life force lost in the modern world, Cather
seeing in the achievements of the Anasazi cliV dwellers ‘‘the superior
values of a civilized people.’’
Through comparison John J. Murphy’s ‘‘Compromising Realism to
Idealize a War: Wharton’s The Marne and Cather’s One of Ours ’’ (ALR 33:
157–67) implicitly defends Cather’s novel against the well-known charge
that it sentimentalizes the war. He notes the similarity between Cather’s
and Wharton’s protagonists, young men seeking escape from unfulŽ lling
lives in romantic fantasies of heroism in war. But he Ž nds The Marne
weakened by the intrusion of the supernatural (the ghost of Troy’s tutor
killed in battle) whereas the ‘‘overwhelming pessimism’’ of One of Ours
precludes the survival of romantic illusions.

c. Criticism: Individual Works Articles on two of Cather’s early stories

appear in the special issue of ALR. Debra J. Seivert in ‘‘Responding to
Romance with Realism in Cather’s ‘Tommy, the Unsentimental’ ’’ (33:
104–09) treats Cather’s story as a realistic response to James M. Barrie’s
Sentimental Tommy (1896). Unlike Barrie’s Tommy Sandys, a character of
fantasy who, like Peter Pan, never grows up, Cather’s protagonist is a
capable, responsible young woman who puts her success in business
before the claims of ‘‘sentimental friendship.’’ Paul R. Petrie argues that
Cather rejects Howells’s social realism in ‘‘ ‘There Must Be Something
Wonderful Coming’: Social Purpose and Romantic Idealism in Willa
Cather’s ‘Behind the Singer Tower’ ’’ (33: 110–22). Opposing the tradi-
tional reading of the story as an exposé of the evils of modern technology,
Petrie sees an unresolved tension created by the narrator’s Howellsian
preoccupation with the plight of exploited immigrant workers and ‘‘a
persistent counter-pull’’ toward a ‘‘cosmic vision’’ of New York in which
the marvels of technology assume mythic grandeur that transcends indi-
vidual suVering.
Lisa Marcus deŽ nes another kind of tension in her careful reading of
‘‘The Singer Tower’’ in ‘‘Architectures of Ethnicity: Willa Cather’s Jewish
New York’’ (WCPMN 45, ii: 39–44). To demonstrate Cather’s ambiva-
lence toward ‘‘Jewish industry and enterprise’’ Marcus emphasizes the
contrasts set up in the story: between the Statue of Liberty and the
Singer Tower, ‘‘a giant Jewish body’’ that dominates the New York sky-
line; and between Merrywether, the Jewish builder of the Ž ctional hotel
Mont Blanc, whose greed causes many deaths, and the Jewish doctor,
Zablowski, the most thoughtful and far-seeing of the characters, who
152 Wharton and Cather

imagines the ultimate fate of New York’s monuments, reduced to ‘‘ves-

tigial relics of the glory and costs of empire building.’’
Judith Butler explores the implications of narrative strategy in an
intricate, densely written essay, ‘‘Withholding the Name: Translating
Gender in Cather’s ‘On the Gull’s Road,’ ’’ pp. 56–71 in Modernist Sex-
ualities, ed. Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett (Manchester, 2000).
Because nothing in Cather’s story indicates the gender of the unnamed
narrator, Butler argues, the narrative cannot be deŽ ned as a ‘‘lesbian tale’’
or a romance of heterosexual desire; rather, it represents a ‘‘thwarted love
aVair in either gender,’’ a love which can exist only because the woman’s
fatal illness forecloses any possibility of fulŽ llment.
Michelle Bollard Toby gives a balanced reading of Cather’s most fa-
mous story in ‘‘ ‘There Is Something Wrong about the Fellow’: Willa
Cather’s ‘Paul’s Case,’ ’’ pp. 252–66 in Teaching Literature and Medicine,
ed. Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre (MLA,
2000). Comparing the reader to an ‘‘investigative physician,’’ Toby warns
against imposing on the story any single interpretation of Paul’s behavior
(e.g., that he is homosexual). She urges teachers to encourage students to
question the assumptions on which an interpretation rests, to focus on
the ‘‘dominant culture’’ that deŽ nes Paul as deviant, and to consider the
causes and eVects of readers’ needs to ‘‘explain, classify, diagnose.’’
Richard C. Stimac in ‘‘The Hero and the Fool in Willa Cather’s Early
Short Fiction’’ (MQ 43: 42–50) compares ‘‘The Bohemian Girl’’ and
‘‘The Treasure of Far Island’’ to illustrate what he calls the ‘‘artistic boy-
man,’’ an outsider in his community who achieves success as an artist but
longs to recapture the world of his childhood.
James Seaton demonstrates Cather’s aYrmation of ‘‘the prosaic virtues
of everyday life’’ in ‘‘The Beauty of Middle-Class Virtue: Willa Cather’s
O Pioneers!, ’’ pp. 193–202 in The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public
Ethics, ed. Henry T. Edmondson III (Lexington, 2000). He observes
that characters such as Frank Shabata and Emil Bergson, whose lives end
in ruin and death, are romanticists who believe themselves and their
passions superior to ‘‘ordinary human nature’’ and its obligations and
responsibilities.
An important connection between Cather’s early reviews and her nov-
els is established by Amy Ahearn in ‘‘Full-Blooded Writing and Journalis-
tic Fictions: Naturalism, the Female Artist and Willa Cather’s The Song of
the Lark ’’ (ALR 33: 143–56). Ahearn sees Cather as ‘‘an ardent supporter of
naturalism,’’ stressing her admiration of Dreiser, Norris, Crane, and Zola
Elsa Nettels 153

in her early reviews. Ahearn defends The Song of the Lark against the
familiar charge that the novel is overburdened by detail and argues that
Cather deliberately used the naturalists’ methods: she sought professional
opinions from vocal trainers and opera singers, developed naturalistic
subjects such as alcoholism and the plight of exploited workers, and ex-
plored the sources of health and disease, weakness and strength, to create
in Thea Kronborg ‘‘a female genius, within the naturalist tradition.’’
Scott Palmer likewise stresses the determinative power of conditions in
‘‘ ‘The Train of Thought’: Classed Travel and Nationality in Willa Cath-
er’s My Ántonia ’’ (SAF 29: 239–50). Describing the novel as ‘‘a series of
nested travel stories,’’ he stresses the importance of the railroad and train
travel in deŽ ning social class and shaping the destinies of the characters.
In ‘‘Bipolar Vision in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia ’’ (ES 82: 146–53) Ed
Kleiman analyzes the fusion of opposites in the novel (e.g., permanence
and transience, beauty and the grotesque) and notes the dual function of
objects such as threshing machines and garden spades that both create
and destroy life.
Robert Seguin is primarily concerned with the structures of class and
hierarchy in his analysis of Cather’s Ž ction, pp. 57–81 in Around Quitting
Time. He begins with a brief discussion of A Lost Lady, noting that both
Niel Herbert and Marian Forrester become déclassé as the once rigidly
deŽ ned class structure becomes ‘‘permeable’’ and the class represented by
Ivy Peters gains power and control. Seguin devotes most of the chapter to
The Professor’s House, in which he sees the harmonious relation of classes
(as represented by St. Peter and Augusta, the sewing woman) disrupted
by the rivalries and envy generated by the social ambitions of the rising
entrepreneurial class (the Marselluses). In Seguin’s reading, Tom Outland
is the pivotal Ž gure, a disinterested scientist who invents a highly lucra-
tive commodity, a ‘‘striking fantasy of the recombination of intellectual
and manual labor,’’ who both enacts and repudiates the role of property
owner.
Christopher Nealon deŽ nes Cather as a ‘‘lesbian forebear’’ and ‘‘gender
inversion’’ as a dominant pattern in her Ž ction, pp. 61–97 in Foundlings.
In his analysis of The Song of the Lark, One of Ours, The Professor’s House,
and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, he demonstrates the pervasiveness of
themes which he sees as the ‘‘literary tracery of lesbianism’’: the aYliation
of protagonists with nonconformists, outcasts, and ambitious dreamers;
resistance to forms of mass culture, particularly the conventions of het-
erosexual romance; and the ‘‘search for genealogies’’ by such characters as
154 Wharton and Cather

Thea Kronborg, Claude Wheeler, St. Peter, and Tom Outland, who Ž nd
their ‘‘true selves’’ in identiŽ cation with ‘‘a European or Indian past.’’
An important pioneering study, Richard Giannone’s Music in Willa
Cather’s Fiction (1968), is now available in the Bison paperback series
(Nebraska), with a Ž ne introduction by the music critic Philip Kennicott.
College of William and Mary
8 Pound and Eliot
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd

This year’s scholarship features the Ž rst critical edition of The Waste Land.
As it is also a Norton Critical Edition, and thus destined for classroom
use, it probably will set the tone for thinking and teaching Eliot in the
new century. Furthermore, the Ž rst biographies of Vivienne Eliot and
Pound’s longtime companion, Olga Rudge, begin the task of recuperat-
ing two important female modernists as well as casting new light on the
two poets. Two collections of papers from major conferences on each
poet have also appeared. Paideuma, the oYcial organ of Pound studies,
has returned to schedule, but with a new mission, a ‘‘New Paideuma,’’
which broadens the scope of the journal and actively seeks new perspec-
tives on Pound. The Ž rst fruit of this change, an essay collection called
Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, has also been published
separately as a book. Scholarship on the two modernist masters is bus-
tling and proliŽ c, though we also sense a tendency to rehash and ‘‘re-
discover’’ what should already be well known. With both writers there is a
great deal to know, of course, but there seems also a great deal that needs
to be reread. Alec Marsh is responsible for the Pound section, Ben Lock-
erd for Eliot.

i Pound
a. Biography Anne Conover’s eagerly awaited biography of Olga Rudge
has Ž nally appeared as Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: ‘‘What Thou Lovest
Well . . .’’ (Yale). It is the Ž rst biography of this brilliant modernist
musician, Pound’s ‘‘Aphrodite,’’ collaborator, and indefatigable partisan.
As one guesses from the title, the book is concerned mainly with Rudge’s
relationship with Pound and his with her; its major source is the extensive
correspondence between the two lovers now at the Beinecke Library.
156 Pound and Eliot

Conover also covers Rudge’s important musical career as a violinist and

scholar. It was Rudge who encouraged Pound’s own musical composi-
tions, and she was his link to George Antheil, with whom she worked
closely. An important musicologist, Rudge is responsible for the recovery
of such composers as Vivaldi; she was the Ž rst to play many of ‘‘the Red
Priest’s’’ pieces since his death in the 18th century. It was late in 1922 —that
crucial modernist year —‘‘that EP and OR met, and everything in my life
happened,’’ Olga said later. Taking her cue from OR, this is where
Conover’s biography begins.
Though born in Ohio, Olga Rudge was brought up in Edwardian
London, which puts her in the same milieu as Dorothy Shakespear.
Olga’s artistic, pushing, Irish mother Julia had been a celebrated singer.
She married a dull, decent Ohioan and escaped to Europe. There she
gave music lessons and shuttled her children between London and
Paris —exactly like a Ž gure in one of Henry James’s stories. Olga became
an excellent violinist, praised for her exquisite tone, and it was under-
stood in a very Jamesian way that she was to make her way in the world
mostly with her Ž ddle and her tall, slender good looks, though remit-
tances from her staid Ohio father helped. OR had a devoted admirer,
Edgerton Grey, who hoped to marry her after the war, but she had
promised on her mother’s deathbed that she would not. Thus she was
saved from happiness, social respectability, and family life —all of the
things Olga’s mother despised. The young violinist went to Corfu, where
she hung with a fast crowd of writers and minor continental nobility of
labile sexuality. Conover speculates, as contemporary biographers feel
compelled to do, about OR’s sex life and possible amours with women.
This angle is only one of the provocative parallels between HD and
OR that Conover’s biography brings to light. Yet she never considers
whether Pound felt some connection between his early girlfriend and his
lifelong lover. Both were tall, slender Americans, both were dedicated
artists, both were willing to take the social risks of having children outside
marriage, both had a strong mystical side —in HD it was obsessive, but
OR also paid attention to her horoscope, having ‘‘a life long belief in signs
of the Zodiac,’’ and she threw the I Ching. In their late years, OR and EP
read Jung together. OR was a very tough character and HD was not, but
the implications of a constant background of New Age and occult ideas
held by the women in Pound’s life, from Ruth Heyman to Sheri Mar-
tinelli, needs further exploration.
It is not Conover’s style to speculate on such things, nor does she shed
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 157

much light on the diYcult OR/EP/Dorothy Pound triangle, though she

does bring forward OR’s complaints about the diYcult year the three
spent holed up in Rudge’s place above Rapallo during the war. We learn a
great deal about the circumstances of their daughter’s birth, which, be-
cause the parents were apart, is well documented in letters. Conover
keeps to a narrow perspective, seeing things almost exclusively from
Rudge’s point of view, as though she is afraid to lose her focus. There is
much we do not learn here that might well have aVected OR: Pound’s
relationships with other women before meeting Olga, the Marcella
Spann crisis, EP’s relationships with Omar Pound and Boris Baratti (de
Rachelwiltz), etc., but perhaps it is up to Pound’s biographers to worry
about the complex relationships between these remarkable people, their
children, and the tradition they carry on.
‘‘The Secret History of St. Elizabeths’’ (Paideuma 30, i–ii: 69–96) is
William McNaughton’s memoir of the St. Elizabeths years, when he
served as Sheri Martinelli’s driver and factotum before becoming a Pound
disciple. Inspired by Leon Surette’s work on the connections between
modernism and the occult, McNaughton Ž nds events he was privy to to
be more meaningful than he had once supposed. Martinelli was im-
mersed in occultism and took her role as muse quite seriously. She and
Pound used to burn incense (olibanum) on the hospital grounds. Her
erotic and visionary power transported Pound, and McNaughton refers
us to moments where she Ž gures in cantos 90, 91, and 93. As I suggested
above, Martinelli is part of a long line of New Age women in Pound’s life.
One of the interesting things about Conover’s biography of Rudge in this
regard is her meeting Martinelli in Pound’s company on the St. Eliz-
abeths lawn. Rudge was not amused and actually broke oV contact with
Pound for some time, something she had never yet done.
McNaughton’s memoir also links Pound’s political thought with the
ideology of the failed ‘‘revolution’’ led by Newt Gingrich and Dick
Armey; he claims that many of the essential ingredients that produced the
Republican successes of November 1994 were major themes in Pound’s
conversation and writing in the late 1940s and ’50s. He concludes with
the true story about ‘‘How Ez Really Got Sprung’’: not, it appears, from
eVorts made by the literati, least of all Robert Frost, but by the work of
John Kasper, whose testimony to a congressional committee and personal
charm with certain important people reopened Pound’s case; Clare
Booth Luce, former ambassador to Italy, whose husband ran Time and
Life, provided the political cover.
158 Pound and Eliot

In ‘‘E.P. on the Imagist Movement 1912–14’’ (Paideuma 30, i–ii: 247–

54) Thomas Cole provides an account of Pound’s reactions to Stanley K.
CoVman’s imagism: A Chapter in the History of Modern Poetry (1951). Cole,
then the young publisher on IMAGI, hoped Pound would review the
book. The poet did not Ž nd the book worthy, but his comments oVer
valuable insights into Pound’s sense of what happened during the brief
imagist moment.

b. General Studies Helen Dennis’s Ezra Pound and Poetic In uence
(Rodopi, 2000) is an edition of 20 papers given at the 17th International
Pound Conference at Brunnenburg in 1997 —too many to discuss in
detail here. The book is divided into four sections: one on Pound the
translator, two on poetic in uence, and a fourth on textual and real
politics. The opening chapter deals with translations. Dennis argues that,
taken together, they show Pound as an ‘‘important transitional Ž gure
between 19th and 20th century translation strategies.’’ Roxana Preda
reconsiders Pound and Guido Cavalcanti (pp. 39–54); the editor com-
pares the translation strategies of D. G. Rossetti, Pound, and Paul Black-
burn (pp. 29–38); Milne Holton deals with Pound’s and Lowell’s ap-
proaches to François Villon (pp. 15–28); while William Pratt considers
Pound’s ‘‘poetic legacy’’ (pp. 1–10). The second section, on Pound’s in u-
ences, includes Diana Collecott on the question of Hellenism (pp. 55–
69), two papers on China by Zhaoming Qian (pp. 100–112) and Naikan
Tao (pp. 114–29); Stafano Maria Casella writes on Cunizza da Romano
and Leon Surette on the little-known American imperialist poet Richard
Hovey (pp. 70–87). Part 3 is on poetry in uenced by Pound: Burton
Hatlen makes important connections between The Pisan Cantos and
Charles Olson’s Projective verse (pp. 130–55); Evelyn Haller writes on
Pound’s in uence on the work of his daughter and the conference host,
Mary de Rachewiltz (pp. 187–99); and Hélèn Aji looks at Pound’s in u-
ence on Jerome Rothenberg (pp. 155–63). For Massimo Bacigalupo on
Pound and Montale see AmLS 2000, p. 147. The last section, on politics,
features Michael Flaherty on ‘‘The Prison Poems of Pound and Wilfred
Scawen Blunt’’ (pp. 212–23), and Ted Blake examines the popular press’s
treatment of the poet (pp. 224–34). Richard Taylor’s essay appeared
in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (see AmLS 1999, pp. 157–61).
William McNaughton’s essay, reviewed above, and Scott Eastham’s essay,
reviewed below, also appear in Paideuma. They are of special interest
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 159

because they oVer ‘‘two diametrically opposed interpretations of Pound’s

political [and] poetic thought.’’

c. The Cantos McNaughton complained last year that ‘‘very few schol-
ars are attending to Pound’s thought.’’ Eastham’s moving reading of
cantos 45, 47, and 49 (‘‘Modernism Contra Modernity: The ‘Case’ of
Ezra Pound,’’ Paideuma 30, i–ii: 97–132) should assure McNaughton that
Pound is being attended to, though the conclusions Eastham draws are
far from his own. Following his Master, Raimon Panikkar, Eastham uses
a ‘‘creative hermeneutics’’ that is ‘‘morphological, diachronical and di-
atopical’’ to oVer a reading of Pound that transcends literary criticism.
Eastham shows how these three cantos enact the palingenesis of The
Cantos as a whole. They are ‘‘the Nightmare, the Dream, and the Wak-
ing.’’ The Nightmare is ‘‘usura,’’ that is, modernity itself, a predatory,
‘‘con ictual worldview’’ that is engaged in the economic war of all against
all, the colonial war against Nature and the war of one culture against
all others —globalization. Canto 45 is the descent into critique of this
‘‘monoculture’’; canto 47 is the collaboration with the past, the dromena,
the gathering of roots, the colloquy with ancestors, the learning of the
tradition; canto 49 is the waking to the ‘‘dimension of stillness,’’ conver-
sion; an awakening to the other, to other peoples, cultures, other ways of
being in the world, and Ž nally to our greater self, the Thou. The way to
peace, Eastham argues, is via this threefold sequence —critique, collab-
oration, conversion. Some might call it outrage, listening, conversation.
The result is the overcoming of modernity, the collapse of the solipsistic
Cartesian ego, an opening to the ‘‘dialogical character of the living Word’’
which speaks Being. Reading at this depth reduces most literary criticism
to mere philology, exegesis, and chatter.
Anna Kventsel’s ‘‘The Crystallization of Pound’s Canto LXXIV’’
(Paideuma 29, iii: 219–31) glitters with intelligence. She takes the refer-
ence to Manes at the opening of the poem to propose a Manichean
principle of language operating in the poem; ‘‘speciŽ cally, the structural
principle whereby a rhetorical premise calls into being the possibility of
its own negation.’’ She Ž nds the poem suVused with such opposites:
‘‘natural  ux and crystallized expression,’’ hard male presence anxious
about the feminine abyss —Charybdis; the proliferation of linguistic
‘‘things’’ in the parable of Ouan Jin is negated by the ‘‘yearning for the
originary word.’’ ‘‘Language,’’ Kventsel notes, ‘‘is a symbolizing medium,
160 Pound and Eliot

not the condition of presence.’’ Yet the poet yearns for ‘‘a further, tran-
scendent dimension of presence.’’ The fruitful quandary is epitomized in
the symbol of the rose in the steel dust.
Naikan Tao also scrutinizes canto 74, seeing it in the Pisan sequence as
‘‘a radiant development of the initial canto.’’ Reminding us that Pound’s
ongoing translation of Confucius is written in the same notebook as the
cantos he was writing, Tao is especially interested in Pound’s idiosyncratic
way of ‘‘dissassembling’’ Chinese writing in ‘‘pursuit of a better poetic
discourse,’’ one in which ‘‘Confucian matter is constituent both to the
theme and the structure’’ of Pound’s ‘‘poetic process’’ which is ‘‘the way’’ —
tao. Still following Ernest Fenollosa’s Emersonian poetics, in Tao’s read-
ing of ‘‘ ‘The Law of Discourse’: Confucian Texts and Ideograms in the
Pisan Cantos’’ (Paideuma 30, i–ii: 21–68) the Chinese characters function
as mental images and verbal signs —‘‘thought-pictures,’’ indeed, though
Tao does not use the word, or as hieroglyphs allowing a ‘‘direct con-
templation of nature over abstract speculation about it via verbal dis-
course.’’ In itself this is not news, but the strength of this long but
rich essay are Tao’s many close-readings of the Chinese ideograms and
Pound’s English ‘‘translations’’ —though that is not quite the word. As
Pound saw the ideograms as syntheses of images, his poetic disassembly —
one almost wants to say deconstruction —of them constitutes his poetic
mode, and what Pound especially emphasizes is the right relation be-
tween the component of each ideogram —whether one part is under an-
other, for example. This, Tao shows, has an ethical, Confucian function.
Stephen Sicari’s ‘‘Pound as Archaeologist: Reconstructing Nature’’
(Paideuma 29, iii: 133–47) begins by Ž nding similarities between Pound
and Alexander Pope and ends with Pound as Foucauldian ‘‘archaeolo-
gist’’ —an audacious but ultimately untenable periplum. The 18th-
century connection, by means of Confucius, is unproblematic; Sicari
notes that the sentiments of An Essay on Man are repeated in The Cantos —
especially the late ones. Pound and Pope agree that ‘‘the plan is in nature’’
and that this plan is the basis of an ethical politics. Nature’s laws ought to
underwrite human laws. Their diVerence lies in Pope’s easy conŽ dence in
this claim versus Pound’s struggle to prove it, which he does by drilling
through the crust of received ideas, including the idea of historical narra-
tive, to Ž nd the permanent and natural that is the foundation of culture.
Pound’s parataxis and ideogrammic method remind Sicari of Foucault’s
‘‘archaeology,’’ which seems to me quite another kettle of Ž sh. Foucault
certainly does not plump for the eternal laws of nature; his poststructural-
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 161

ist need for rupture and interest in discursive practice mean, in Sicari’s
own words, that ‘‘only a humanly constructed foundation . . . opens up
space for discourse and events.’’ Yet Pound insists on eternal, natural
ground to stand on. Sicari attributes this to Pound’s ‘‘Modernist nostal-
gia’’ and Ž nds it predictably ironic that Pound found postmodern tech-
niques to express it.

d. Shorter Poems In Theresa M. Welford’s diYdent ‘‘Echoes of Thomas

Wyatt’s ‘They Flee from Me’ in Ezra Pound’s ‘The Return’ ’’ (Paideuma
30, i–ii: 201–16) the echoes are so faint we cannot be sure they are there at
all. Her careful article is so intent on not claiming too much that she does
not claim half enough. She does not consider that what may link the
poems is their attitude toward the Muse or Muses, toward the gods and
goddesses that have left Wyatt bereft and whom Pound hopes to coax back
via the return of the adonic rhythm that will be the signature of his mature
poetry. Nonetheless, the rehearsal of the scant Pound criticism on any
Pound/Wyatt connection is worth one’s time.
In ‘‘Blurring of Poet and Persona in Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ’’
(Paideuma 29, iii: 193–205) Kevin Arthur Wong hopes to bring some
clear terminology to the persona and speaker problem. He proposes the
application of ‘‘discourse analysis’’ to the poem. After making useful
theoretical distinctions, however, Wong seems to lose interest in applying
them rigorously to the poem. His conclusion is anticlimactic; it seems
Pound ‘‘intentionally left the identity of the persona in Mauberley ambig-
uous in order to create a sense of tension, and a sense of wonder,’’ and to
prompt ‘‘his reader to think that much harder about who is taking respon-
sibility for the words of the poem.’’ The critic seems to have bitten empty
air. Julie Dennison has been thinking hard and creatively. She thinks it
is better to bypass the intractable persona problem altogether and to re-
consider Mauberley as an ekphrastic poem. ‘‘ ‘His Fundamental Pas-
sion’: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the Ekphrastic Vortex of ‘The Eyes’
(Paideuma 30, i–ii: 185–200) proposes an ‘‘integrative reading of the text,
in which two alternative poetic modes, the verbal and the visual, are Ž rst
interrogated by, then ultimately merged into Pound’s conception of ‘the
Image.’ ’’ Relying heavily on W. J. T. Mitchell’s trifold theory of ekphra-
sis, which moves from indiVerence to hope to fear, Dennison focuses on
three poems within Mauberley (‘‘Yeux Glauques,’’ ‘‘Envoi,’’ and ‘‘Medal-
lion’’) which she says ‘‘address the problem of turning a woman into an
artistic image.’’ Dennison’s innovation is to link George Bornstein’s state-
162 Pound and Eliot

ment of the problem to Mitchell’s model and to follow up the ideological

implications that ‘‘tensions between visual and verbal representations are
inseparable from struggles in cultural politics.’’ Dennison’s reading is
faithful to the political dimension of the poem, including its sexual
politics. She shows how the poem reenacts the birth of Aphrodite. If this
is presented ironically (as ‘‘from the pages of [Salomon] Reinach’’) the
irony is not intended to dismiss the ‘‘eYcacy of the Imagist project, but to
foreground Imagism as a crucial early phase of the pictorial turn’’; indeed,
Dennison believes that Mauberley concludes unmistakably in a ‘‘the-
ophantic glow.’’

e. Relation to Other Writers A special issue of Paideuma (29, i–ii) has

been issued simultaneously as Ezra Pound and African American Modern-
ism, ed. Michael Coyle (NPF). It is a deliberately unsettling volume, and
an uneven one, which announces a ‘‘renewed Pound studies’’ by present-
ing a ‘‘body of scholarship that . . . is alive to ‘making it new.’ ’’ Beyond
providing new perspectives on Pound, Coyle hopes ambitiously to ‘‘open
up modernist study to new kinds of questions’’ posed by reconsidering
the discourse of modernism from the perspective of the African diaspora
to the New World. The larger term seems necessary because the longest
piece in the volume, Kathryne V. Lindberg’s on Pound and Claude
McKay, and Reed Way Dasenbrock’s important theoretical contribution,
‘‘Why the Post in Post-colonial Is Not the Post in Post-modern: Homer:
Dante: Pound: Walcott,’’ focus on major Caribbean writers, with Amer-
ica ‘‘in the largest sense,’’ as Coyle puts it. Ezra Pound and African
American Modernism is not an easy volume to assess. It is, however,
refreshing and a point of departure for further research.
Dasenbrock’s article (pp. 111–22) is important because he argues that
the post in postcolonial is not the same as the post in postmodern: ‘‘the
dominant aesthetic of post-colonial literature is modernist, not post-
modernist.’’ Postcolonialism is not usually hostile to modernism, whereas
postmodernism necessarily is. Why? Because ‘‘if Modernism is the prod-
uct of the margins reacting to Western culture as it moves to and is
incorporated in the center or deŽ nes a new center, post-modernism is the
response of the center to that reaction, incorporation and redeŽ nition.’’
This not only explains po-mo’s strange condescension to the postcolo-
nial, it has important implications for thinking about modernism in
general. Dasenbrock observes that a ‘‘remarkable percentage’’ of the cen-
tral Ž gures of modernism ‘‘came from the margins of European culture
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 163

and migrated to a limited number of key European centers.’’ This group

includes not only most of the major Anglophone writers but also the
signiŽ cant modernist painters who congregated in Paris, as well as com-
posers like Igor Stravinsky and George Antheil; a similar trajectory from
periphery to center has been followed by the major postcolonial writers:
Derek Walcott is Dasenbrock’s representative Ž gure, Omeros his represen-
tative work. The comparisons to Pound are compelling.
The volume gets oV on the wrong foot with Lindberg’s interminable
‘‘Rebels to the Right/Revolution to the Left: Ezra Pound and Claude
McKay in ‘the Syndicalist Year’ of 1912’’ (pp. 11–77). She spins out 66
pages, including 13 pages of notes (but no works cited), on the coinci-
dence that both Pound and McKay published in T.P.’s Magazine in 1912.
Wearing the Phrygian cap of romantic revolutionary, she does Pound no
justice, accusing him, in eVect, of not being a syndicalist agitator —that is,
of not engaging in ‘‘revolutionary industrial unionism.’’ She says nothing
about the tangled connections between syndicalism and guild socialism,
which was promoted by the New Age, nor does she go into the connec-
tions between syndicalism and fascism —Mussolini was a syndicalist for a
time. Lindberg’s article has the feel of something adapted from a larger
work, with Pound put into the mix for this venue; before she publishes,
she would do well to read David Kadlec’s careful account of Pound’s
thinking circa 1912–13 in Mosaic Modernism (see below). Lindberg is
writing a book on ‘‘black radical writing’’ entitled From Claude McKay to
Huey Newton. The title predicts what will happen to Pound; his racial
and class aYliations, and his politics, will make him, in eVect, a class
enemy. Pound was a revolutionary poet; McKay a poet revolutionary.
Lindberg values the latter position.
C. K. Doreski’s article with its nice tribute to Lindberg’s earlier work,
‘‘Reading Tolson Reading Pound’’ (pp. 89–109), also suVers somewhat
from being part of a projected larger project: Citizenship and Its Discon-
tents: Americans at Home in the Second World War. Some of the more
direct connections between Pound and Melvin Tolson —speciŽ cally, what
of Pound’s Tolson was reading when —are unclear in the article. She con-
centrates on Tolson’s newspaper pieces, many of which have a Poundian
ring; none cite Pound speciŽ cally so a sense of direct in uence remains
vague. What is clear is that Tolson, like Pound, was a populist critic of
capitalism and imperialism. But when it got down to cases —Ethiopia, for
example —their views were very diVerent.
Jonathan Gill addresses Pound’s relationship with Langston Hughes
164 Pound and Eliot

via their correspondence (pp. 79–88), arguing that ‘‘Pound’s Modernism

and Hughes’s role in the Harlem Renaissance function . . . as something
approaching a single literary enterprise’’ —that is, making modernism.
Gill uses this claim to suggest that we read Hughes’s Montage of a Dream
Deferred as a high modernist long poem and that only the ‘‘white
shadows’’ of race prevent Hughes and Pound from being read as brothers
in arms.
Four articles address the ‘‘African American Presence’’ in Pound’s work:
Alec Marsh looks at rejected drafts of canto 20 (pp. 125–42), Ž nding a
buried Africanist presence in the epic from as early as 1924 and observing
that, for Pound, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is always associated with Afro-
America; Aldon Nielsen shows that the elusive ‘‘Elder Lightfoot’’ of canto
95 was once referred to as ‘‘The Best Known Colored Man in the United
States’’ (pp. 143–56) and wonders why he remains unknown to most
readers of The Cantos (for a current example see Sicari’s essay discussed
below). In ‘‘Ezra Pound, New Masses and the Cultural Politics of Race
circa 1930’’ (pp. 157–84) Burton Hatlen explores Pound’s relationship
with the famous CPUSA organ edited by Mike Gold and, in particular,
the shifting racial politics of the CPUSA as expressed there. Pound
followed developments closely and eventually chose a number of ‘‘Negro
Protest Songs’’ for his little-studied anthology ProŽ le, which appeared in
Italy in 1932. Finally, Kevin Young (pp. 185–204) meditates on Pound as a
kind of black writer, or a writer putting on a black mask who asks to be
read with black ears: ‘‘to hear The Cantos properly,’’ he writes, ‘‘we should
listen like Negroes, not just merely for them.’’ Why? In order to simulate
or join a kind of ‘‘counterfeit tradition’’ central, in Young’s view, to
African American modernism. If we are not black, we are encouraged to
‘‘Fake it till we make it’’ —a strategy Young thinks Pound used eVectively.
Kevin Dettmar’s review (pp. 257–60) of Michael North’s The Dialect of
Modernism (see AmLS 1994, pp. 135–36, 400–401) is especially welcome,
as most of the essays in this volume are in conversation with North about
the extent to which ‘‘ ‘linguistic imitation and racial masquerade’ are
central to transatlantic modernism.’’
Bill Freind thinks that Don Juan was ‘‘more important to The Cantos
than Browning’s Sordello. ’’ In ‘‘ ‘All Wandering As the Worst of Sinning’:
Don Juan and The Cantos ’’ (Paideuma 29, iii: 111–31) Freind notices that
Byron ‘‘utilizes many of the techniques that would become hallmarks of
twentieth century literature, including self-re exiveness, parataxis, and
appropriations from other sources,’’ and that Byron’s in uence on Pound
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 165

‘‘is both unmistakable and self-confessed in his poem ‘L’Homme Moyen

Sensuel.’ ’’ Pound’s application of Byron to the Ž rst ur-canto seems
more problematic, but one can recognize a stance of ‘‘Byronic self-
re exiveness’’ in its autobiographical slant and its ‘‘Byronic strategy of
self-interruption.’’ Stephen Brown’s ‘‘Preparing the Palette’’ (Paideuma
30, i–ii: 217–21) locates similar poetic attitudes in the crisis of beginning
The Cantos. In conversation with remarks made by Edward Said in
Beginnings (1997), Brown would seem to be in substantial agreement with
Freind —perhaps the real issue here is Byron’s in uence on Browning.
Michaela Giesenkirchen prefers the more traditional approach in her
‘‘ ‘But Sordello, and My Sordello’: Pound and Browning’s Epic’’ (MoMo 8:
623–42), an article which quotes usefully from Browning’s little-read
poem.

f. Correspondence With The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Senator

William Borah, ed. Sarah C. Holmes (Illinois), the poet’s most signiŽ cant
exchanges with American politicians are now all available in book form.
This collection contains 28 Pound letters to Borah and a few other
relevant missives, including a letter from Pound to George Tinkham
because of the light it sheds on Pound’s hopes for a Borah-Tinkham
presidential ticket. Invaluable to biographers is a letter from former
Borah aide Charles Corker describing Pound’s 1939 visits to Borah’s
oYces in the poet’s fruitless mission to stop World War II.
Holmes’s edition conŽ rms our sense of the poet’s diYculty getting a
hearing in Washington. Indeed, one depressing conclusion that could be
drawn from this very one-sided correspondence is that there was no
correspondence between the senator and poet at all. The three bluV and
empty notes the poet received in exchange for his many energetic, hector-
ing, and encouraging letters between November 1933 and January 1939
were very likely penned by staVers; there is a real chance that Borah never
even saw Pound’s letters. Given these problems, I am surprised that
Holmes pretends that ‘‘throughout the letters we see a nervous struggle
between the two men’’ when, in fact, that is just what we do not see.
After Pound’s brief meeting with Borah the senator told Corker that he
thought the poet was crazy. Holmes suggests that in light of this failed
meeting, we might want to reread Pound’s account of the visit as written
in canto 84 not as Pound recalled it: ‘‘ ‘am sure I don’t know what a man
like you / would Ž nd to do here’ / said Senator Borah,’’ but as it was
probably meant: ‘‘am sure I don’t know what a man like you / would Ž nd
166 Pound and Eliot

to do here.’’ Holmes concludes depressingly, ‘‘Borah was simply not

interested in [Pound’s] poetry or economic ideas.’’ Borah’s indiVerence
should have been devastating to Pound. The poet’s self-protective misun-
derstanding of his meeting with Mussolini comes to mind here.
David Roessel, coauthor with Arnold Rampersad of the two-volume
biography of Langston Hughes, has edited and annotated the Pound-
Hughes correspondence for Coyle’s Ezra Pound and African American
Modernism (pp. 207–42). There are 18 letters altogether (3 are brief notes
by Dorothy Pound) and they are among Pound’s most interesting —and
most respectful. Roessel also includes Pound’s exchange of letters with
Countee Cullen over translating Leo Frobenius, though unfortunately
this is not indicated in the table of contents. Roessel claims justly that
Pound was ‘‘one of the founding fathers of academic multiculturalism.’’
Pound hoped that Negro universities might use Frobenius to achieve an
Afro-American ‘‘paideuma.’’ No translator could be found, however, and
Pound’s project languished. I have always found it odd that the one
obvious translator, Cullen’s Germanophilic father-in-law W. E. B. Du
Bois —he of the Berlin dissertation —was not suggested by Cullen or
Hughes.

g. Texts Massimo Bacigalupo has edited the unpublished Ž rst draft of

Pound’s essay ‘‘European Paideuma’’ (‘‘Ezra Pound’s ‘European Paideu-
ma,’ ’’ Paideuma 30, i–ii: 225–45), which Pound sent to Douglas Fox, the
late Leo Frobenius’s assistant, in August 1939: ‘‘Pound’s notes and his
additional explanations . . . are exciting for all readers of The Cantos, for
they are very much at the center of the poem’s idea of the numinous and
of its ‘sagetrieb.’ ’’ Here we have Pound’s troublingly Naziistic anthropol-
ogy (the piece anticipates Fox’s translation for a German audience) as well
as his ‘‘European neo-paganism and goddess-worship.’’ Fox’s queries are
also included along with further explanations by the poet. As well,
Bacigalupo’s rich notes are supplemented by invaluable photographs,
which illuminate details familiar to readers of The Cantos.
Rustling through Olga Rudge’s papers, A. David Moody has discovered
the missing notebook of Pound’s 1912 walking tour in troubadour coun-
try. ‘‘ ‘The Walk Here Is Good Poetry’: The Missing Rochechouart Note-
book of Pound’s 1912 Walking Tour’’ (Paideuma 29, iii: 235–41) reprints
Pound’s notes, which in ected such poems as ‘‘Provincia Deserta’’ and
‘‘Near Perigord.’’ These pages should be inserted into Richard Sieburth’s
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 167

edition of A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound among the

Troubadours (see AmLS 1992, p. 118).

h. Translations Paideuma 29, iii features no fewer than six articles on

Pound’s translations, including a theoretical piece by John W. Maerhofer
Jr.; two on ‘‘Donna Mi Prega’’; and two on Pound’s Chinese translations,
one of them provocative, by James Wilson, the other a respectful appre-
ciation on ‘‘The Man That Is Waiting: Remarks on Li Po’s ‘Chokan Shin’
and Pound’s ‘River-Merchant’s Wife’ ’’ by Anna Xiao Dong Sun (pp. 149–
63). Another essay, on the relation of imagism to Japanese poetry by
Yoshiko Kita (pp. 179–91), is about why certain poems and poets were not
translated.
Maerhofer’s ‘‘Towards an Aesthetic of Translation: Ezra Pound’s Trans-
lation Theory’’ (pp. 85–109) argues that ‘‘Pound did not diVerentiate
between the process of translation and the poetic act.’’ He stresses what
Pound called ‘‘the interpretive function’’ as that which enables the trans-
lator ‘‘to render with precision the ‘ambience’ of eVect of an author in an
English equivalent.’’ The translator’s ‘‘assimilative function’’ then allows
the incorporation of ‘‘another poet into his own creative composition.’’
Brie y, Pound’s ‘‘translation aesthetic consists of his interpretive sense
and his assimilative ability.’’ When this manifests itself in a persona
poem —Homage to Sextus Propertius, for example —we have ‘‘creative
translation.’’ When it is infused with imagism we have ‘‘re-creation,’’ a
term Maerhofer borrows from Wai-lim Yip. In The Cantos ‘‘Pound’s
prime concern’’ is ‘‘the language of the original author, which holds the
pure uncut forms of the author’s consciousness.’’ This in turn becomes
‘‘the object of representation.’’ Maerhofer wants to follow Richard Sie-
burth here but runs into the very problem Sieburth warns against; that is,
‘‘quotation . . . should not be confused with mimesis.’’ So Maerhofer’s last
idea, if true, seems problematic at a number of levels.
The Danish scholar Line Henriksen oVers a comprehensive close-
reading of ‘‘Donna Mi Prega’’ by comparing Pound’s source text (which
diVers in certain signiŽ cant respects from the one preferred by Italian
medievalists) with what he actually wrote. Her carefully researched
‘‘Chiaroscuro: Canto 36 and Donna Mi Prega ’’ (pp. 33–57) tries to show
why Pound ‘‘reads light where Cavalcanti wrote darkness’’; why the
translation moves away from Cavalcanti’s ‘‘Averroistic’’ and ‘‘negative
conception of love,’’ which is opposed to the intellect, toward ‘‘Neoplato-
168 Pound and Eliot

nism and a Dantescan conception of love,’’ which uniŽ es love and intel-
lect. Nicolas Ambrus’s ‘‘The White Light That Is Allness: Ezra Pound’s
Cantos on Love’’ (pp. 207–15) is a jagged article. Despite its title it focuses
exclusively on canto 36, which in Ambrus’s hands becomes a meditation
on art as well as love. He thinks that the canto shows that ‘‘any work of
art, a canto as well, is an emanation of deep-rooted beauty, a condensa-
tion of a ceaselessly aVective  ood of information.’’ This  ush of meta-
phor reveals why it is so hard to write well about Cavalcanti’s mysterious
poem and Pound’s only somewhat less mysterious translation. In the end,
relying heavily on a statement of Pound’s in Literary Essays that he does
not cite but which Henriksen does, Ambrus claims that Pound argues we
must ‘‘accept only experience’’ —i.e., what is ‘‘felt’’ —and keep away from
abstract syllogisms. Canto 36 is ‘‘an ideogram of real and ethereal love
which is far from any scholastic thinking and formal logic,’’ which makes
it a model for other cantos.
James Wilson’s superb ‘‘His Own SkiVsman: Pound, China and Ca-
thay Revisited’’ (pp. 3–32) scrutinizes Pound’s choices in sticking close to
or deviating from the notes in Fenollosa’s notebooks. The poet’s devia-
tions are almost never lapses of attention to scholarship; rather, they are
choices to engage in a ‘‘metahistorical’’ poetic exchange that would make
Pound a mature poet. Wilson Ž nds that Pound’s choices are often guided
by his previous experience with troubadour poetry, especially in his
imagining the Ž gures of women in the Chinese poems. Likewise, Pound
actively suppressed Taoist themes when translating Li Po. This is most
evident in his reworking of ‘‘The River Song’’ and ‘‘Poem by the Bridge at
Ten-Shin.’’ In both cases moments of Taoist passivity are transformed
into Poundian activity. Instead of drifting with the current he becomes
his own skiVsman, guiding, not guided by the tendency of things. Wilson
repeats the term ‘‘poetic ritual’’ throughout his essay, which gives it a
mysterious, metaphysical air; we are never told what it means, though,
and have to intuit that it has to do with the poetic act itself, gathering
from the air a live tradition perhaps, or with the nonlinguistic essence of
the being of language that Heidegger posits. Perhaps we will learn more
when Wilson’s unpublished book, referred to tantalizingly in this text,
Ž nally sees print.
The same impulse that led Pound to suppress the Taoist import of Li
Po may also have led him to neglect the Zen of Basho. Yoshiko Kita’s
‘‘Ezra Pound and Haiku: Why Did Imagists Barely Mention Basho?’’
(pp. 179–91) shows that Pound was probably well aware of Basho’s work
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 169

and importance. Yone Naguchi was known to Pound, although it is

unclear if the poet had heard his lectures on Japanese poetry published in
London in 1914. Still, they moved in connected literary circles, and
Pound’s use of Moritake (‘‘The fallen plum blossom  ies back to its
branch: / A butter y’’) in his 1914 essay on ‘‘Vorticism’’ is usefully read as
a choice against Basho’s more contemplative writing, which ‘‘implies
Pound’s strong sense of ego being in the mainstream of [the] Western
poetic tradition.’’
On the other hand, Aaron Loh’s deep and insightful study ‘‘Decoding
the Ideogram: The Chinese Written Character in The Cantos of Ezra
Pound’’ (Paideuma 30, i–ii: 133–50), by focusing on the written quality of
the Chinese calligraphy, exposes a mystical, even Taoist dimension in the
work that is often sensed but which Western criticism has had trouble
locating. Loh’s essay addresses Pound’s explicit concern with zheng ming,
the use of exact words, to convey exact meaning and its corollary that the
character of the brushed word be written so as not to be confused with
other characters or what we see in his poem. The characters contributed
by Dorothy Pound —in canto 53, for example —contain errors, so ‘‘the
reader is . . . forced to ask the question: Did Pound know what he was
doing with the characters, or was [he] guilty of the very ignorance that he
polemicizes against?’’ Loh moves to canto 85, where ‘‘Pound exhibits a
bewildering mix of profound understanding and apparent ignorance.’’
What he Ž nds is that despite ‘‘jarring’’ and ‘‘dislocating’’ juxtapositions of
characters, there is assembled a kind of ‘‘meta-ideogram’’ that coheres
partly through visual and aural rhyming in a stacked complex of ‘‘dy-
namic modes of meaning that transmit on multiple cognitive and aes-
thetic wavelengths simultaneously.’’ Pound’s goal, in short, is to over-
come linear thinking altogether and to set up a ‘‘regenerating, natural
 ow between the spiritual and the physical, between man and nature,
all working towards wholeness and abundance.’’ The stacked meta-
ideogram is likened to the tree Ygdrasail, with multilingual branches that
‘‘feed back in a dynamic loop that deŽ es conventional concepts of linear,
linguistically driven logic.’’ This ‘‘circuit’’ reminds Loh of the trigrams of
the I Ching, which thanks to Conover we know Pound and Olga Rudge
studied.
In light of such connections, the attempt by Lance Callahan to Ž nd
‘‘Signs of Life [by] Rethinking the Ideographic Method’’ (Paideuma 30,
i–ii: 151–66) by resorting to a Derridean argument for the arbitrariness of
the sign and ‘‘the randomness at the very heart of language’’ seems thin.
170 Pound and Eliot

Callahan recruits Fenollosa’s Chinese Character into the poststructuralist

project of ‘‘only disconnect’’ in order to rescue it from ‘‘intellectual impo-
tence’’ due to its perceived con ation of signiŽ er and signiŽ ed. Callahan’s
target is an unpublished paper by Charles Ferrall. Judging from Calla-
han’s quotations, it seems that Ferrall has been guilty of repeating
Fenollosa’s argument that written Chinese is a kind of ‘‘natural’’ language.
Callahan is determined to show that language is an artiŽ cial, arbitrary
construct, in line with the latest thinking. Fenollosa, it seems, was a
poststructuralist avant la lettre: ‘‘the shortcomings in Fenollosa’s argu-
ment may be attributed to the fact that most of the terminology’’ he
needed ‘‘would not be devised for another half-century.’’ Callahan seems
oblivious to the sophisticated appropriation of Emersonian and espe-
cially Jamesian linguistic theory in Fenollosa, theory that underlies the
phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
even George LakoV and Mark Johnson. Callahan is a defender of Fe-
nollosa and Pound, but his wrongheaded attempt to keep both in confor-
mity with recent theory means that he needs to destroy Pound in order to
save him.
In ‘‘Authority and the Authorless Text: Ezra Pound’s ‘The Seafarer’ ’’
(Paideuma 30, i–ii: 167–83) Michael Gooch argues that Pound’s transla-
tion reduces a complex and inherently dialogic and internally con icted
poem to a uniŽ ed and wholly pagan work in tune with the scholarship of
his time. The age demanded a uniŽ ed work with a single point of view
and proposed an early purely pagan text corrupted by monkish in u-
ences. Gooch’s careful parsing of Pound’s translation shows how he si-
lenced the Christian side of the poem to create an ‘‘authoritative’’ render-
ing at odds with the poem’s essentially authorless (because oral) history.
‘‘The Seafarer’’ is not a modernist poem but a conservative one; compare
it, Gooch says, to canto 1 with its palimpsest of voicings —that is what
Pound might have gone for here.

i. Politics and Economics David Kadlec’s Mosaic Modernism: Anar-

chism, Pragmatism, Culture (Hopkins, 2000) attempts to reorient ‘‘the
historical bearings of early twentieth-century literature’’ by situating it
within an anarchist discourse. The result is an interesting account of the
‘‘antifoundationalist genesis of literary modernism’’ which charts the
movement’s resistance to ‘‘beginnings, origins, and principles’’ as shown
in the movement from anarchism to pragmatism in major modernists.
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 171

Kadlec’s chapter on Pound is titled ‘‘Imagism and the Gold Standard.’’

Kadlec Ž nds that Pound’s economic education began earlier than is
generally supposed, in the Dora Marsden, Harriet Shaw Weaver, feminist
world of the New Freewoman and the Egoist, not at the New Age. Kadlec
has discovered that Arthur Kitson, an important in uence on Pound
early and late (and a signiŽ cant precursor to C. H. Douglas), was writing
on Britain’s ‘‘Gold Fetish’’ in the Freewoman (the New Freewoman ’s pre-
vious incarnation) in the summer of 1912 and at the same time in the New
Age, where his articles appeared next to Pound’s music criticism. Reading
Kitson through Marsden, Kadlec argues, gave Pound the program that
would result in imagism. It also allowed him to read Fenollosa’s Chinese
Character as a kind of economic document. Fenollosa’s emphasis on
dynamic movement, derived from William James, would lead Pound to
vorticism, pragmatism, and volitionist economics; from there via Silvio
Gesell he would recover Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, on whom Kitson de-
pends. In creating this compelling genealogy Kadlec ignores Pound’s
(and Kitson’s) American populist aYnities, on which I have written, but
he arrives at the same place; money and language are semiotic systems
and the urge to make them ‘‘natural’’ runs into the problems of utopia
and the mistake of choosing sublimity over humanity —an eVort Kadlec
believes Pound repudiated in his Ž nal cantos.
Charles Ferrall’s Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics (Cam-
bridge) is a cultural studies book in the tradition of Raymond Williams
and Peter Bürger. His chapter ‘‘Ezra Pound and the Poetics of Literalism’’
suggests that Pound’s poetics amounts to a ‘‘parody of the avant-garde.’’
Much of the chapter unsympathetically rehearses Pound’s economics,
assuming a priori that Pound had it wrong because he did not share
Ferrall’s premises about the social relations of production and distribu-
tion. The discussion soon turns from Pound’s misprision of the opera-
tions of capital to his anti-Semitism. Ferrall believes that Pound’s intol-
erant paganism ‘‘parodies the monotheistic idea’’ it wishes to expunge
and equally reproduces the kind of rhetoric (already associated with
usury) that Pound ‘‘would otherwise eliminate.’’ Ferrall details the pro-
liŽ c rhetoric of conspiracy theory and Pound’s increasing paranoia to
suggest that his poetry comes to resemble what it is meant to oppose, the
abstractions and endlessly multiplying Ž gures of rhetoric as in the anaph-
oric ‘‘With usura . . . ,’’ which from Pound’s point of view could extend
forever. Ferrall then turns to The Pisan Cantos and observes that Pound
172 Pound and Eliot

remained loyal to the memory of Mussolini, whom he saw as a sacriŽ cial

victim of the Jews. With little new to say, Ferrall’s Pound remains re-
calcitrant, unrepentant, and not terribly interesting.
A. David Moody in ‘‘E.P. with Two Pronged Fork of Terror and Cajol-
ery: The Construction of His Anti-Semitism (up to 1939)’’ (Paideuma 29,
iii: 59–84) threads his own way through the mineŽ eld of Pound’s bigotry.
A printed version of a talk given at the 1997 International Pound Con-
ference, the piece unfortunately has not been updated to address new
information exhaustively supplied by Leon Surette in two recent volumes
(see AmLS 1998, pp. 130–31 and AmLS 1999, pp. 165–66). Moreover, it
only traces Pound’s beliefs up to 1939, so it is of limited usefulness. Moody
notes what to fair-minded readers is obvious enough, that Pound’s anti-
Semitism derives from his economics, not the other way around. Pound
Ž rst caught the bug at the New Age, Moody believes. He mentions
Kitson’s anti-Semitism but not Douglas’s and seems unaware that Kitson
and Pound never met, though many years later Kitson would send Pound
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Pound apparently did not bother
to read until 1940 —just over the horizon of Moody’s careful article.
Though it falls within his time frame, Moody does not speculate on any
anti-Semitism in Dorothy Pound’s milieu, but letters he quotes suggest
that she fully shared Pound’s views. One would like to know if she
nurtured them earlier. Olga Rudge, too, may have encouraged Pound.
(The Conover biography does not touch any such idea, however; the
issue of anti-Semitism is absent from that text.) Moody’s article is circum-
spect and gentlemanly; it bumps up against the paradox that many have
noticed —Pound was and was not an anti-Semite. But Moody cannot get
past the paradox. He wants to quarantine The Cantos and the mind that
created them from infection, but to do so may be, for better or worse, to
fail to take Pound seriously enough.
Greg Barnhisel looks at ‘‘Ezra Pound, James Laughlin, and New Direc-
tions: The Publisher as Spin Doctor’’ (Paideuma 29, iii: 165–78). He is
interested in the poet’s unsuccessful attempt to annex New Directions for
his anti-Semitic propaganda, the young Laughlin’s successful defense of
his business, and Laughlin’s attempt, via a 16-page pamphlet he wrote
and included with the 1940 edition of The Cantos (the Ž rst 500 copies), to
control and explain —and in part explain away —Pound’s politics. Laugh-
lin’s defense is a social credit analysis of Pound’s project, though Barnhisel
seems unaware of this; Barnhisel Ž nds it mildly socialistic. Perhaps he
does not realize that Laughlin was an active social creditor himself and
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 173

that New Directions began as a column by Laughlin in Gorham Mun-

son’s social credit paper, New Democracy.

ii Eliot
a. Bibliography and Biography The year produced a long-awaited
event, the publication of a critical edition of The Waste Land, capably
edited by Michael North. As a Norton Critical Edition, this text is
intended for use in the classroom, but it will prove invaluable to all
readers and scholars since there has been until now no critical edition of
the poem.
North discusses the poem’s textual history, and indeed there is less
certainty about an authoritative text than one might suppose, given that
the author oversaw many reprintings. On this point the editor has con-
sulted Joseph Baillargeon, the authority on the publication history of the
poem. Eliot’s notes are kept at the end, with the extremely useful editorial
notes at the bottom of the page. North provides excerpts from many
sources, even including the words and music to ‘‘That Shakespearian
Rag.’’ It is no doubt reasonable not to include readily accessible literary
sources such as Dante and Shakespeare, but their exclusion might give
the casual reader the wrong idea as to the relative importance of various
sources.
Eliot’s later, generally dismissive, comments on the poem are printed,
as well as relevant excerpts from his critical essays. North adds accounts of
the poem’s composition by Lyndall Gordon and Helen Gardner as well as
Lawrence Rainey’s story of how Eliot sold the poem (a less worthwhile
addition in which Rainey seems shocked that Eliot sought to proŽ t from
the publication of his work). Early reviews are reprinted, including what
seems in retrospect one of the best criticisms ever written, the brief
anonymous review in TLS. Selections from the New Critics, including
F. R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks, are included and are still worth reading.
When it comes to more recent criticism, the editor must have struggled
with having to choose just a few essays to represent the range of criticism.
He has assembled an interesting group, ranging from the magisterial
work of Denis Donoghue to Tim Armstrong’s fascinating and irreverent
comments on waste. It would be ungenerous to carp at an editor who had
to make such a choice, but I cannot help wishing the book had been
made a bit longer to include a few other leading scholars, such as Grover
Smith, Jewel Spears Brooker, or Sanford Schwartz. Still, North is to
174 Pound and Eliot

receive our thanks for this work —and may it be followed by scholarly
editions of all Eliot’s works.
New biographical information appears in the biography of Eliot’s Ž rst
wife, Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot,
and the Long-Suppressed Truth about Her In uence on His Genius, by
Carole Seymour-Jones (Doubleday). The overwrought subtitle makes it
sound like a scandal article in a grocery store tabloid, and the comparison
is apt, for the book is mostly gossipy speculation about the sex lives of
the Eliots and their acquaintances. Readers who already know enough
about the subject to sort out fact from Ž ction will nevertheless Ž nd much
of value. Seymour-Jones has done extensive research in the unpub-
lished papers of many people who knew the Eliots. Most signiŽ cant, the
author was granted access to the Vivienne Eliot Papers at the Bodleian
Library. Extensive quotations from these sources allow the reader to catch
glimpses of Tom and Vivienne from several perspectives.
Her ample research allows the biographer to question some received
ideas. For instance, the Eliots were not as poor as everyone thought. Both
raised in aZuent families, they complained frequently about their strait-
ened circumstances and accepted assistance from friends and family even
while retaining a servant, taking expensive vacations, and (at times)
maintaining two residences. They may also have exaggerated their ill-
nesses, especially when speaking of each other to friends —each of them
considering the other the greater invalid.
Gossip about the sexual practices of the Bloomsbury group is not
exactly news, but when one book details the promiscuity of nearly all the
people with whom the Eliots associated it is rather shocking. In this
atmosphere Vivienne’s adulterous liaison with Bertrand Russell seems
almost expected, and it is diYcult to believe that her husband never
knew. Seymour-Jones shows that the aVair went on for a few years.
Nevertheless, it seems malicious to suggest, as she does, that Eliot had an
understanding with Russell, agreeing to make no fuss so long as Bertie
kept paying. And when Seymour-Jones suggests that Eliot was also
vicariously satisfying his own desire to be Russell’s lover, she has con-
verted biography into fantasy.
Much of the book is in fact devoted to an attempt to prove that Eliot
was homosexual. While there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence
pointing in this direction, none of it is conclusive. It seems odd, for
example, that he should have shared lodgings at one point with three
men who were all more or less openly homosexual if he had no such
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 175

inclination, but the fact that none of these men claimed to have had a
sexual relationship with Eliot or to have known for certain that he was
actively homosexual seems even stronger evidence to the contrary. The
author’s insistence on this point leads to some bad readings of the poetry.
References to buggery in the infamous Columbo and Bolo verses are
taken as evidence, but buggery on the high seas is standard nautical
humor, and there is a fair amount of heterosexual obscenity as well:
Columbo does cry, ‘‘Hooray for whores’’ once he is in port. These are
poems of polymorphous perversity, not of homosexuality. Turning to The
Waste Land, Seymour-Jones really extends herself, claiming that the ‘‘hya-
cinth girl’’ is actually a male lover and that the Ž gure of Christ on the
way to Emmaus may be ‘‘the shrouded shade of [ Jean] Verdenal’’ —
recognized, no doubt, in the breaking of a baguette. Her sometimes
careful scholarship breaks down entirely when she attempts to make the
line from the Purgatorio another homosexual reference, claiming that
Arnaut Daniel is being punished for sodomy and proving this by point-
ing to another statement of his, ‘‘Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito.’’ But it is
not Arnaut who says this (it is Guido Guinizelli) and in the context
‘‘hermaphrodite’’ clearly means just the opposite. Though she does show
that Vivienne was a good writer who contributed quite a lot to The
Criterion for a time, Seymour-Jones ends up writing a condemnatory
biography of Tom rather than the sympathetic biography of Vivienne
that she promised.

b. General Studies The one monograph published this year on Eliot is a

valuable one, Donald J. Childs’s From Philosophy to Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s
Study of Knowledge and Experience (Palgrave). The introduction alone is
worth the price of the book, for in it Childs gives a lengthy and careful
review of nearly everything that has been written on Eliot’s philosophical
thought. Early critics assumed that Eliot was a thoroughgoing devotee of
F. H. Bradley, while later scholars began to notice Eliot’s critique of
Bradley and the development of his own views. One group ( J. Hillis
Miller is the leading representative) misread both Bradley and Eliot as
subjectivists or solipsists; they were corrected by more judicious scholars
such as Jewel Spears Brooker. Childs succinctly reviews the literature on a
number of topics: Henri Bergson, Indian philosophy, anthropology,
poststructuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychology, mysti-
cism, and political philosophy. This learned and thorough account will
become essential reading.
176 Pound and Eliot

In the rest of the book Childs examines the in uence of Eliot’s philo-
sophical ideas on his poetry. In ‘‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’’ the
persona seeks the ‘‘lunar synthesis,’’ the mystical Bergsonian intuition,
but lapses into the practical intellect at the end. ‘‘Prufrock’’ enacts a
merging of Bergson and Bradley. Childs makes an original and important
contribution in pointing out that the evening ‘‘spread out against the sky’’
echoes Bergson’s concern with the intellect’s tendency to ‘‘spread out in
space’’ anything quantiŽ able, particularly time. He also shows that in
spite of Eliot’s critical treatment of occultism, the poet was involved in it
at a certain point, attending séances of P. D. Ouspensky in 1920. The
Waste Land expresses Eliot’s ambivalence on the subject, for Mme.
Sosostris is ridiculous but her reading of the cards gives structure and
symbolism to the rest of the poem.
Childs examines ‘‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’’ from the perspective
of Eliot’s discussion of ‘‘the insubstantiality of the self ’’ in his dissertation.
This poem describes the kind of romantic mysticism Eliot criticizes in the
Clark Lectures. At the end of his poetic career, in Burnt Norton, he
follows instead the intellectual path of classical mysticism. The image of
the ‘‘wounded surgeon’’ reprises ‘‘his recognition in the dissertation that
there is no escape from the hermeneutic circle that involves and revolves
as physician and patient both self and non-self.’’ Childs rightly sees
concern with the subjective and objective aspects of experience as central
to Eliot’s entire oeuvre.
The limitations of Childs’s approach appear toward the end of the
book, where he continues to use Eliot’s dissertation as a proof-text long
after the poet’s conversion to Christianity. In his dissertation Eliot speaks
of knowledge as being strictly conventional, so Childs asserts that Eliot’s
proposals (in his late social criticism) to maintain Christianity as the
foundation of society should be understood as ‘‘maintaining our ground-
less conventions’’ —which was surely not Eliot’s view of Christian teach-
ings at this time. Similarly, when Childs Ž nds in Four Quartets an en-
counter between Bergsonism and pragmatism, he may be claiming too
much longevity for these philosophies: by this time Eliot was thinking in
very diVerent categories. Childs takes the Incarnation, invoked in The
Dry Salvages, as one side of the old opposition, but surely the point is that
it is the perfect conjunction of opposites.
In the end, it seems Childs translates Eliot’s philosophical relativism
into social constructionism. A fuller understanding of Eliot’s relativism
must see it in relation to Aristotelian relativism, which is realist rather
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 177

than constructionist. Childs gives us a learned and authoritative account

of Eliot’s engagement with modern philosophies, but to the neglect of
classical philosophy, which was arguably more important to Eliot. Still,
the superb introduction and all the chapters on Eliot’s earlier works are
excellent.
But Donald Childs is not Ž nished with us, for in the same annus
mirabilis he has published Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats,
and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge). An extended treatment of
this subject is welcome, for it is a fact that many intellectuals in the early
20th century were enthusiastic supporters of the eugenics movement.
Apart from passing references, only two writers have addressed this issue
in relation to Eliot: Robert Crawford (see AmLS 1987, p. 21) and Juan
Leon (see AmLS 1988, p. 128). Crawford concluded that Eliot was critical
of eugenics, and Leon that he was ambivalent. Childs devotes three
chapters to Eliot and concludes that he was a completely committed
eugenicist from start to Ž nish. Actually, another book dealing at some
length with the topic came out just before this one, Lois Cuddy’s T. S.
Eliot and the Poetics of Evolution (see AmLS 2000, pp. 151–53), and Cuddy
also regards Eliot as a convinced eugenicist.
The eugenics movement was so popular that Julian Huxley could
conŽ dently predict ‘‘eugenics will inevitably become a part of the religion
of the future.’’ It became socially acceptable to speak of the poor as
‘‘human weeds.’’ In spite of resistance by a few writers and by the Roman
Catholic Church, it looked as if Huxley was right. Childs bases his
contention that Eliot was a eugenicist almost entirely on his 1918 review
of ‘‘Recent Periodical Literature in Ethics.’’ It seems that Eliot is indeed
sympathetic to the eugenicists here, but it should be noted that he makes
no deŽ nite statements of his own on the topic. He mentions an article by
Leonard Darwin, ‘‘whose articles always deserve attention’’ —an ambig-
uous recommendation. He gives a paragraph to the essays of E. W.
MacBride, saying he ‘‘draws two conclusions of social importance’’ —
another positive statement that is not quite an endorsement. The only
place where he unambiguously supports MacBride’s view is where he
writes, ‘‘Furthermore, he insists upon the importance of the respon-
sibility of parents: ‘there is no system of state subventions,’ he says very
justly, ‘which will not break down if parental responsibility be removed
and reckless reproduction encouraged.’ ’’ Here Eliot certainly seconds the
eugenicist’s worry about ‘‘reckless reproduction,’’ yet even here the em-
phasis falls on opposition to any ‘‘system of state subventions.’’ I have
178 Pound and Eliot

quoted here the most positive things Eliot ever said about eugenics, and it
seems to me these comments will not bear the weight Childs puts on
them.
More convincing, however, are observations Childs makes about the
early poetry. ‘‘Hysteria’’ and ‘‘Ode’’ may re ect the fear of Rose Haigh-
Wood that her daughter Vivienne had inherited ‘‘moral insanity.’’ Eliot’s
frequent reference to prostitution also echoes a major concern of the
eugenicists. Childs gives ‘‘A Game of Chess’’ a subtle reading, Ž nding that
the poet has greater sympathy for Lil than for the barren middle-class
couple. The typist of ‘‘The Fire Sermon’’ is also connected with eugenics,
for Bertrand Russell expresses a worry that typists and other working
women are not bearing children, resulting in the ‘‘sterilizing of the best
parts of the population.’’
Childs claims that the ‘‘impact’’ of eugenics ‘‘is evident as late as Notes
towards the DeŽ nition of Culture (1948).’’ He Ž nds this impact in one
statement in that work: ‘‘we have arrived at a stage of civilization at which
the family is irresponsible, or incompetent, or helpless.’’ This passage is
quoted out of context: Eliot is arguing that the modern educational
system is displacing the family and thus weakening it. A far more relevant
passage is to be found in Eliot’s ‘‘Commentary’’ in the January 1931 issue
of The Criterion, where he expresses his worry that ‘‘we may conceivably
have, in time, legislation framed to enforce limitation of families (by the
usual methods) upon certain parts of the population, and to enforce
progenitiveness upon others. With the applause of some of the clergy.’’
This statement was quoted long ago by Russell Kirk but is not quoted by
Childs. It overtly deprecates the main principle of eugenics and strongly
implies that the Darwinian materialism of the eugenicists is utterly in-
compatible with the Christian view of the human person. This is the
understanding Eliot reached well before many other intellectuals Ž nally
distanced themselves from the eugenics movement as it became a central
tenet of the Nazi party.
William D. Melaney discusses Eliot in After Ontology: Literary Theory
and Modernist Poetics (SUNY), Ž nding ‘‘Hamlet and His Problems’’ and
the early criticism generally ‘‘unresponsive to the presence of inter-text as
a literary concern.’’ This is a surprising judgment to make about a critic
so concerned with literary tradition, but Melaney insists that Eliot’s view
of tradition is ‘‘excessively narrow.’’ He sees the early poetry, on the other
hand, as breaking through the limitations the Hamlet essay places on
intertextuality. Melaney’s commitment to the Hermeneutic Circle seems
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 179

to result in circular reasoning, as well as in some impenetrable and even

ungrammatical sentences.

c. Relation to Other Writers and Artists Let us begin with the most
ancient in uences and proceed chronologically. Eliot’s assessment of the
Roman poets is the subject of Brian Arkins’s ‘‘Eliot as Critic: The Case of
Latin Literature’’ (YER 17, iii: 10–17). Arkins, a classicist, argues that in
developing his view of Vergil as a proto-Christian ‘‘Eliot was considerably
in uenced by a very inadequate and misleading book about Virgil, The-
odor Haecker’s Virgil the Father of the West. ’’ This view is questionable
because Vergil’s philosophy was predominantly Epicurean and hence
incompatible with Christianity. Arkins concludes, however, that Eliot
‘‘was generally successful in his assessments’’ of Latin literature.
Turning to the Middle Ages, we Ž nd Daniela Cavallaro’s ‘‘A Song for
Virgil: Dantean References in Eliot’s ‘A Song for Simeon’ ’’ ( JML 24:
349–52), which notes parallels between Eliot’s Simeon and Dante’s Ver-
gil. Both witness the coming of Christianity without being able to par-
ticipate fully. Cavallaro presents a convincing argument establishing an
important connection. David J. Ferrero suggests another Dantean allu-
sion in ‘‘Ger(ont)yon: T. S. Eliot’s Descent into the Infernal Wasteland’’
(YER 17, iii: 2–9). Geryon’s ‘‘Wheeling’’ descent, the similarity of his
name, and his representation of fraudulent speech link him with Geron-
tion. Frank Perez in ‘‘Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford: A Prototype for Pruf-
rock?’’ (YER 17, ii: 2–5) notes that the phrase ‘‘Full of high sentence’’ is
from Chaucer’s description of the Clerk —but B. C. Southam identiŽ ed
this borrowing long ago.
Though Eliot often disparaged Shelley, there is one work he admired,
as Neil Arditi demonstrates in ‘‘T. S. Eliot and The Triumph of Life ’’ (KSJ
50: 124–43). Eliot found in Shelley’s poem ‘‘some of the most Dantesque
lines in English’’ in the description of Rousseau as ‘‘an old root’’ with
‘‘thin discoloured hair,’’ and Arditi suggests an echo in ‘‘The withered
root of knots of hair’’ in ‘‘Sweeney Erect.’’ He makes an illuminating
comparison of the two poems. Allyson Booth takes a closer look at the
source of the draft title in ‘‘ ‘He Do the Police in DiVerent Voices’: Our
Mutual Friend and The Waste Land ’’ (Dickensian 97: 116–21). The two
main male characters in Dickens’s novel are presumed drowned or nearly
drowned and then brought back to life by a woman’s love, which presents
a fascinating parallel with a number of characters in Eliot’s poem caught
between life and death. Instead of concluding (as Booth does) that the
180 Pound and Eliot

novel’s ‘‘belief in both life and an afterlife’’ is ‘‘nowhere to be found’’ in

the poem, one might suggest that Eliot’s allusion to a work that aYrms
the potential for spiritual rebirth at least holds out that possibility. Pa-
tricia Sloane’s essay ‘‘Richard Wagner’s Arthurian Sources, Jessie L.
Weston, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ’’ (Arthuriana 11, i: 30–53) is
wide-ranging and original. One of her most interesting observations is
that the lines Eliot quotes from Tristan are sung by ‘‘a young sailor’’ and
are thus linked with the ‘‘drowned Phoenician Sailor.’’ We deeply regret
the recent passing of Dr. Sloane, a dynamic and creative scholar.
John G. Cawelti’s ‘‘Eliot, Joyce, and Exile’’ (ANQ 14, iv: 38–45) notes
that both writers were exiles from their native lands and that both wrote
about the experience: ‘‘While Eliot envisions exile as an encounter with
the meaninglessness of human history, Joyce sees in it the possibility of
escaping the trap of particular cultures and emerging into a wider and
deeper sense of human possibility.’’ True, but one should add that Eliot
Ž nally saw his exile as a return to a primal homeland and a rediscovery of
meaning in history. The Welsh Catholic poet David Jones, whose long
poem In Parenthesis was published by Eliot, has a growing following
today. Barry Spurr compares the two poets in ‘‘ ‘I Loved Old Tom’: David
Jones and T. S. Eliot’’ (YER 17, i: 19–25), pointing out that ‘‘[l]ike Eliot,
Jones, although an innovator in poetic language and forms, was also a
conservator,’’ and that he imitates Eliot in his ‘‘incorporation of Catholic
doctrine, liturgy, and culture into verse.’’ Spurr’s contention that Eliot
diVered from Jones in being detached ‘‘from the sacramental, incarna-
tional worldview’’ should be challenged, but the essay is a valuable contri-
bution. Eliot’s in uence on a very diVerent poet is the subject of ‘‘ ‘The
Sea Has Many Voices’: Robert Lowell’s ‘The Quaker Graveyard at Nan-
tucket’ and the In uence of T. S. Eliot’’ by Glen Robert Gill (YER 17, iv:
8–22). Lowell reviewed Four Quartets (very positively) while composing
his poem, which deals with the same themes but more pessimistically.
Lowell’s part 6, ‘‘Our Lady of Walsingham,’’ makes extensive allusion to
The Dry Salvages. In passing, Gill identiŽ es a source for Eliot’s phrase
‘‘winter lightning’’ in Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘‘Thou art lightning and
love, I found it, a winter and warm.’’
Lewis Freed was one of the Ž rst critics to take Eliot’s study of philoso-
phy seriously in T. S. Eliot: The Critic as Philosopher (see AmLS 1979,
p. 127). He takes another look at one aspect of the subject in ‘‘T. S. Eliot’s
Impersonal Theory of Poetry and the Doctrine of Feeling and Emotion as
Objects’’ (YER 17, i: 2–18), a closely argued analysis. Freed shows how
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 181

Bradley’s idea of ‘‘objective emotion’’ is taken up in Eliot’s dissertation

and eventually in uences his literary criticism. Some signiŽ cant points of
agreement may be found here with what Childs says.
The in uence of Bradley, Vergil, and Dante on Eliot’s thought was
rivaled, as several writers have pointed out recently, by that of the music
hall performer Marie Lloyd. Barry Faulk in ‘‘Modernism and the Popu-
lar: Eliot’s Music Halls’’ (MoMo 8: 603–21) shows that Eliot’s lament for
the passing of Lloyd takes its place in a well-established genre. Earlier
writers such as Elizabeth R. Pennell and Max Beerbohm identiŽ ed the
music halls with English character and lamented their passing, much as
Eliot does.

d. Poetry Possibly the most signiŽ cant publication of the year is the Ž rst
chapter in Marjorie PerloV ’s book 21st Century Modernism: The ‘‘New’’
Poetics (Blackwell). Entitled ‘‘Avant-Garde Eliot,’’ this chapter is a return
by a great critic to a subject she had left behind and even dismissed 20
years ago. Noting a renewed emphasis on artiŽ ce, on making, in pro-
nouncements of some poets today, she points to similar statements in
Eliot’s criticism. This observation leads to a revaluation of his early poetry
as well as his early life. Cynthia Ozick’s famous NY essay (see AmLS 1989,
p. 130) declaring liberation from the oppressive in uence of Eliot comes
in for a strong (well-deserved) contradiction here, as PerloV rediscovers
the avant-garde Eliot who remains relevant. There follows a close-reading
of ‘‘Prufrock,’’ both masterly and fresh, which pays such close attention to
diction and scansion that it cannot be summarized. Her conclusion is
that the ‘‘complex perspectivism’’ of the poem is a radical break from the
‘‘naturalist poetic mode . . . that preceded it’’ and that it also ‘‘has little in
common with the more orderly sequential-associative mode of late mod-
ernist poets like Randall Jarrell or Elizabeth Bishop.’’ The implication is
that much 20th-century verse has been a retreat from the radical ap-
proach Eliot took and that only now are some poets ready to cross those
borders again. In a brief section on Eliot’s life from 1910 to 1922 PerloV
touches the poet’s heart more surely than most biographers, suggesting
that he was happy in Paris and in his brief time in Marburg, that the
outbreak of the war (which brought him to Oxford) was a disaster for
him, and that he afterward became increasingly nervous and worried.
Eventually, ‘‘the cosmopolitanism of the avant guerre gave way to an
imposed nationalism’’ as Eliot was barred from the Continent by the war.
PerloV has thus drawn a new line in Eliot’s career: instead of the 1927
182 Pound and Eliot

conversion as the crucial divide, it is the 1914 war. This approach tends to
imply a falling oV of poetic intensity and originality in the later work, but
her take on these early years rings true and yields the clearest understand-
ing ever achieved of the poet’s life and work in this period.
Laurie MacDiarmid oVers a valuable analysis in ‘‘ ‘Torture and De-
light’: T. S. Eliot’s ‘Love Song for St. Sebastian’ ’’ (ArQ 57, ii: 77–92),
arguing that the sexual fantasies of the poem are connected with a ‘‘sacri-
Ž cial poetic.’’ This identiŽ cation becomes reductive, however, when ap-
plied to later works. Troy Urquhart’s piece on ‘‘Eliot’s ‘The Hollow
Men’ ’’ (Expl 59, iv: 199–201) focuses insightfully on the images of immo-
bility in that poem.
The Waste Land remains the poem of greatest interest to scholars.
Shawn R. Tucker in ‘‘The Waste Land, Liminoid Phenomena, and the
Con uence of Dada’’ (Mosaic 34, iii: 91–109) argues that the poem ex-
presses ‘‘Dada disgust.’’ Daniel T. McGee takes a nearly opposite position
in ‘‘Dada Da Da: Sounding the Jew in Modernism’’ (ELH 68: 501–27),
claiming that ‘‘[t]he link between dadaism and Judaism was already
implicit in the proto-fascist aesthetics of Charles Maurras’’ and that The
Waste Land is a thoroughly anti-Semitic poem. McGee Ž nds no overt
expression of anti-Semitism in the poem but asserts, ‘‘Far from being
Eliot’s abandonment of anti-Semitism, . . . this absence of Ž guration
marks the emergence of a purely performative anti-Semitism.’’ It seems
that the less Eliot says on this subject, the more he is suspected and indeed
convicted. The argument is that Jews were accused of barbarism, which
means a babbling corruption of language, so any linguistic incoherence
and babbling in Eliot’s poetry signiŽ es, quite simply, the Jews. The
School of Resentment has yielded to the School of Paranoia.
Sukhbir Singh in ‘‘T. S. Eliot’s Concept of Time and the Technique of
Textual Reading: A Comment on ‘Cross’ in The Waste Land 3, Line 175’’
(ANQ 14, i: 34–39) shows the relevance of several diVerent meanings of
this word. Juan A. Suárez examines the in uence of one medium of
popular culture in ‘‘T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Gramophone, and
the Modernist Discourse Network’’ (NLH 32: 747–68). Suárez’s interest-
ing contention is that the ‘‘total inclusiveness’’ of gramophone recordings
in uenced Eliot’s poetic technique.
Four Quartets receives some attention as well. Cornelia Cook in ‘‘Fire
and Spirit: Scripture’s Shaping Presence in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets’’
(L&T 15: 85–101) notices a shift in Eliot’s use of scripture. The early works
are more apocalyptic, but here the emphasis is on the gospels and their
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 183

sense of immediate incarnation, as well as on the spirit’s presence in

history. In passing, Cook identiŽ es a source for the ‘‘wounded surgeon’’ —
the ‘‘messianic Ž gure’’ of Isaiah 53:5, who is ‘‘wounded for our transgres-
sions.’’ Nancy Hargrove returns to a place she visited some time ago in
‘‘The Curious Case of T. S. Eliot’s Sources(s) for Part IV of ‘The Dry
Salvages’ ’’ (YER 17, iv: 2–7). Earlier Hargrove suggested (see AmLS 1978,
p. 121) that the ‘‘Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,’’ was
inspired by the Church of Our Lady of Good Voyage in Gloucester, with
its large statue of Mary atop the roof, holding a ship and blessing the
harbor. Eliot claimed in a letter to Pound that he ‘‘had no knowledge’’ of
the statue’s existence when he wrote the poem. Though the church always
bore that name and always had a statue of the Blessed Mother as guardian
of sailors inside, the exterior statue was not added until 1915. Hargrove
proves it was there when Eliot came to Gloucester brie y in 1915, so he
might have seen it then and might have been in uenced by it uncon-
sciously later on. This is all that can be said on this minor but interesting
question. I expect that anyone who has visited the church in Gloucester
will Ž nd it diYcult to believe that it was not somehow present in the
poet’s mind as he wrote that line.

e. The London Conference In 1996 a number of Eliot scholars from

around the world gathered at a conference at the University of London.
The organizer, Jewel Spears Brooker, has edited a collection of essays
based on the lectures given there, T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World
(Palgrave). The reader will Ž nd here a diversity of approaches but a
consistently high level of scholarship.
The Ž rst section comprises two essays with a personal dimension.
Marianne Thormälhen in ‘‘T. S. Eliot and the Reality of Childhood’’
(pp. 3–14) proposes that the image of hidden children in Burnt Norton
illustrates F. H. Bradley’s concept of ‘‘immediate experience,’’ while ‘‘Ani-
mula’’ and The Family Reunion address the inevitable loss of that state of
uniŽ ed awareness. Rudolf Germer’s ‘‘ ‘Journey of the Magi’ in the Con-
text of T. S. Eliot’s Religious Development and Sensibility’’ (pp. 15–26)
emphasizes the in uences of Paul Elmer More and Charles Maurras on
Eliot’s conversion. Germer then examines the poetry Eliot wrote soon
after his baptism, pointing to a sense of weariness from the diYcult
journey to faith and a strong sense of original sin: ‘‘Eliot writes as he feels,
not as he would like to feel.’’
The second section deals with ‘‘Eliot and Philosophy’’ and is perhaps
184 Pound and Eliot

the most valuable part of the book. William Blissett in ‘‘T. S. Eliot and
Heraclitus’’ (pp. 29–46) shows that Eliot’s debt to his favorite pre-
Socratic philosopher goes far beyond the epigraphs to Burnt Norton.
Blissett quotes extensively from both philosopher and poet and reveals
the subtler resonances with a light, sure touch. I would like to note here
that in a section on Heraclitus in my book Aethereal Rumours (see AmLS
1998, pp. 142–43) I glossed Eliot’s phrase ‘‘the damp souls of housemaids’’
with the fragment ‘‘A dry soul is best.’’ I thought at the time that the
insight was original with me, but I recently glanced through some notes I
took in a class with Professor Blissett and there it was. For the record, I got
the idea (and many others) from the master.
So much attention has been paid to Bergson and Bradley that we have
only recently begun to look farther aŽ eld. Brooker and William Charron
do so in ‘‘T. S. Eliot’s Theory of Opposites: Kant and the Subversion of
Epistemology’’ (pp. 47–62). Examining three papers Eliot wrote at Har-
vard, they Ž nd that he ‘‘focuses on Kant’s initial subversion of, and
subsequent lapse into, epistemological dualism.’’ His study of Kant con-
tributed to Eliot’s theory of opposites, which asserts that apparent op-
posites are always correlative to each other and relative to a particular
point of view. Kant’s argument that ‘‘the epistemological dilemma is
avoidable and artiŽ cial’’ becomes a central tenet of Eliot’s view. (In pass-
ing, the authors note Eliot’s critique of Herbert Spencer, which adds to
the evidence that Eliot had little respect for Spencer and would have been
unlikely to adopt his views on evolution and eugenics.) Brooker and
Charron point out that ‘‘[t]o avoid the paradoxes of Kantian moral
theory, Eliot redirects the reader to Aristotelian ethics,’’ an important
instance of Eliot’s deference to Aristotle. Eliot is shown here to be a
relativist ‘‘not in the sense that the world has no intrinsic characteristics,
but in the sense that, from a human point of view, there are no uncondi-
tional truths about the world’’ —an extremely important distinction.
Stephen Medcalf looks at early poetry written as Eliot converted from
Bergson to Bradley in ‘‘Points of View, Objects, and Half-Objects: T. S.
Eliot’s Poetry at Merton College, 1914–15’’ (pp. 63–79). Half-objects are
simultaneously experienced subjectively and objectively, and Medcalf
shows that these poems merge the awareness of the poetic persona with
the objects described. Tatsuo Murata in ‘‘Buddhist Epistemology in T. S.
Eliot’s Theory of Poetry’’ (pp. 80–88) shows that the Buddhist philoso-
phy Eliot studied also supported his antidualistic or relativistic approach,
since Buddhism holds that all things ‘‘are conditional, relative and com-
Alec Marsh and Ben Lockerd 185

plementary.’’ It is particularly illuminating to read these essays together,

for they reach similar conclusions from diVerent starting points.
The next section has essays on music, Dante, and Shakespeare. Peter
Dickinson explores ‘‘Connections Between T. S. Eliot and Major Com-
posers: Igor Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten’’ (pp. 91–99). Eliot and
Stravinsky, two stylistic revolutionaries, admired each other’s work and
became friends. The composer eventually set two passages from Little
Gidding to music and wrote an elegy, Introitus: In Memoriam T. S. Eliot.
Britten set several Eliot passages and they are analyzed here. As this book
was in press, so was T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra, which contains an essay on
Britten by C. F. Pond (see AmLS 2000, p. 160).
Randy Malamud in ‘‘Shakespeare/Dante and Water/Music in The
Waste Land ’’ (pp. 100–113) Ž nds identiŽ cations of Shakespeare with
water imagery and Dante with Ž re, concluding that Eliot ‘‘promotes the
Dantean trope over the Shakespearean,’’ which may force an unnecessary
dichotomy. Malamud characterizes Ariel’s song as ‘‘delusory,’’ but it may
ring true to Eliot. David Gervais in ‘‘Eliot’s Shakespeare and Eliot’s
Dante’’ (pp. 114–24) also looks at Eliot’s preference for Dante over Shake-
speare, arguing that it ‘‘stemmed from . . . uneasiness with tragedy.’’ This
view perhaps gives too little weight to Eliot’s intense engagement with
Shakespeare’s Ž nal plays, the romances, but Gervais raises the issue in a
subtle and compelling way.
Two essays address Eliot’s fascination with popular culture. David
Chinitz in ‘‘The Problem of Dullness: T. S. Eliot and the ‘Lively Arts’ in
the 1920s’’ (pp. 127–40) forcefully contradicts the assumption that Eliot
was a czar of ‘‘elitist’’ high art (Cynthia Ozick is singled out for correction
again). What Eliot did deprecate was not lowbrow entertainment but
pretentious middlebrow art and the very tendency to separate high and
low art. Michael Coyle attends to Eliot’s many radio broadcasts in ‘‘T. S.
Eliot on the Air: ‘Culture’ and the Challenge of Mass Communication’’
(pp. 141–54). It turns out that the conservative champion of tradition
embraced the mass medium of radio, considering it more ‘‘intimate’’ and
‘‘friendly’’ than television. According to Coyle, ‘‘He respected radio as a
kind of pre-modern medium, an essentially oral medium,’’ and often
used it to promote his idea of a uniŽ ed European culture, adopting an
‘‘ecumenical,’’ uncontentious tone.
Anthony Julius’s T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (see
AmLS 1995, pp. 134–35) is critiqued by two of the contributors. Brooker
argues in ‘‘Eliot in the Dock’’ (pp. 157–64) that Julius typically ‘‘assumes
186 Pound and Eliot

what most readers would expect him to attempt to prove.’’ Julius’s use of
evidence is also suspect. For example, he tells a story about Sarah Millin,
who supposedly asked Eliot to leave her house when he refused to apolo-
gize for a comment about Jews in one of his poems. Brooker points out
that ‘‘Julius’s moral censure is based on an incident that never happened.’’
Julius half admits that he knows this, but only in an endnote buried deep
in the back of the book. Julius’s analysis of the poetry assumes ‘‘that a
poem is as propositional as a newspaper editorial.’’ The one genuinely
propositional comment Eliot made, about the undesirability of having a
‘‘large number of free-thinking Jews,’’ he later clariŽ ed by placing the
emphasis squarely on ‘‘free-thinking.’’ Julius quotes this comment out of
context and repeats it insistently, since it is really all the evidence he has.
David M. Thompson in ‘‘T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and the Weight of
Apologia’’ (pp. 165–76) Ž rst points out that Julius adds nothing to what
many earlier writers had said on the subject. Thompson seconds Brooker
in accusing Julius of ‘‘shoddy use of evidence and clumsily impressionistic
interpretations’’ and notes that ‘‘many reviewers of the book have ne-
glected to ask whether in fact Julius makes any coherent argument at all.’’
At this point it seems to be fairly well established that Julius argues by
assertion and innuendo, not by evidence and reasonable interpretation.
The collection concludes with two essays under the heading of ‘‘Con-
temporary Criticism.’’ Richard Badenhausen demonstrates in ‘‘Rethink-
ing ‘Great Tom’: T. S. Eliot and the Collaborative Impulse’’ (pp. 179–90)
that Eliot, far from being the ‘‘autonomous author’’ that many have
pictured, tended to work collaboratively. He points particularly to Eliot’s
continuing theatrical collaboration with the producer Martin Browne. In
‘‘T. S. Eliot and the Feminist Revision of the Modern(ist) Canon’’
(pp. 191–202) Teresa Gibert gives an even-handed account of various
feminist appraisals of Eliot. Gibert criticizes the tendency of Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar to think in binary oppositions. She praises
‘‘fresh approaches’’ (by Bonnie Kime Scott, Carol Christ, and others) that
‘‘instead of merely stereotyping him as a misogynist, tend to emphasize
the rich variety of his writings, some of which may even be used to
support feminist issues.’’ This collection of essays demonstrates the diver-
sity and vitality of Eliot scholarship today. The writers reject cant and
rant in favor of learning and judgment.
Muhlenberg College
Grand Valley State University
9 Faulkner
Joseph R. Urgo

We are seeing a return to holistic studies of Faulkner and a burgeoning of

interest in his Hollywood career. Faulkner’s contribution to intellectual
history is the subject of excellent essays this year on Mosquitoes and
Intruder in the Dust, on his lifelong engagement with Thomas JeVerson,
and on his critique of Cold War ideology. This essay was prepared with
the bibliographic assistance of Lorraine Dubuisson.

i Biography
This year’s most important biographical work is by Lisa C. Hickman,
who publishes a series of articles about Faulkner and Joan Williams. A
two-part essay, ‘‘In Orbit with William Faulkner’’ (Memphis Magazine
26, iv: 64–72 and 26, vi: 51–56), includes the re-publication of student-
newspaper accounts of Faulkner’s appearances at Bard College in 1951 and
the recollections of Brandon Grove, present at Faulkner’s appearance at
Princeton that same year. Hickman’s ‘‘William Faulkner and A. E. Hous-
man: A Writer’s Poet’’ (HSJ 27: 23–25) traces Housman’s in uence on
Faulkner, identifying parallels in their careers and pointing out Faulkner’s
reliance on Housman at various points in his life (e.g., during his aVair
with Joan Williams, he instructed her to write him at a post oYce box he
had rented in the name A. E. Holston). Hickman’s most extensive exam-
ination of the Faulkner-Williams aVair is in ‘‘The Teller’s Tale: An After-
noon on Faulkner’s ‘Minmagary’ ’’ (SoQ 39, iii: 151–61), which takes up
details of the relationship biographically as well as in the Ž ctional treat-
ment given it by each writer, Faulkner in The Town and The Mansion and
Williams in The Wintering. The title of the essay refers to an assignation
arranged by Faulkner on Sardis Lake in Mississippi aboard his boat (‘‘The
Minmagary’’) for himself; his wife, Estelle; Williams; and Grove.
188 Faulkner

Massimo Bacigalupo’s ‘‘New Information on William Faulkner’s First

Trip to Italy’’ ( JML 24: 321–25) presents Italian newspaper reports of
William Spratling’s arrest in Genoa in August 1925, an event Faulkner
probably witnessed, certainly envied, and later wrote about. Joseph
Blotner records his recollections in ‘‘Mr. Faulkner: Writer-in-Residence’’
(VQR 77: 323–38), remembering, for example, resistance by some Uni-
versity of Virginia administrators to the idea that Faulkner be given a
permanent aYliation with the institution, in part because of Faulkner’s
liberal stance on integration. Paul Gray, a graduate student at UVa in the
early 1960s, remembers Faulkner and his rise to prominence in ‘‘Mister
Faulkner Goes to Stockholm’’ (Smithsonian 32, vii: 56–60). Carol Pols-
grove rehearses Faulkner’s ambivalence toward integration politics in the
1950s in ‘‘William Faulkner: No Friend of Brown vs. Board of Education’’
( Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 32: 93–99), concluding that ‘‘at
least he had seen his duty and had tried to do it.’’

ii Bibliography, Editions, Manuscripts

Teleplay versions of the short stories ‘‘The Brooch’’ (1953) and ‘‘Shall Not
Perish’’ (1954), written by Faulkner and discussed later in this review, are
now in print (FJ 16: 148–216), as is ‘‘A Letter to Bishop Robert E. Jones’’
(GaR 55: 529–36), written by Faulkner in March 1940 after the death of
Caroline Barr. Bart W. Welling’s ‘‘In Praise of the Black Mother: An
Unpublished Faulkner Letter on ‘Mammy’ Caroline Barr’’ accompanies
the letter (GaR 55: 536–42). Faulkner wrote the six-page, carefully typed
letter in response to a request by the Methodist Episcopal Bishop collect-
ing information about the positive role played by African American
‘‘mammies’’ in the South, a project he abandoned after Ž nding that what
he had gathered ‘‘would do little to promote sympathetic relations be-
tween the races.’’ Welling suggests that the letter marks the earliest emer-
gence of ‘‘the public Faulkner’’ associated with the 1950s and that, written
roughly concurrent with ‘‘Pantaloon in Black,’’ it is an important context
for Go Down, Moses. Details concerning the controversy over Faulkner’s
staging of Caroline Barr’s funeral at Rowan Oak (‘‘a novelist’s black-face
show’’) and Faulkner’s possession of ‘‘two mothers’’ and its eVect on his
race consciousness make Welling’s essay among this year’s more impor-
tant contributions.
Ilan Stavans in ‘‘Beyond Translation: Borges and Faulkner’’ (MQR 40:
628–39) examines Borges’s translation of The Wild Palms, completed in
Joseph R. Urgo 189

1940, and the claim that Borges ‘‘opened the door to Faulkner’s mam-
moth in uence over south-of-the-border literature at mid-century.’’
While Faulkner had been translated into Spanish before Borges, no
translator had succeeded in mimicking ‘‘the American’s style elegantly,
making it  uid, electrifying, breath-taking in Spanish’’ because none
had approached Faulkner as ‘‘Ž rst and foremost a technician; that Yokna-
patawpha is to be found in Mississippi is sheer accident.’’ Hans Skei in
‘‘On Translating William Faulkner: A Personal Note’’ (AmStScan 33, ii:
41–46) recalls the technical challenges of capturing ‘‘changing tone and
pitch and modulations of speech’’ from Faulkner’s English to credible
Norwegian.

iii General Criticism

Don H. Doyle’s Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha
(No. Car.) is the most signiŽ cant book on Faulkner this year and among
the most important studies published in the last decade. Doyle is a
historian who quite consciously avoids ‘‘practicing literary criticism with-
out a license’’ in order to explore the substance of Faulkner’s historical
sensibility, a sensibility Doyle Ž nds ‘‘more tragic than nostalgic.’’ He
begins with the Indians, ‘‘dispossessed of Yoknapatawpha only after they
embrace the conceit that it is theirs to sell,’’ and continues, tracing the
social history of Lafayette County, Mississippi, through the 1920s. Al-
though Doyle steers clear of textual interpretation, the history he writes
poses numerous challenges for Faulkner’s readers and critics. Settlement
in northern Mississippi during the 19th century was marked by rapid
population turnover, so that the social order was ‘‘built upon a per-
petually unstable demographic foundation,’’ one which extends, in the
Ž ction, from Thomas Sutpen’s design through the middle-class Snopeses
of the 1950s. Early Lafayette County populations were so mobile that the
historical record ‘‘suggests a people who rarely put down roots or congre-
gated often enough to form what we think of as genuine communities.’’
As late as the 1880s the local newspaper editor bemoaned the fact that the
‘‘best citizens’’ of the town were leaving for better prospects elsewhere.
Particularly strong is the material Doyle gathers on poverty in the county,
providing a rich background for Faulkner’s interest in ‘‘alternative re-
sponses to poor white resentment,’’ from violence against established
economic power to ‘‘dogged ambition . . . to rise and emulate their social
superiors.’’ Doyle concludes that ‘‘the most salient feature’’ of the county’s
190 Faulkner

history is ‘‘the constant motion of the people through the land’’ —a

historical Ž nding that would put the Snopes phenomenon at the center
and not the margins of Faulkner’s cosmos, along with such scenes as Sam
Beauchamp’s exile, Quentin Compson’s college career, and the migration
of slaves in The Unvanquished. Doyle’s meticulous archival research into
the origins of Lafayette County and into the history of northern Mis-
sissippi makes his a landmark study and required reading for all Faulkner
scholars.
On the other hand, R. Rio-JelliVe’s Obscurity’s Myriad Components:
The Theory and Practice of William Faulkner (Bucknell) Ž nds that ‘‘con-
tradiction or paradox governs his theory of language and form’’ to the
extent that ‘‘the sources, substance, and theme of narrative are incidental
to language, technique, and structure that embody sense.’’ As a result,
‘‘Faulkner contrives of language a form that signiŽ es more than it de-
notes, and thus transcends the word.’’ Rio-JelliVe means to counter the
heavy emphasis in Faulkner studies on content, arguing that the sum of
Faulkner’s work ‘‘is not the Yoknapatawpha theme . . . but a pattern of
multiple yet correlative unfoldings from a concentric point.’’ The anal-
ysis draws heavily on Henri Bergson, attempting ‘‘a more precise assess-
ment’’ of Faulkner’s debt to the philosopher. A theoretical introduction is
the most provocative, if cryptic, chapter, outlining the ways in which
Faulkner used language to transcend the need for language, to work
English beyond the literal, beyond the word, which at once promises to
enable and threatens to forestall communication. Individual chapters on
novels follow, the strongest element of which is Rio-JelliVe’s attention to
Faulkner’s craft, placing revisions in brackets within holograph quota-
tions, thus making plain (in the case of The Unvanquished ) Faulkner’s
conception of the diVerence between magazine Ž ction and the formalist
demands of the novel. In revisions to Light in August Rio-JelliVe shows
Faulkner both proving and denying determinism, inserting revisions to
the holograph designed to suspend conclusion. Rio-JelliVe’s attention to
tone of voice in The Sound and the Fury provides a Ž ne example of
‘‘language empowered in form that surpasses the word and infuses its
silence.’’ In his analysis of Go Down, Moses Rio-JelliVe oVers a fresh
defense of Isaac McCaslin, Ž nding in his ‘‘ awed eVort’’ a ‘‘moral insight,
which few possess with more clarity and enact at greater personal cost.’’
Of particular interest to Faulknerians is Rio-JelliVe’s presence at Nagano
in 1955, where the discovery was made about ‘‘Faulkner’s obsessive drive
to try again: his distrust of language and desire to overcome the enemy.’’
Joseph R. Urgo 191

David Minter’s Faulkner’s Questioning Narratives: Fiction of His Major

Phase, 1929–1942 (Illinois) contains 10 essays (5 published previously)
exploring a number of recurring ideas: Hannah Arendt’s identiŽ cation of
the tie between historical memory and Faulkner’s method of ‘‘incessant
talking’’; history, myth, and region; modernism; the sacred; violence;
class and gender. Although the author asks reviewers to judge the book on
what is included, not excluded, the fact that many arguments point to
later novels (the idea of the sacred and A Fable; ‘‘incessant talking’’ and
the Snopes trilogy) makes it diYcult to comply. Provocative threads
probe links between memory and creativity, how Faulkner ‘‘brings the
problem of creation and the problem of meaning into conjunction,’’ and
how, like Shakespeare, Faulkner’s genius is characterized by his simul-
taneous mastering and transcending of received models. The reader
whose role is to create meaning, called the ‘‘participatory reader’’ a gener-
ation ago, is given renewed and timely attention and labeled a complicit
reader.
Evelyn JaVe Schreiber’s Subversive Voices: Eroticizing the Other in
William Faulkner and Toni Morrison (Tennessee) features three chapters
on Faulkner, two of them published previously, examining the ways in
which ‘‘marginalized voices speak to central social issues’’; Schreiber’s
analysis is steeped in Lacanian theory, especially Lacan’s work on nostal-
gia. As have many others recently, Schreiber sees Morrison as continuing
and expanding Faulkner’s social and aesthetic project, identiŽ ed here as
‘‘the struggle to maintain subjectivity through continual encounters with,
and avoidance of, the Lacanian real, speciŽ cally in the form of the gaze of
the other.’’ Schreiber’s method is relatively weak as applied to Go Down,
Moses (centering on Isaac McCaslin’s success in ‘‘sustaining his sense of
self ’’) but emerges more strongly in a study of women in the Snopes
trilogy (who possess la facultad, a term used by Gloria Anzaldúa to denote
‘‘intuition, perceptiveness, [and] sensitivity’’) and in a good chapter on
black voices. ‘‘In Faulkner’s texts,’’ Schreiber demonstrates, ‘‘women and
blacks become forces that alter the dominant culture,’’ and the energies of
social change are located within subjectivities marginalized and thus in
possession of critical perspectives on social injustice. Faulkner’s novels
repeatedly show how social change must be preceded by alterations in
public consciousness, and by articulating marginalized subjectivity the
novels participate in such change.
Kiyoka M. Toyama’s Faulkner and the Modern Fable (International
Scholars) also includes essays on Yukio Mishima, Eugene O’Neill, Saul
192 Faulkner

Bellow, and Carlos Fuentes. Toyama oVers analyses of Absalom, Absalom!,

Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, The Wild Palms,
and Pylon. No thesis unites the study, which is, as Peter Milward says in
the foreword, ‘‘a personal approach to literature.’’ Engaging sections draw
parallels between Faulkner and Mishima. Asking why Faulkner scholars
have largely ignored his lifelong argument ‘‘against the old problem of
war and humankind,’’ Toyama’s most extensive chapter is her previously
published essay on A Fable.
Teaching Faulkner: Approaches and Methods, ed. Stephen Hahn and
Robert W. Hamblin (Greenwood), includes 19 essays by scholars describ-
ing ways to present Faulkner to students. Three essays in a section titled
‘‘Why Faulkner?’’ open the volume. Theresa M. Towner contributes a
portion of her book Faulkner on the Color Line: The Later Novels (see
AmLS 2000, pp. 164–65) in ‘‘When the Dancing Mind Meets Inquiring
Minds: The Nobel Profession in Practice’’ (pp. 12–18) and Philip Wein-
stein oVers a revised portion of his book, What Else But Love? The Ordeal
of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (AmLS 1996, p. 143) in ‘‘ ‘No Longer at
Ease Here’: Faulkner at the New Millennium’’ (pp. 19–30); both suggest
teaching Faulkner and Toni Morrison. The third essay in this section is a
reprint of Rajini Srikanth’s ‘‘Why I, a Woman of Color from India, Enjoy
Teaching William Faulkner’’ (pp. 31–43), originally published by MissQ
(see AmLS 1996, p. 154). The remainder of the essays are original contribu-
tions. ‘‘Tracing Racial Assumptions: Teaching ‘That Evening Sun’ ’’
(pp. 47–42) by Doreen Fowler and ‘‘ ‘Handy’ Ways to Teach ‘That
Evening Sun’ ’’ (pp. 53–57) by Charles A. Peek attest to the increased
classroom attention brought to the story, with Fowler Ž nding it an ef-
fective prelude to teaching The Sound and the Fury and Peek suggesting
that the story be taught in the context of W. C. Handy’s ‘‘St. Louis Blues’’
because ‘‘the cultural codes embodied in the blues idiom shape the style,
structure, and subjects’’ of Faulkner’s story. Stephen Hahn oVers a way
into Faulkner’s diYcult early novel in ‘‘ ‘Who Says What about Whom to
Whom?’: Teaching the Fourth Section of The Sound and the Fury ’’
(pp. 59–71) in an extended response to Richard Godden’s suggestion that
section 4 ‘‘has little to do with the novel,’’ arguing for the section’s
connection to African American literary traditions.
Comparative approaches to teaching Faulkner are suggested by Cata-
rina Edinger in ‘‘ ‘Words That Don’t Fit’: As I Lay Dying and Graciliano
Ramos’s Barren Lives’’ (pp. 73–83) for a course called ‘‘Literature Across
the Americas,’’ and by Mary McAleer Balkun in ‘‘Faulkner, Cather, and
Joseph R. Urgo 193

‘Lost Ladies’ ’’ (pp. 85–95), which suggests a number of Faulkner/Cather

juxtapositions and presents one in detail, that of Sanctuary and Cather’s A
Lost Lady. James D. Bloom explains his practice of presenting novels
‘‘with preachers as leading characters’’ to students in ‘‘The Invention of
Sunday: Eloquence and Counter-Eloquence in Light in August’’ (pp. 97–
103) and John N. Duvall, contributing to work on Ž lm and Faulkner’s
1936 novel, oVers ‘‘Entering the Dark House: Teaching Absalom, Absalom!
through Citizen Kane ’’ (pp. 105–16). Veronica Makowsky and Bradley
Johnson provide a useful ‘‘Contextual Timeline’’ to Faulkner’s Civil War
novel in ‘‘Teaching The Unvanquished ’’ (pp. 117–23) and David H. Evans
presents a philosophical context in ‘‘Reading Faulkner Pragmatically: The
Hamlet and William James’’ (pp. 125–30), suggesting a parallel between
James’s in uential writing and ‘‘the importance of change, mobility, and
creative activity’’ in Faulkner’s works.
Two essays on Go Down, Moses are included, one holistically inclined
and the other attendant to crucial detail. Arthur F. Kinney teaches the
novel through the lens of its opening chapter in ‘‘Teaching Go Down,
Moses: ‘Was,’ Faulkner’s ‘Nigger Stories,’ and Now’’ (pp. 131–36) and
Peter Alan Froehlich in ‘‘Teaching ‘The Bear’ as an Artifact of Frontier
Mythology’’ (pp. 137–49) teases out an answer to the question, ‘‘Why
does Faulkner have Boon Hoggenbeck kill the bear?’’ Two authors pro-
vide guidance in teaching Faulkner’s 1948 Civil Rights novel. Robert W.
Hamblin’s ‘‘Teaching Intruder in the Dust Through Its Political and
Historical Context’’ (pp. 151–62) presents four very speciŽ c contextual
statements from the era and Evelyn JaVe Schreiber’s ‘‘ ‘The Sum of Your
Ancestry’: Cultural Context and Intruder in the Dust ’’ (pp. 163–70)
attends to ‘‘the impact of social expectations on individual development.’’
Christopher LaLonde shares success in teaching Faulkner’s 1951 novel as
theater in ‘‘The Drama of Teaching Requiem for a Nun ’’ (pp. 171–79) and
thinks of the classroom as theater where ‘‘like Temple Drake, most stu-
dents are less than willing to speak.’’ The personal connections between
young students and Faulkner are developed further by David L. Vander-
werken in ‘‘Teaching Faulkner’s ‘Case Histories’ ’’ (pp. 181–87) by noting
the many instances of the coming-of-age paradigm in his works. The
volume ends with a coda by Terrell L. Tebbetts, ‘‘Tense Unresolve: Ending
a Course on Faulkner’’ (pp. 191–200), that explains how Faulkner fore-
stalls closure using Go Down, Moses, the novel which most clearly ex-
empliŽ es Faulkner’s sense that nothing is ever Ž nished, not even after it
has ended.
194 Faulkner

Faulkner in America: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 1998, ed. Joseph R.

Urgo and Ann J. Abadie (Miss.), asks (as Urgo puts it in his introduction)
how it is that Faulkner, ‘‘quintessentially marginal’’ in American culture,
can be America’s greatest writer; and if he is our greatest writer, does that
mean that ‘‘the literary, cognitive, and aesthetic capital of the nation’’ is
located in Mississippi, a marginal state, and only part of the nation
because it was compelled by war to rejoin the Union? The volume
contains 10 essays; general essays are discussed here and work-speciŽ c
essays are included in appropriate sections below. Hortense Spillers in
‘‘Faulkner Adds Up: Reading Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the
Fury ’’ (pp. 24–44) examines the diVerence of opinion between Mr.
Compson and his son, Quentin, over which is the saddest word in
English. Mr. Compson says it is ‘‘was’’ —the loss of the event, the emo-
tion, or the thought into the nothingness of the past. Quentin counters
with ‘‘again,’’ which he posits is sadder than ‘‘was’’ for its repetition into
meaninglessness the very signiŽ er which once possessed meaning. The
 uidity between repetition and loss marks a Faulknerian mode of exis-
tence, a psychology intricately tied to history and duration, and receives
its fullest historical play in Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner’s grief, then,
becomes ‘‘a gift to the national culture,’’ a way to comprehend modern-
ism and regionalism. Noel Polk in ‘‘ ‘The Force That Through the Green
Fuse Drives’: Faulkner and the Greening of American History’’ (pp. 45–
63) places Isaac McCaslin and Thomas Sutpen (and the novels Go Down,
Moses and Absalom, Absalom! ) in juxtaposition. Sutpen wagered every-
thing and lost it all attempting to create an Isaac McCaslin of himself.
Where Sutpen fell into history through action, Isaac, in contrast, is
painfully aware of his time, circumstance, heredity, and environment —to
the point of intellectual paralysis. The irony is that Isaac is in a position to
accomplish the ends he says God has in mind, but can do so only by
accepting and not repudiating history. Together the novels articulate
Faulkner’s sense of historical responsibility; Polk’s formulation escapes
the simplistic but does not err from presenting Faulkner’s challenge, the
refusal to believe in victimization.
Peter Nicolaison and Charles Reagan Wilson each contribute to
an important but infrequent project of mapping Faulkner’s intellect.
Nicolaison in ‘‘William Faulkner’s Dialogue with Thomas JeVerson’’
(pp. 64–81) oVers an extensive consideration of the signiŽ cance of ‘‘JeVer-
son’’ to Faulkner. Brie y considering the Ž ctional account of the town’s
naming in Requiem for a Nun, Nicolaison is more interested in the
Joseph R. Urgo 195

intellectual dialogue with Thomas JeVerson that Faulkner began in 1926,

when he Ž rst used the name for the Yoknapatawpha County seat, and
continued through the publication of A Fable, read by Nicolaison as
written in part ‘‘to refute JeVerson.’’ A Fable is ‘‘a direct attempt to come
to terms with JeVerson’s position on the liberty of the people, and the
power of an entrenched establishment bent on defending its privileges.’’
After locating JeVersonian traces in a range of novels, including A Fable,
The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and The Unvan-
quished, Nicolaison concludes that there is a crucial ‘‘aYnity between the
two men’’ which has to do with a shared awareness ‘‘that the great
democratic experiment in America might have a dark underside.’’ Wil-
son’s ‘‘Our Land, Our Country: Faulkner, the South, and the American
Way of Life’’ (pp. 153–66) credits Faulkner with detecting a potentially
corrosive contradiction between the American Dream, based in individ-
ual liberty, and the more collective American Way of Life, which Faulk-
ner saw as rooted in fear and hysteria and buttressed by corporate and
consumer forces. Wilson suggests that we place Faulkner’s warnings
alongside President Eisenhower’s, adding to Eisenhower’s invocation of a
‘‘military-industrial complex’’ the more intrusive forces of consumer and
media manipulation. Aligning Faulkner’s thinking with the progressive
work of activist James McBride Dabbs, Wilson places him among those
Southerners who saw racial integration as a social action that should
aVect the world at large. Faulkner knew that biracial justice in the South
would provide a model for world race relations and thus expand the
signiŽ cance of the American Dream —but only if accomplished by the
people themselves, not by the purveyors of the American Way. Wilson’s
essay is an important corrective to the commonplace in Faulkner crit-
icism that considers the author’s public statements in the 1950s as far less
complex and sophisticated than the Ž ction.
Kathryn B. McKee’s ‘‘The Portable Eclipse: Hawthorne, Faulkner, and
Scribbling Women’’ (pp. 167–86) expands our sense of the parallels
between Hawthorne and Faulkner by drawing attention to women
writers, contemporaries of Faulkner, whose work, like the ‘‘scribbling
women’’ in Hawthorne’s famous phrase, paralleled his own. McKee pro-
vides detailed analyses of the careers of Evelyn Scott and Frances New-
man and raises troubling issues concerning the way in which the South
that Faulkner wrote to national and international prominence was (and
is) quite speciŽ cally gendered male. For Scott and Newman, region is
continuously interrupted by issues relating to gender; in fact, region is as
196 Faulkner

gendered as it is placed. Gender may be known as the physical region

through which the author’s imagination must traverse, so that any critical
concern for the relation between region and nation that fails to account
for gender will either fail or, what is worse, confuse the masculine with
the universal. In drawing our attention to Scott and Newman, McKee
clariŽ es Faulkner’s towering presence as obscuring a fuller, more com-
prehensive awareness of the South in America.
John C. Inscoe in ‘‘The Racial ‘Innocence’ of Appalachia: William
Faulkner and the Mountain South,’’ pp. 85–97 in Back Talk from Ap-
palachia: Confronting Stereotypes, ed. Dwight Billings, Gurbey Norman,
and Katherine Ledford (Kentucky), examines ‘‘Two Soldiers’’ and Ab-
salom, Absalom! and Faulkner’s depiction of the mountain South, an area
that intrigued him because it contained ‘‘the only group of [white] South-
erners whom he believed had never known blacks and whose lives had
been untouched by the basic biracial character of the rest of the South,’’ a
group that displayed a ‘‘latent but volatile racism’’ when confronting
other races. The problem with Faulkner’s intrigue is that its object never
existed. ‘‘Though there were certainly pockets of extreme isolation,’’
Inscoe argues, ‘‘there never was a point at which an all-white population
characterized the region.’’ Faulkner’s adoption of the myth of Appala-
chian hyperracism, especially in his great novel, has assured its perpetua-
tion. Of interest also is Inscoe’s exploration of sources for Faulkner’s
information about Appalachia in novels by Emmet Gowan and Grace
Lumpkin and historical studies published in the 1920s. James B. Potts in
‘‘The Shade of Faulkner’s Horse: Archetypal Immortality in the Post-
modern South’’ (SoQ 39, iii: 109–21) tracks Faulkner’s employment of
horse imagery ‘‘as an embodiment of dreams of nobility, as a measure of
manhood, and as a wedge between the past and present generations.’’ In
Flags in the Dust, As I Lay Dying, and ‘‘Carcassone’’ the horse emerges as
the icon of a ‘‘form of art so powerful that it might aVect, and survive
within, the collective unconscious.’’ Potts then tracks the horse into
speciŽ c works by Southern writers Charles Frazier and Barry Hannah,
where the shadow not just of Faulkner but of Faulkner’s horse ‘‘looms
over his successors at the center of southern writing which probes into the
character of man.’’
A special issue of FJ, ‘‘Faulkner and Film,’’ guest edited by Edwin T.
Arnold (16: i–ii), contains essays of mixed quality. Especially insight-
ful and groundbreaking is D. Matthew Ramsey’s ‘‘ ‘Lifting the Fog’:
Faulkners, Reputations, and The Story of Temple Drake ’’ (pp. 7–34),
Joseph R. Urgo 197

which continues Ramsey’s valuable work on Faulkner, Hollywood, and

popular culture. In this essay Ramsey covers the wide reputation in the
popular press Faulkner won for Sanctuary and the ways in which the
academy has downplayed that popularity in the process of canonization.
Particularly strong is an exploration of Hollywood’s coding of Temple
Drake as lesbian and the public’s fascination with gender bending in
the 1930s. Less successful or helpful is Doug Baldwin’s ‘‘Putting Images
into Words: Elements of the ‘Cinematic’ in William Faulkner’s Prose’’
(pp. 35–64), which (perhaps unconsciously, though the predecessor is
cited on occasion) recasts work done by Claude-Edmonde Magny. Bald-
win largely relabels certain narrative techniques, employing movie terms
such as ‘‘jump cut’’ for juxtaposition and ‘‘rapid  ashback cross-cutting’’
for Benjy Compson’s disorientation. The novels under study are The
Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!,
and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Scott Yarbrough’s ‘‘Faulkner and Water
Imagery in Barton Fink ’’ (pp. 95–104) assembles all the Faulkner refer-
ences in the Coen brothers’ work and Ž nds that they provide ‘‘a connec-
tive reading of some of Faulkner’s most persistent, oblique and recurring
imagery while at the same time oVering an odd, literary logic behind
Faulkner’s destructive alcoholism.’’
Faulkner’s own scriptwriting is examined in Dallas Hulsey’s ‘‘ ‘I don’t
seem to remember a girl in the story’: Hollywood’s Disruption of Faulk-
ner’s All-Male Narrative in Today We Live’’ (pp. 65–78), Stephanie Li’s
‘‘Intruder in the Dust from Novel to Movie: The Development of Chick
Mallison’’ (pp. 105–18), Robert W. Hamblin’s ‘‘The Curious Case of
Faulkner’s ‘The De Gaulle Story’ ’’ (pp. 79–86), and William Furry’s
‘‘Faulkner in a Haystack: The Search for William Faulkner’s Adaptations
of ‘The Brooch’ and ‘Shall Not Perish’ ’’ (pp. 119–47). Hulsey oVers ‘‘an
intensive examination’’ of Today We Live and the art of adaptation,
employing a theoretical framework from Roland Barthes, Gérard Gen-
ette, Ivan Todorov, and René Girard. Hulsey identiŽ es and compares ‘‘the
major cardinal points’’ of the original short story and the screenplay,
emphasizing ‘‘how the transfers and changes contribute to the triangular
dynamics in each script’’ and concluding that Faulkner’s ‘‘screenplay is
exceedingly more complex than its prose counterpart.’’ Li Ž nds that ‘‘race
is continually revealed to be a central focal point for the formation of
white subjectivity’’ in both the novel and Ž lm version of Intruder in the
Dust, where the primary concern is with ‘‘the emergent social and per-
sonal consciousness’’ of Charles Mallison. The black characters are cre-
198 Faulkner

ated ‘‘as abstractions constructed by white psychic need,’’ which is not

surprising given the social order of Mississippi and the United States in
1948. Nonetheless, Li makes a convincing case that Faulkner ought to be
considered ‘‘not the creator of an entire universe, but a single, subjective
participant in this one.’’ Of particular interest is Li’s speculation on the
eVect of casting a Puerto Rican man to portray Lucas Beauchamp, a man
whose fair skin makes him ‘‘misplaced and incongruous’’ but who may
have been cast in an attempt to Ž lm Faulkner’s conception of racial
transcendence. Hamblin oVers an elucidating study of Faulkner’s work
on ‘‘The de Gaulle Story,’’ work which further reveals Faulkner’s lifelong
concern with ‘‘the fundamental con ict between fact and Ž ction.’’ In the
course of collaborating on this project Faulkner encountered resistance
from French oYcials concerning his apparent lack of interest in the facts
of Charles de Gaulle’s life. The project was abandoned by Warner Bros.
and the movie was not produced until 1990, when a French television
company released Moi, General de Gaulle, based on Faulkner’s script.
Furry relays how his search for materials relating to the production of the
‘‘Barn Burning’’ Ž lm resulted in his discovery of two Faulkner television
adaptations, ‘‘The Brooch’’ and ‘‘Shall Not Perish,’’ written for Lux Video
Theatre, and oVers an analysis of Faulkner’s work on the teleplays, Ž nding
him, as always, quite willing to make ‘‘dramatic alterations’’ to his own
work. The teleplays were not saved for their historical value but because
the sponsor’s advertisements were considered by the producers to be
‘‘worthy of preservation.’’ Neither adaptation was critically successful,
and ‘‘The Brooch’’ earned Faulkner an accusation by the New York Times
of betraying ‘‘his responsibility to sustain high standards.’’ Gene M.
Moore does similar work in ‘‘A Film for Emily’’ (pp. 87–84), comparing
the Ž lm version of ‘‘A Rose for Emily’’ with the short story —although
Faulkner did not write the screenplay in this case. Drawing on the Ž lm-
adaptation scholarship of George Bluestone, Moore Ž nds that the award-
winning Ž lm ‘‘dampens and mutes much of the social clarity and vivid-
ness of Faulkner’s story’’ and, worse, ‘‘the Ž lm seems to have been made in
a didactic and solemn spirit, as beŽ ts a boring classic.’’ And as the Ž lm is
used frequently in classrooms, one wonders what sorts of misconceptions
it has bred about Faulkner since its release in 1982.
Noel Polk’s ‘‘Testing Masculinity in the Snopes Trilogy’’ (FJ 16, iii
[Addendum]: 3–22) Ž nds in Snopes a phallus-haunted landscape where
horses, farming, hunting, porch-sitting, and even the overdetermined
narratives of race relations serve ‘‘as a mask for gender’’ or, more speciŽ -
Joseph R. Urgo 199

cally, sexual drama. ‘‘Nobody more’’ than Faulkner ‘‘understood how our
culture works to rob men and women both of an instinctual sexual life, by
forcing them to conform to a performative sexual role.’’ Polk’s thesis is
exempliŽ ed by numerous examples which remind us of the sexual ener-
gies that run throughout the Faulkner canon and the degree to which
Faulkner’s thinking contributes to the intellectual history of sexuality.
Martyn Bone in ‘‘ ‘All the Confederate Dead . . . All of Faulkner the
Great’: Faulkner, Hannah, Neo-Confederate Narrative and Postsouthern
Parody’’ (MissQ 45: 197–211) examines two stories by Barry Hannah
identiŽ ed as rewrites of scenes from Flags in the Dust and other works
where Hannah may be seen as oVering ‘‘a parodic take on the literary
legacy’’ of Faulkner’s Civil War narratives. Bone also examines Faulkner’s
own revisions to the Confederate nationalism of the generation which
preceded his (in Flags, Absalom, Absalom!, and ‘‘A Return’’), making the
essay a study of ‘‘military-ancestral anxiety of in uence.’’ Owen Robin-
son in ‘‘Monuments and Footprints: The Mythology of Flem Snopes’’ (FJ
17, i: 69–85) reexplicates the thesis that Flem is a product of his environ-
ment, that he does not invade so much as master established forms of
behavior in his community. Saussurian semiology by way of Roland
Barthes’s Mythologies provides theoretical scaVolding for the reaYrma-
tion of the ways in which Flem ‘‘takes something apparently Ž xed and
deforms it into something else, thereby denying the monumental quality
that it had previously assumed and using and adapting it to make his own
mark.’’ Robinson unsystematically engages the critical work of Cleanth
Brooks and Myra Jehlen and builds on their fascination with Flem’s
evolution throughout the Snopes trilogy.
Of interest to Faulkner scholars is a volume of essays ed. Dorothy M.
Scura and Paul C. Jones, Evelyn Scott. Scott was an external reader of the
manuscript of The Sound and the Fury and wrote a highly in uential
assessment of it that was published alongside the novel. She was also at
work on a retelling of the Christ story, set during the French Revolution,
when A Fable appeared —at which time she abandoned her novel as no
longer relevant. The book contains no separate essay on the Scott-
Faulkner connection, unfortunately.

iv Individual Works to 1929

Ted Atkinson’s ‘‘Aesthetic Ideology in Faulkner’s Mosquitoes: A Cultural
History’’ (FJ 17, i: 3–18) is a brilliant study of ‘‘Faulkner’s exploration of
200 Faulkner

the competing aesthetic ideologies’’ of late-1920s literary culture. Ac-

knowledging narrative as the weakness of the novel, Atkinson makes a
strong case that ‘‘the very contradictions that diminish the value of
Mosquitoes in terms of artistic achievement render it an important artifact
of a pivotal moment in American cultural history.’’ SpeciŽ cally, Faulkner
addresses the con ict between social realism and formalism in the novel,
working out the implications of each position ‘‘in terms of characteriza-
tion, thematic content, and form’’ in advance of the literary class war
which would mark the following decade. Aesthetic principles in the novel
are presented and challenged, defended and rebuked, showing the young
novelist to have internalized the con icts which would rage in the 1930s,
when his own work, as we now know, would encompass the spectrum of
formalism and social realism, making major advances in novelistic form
while anticipating the social and cultural issues of race, gender, and class
relations. Astute Faulkner scholars will discover in Atkinson’s example a
range of work still to be done in Faulkner studies.
One of three excellent source studies, Jo LeCoeur’s ‘‘Two-Basket Struc-
ture in The Sound and the Fury ’’ (POMPA, pp. 9–14), presents evidence
that the four-part structure of the novel derives from a traditional Choc-
taw storytelling concept. A Choctaw basket has two walls, and a two-
basket story has four versions, requiring four speakers from four perspec-
tives. With at least one night’s sleep between each telling, three speakers
tell the tale in succession with emphasis Ž rst on sensory perceptions,
second on historical background, and third on comic elements. The last
storyteller, chosen from among those in the audience for the Ž rst three
versions, ‘‘must not have participated in nor witnessed any of the story’s
events, and is therefore unable to rely on previous knowledge or Ž rsthand
experience.’’ The last teller, exercising judgment and memory skills and
charged with oVering a forecast for the future, combines ‘‘synthesis and
prophesy.’’ LeCoeur speculates that Faulkner likely came into close con-
tact with Choctaw oral tradition in 1925, when he lived a few blocks away
from where ‘‘Choctaw basket sellers and storytellers set up among the
vegetable stalls’’ in the New Orleans French Market. A second, important
source study is Stephen M. Ross’s ‘‘Jason Compson and Sut Lovingood:
Southwestern Humor as Stream of Consciousness,’’ pp. 236–346 in
Humor of the Old South, which reads Jason’s monologue alongside Sut
Lovingood’s Yarns to explicate ‘‘a convergence of tone’’ and to claim Sut as
Jason’s ‘‘closest ancestor in American literature.’’ The essay explores
rhythms of speech and idiom as well as the ‘‘emotional brutality’’ in
Joseph R. Urgo 201

Jason’s psyche by which Faulkner darkens further the pessimism of

George Washington Harris’s humor: ‘‘Sut’s world becomes Jason’s men-
tality, raised to a shriller pitch.’’ However, what Faulkner does not de-
velop in Jason is ‘‘Sut’s most redeeming trait —the ability to laugh at
himself,’’ resulting in a character who is ‘‘genuinely malignant.’’
Michelle Ann Abate in ‘‘The Man with the (Gay) Red Tie in Faulk-
ner’s The Sound and the Fury ’’ (MissQ 54: 294–312) oVers one of the most
original and provocative essays on the novel in years. This carefully
researched essay ‘‘outs’’ the man with whom Quentin leaves town at the
end of the novel by revealing his character to be coded homosexual. Abate
presents historical fashion evidence that ‘‘from the 1890s until the 1940s
red neckties were among the most common and famous symbols used by
gay males to identify themselves to others.’’ Abate then teases out a
number of implications arising from Quentin’s partnership with a gay
man (including a major, positive reassessment of her sexual morality) and
links the character to other homosexual associations in Faulkner’s work
and biography.
Stacy Burton in ‘‘Rereading Faulkner: Authority, Criticism, and The
Sound and the Fury ’’ (MP 98: 604–28) rightly takes critics to task for
giving undue weight to ‘‘Appendix: Compson’’ and to the various written
and oral comments on the novel Faulkner made in his lifetime (eVorts by
Faulkner to provide ‘‘a Ž nal, deŽ nitive version of the Compson story’’)
and admonishes readers to ‘‘approach Faulkner’s later narratives about
this narrative much more skeptically.’’ Helpfully pointing out the ways in
which ‘‘Appendix: Compson’’ is a skewed and often reductive reading of
the novel and the ways in which Faulkner’s responses to questions about
the novel fostered myths and misreadings for a generation, Burton asserts
that ‘‘the modern novelist may pose as a traditional author but cannot be
one,’’ and that Faulkner’s postpublication statements should be read not
as deŽ nitive or even authoritative but ‘‘as novelistic discourse’’ subject to
the usual critical interventions. Nonetheless, whether ‘‘Appendix: Comp-
son’’ leads to misreadings or good readings, the fact of its existence in the
textual history of The Sound and the Fury and within Faulkner’s sense of
himself as ‘‘sole owner and proprietor’’ presents a multidimensional chal-
lenge in Faulkner studies, aVecting authorship, critical authority, inter-
pretive strategy, and textual scholarship. Even reading more skeptically
will not overpass the skepticism embedded in Faulkner’s audacity in
creating the appendix in the Ž rst place.
Merrill Horton’s ‘‘Quentin Compson’s Suicide: A Source in Balzac’’ (FJ
202 Faulkner

17, i: 59–67) adds to the growing critical literature on Faulkner’s uses of

La Comédie Humaine with a parallel between Quentin’s suicide and a
character from The Old Maid. Horton goes on to draw useful lines of
in uence in the shared suicide motif in Balzac and Faulkner and the ways
in which self-annihilation functions in each author’s overall aesthetics.
Steven Carter in ‘‘A Note on Hemingway’s ‘Ten Indians’ and Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury ’’ (HN 20, ii: 103–06) suggests a source for Jason’s
‘‘good piece of meat’’ exchange with his niece Quentin in the Hemingway
story, where Dr. Adams implores Nick to ‘‘have another piece.’’ Peter
Hays in ‘‘Chaucer’s and Faulkner’s Pear Trees: An Arboreal Discussion’’
(ELN 38, iv: 57–64) Ž nds a source for the pear tree that Caddy climbs up
and daughter Quentin climbs down within a ‘‘string of parallels’’ in the
novel to ‘‘The Merchant’s Tale,’’ where Chaucer used the same tree as ‘‘the
site of a woman’s deception.’’

v Individual Works, 1930–1939

Charles A. Peek discusses Faulkner’s place in intellectual history in
‘‘ ‘A-laying there, right up to my door’: As American as As I Lay Dying ’’
(Faulkner in America, pp. 116–35), bringing two contexts to the novel: the
‘‘good roads movement’’ of the early 20th century, particularly the recep-
tion of that program in the South and its relation to taxation and to the
growing role of government in the lives of Mississippi farmers, and the
culture of the Bible among the peasantry, or the way biblical phrases and
stories informed a worldview and provided metaphoric and allegorical
touchstones of understanding and questioning the world of experience.
Peek extrapolates from the crossing of road and God an American duality
between the materialism of capital and Christian faith, between the
desire for transcendence and respect for pragmatic methods, ultimately
between the sacred and the profane. Faulkner in Peek’s explication re-
stores the sense that American spiritualism and American materialism are
extremes on a continuum, which at the point of crossing provide human
energies unparalleled through most of history.
Rita Rippletoe in ‘‘Unstained Shirt, Stained Character: Anse Bundren
Reread’’ (MissQ 54: 313–25) presents medical evidence which quite con-
vincingly diagnoses Anse Bundren as suVering from anhidrosis, a condi-
tion brought on by heatstroke marked by a serious and in the climate of
Mississippi very dangerous inability to expel heat through perspiration.
Medical knowledge in the 1920s advised anhidrosis patients to curtail
Joseph R. Urgo 203

physical or mental work in periods of high temperatures. Anse Bundren’s

notorious laziness, for which he has been condemned by most readers of
the novel in the past century, is reassessed by Rippletoe as his own
‘‘realistic appraisal of a serious and chronic health condition’’; she traces
his condition to an illness suVered soon after his marriage to Addie that
changed both his physical status and his personality. Further injuries to
Anse’s body —references to an incapacitating back injury, deformed feet,
teeth removed after rotting —attest to Faulkner’s painstaking account of
the ways in which illness and ‘‘misfortune’’ erode human bodies in pov-
erty. Less useful is Amado Chan’s ‘‘Stereotypical, but Revengeful and
DeŽ ant: Addie Bundren in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying ’’ ( JEP 22, iii–iv:
118–22), which Ž nds in Addie Bundren a character who is ‘‘more complex
than villainous, incompetent, unfulŽ lled, or dead’’ but is also ‘‘deŽ ant
and revengeful.’’
Florence W. Dore in ‘‘Free Speech and Exposure: Obscenity, the
Phallus, and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary ’’ (Narrative 9: 78–99) places
the novel in the context of contemporaneous obscenity law. Unlike Ulys-
ses, for example, Sanctuary, although often judged to be lewd by com-
plainants, was never judged obscene by a U.S. court. Dore takes up the
novel’s twin reputation as both elliptical and obscene and asks, ‘‘How
does a novel that can be described as ‘silent’ produce such surety about its
‘Ž lth’?’’ The approach produces one of the more original and instructive
essays on Sanctuary in decades. Dore’s thesis is that ‘‘Sanctuary ’s silence is
an instance of censorship law ‘in’ the literary text’’ —that is to say, the text
is lewd only in that it is quite clear to readers what is censored or
squelched by Faulkner’s language, and even its obscenity is unquestion-
ably ‘‘there.’’ ‘‘Faulkner depicts representation,’’ suggests Dore, ‘‘as a
threat to that which nonetheless compels it,’’ and she identiŽ es parallels
between the logic of obscenity law and the novel’s narrative strategy.
Faulkner’s novel works the very idea of obscenity into its structure. Only
when readers articulate what ‘‘remains unsaid’’ in the text is the obscenity
revealed, but the revelation is not legally actionable because it is not
present in the text. Further, the novel presents bodies that possess secrets
that are simultaneously open and concealed, liable to become obscene
upon revelation. Centering on Temple Drake’s rape, her fantasies of
physical transformation, and on the fact of the impotent rapist, Dore
claims provocatively that what obscenity laws (and Sanctuary ) preserve is
‘‘the disastrous ‘reality’ of bodily inadequacy.’’ Maggie Gordon’s ‘‘(Dis)lo-
cating Evil in the Detective Novel and Film Noir: Faulkner’s Sanctuary
204 Faulkner

and Lynch’s Blue Velvet ’’ (Clues 22: 53–77) is an extensive and quite
thorough comparison of the ways in which the novel and movie reveal
‘‘similar employment and subversion of the generic conventions of classic
detective Ž ction’’ so that both ‘‘explode the conventions of such commer-
cially popular genres as the detective novel and Ž lm noir, respectively.’’
Gordon locates a wealth of parallels, including the middle-class town
with a vicious underbelly, heroes who learn to locate evil in their own
backyards, the casting of the female body as ‘‘the central site of contention
between the hero and the villain,’’ and the projection of the biological but
not social paradox, the impotent rapist. All parallels are impressionistic as
there is no evidence of Faulkner’s direct in uence on David Lynch’s work.
Light in August continues to beguile. Laura Doyle’s ‘‘The Body Against
Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race’’ (AL 73: 339–64) reminds us
of the ways in which the novel ‘‘serves as a guide to our ongoing entangle-
ment in the snarled legacies of violence, the body, and the South’’ and
ultimately ‘‘anchors these legacies in the reader.’’ Postcolonial terminol-
ogy makes arguments such as ‘‘the colonization of the body through the
sign of race’’ accessible to scholars trained in this tradition. Some of
Doyle’s comments about Faulknerian ambiguity (e.g., ‘‘Faulkner as au-
thor of the novel remains inscrutable’’) and her surprise at ‘‘Faulkner’s
grasp of the complex social drama he represents’’ reveal that discomfort
with Faulkner’s intellect persists into new schools of criticism. However,
less is revealed about the artist than the critic, who is genuinely torn
between what she calls ‘‘the heroism and the delusion of art’’ as she faces a
novel that ‘‘feeds on these habitual equivocations’’ and will not serve the
present cause or concern. Krister Friday’s ‘‘Miscegenated Time: The
Spectral Body, Race, and Temporality in Light in August’’ (FJ 16, iii: 41–
63) is an excellent bridge connecting criticism on race with studies of
time and history. Friday argues that the pervasive trope of miscegenation
in Faulkner represents ‘‘not just pivotal events to be denied or rued but
the very process of historical change and genealogical transmission.’’
Supported theoretically by Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Homi Bhabha’s
Location of Culture, Friday Ž nds that the greatest threat to the commu-
nity presented by Joe Christmas’s ambiguous racial identity is his disrup-
tion of the ‘‘belief in the pastness of the past and the presence of the
present’’ or the very basis of temporality. Joe’s racial identity is always
revealed after he has passed, so that the white characters who Ž nally learn
(or think they learn) who he is must relearn what they think has hap-
pened. As a result, ‘‘Joe compels, even in his absence, a frantic revision of
Joseph R. Urgo 205

the past’’ in which signs of ‘‘whiteness’’ and ‘‘blackness’’ are confused,

disrupting racial and historical ideologies simultaneously.
Deborah Clarke in ‘‘Humorously Masculine —or Humor as Mascu-
linity —in Light in August’’ (FJ 27, i: 19–35) asks, If ‘‘humor is a measure of
masculinity, how can masculinity, reduced to a  oating compilation of
traits and behaviors, be anything more than a joke’’ or a construct? There
is ample evidence throughout Faulkner for this conclusion, which critics
are reaching today through the lens of performance theory. Clarke exam-
ines a pattern in Faulkner of ‘‘covering masculine anxiety with humor’’
and employing humor in ‘‘the uneasy construction of male identity in
Yoknapatawpha County.’’ Textual evidence reveals such humor to be a
deadly business, serving to ‘‘establish a pattern of dominance’’ in a mas-
culine ideology ‘‘that needs to deŽ ne itself as superior to something else.’’
Thus, while masculinity may well be ‘‘nothing more than a construct,’’ it
functions in a world of socially constructed reality where, in the eyes of
readers, women like Lena Grove prevail because they learn constructive
manipulation of both masculine and feminine codes and men like Joe
Christmas are destroyed because, in Clarke’s Ž ne reading, they never get
the joke. Beth Widmaier in ‘‘Black Female Absence and the Construction
of White Womanhood in Faulkner’s Light in August’’ (FJ 16, iii: 23–37)
oVers an enlightening examination of ‘‘the connection between the ab-
sent presence of the black female body and the markers of race and sex-
uality that deŽ ne Southern black and white womanhood,’’ particularly
the process by which white female subjectivity is constructed through
black absence. Some of this is familiar, echoing Southern historians’ work
on the status of white women. Nonetheless, Widmaier successfully re-
veals Light in August as fully participating in this ideological matrix, with
black female subjectivity ‘‘presented as a void’’ and as ‘‘a composite of
fragmentary traces scattered throughout’’ the narrative. Widmaier sur-
veys every black female’s appearance in the novel, including Joe Christ-
mas’s forced aYnity with their absence in his climactic encounter with
Percy Grimm.
Alex Vernon’s ‘‘Narrative Miscegenation: Absalom, Absalom! as Natu-
ralist Novel, Auto/Biography, and African-American Oral Story’’ ( JNT
31: 155–79) Ž nds the content of racial intermixing structurally reinforced
by a ‘‘ ‘cross-breed’ of several literary forms,’’ many of them associated
with African American culture in the South. In particular, Faulkner
crosses the naturalist novel (e.g., Sutpen’s beastlike character and beastly
depictions of slaves) with the autobiographical (with Quentin as author),
206 Faulkner

both of which ultimately give way to oral storytelling —exempliŽ ed by

Sutpen’s refusal of the past and in Quentin and Shreve’s retelling of the
tale. As a result, while invoking the naturalist novel, Absalom, Absalom!
‘‘deconstructs the very notion of strict genre categorization by interweav-
ing it with other genres’’ and thus uses ‘‘this generic deconstruction to
challenge strict racial categorizations.’’ Sutpen’s voice and those of subse-
quent narrators all culminate in oral storytelling, which ‘‘becomes a
redemptive form of memory, adaptation, and survival’’ through which
Faulkner ‘‘locates his solution to the debilitating aspects of Southern
culture by aYrming the South’s African-American heritage.’’ Peter Lurie’s
‘‘ ‘Some Trashy Myth of Reality’s Escape’: Romance, History, and Film
Viewing in Absalom, Absalom! ’’ (AL 73: 563–97) advances our under-
standing of the relationship between that novel and American cinema
aesthetically and ideologically. Lurie places Faulkner’s work in the con-
text of Ž lms like D. W. GriYth’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) to argue that
in Absalom, Absalom! he critiques ‘‘the reiŽ ed, commodiŽ ed relationship
to history he saw early Ž lm encourage.’’ Lurie does his best work, though,
on Faulkner’s aesthetics, as when explaining the Faulknerian long sen-
tence (especially in Rosa’s narrative) as ‘‘not a sentence at all, but, rather,
a continuous sequence that (like the Ž lm image) commands a rapt,
unbroken attention.’’ In the experience of reading Faulkner, ‘‘the sen-
suous or material properties of language overtake its referential func-
tion,’’ which Lurie provocatively calls ‘‘a verbal approximation of Ž lm.’’
As a result, when we read Faulkner at his most nonreferential, we ‘‘ ‘watch’
the language perform or experience it in passing, like the shifting imagery
upon the Ž lm screen.’’ Lurie also examines the parallels between Quentin
and the Ž lm viewer and his collaboration with Shreve to produce roman-
ticized versions of the past.
While overstating the absence of criticism on the novel, Cynthia
Dobbs in ‘‘Flooded: The Excesses of Geography, Gender, and Capitalism
in Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem ’’ (AL 73: 811–35) eVectively charts
Faulkner’s exploration of ‘‘his culture’s fear of radical  uidity in ways that
connect women’s bodies . . . to both a radically feminized landscape and a
dangerously volatile free-market economy.’’ Within old debates about
whether the depiction of misogyny indicts the writer (‘‘we are, I think,
meant to look askance at the convict’s perspective on women’’) Dobbs
clariŽ es the economic implications of pregnancy in the 1930s and the
resultant male ambivalence toward reproduction —especially concerning
its control. For example, while ‘‘the Doctor is horriŽ ed by an aborted
Joseph R. Urgo 207

pregnancy . . . the convict is terriŽ ed by a ‘successful’ one’’ and both men

re ect their culture generally in their ‘‘fear of female agency and power.’’

vi Individual Works, 1940–1949

Richard Godden in ‘‘A Phenomenological Reading of The Hamlet as a
Rebuke to an American Century’’ (Faulkner in America, pp. 1–23) reads
the episode of Ike and the cow within a nexus of ‘‘comparative idiocy’’ in
Faulkner that includes Benjy Compson, Isaac McCaslin, Rider, Henry
Armstid, and Jim Bond. These characters are linked into a recognizable
and socially signiŽ cant pattern by the autochthonous qualities they share.
Ike provides the paradigmatic example of a character who reenters the
earth, in this case through what Godden argues is a seminal relation with
the cow. Isaac rejoins the natural world through less physical but far more
consequential means. Godden leans toward ecocritical and anti-Lockean
implications, seeing in the earth a gravitational ecology whereby agricul-
tural labor alienates human beings from spiritual fulŽ llment and traps
them within situations where, like Henry Armstid at the end of The
Hamlet, they quite literally are seen to dig their own social identities
through their labor. As a result, Godden is able to acknowledge but
transcend standard readings of The Hamlet which see in it the onset of
market capitalism intruding on an agricultural economy.
In a Ž ne example of the con uence of textual scholarship and inter-
pretation, Linda Wagner-Martin in ‘‘Go Down, Moses: Faulkner’s Interro-
gation of the American Dream’’ (Faulkner in America, pp. 136–52) reads
the novel through the narrative with which Faulkner began the composi-
tion process, ‘‘Pantaloon in Black.’’ Wagner-Martin calls it ‘‘Faulkner’s
most eloquent evocation of human pain,’’ a lament not only for the loss
of a spouse ‘‘but for a lost life.’’ A succession of textual examples examine
the way in which Faulkner displays the insuYciency of the American
Dream to provide signiŽ cant resources for the contemplation of genuine,
emotional loss. Wagner-Martin enters the text not through its white male
characters, but through Rider, Zack, and the black characters. She notes
examples of the damage to those excluded from the American Dream by
birth as well as to those who gain it only to see it fail to sustain them
through times of intense emotional or psychological need. Erik Dussere
in ‘‘Accounting for Slavery: Economic Narratives in Morrison and Faulk-
ner’’ (MFS 47: 329–55) applies scholarship from the Ž eld of critical
accounting to read the ledgers in part 4 of ‘‘The Bear’’ in Go Down, Moses
208 Faulkner

with particular attention to the system of double-entry bookkeeping

which ‘‘underlies any system of modern accounting.’’ Faulkner conspic-
uously contrasts ‘‘numeric representation and brevity,’’ the language of
the ledger book fulŽ lling its ideological function as ‘‘the very model for
what is considered factual, and thus truthful,’’ with ‘‘his longest, most
baroque, most outraged emotive sentences,’’ language drawn, perhaps
ironically, from ‘‘the cadences of the King James Bible.’’ The eVect, in
Dussere’s Ž nely wrought analysis, is ‘‘an attempt to force the violence and
suVering of slavery oV the pages of the ledger and into the foreground.’’
Despite the functional demands of accountancy, the ledger books cannot
be balanced because the debt is beyond the capacity of bookkeeping.
Isaac and all those who reach this end in their attempt to repay such debts
‘‘have no choice but to reject the ledger, but they know even before they
reject it that it will persist.’’ Dussere traces ‘‘the importance and per-
sistence of economic discourse in our thinking about race in America’’
from Go Down, Moses to works by Toni Morrison.
Dussere also applies his distinctive economic perspective in ‘‘The
Debts of History: Southern Honor, AYrmative Action, and Faulkner’s
Intruder in the Dust ’’ (FJ 17, i: 37–57) to oVer a valuable reading of the
function of ‘‘money and property, responsibility and reparation’’ in the
novel. He pays particular attention to ‘‘competing Northern and South-
ern’’ ideas about desegregation based on ‘‘contentious questions of what
sort of debt’’ slavery represents, ‘‘who owes it, and how it is to be repaid.’’
Dussere is especially interested in probing Faulkner’s sense of how ‘‘the
South has disavowed the economics at the heart of its antebellum social
systems.’’ The novel rejects ‘‘problems of remuneration’’ and ‘‘the radi-
cally unpayable money or property value that might be owed to slaves . . .
or their descendents’’ and constructs ‘‘an alternate set of terms within
which any discussion of money or property would be unthinkable, inap-
propriate.’’ The profoundly conservative nature of the novel is in its
alternative, ‘‘a facile assumption of repayment to be oVered in the inde-
terminate future,’’ and in its preoccupation not for or against racial
justice but against ‘‘capitalist Northernization’’ with its debt-model of
racial reconciliation.

vii Individual Works, 1950–1962

Two essays on A Fable appear in Faulkner in America: Catherine Gunther
Kodat’s ‘‘Writing A Fable for America’’ (pp. 82–97) and Joseph R. Urgo’s
Joseph R. Urgo 209

‘‘Where Was that Bird? Thinking America through Faulkner’’ (pp. 98–
115). In the preface to A Fable Faulkner acknowledges James Street’s Look
Away as the source for a speciŽ c passage in his novel but there is nothing
in Look Away that resembles the passage for which Faulkner expresses a
debt. Urgo Ž nds the false source claim emblematic of Faulkner’s aesthetic
practice in the text, which contains less representation than declaration,
‘‘a way to think America, a cognitive practice rooted in an American
cultural ideology.’’ That ecology is a tendency toward the performative,
which is traced in this essay from linguistic claims made in the Declara-
tion of Independence, through Sutpen’s ‘‘Be Sutpen’s Hundred,’’ and into
A Fable ’s  ight away from the representational function of literature
toward the potential of literary declaration to create reality. Included in
the essay is a minor compendium of those occasions on which Faulkner
denied the centrality of the mimetic or symbolic aspects of his Ž ction,
leading his interlocutor instead to a consideration of language, craft, and
articulation. Kodat redeŽ nes the terms by which we might read this
novel, away from the biographical (‘‘late Faulkner’’) or the evaluative
(‘‘bad Faulkner’’) toward literary, economic, and cultural implications of
the text, in terms of both its production and its eVect. Calling the novel
Faulkner’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin because of the sentimentality with which it
casts political issues as family dramas (e.g., the General and his son, the
corporal), Kodat implicitly raises deŽ nitional questions: If sentimental
Ž ction recognizes sympathetic feeling as the glue holding together the
social, in Faulkner’s novel that glue is both weakened by the wedge of
military authority and replaced by it, so that corporate-military hier-
archies replace sympathetic connections as the phenomena of social co-
hesion. Kodat ingeniously connects the desire for such ties to the per-
sistence of Freemasonry in the novel, a matter which has confounded
critics. The Masonic ‘‘brotherhood’’ is the masculine counterpart to what
is often considered feminine sentimentality —Freemasonry is sentimen-
talism reiŽ ed. According to Kodat, ‘‘the frustrating and ungainly aspects
of A Fable are best accounted for when we read the novel as a book about
America’’ that includes ‘‘Faulkner’s most sustained meditation on Ameri-
can philosophies and American aesthetics at the moment of the United
States’ ascension to global power via the twin forces of military victory
and mass cultural expansion.’’ When American culture achieved hege-
monic status among the victorious nations of World War II, it could
no longer cast itself as ‘‘the runner’’ among nations; it had become,
despite its national rhetoric of revolution and youth, the Generalissimo
210 Faulkner

of nation-states. Links between Faulkner’s and Huxley’s attitudes toward

nationalism are explored by Sanford Marovitz in ‘‘A ‘Phantasy’ and A
Fable: Huxley and Faulkner on Nationalism and War’’ (Aldous Huxley
Annual 1: 175–89), speciŽ cally in parallels between Huxley’s Ape and
Essence (1948) and Faulkner’s 1954 war novel. Both writers lived and
worked in Hollywood in the 1940s, and while no evidence exists to
suggest they met, Marovitz presents intellectual parallels to suggest ‘‘a
remarkable similarity that exists in their expressed views on the relation
of nationalism to religion, war—and language.’’

viii The Short Stories

Bradley A. Johnson’s ‘‘Constructing the Female Gaze in Faulkner’s
‘Mountain Victory’ (FJ 16, iii: 65–80) reads the story through the per-
spective of the nameless daughter, the character around whom ‘‘revolve
the violent and self-destructive actions of the other characters’’ and who is
consistently depicted as a witness. In uenced by feminist Ž lm theory,
particularly that of Mary Ann Doane, Johnson recasts a study in point of
view in new terms, reaYrming a Faulknerian complication of perspec-
tive: ‘‘a male author creates a female character viewing a male character,
and he makes the reader an accomplice in the viewing.’’ The girl, a
socially marginal character, is another example of Faulkner’s projection of
dominance through the eyes of the dominated, and in this case ‘‘the girl
forces the underlying structures of patriarchy into the light, to reveal its
insidious values, even though doing so will not bring about change.’’
Finally, Abid Vali in ‘‘Faulkner’s ‘Turnabout’ ’’ (Expl 59: 201–02) argues
that rather than a tall tale of war this story ‘‘is carefully designed both as a
tribute to the craft of the soldier and a re ection on the sorrows of war.’’
University of Mississippi
10 Fitzgerald and Hemingway
Albert J. DeFazio III

For Hemingway, this year’s distinguishing feature is the willingness of

critics to treat a broader range of his canon than is their custom: while
The Sun Also Rises and the short stories continue to attract the most
interest, relatively neglected stories and novels garner thoughtful consid-
eration as well. For Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night
attract the most critical attention, though his perpetually delightful sec-
ond act is marked this year by a host of signiŽ cant editions, discussions of
correspondence, bibliographies, and biographies.

i Texts, Letters, Archives, and Bibliography

Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-six Stories, ed. Mathew J. Bruccoli with
Judith S. Baughman (So. Car.), arranges the tales according to their date
of composition rather than publication so that readers might better
perceive Fitzgerald’s extraordinary development. For stories that the au-
thor reworked, Bruccoli publishes the revised work; otherwise he reprints
the magazine version, silently altering accidentals and stipulating sub-
stantive emendations. More than 50 illustrations, many of them repro-
ductions from pages of the Saturday Evening Post, complement the text,
and each story is followed by helpful explanatory notes. Bruccoli’s intro-
duction documents Fitzgerald’s evolution as a short-story writer and
addresses the author’s attitude toward this facet of his literary career. The
Modern Library’s This Side of Paradise includes a chatty introduction by
Susan Orlean and brief critical excerpts by H. L. Mencken, Edmund
Wilson, Glenway Wescott, John Peale Bishop, and Arthur Mizener. Un-
fortunately, the introductory material contains not a jot about the text,
which begins ‘‘Well This side of Paradise! . . . / There’s little comfort on the
wise ’’ rather than ‘‘. . . Well, This side of paradise / There’s little comfort in the
212 Fitzgerald and Hemingway

wise, ’’ as does the Cambridge edition. James L. W. West III contributes

‘‘Two Things You Should Know about the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edi-
tion’’ (FSN 11: 9–11), reminding readers that the series oVers ‘‘provi-
sional,’’ not ‘‘deŽ nitive’’ editions and that those editions are ‘‘public’’
documents which require the editor to resolve inconsistencies, not ‘‘pri-
vate’’ ones which might preserve idiosyncrasies.
Patrick Hemingway provides an engaging, anecdotal foreword to
Hemingway on Hunting (Lyons), ed. with an introduction by Seán
Hemingway (son of Gregory who passed away this year). This 300-page
anthology includes short stories, selections from books (the largest share
from Green Hills of Africa ), essays, and a few excerpts from letters. Newly
anthologized are excerpts from Garden of Eden and True at First Light. Of
the two dozen glossy photographs, several will be new to most readers.
A. E. Hotchner’s televised adaptation of Hemingway’s short story, pub-
lished as ‘‘After the Storm’’: The Story, Plus the Screenplay & a Commentary
(Carroll), earned well-deserved unfavorable reviews.
Overlooked last year was an important article on the Fitzgeralds’ corre-
spondence. Jackson R. Bryer’s ‘‘ ‘Torches of Fury’: The Correspondence
of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,’’ pp. 65–80 in American Literary Dimen-
sions: Poems and Essays in Honor of Melvin J. Friedman, ed. Ben Siegel and
Jay L. Halio (Delaware, 1999), draws on mostly unpublished letters
between Scott and Zelda, allowing them to account for the ebbs and
 ows of the complex relationship in their own words. Bryer also illus-
trates ‘‘Zelda’s gifts as a letter writer, as well as . . . the complex and often
contradictory forces that were at war in the personality of this Southern
belle/pre–Woman’s Liberation independent woman.’’
Led by general editor Sandra Spanier of Penn State, preparations for a
multivolume set of Hemingway’s letters are under way. Bruccoli pub-
lishes letters from Maxwell Perkins and Maurice Speiser about Heming-
way in keepsakes celebrating the opening of the Speiser & Easterling-
Hallman Foundation Collection of Ernest Hemingway at the University
of South Carolina (Columbia: Thomas Cooper Library). Drawing on the
published correspondence and the Ross-Hemingway archive at the New
York Public Library, Francis J. Bosha’s ‘‘Hemingway and The New Yorker:
The Harold Ross Files’’ (HN 21, i: 93–99) explains how Ross was unable
to land the author for the magazine but was successful in securing Hem-
ingway’s friendship.
Collectors will appreciate Bruccoli’s ‘‘Hemingway’s Salesman’s Dum-
Albert J. DeFazio III 213

mies’’ (DLB Yearbook 2000: 319–20), which includes photographs and

descriptive bibliographies for dummies of Death in the Afternoon, Winner
Take Nothing, and A Farewell to Arms, noting that fewer than 30 copies of
each were manufactured. Hard to classify are a pair of articles by David
Gregor from Firsts: The Book Collector’s Magazine. ‘‘Paris in the Twenties.
Part One: Where the World Came to Be Modern’’ (9, i [2000]: 26–37)
oVers a historical perspective on the era and includes numerous dust-
jacket photos and a list of 20 important books on the expatriate experi-
ence. ‘‘Paris in the Twenties. Part Two: Some of the Players Behind the
Celebrities’’ (9, ii [2000]: 20–32) provides a cultural and political per-
spective on the era, includes brief biographies of many expatriates, and
lists the 20 important memoirs of Paris in the ’20s.
The Thomas Cooper Library at South Carolina has acquired a copy of
the 1925 printing of This Side of Paradise belonging to John Biggs, execu-
tor of Fitzgerald’s estate, as well as a 1924 letter to Charles C. Baldwin in
which Fitzgerald claims to have ‘‘just Ž nished’’ his third novel, Gatsby,
before departing for Paris, as well as Artie Shaw’s unproduced musical
version of Gatsby (The F. Scott Fitzgerald Collection Notes of Thomas
Cooper Library, University of South Carolina 6, ii). James M. Roth’s
‘‘News from the Hemingway Collection’’ (HN 21, i: 123–24) announces
the acquisition of the papers of Jane Mason, which include correspon-
dence and a scrapbook. Charles M. Oliver’s Hemingway Newsletter (42:
9–10) publishes ‘‘Procedures for Requesting Permission to Publish Por-
tions of the Works of Ernest Hemingway.’’
In his welcome addition to the annotated bibliography, Christo-
pher D. Lewis provides a thorough headnote and 116 substantial annota-
tions on ‘‘Tender is the Night and the Critics: From 1982 to the Present’’
(BB 58: 109–24). Lewis’s list supplements Jackson R. Bryer’s invaluable
pair of works, The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Bibliograph-
ical Study (1967) and The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Bibli-
ographical Study—Supplement One Through 1981 (1984). Peter Coveny’s
review-essay includes a brief bibliography and canvasses the fruits of
‘‘The Hemingway Centennial’’ (Firsts: The Book Collector’s Magazine, 9, i
[2000]: 54–63) including new books, conferences and lectures, maga-
zines, Web sites, and nonprint events. I provide the ‘‘Current Bibliogra-
phy: Annotated’’ (HN 20, ii: 118–27 and 21, i: 108–17). The forthcoming
F. Scott Fitzgerald Review will now publish the annual bibliography that
previously appeared in the FSN.
214 Fitzgerald and Hemingway

ii Biography
Ruth Prigozy’s photographic biography F. Scott Fitzgerald (Overlook) in-
cludes an engaging, succinct life and more than 100 illustrations, many of
them in color, some previously unpublished. Several of Zelda’s paintings
as well as numerous stills from Ž lm adaptations are included. In prose
that is readable but not especially inviting, Taylor Kendall’s Sometimes
Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, A Marriage (Ballantine)
describes the diYcult marriage, but Kendall’s thesis becomes increasingly
transparent if not convincing: Zelda sought equality with her husband
but he thwarted her ambition; his behavior exacerbated her nervousness.
In short, Kendall blames the Fitzgeralds’ diYculties on Scott. Heming-
way does not fare any better in this text: he apparently wrote The Sun Also
Rises ‘‘hopeful of reaping big money and gaining recognition.’’ Kim
Moreland’s ‘‘Gerald Murphy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dick Diver: The
Artist’s Vocation’’ ( JML 23 [1999–2000]: 357–63) explains how Gerald
Murphy served not only as a model for Dick Diver but also as a ‘‘negative
exemplum’’ for Fitzgerald: while Murphy sacriŽ ced his art in response to
his son Patrick’s death, Fitzgerald ‘‘maintained a healthy balance between
the needs of his wife/child and his own needs as an artist.’’
In a rare deviation from the norm there are few biographical pieces on
Hemingway this year. Walter Houk’s ‘‘Lessons from Hemingway’s Cuban
Biographer’’ (NDQ 68, ii–iii: 132–55) corrects a litany of errors in Nor-
berto Fuentes’s Hemingway in Cuba, many of which seem due to faulty
translation. An overlooked item by Michael Reynolds bears mentioning:
‘‘A View from the Dig at Century’s End,’’ pp. 1–14 in Value and Vision in
American Literature: Literary Essays in Honor of Ray Lewis White, ed.
Joseph Candido (Ohio, 1999), pleads for the use of better methods in
compiling literary history and oVers a timeless observation: ‘‘We need
more scholars and fewer critics.’’ In a rambling, pleasant narrative about
visiting the graves of famous authors, Michael Malone in ‘‘The Old Man’’
(WilsonQ 25, iv: 24–32) dilates on debts, fathers, and winners as he
considers Hemingway’s gravestone stretched  at beneath three large ever-
green trees.

iii Sources and In uences

Most of the year’s work in source and in uence studies falls to Fitzgerald.
In his wide-ranging ‘‘Carraway’s Complaint’’ ( JML 24 [2000]: 161–71)
Albert J. DeFazio III 215

George Monteiro identiŽ es Washington Irving’s A History of New York,

from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty as the likely
source for the Ž nal sentences of Gatsby wherein Nick considers the fresh
green breast of the world that  owered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes.
Monteiro also considers the surprising signiŽ cance of the anecdote of
Columbus and the egg in light of Sherwood Anderson’s ‘‘The Egg.’’
Another source appears in ‘‘Literary History/Unsolved Mystery: The
Great Gatsby and the Hall-Mills Murder Case’’ (ANQ 14, iii: 33–39),
where Henry C. Phelps convincingly argues that this ‘‘notorious un-
solved murder case from 1922 . . . not only provided the writer with
important details, models, and suggestions for the Wilson subplot, but
in uenced many other aspects of Gatsby as well.’’ For example, George
Wilson’s character echoes James Mills’s description in newspaper ac-
counts, which also mention Simon Called Peter and a rendezvous spot
called Buccleuch Park.
Thomas P. Riggio’s ‘‘Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and the Question of In u-
ence,’’ pp. 234–47 in Theodore Dreiser and American Culture, ed. Yoshi-
nobu Hakutani (Delaware, 2000), encourages readers to pursue the ques-
tion because of thematic and narrative aYnities between the two writers.
While he admits a paucity of empirical evidence that would document
in uence (meetings, references in correspondence) Riggio notes that
Fitzgerald began to read Dreiser closely after publishing This Side of
Paradise. He provides passages in which Anthony Patch of The Beautiful
and Damned echoes Dreiser’s Hurstwood and suggests that An American
Tragedy gave Fitzgerald anxieties about his own Tender is the Night. He
recalls Maxwell Geismar’s demonstration of The Great Gatsby’s debt to
Dreiser’s ‘‘Vanity, Vanity, Saith the Preacher,’’ a sketch from Twelve Men
(1919). Riggio makes the reasonable claim that Dreiser’s work seems to
have inspired both the plot and the lyrical quality of the prose in The
Great Gatsby. While critics have made only modest claims about the
younger writer’s debt to the elder, Dreiser was equally reticent. Though
they were contemporaries, published stories in the same numbers of
magazines, and met once, Dreiser ‘‘refused to recognize Fitzgerald’s exis-
tence,’’ which may suggest that he sensed a rivalry. Robert Seguin’s ‘‘Res-
sentiment and the Social Poetics of The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald Reads
Cather’’ (MFS 46 [2000]: 917–40) pursues ‘‘that rather old-fashioned
thing, literary in uence, but in a new key, the emphasis upon aVect and
historical rhythm’’ toward the end of providing ‘‘a clearer understanding
of the ultimate social grounds of the literary achievement’’ of Gatsby.
216 Fitzgerald and Hemingway

Citing similarities in style and point of view, Seguin claims that Fitz-
gerald learned from A Lost Lady ‘‘Cather’s use of aVect as a means of
charting social space and cultural change.’’ Peter Mallios in ‘‘Undiscover-
ing the Country: Conrad, Fitzgerald, and Meta-National Form’’ (MFS
47: 356–90) argues that ‘‘the example of Conrad’s innovations in form
[especially in Nostromo ] enables Fitzgerald to resist precisely the ambi-
tions of authoritative national ‘discovery’ with which he began.’’
Richard Allan Davison’s brief ‘‘Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place’: Some Notes on American In uences,’’ pp. 81–98 in American
Literary Dimensions, suggests that ‘‘the human dignity in the face of
despair evidenced in the old man in ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ also
endures in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s ‘Ben Jonson Entertains a Man
from Stratford’ and ‘Mr. Flood’s Party,’ in Robert Frost’s ‘Desert Places’
and ‘Acquainted with the Night,’ and in Archibald MacLeish’s ‘The End
of the World’ ’’ because of their ‘‘sense of living with dignity in the
midst of nothingness, of living courageously despite a sense of annihila-
tion.’’ Keneth Kinnamon in ‘‘Wright, Hemingway, and the BullŽ ght,’’
pp. 157–64 in Richard Wright’s Travel Writing, contrasts Death in the
Afternoon with Wright’s Pagan Spain (1957), noting that Wright’s focus is
on the bull, Hemingway’s on the bullŽ ghter. He believes that Wright’s
book deserves a spot on ‘‘the required reading list of the English-speaking
aŽ cionado.’’ Pursuing a parallel is Dwight Eddins in ‘‘Of Rocks and
Marlin: The Existentialist Agon in Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea ’’ (HN 21, i: 68–77), which reads
Santiago’s story in light of Camus’s philosophy and determines that the
Ž sherman rejects metaphysical solutions and embraces ‘‘a philosophy
that locates a stark unresolvability deep in the scheme of things, and
prescribes courage and dignity in the face of it.’’ Peter L. Hays’s note
‘‘Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and James’s The Ambassadors’’ (HN 20,
ii: 90–98) argues that Hemingway was acquainted with James’s work
before writing The Sun Also Rises.

iv Criticism
a. Full-Length Studies Treating the intellectual milieu of both authors
is Ronald Berman’s Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties (Alabama).
Berman’s premise is that Hemingway and Fitzgerald were well informed,
through their reading and conversation, about the central intellectual
issues of their day addressing morality, meaning, drift, and value. Further,
Albert J. DeFazio III 217

he suggests that the authors consciously incorporated into their novels

and stories many of the philosophical inquiries being pursued by William
James, Alfred North Whitehead, Walter Lippmann, Edmund Wilson,
and others. One argument of this collection of interrelated essays (two of
the nine are reprinted) is that generalizations about the ’20s are invalid:
the decade was disintegrative; religious and social foundations disap-
peared along with the certainty they once oVered. Berman’s stated aim is
to connect the authors’ works with this disintegration and loss of cer-
tainty. He does this in his perceptive readings of The Sun Also Rises, where
Hemingway considers anti-Semitism in relation to Protestant and Cath-
olic ideologies; of ‘‘The Killers,’’ ‘‘Indian Camp,’’ and A Farewell to Arms,
where he exposes invalidated ideas; and again in Farewell where Heming-
way uses the ‘‘dialogue of question.’’ Among Fitzgerald’s works, Berman
documents moral drift (the refusal of humans to live the conscious life of
moral decision) in ‘‘The Ice Palace’’ and The Great Gatsby and reconsiders
the American dream. The refreshing features of Berman’s inquiry include
his willingness to grapple with ideas in language that is cogent and
accessible; additionally, he treats authors as if they were capable of having
ideas and of using their art to pursue those ideas in a Ž ctional context.
This is a pleasant relief from assessments that treat authors as little more
than ineVable waifs manufactured exclusively by social, political, or eco-
nomic forces. An excellent teaching tool, Reader’s Guide to The Great
Gatsby: Resources for Reading and Discussion (Great Books), explains the
philosophy and strategy of the ‘‘shared inquiry’’ method, reprints ‘‘Win-
ter Dreams’’ and passages for close-reading from Gatsby, and includes
thoughtful suggestions for writing. Brief essays or excerpts in the ‘‘Back-
grounds and Context’’ section cover ‘‘Coolidge Prosperity,’’ sports, jazz,
the  apper, the bootlegger, the Horatio Alger myth, Thorstein Veblen’s
theory of conspicuous consumption, alienation and the social classes, and
excerpts from Franklin’s Autobiography. Employing a psychoanalytical
approach, Jonathan B. SchiV in Ashes to Ashes: Mourning and Social
DiVerence in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction (Susquehanna) explores ‘‘how the
experience of sibling loss contributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary
career.’’
Matthew Stewart’s Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway’s In Our
Time: A Guide for Students and Readers (Camden House) joins a growing
number of full-length treatments that addresses the collection in its
entirety. Individual chapters treat the biographical and literary contexts,
the book’s unity, stories, and interchapters, and the conclusion links the
218 Fitzgerald and Hemingway

collection’s themes to Hemingway’s subsequent work. For his primary

audience of students and readers, Stewart cogently distinguishes the
‘‘modern’’ from the ‘‘traditional’’ and in doing so introduces an era as well
as the collection at hand. His readings of the stories and discussions of the
‘‘continuities and discontinuities’’ are lucid and compelling. His text
reads like a carefully prepared lecture —it is inviting and accessible. Lisa
Tyler’s Student Companion to Ernest Hemingway (Greenwood) does an
admirable job with an impossible task —to introduce the life and works in
fewer than 200 pages. She covers the increasingly complex biography
deftly but occasionally oVers assertions that her limited space leaves her
scant room to elaborate. In assessing Dr. Adams of ‘‘Indian Camp,’’ for
instance, she claims that ‘‘his indiVerence to his patient’s screams blinded
him to the acute emotional suVering of [the patient’s] husband in the
upper bunk, suVering that directly led to the man’s suicide.’’ Certainly it
is true that the husband cuts his throat, but readers do not know precisely
why (in a ritualistic attempt to siphon the pain from his laboring wife?
because a white doctor has violated his home/culture? because the infant
was fathered by someone other than the husband?). What readers do
know is that Dr. Adams’s skill and imagination are responsible for saving
two lives. Likewise in her discussion of The Sun Also Rises Tyler deems
reliance on alcohol a ‘‘particularly disturbing aspect’’ without leaving
room to explain why Americans especially were likely to abuse alcohol in
Europe during Prohibition. Bill Gorton is duly scolded for peppering his
recollection of a prizeŽ ght with the word ‘‘nigger,’’ but Tyler does not save
space to describe Bill’s generosity toward the Negro boxer, an explanation
that would complicate an assessment of him as a racist. Also noted is ‘‘the
equally disturbing homophobia’’ expressed by Jake, who is angered by
Brett’s gay entourage at the bal musette, and by Bill, who uses the word
‘‘faggot.’’ If one object of an introductory text is to help to open the novel
to Ž rst-time readers, then more suggestions and fewer conclusions might
be in order. Tyler’s ‘‘alternative readings’’ (e.g., Jungian, ecofeminist) and
bibliography will be welcomed by her intended audience (high school
students and undergraduates).

b. Collections Robert W. Lewis’s NDQ once again features a special

issue, ‘‘Hemingway in the Millennium’’ (68, ii–iii). It includes many Ž ne
pieces among its more than two dozen works but others are of uneven
quality (selected articles are treated under appropriate rubrics). As papers
delivered at the Ninth International Hemingway Conference (Bimini,
Albert J. DeFazio III 219

Bahamas, 2000) they would all have been worth hearing; as published
‘‘articles’’ several could have beneŽ ted from revision and elaboration.
While one appreciates the documentary nature of this special issue
(where else might nonattendees hope to Ž nd Derek Walcott’s keynote
address, ‘‘Hemingway Now’’?), one might also hope for a more readily
discernible organizing principle and an editorial statement about the
nature of the selections.

c. General Essays Both authors beneŽ t from provocative assessments of

their treatment of politics, history, and race. Their treatment of metaphor
is the subject of George Monteiro’s ‘‘Expatriate Life away from Paris’’ (AR
59: 587–607), which pursues the phrase ‘‘out of season’’ and its meta-
phorical implications. Monteiro suggests that something ‘‘of the develop-
ment of Fitzgerald’s novel [Tender ], if not its genesis, was anticipated
by some of Ernest Hemingway’s early ‘out of season’ Ž ction as well as an
essay [‘‘On Visiting Fashionable Places out of Season’’ ] by the American
critic, novelist, and photographer Carl Van Vechten.’’ Monteiro discusses
Hemingway’s ‘‘Out of Season,’’ ‘‘Cat in the Rain,’’ A Moveable Feast, and
A Farewell to Arms; Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender and ‘‘Babylon Revisited’’;
and Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz by way of contrasting the
raucous Ž esta atmosphere versus the quiet stillness of places away from
Paris and ‘‘out of season.’’
Scott Donaldson’s title ‘‘Possessions in The Great Gatsby ’’ (SoR 37: 187–
210) does not belie the range of his considerations, which includes per-
spective connections to The Portrait of a Lady, This Side of Paradise,
Tender is the Night, and Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class en route to
demonstrating that ‘‘there is a good deal more than romantic wonder’’ in
Fitzgerald’s Ž ction. Donaldson pursues Fitzgerald’s political thinking and
his depiction of the relationship between money and social position, and
claims that in Gatsby ‘‘Fitzgerald intuitively grasped and illustrated basic
Marxian precepts.’’ In particular he shows how ‘‘[p]eople became objects
to be bought and sold, with their attractiveness as purchases depending
largely on their presentation of themselves.’’ As he concludes, ‘‘Fitz-
gerald’s masterpiece remains an engaging example of social history even
as it uncovers the cracks in the glittering surface, the poison eating away
underneath. It is this double vision that makes The Great Gatsby great.’’
Noting that critics often link Fitzgerald’s ‘‘disenchantment with the
southern belle’’ to his ‘‘ultimate rejection of Zelda,’’ P. Keith Gammons
claims in ‘‘The South of the Mind: The Changing Myth of the Lost
220 Fitzgerald and Hemingway

Cause in the Life and Work of F. Scott Fitzgerald’’ (SoQ 36, iv [1998]:
106–12) that ‘‘what most Fitzgerald scholarship fails to do is to make the
connection between the belle Ž gure and the later mythology of the
South.’’ The myth of the ‘‘Lost Cause’’ posited ‘‘the possibility of seeing
the Old South in the modern world’’ and was embodied by the Southern
belle. Gammons traces Fitzgerald’s rejection of this myth with reference
to the short stories and Fitzgerald’s own relationship with Zelda, culmi-
nating in his Ž nal repudiation of the myth in ‘‘The Last of the Belles.’’
Michael Nowlin explores the meaning of race in ‘‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Elite Syncopations: The Racial Make-up of the Entertainer in the Early
Fiction’’ (ESC 26 [2000]: 409–43) by asking what makes the author ‘‘a
white writer’’ and focusing ‘‘on the grotesque and satirical rendering of
whiteness’’ in ‘‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,’’ ‘‘Head and Shoulders,’’
‘‘The OVshore Pirate,’’ and The Beautiful and Damned. This Ž ction,
Nowlin observes, ‘‘suggests that the guardians of ‘whiteness’ themselves
are self-betraying’’ and that ‘‘it is Ž nally the authority of ‘white American-
ness’ that is at stake in Fitzgerald’s boldest work.’’
A trio of articles addresses Hemingway and politics. Brock Clarke’s
lucid ‘‘What Literature Can and Cannot Do: Lionel Trilling, Richard
Rorty, and the Left’’ (MR 41: 523–39) applauds Trilling and Rorty for
pursuing the complex relationship between politics and art, with particu-
lar reference to Trilling’s ‘‘Hemingway and His Critics.’’ Clarke observes
that it was ‘‘not that Hemingway could not write political literature, but
rather that Hemingway, aided and abetted by left-wing critics, had for-
gotten how expansive such literature had been and might still be. In
being so irresponsible, Trilling implied, left-wing critics had ceased to be
critics at all because they had stopped being serious readers of texts,
readers who paid attention to the speciŽ c aims, possibilities, and limita-
tions of the texts themselves.’’ In ‘‘The Politics of ‘The Snows of Kiliman-
jaro,’ ’’ pp. 15–31 in Value and Vision in American Literature, Keneth
Kinnamon locates Hemingway’s ‘‘most intense political commitment in
his life’’ in the democratic republic of workers in Spain. Hemingway’s
sympathies for the ‘‘descendants of the Communards’’ mark his transi-
tion between disengagement (Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Af-
rica ) and commitment (The Spanish Earth, The Fifth Column, For Whom
the Bell Tolls ). In a too brief piece comparing the ‘‘Political Commitment
in Hemingway and Sartre’’ (NDQ 69, ii–iii: 182–88) Ben Stoltzfus con-
cludes that Hemingway ‘‘was a more private person than Sartre, that he
Albert J. DeFazio III 221

lived primarily for his writing, that he did not work as actively as Sartre to
change the world, and that he eschewed the publicity of social causes.’’
Stoltzfus calls Hemingway’s literary output apolitical, with the exception
of The Fifth Column, To Have and Have Not, and ‘‘quite possibly’’ For
Whom the Bell Tolls.
Ron McFarland’s unusual ‘‘Hemingway and the Poets’’ (HN 20, ii: 37–
58) graces us with a long-overdue examination of allusions to Heming-
way in poetry, claiming to have accumulated in excess of 100 such allu-
sions (he cites 30). He discusses more than a dozen, dividing them into
three categories: responses to Hemingway’s work, including reminis-
cences and testimonials; elegies, epitaphs, and eulogies; and imaginative
reconstructions. McFarland’s comments on the technical features of the
poems are especially welcome —as would be a related study on Heming-
way and prose writers. Less compelling is Peter Lecouras’s ‘‘Hemingway
in Constantinople’’ (MQ 43: 29–41) which condemns Hemingway’s non-
Ž ction on the Greco-Turkish war for the Toronto Star for dehistoricizing
the Greek culture, a fair enough criticism of the 23-year-old reporter; but
then he condemns Hemingway’s Ž ctional use of the con ict, claiming
that it rejects ‘‘the complex, though recent, political history which pre-
cipitated the war [and] demonstrate[s] a symbiotic relationship between
Hemingway’s discourse and the politics of the Western-backed hege-
mony.’’ Lecouras does not explain why Ž ction that makes reference to
actual events must be rendered with historical accuracy. Isn’t this one
reason why we call it ‘‘Ž ction’’? Tracing the evolution of Hemingway’s
response to World War I is Milton Cohen’s ‘‘War Medals for Sale? Public
Bravery vs. Private Courage in Hemingway’s WWI Writing’’ (NDQ 68,
ii–iii: 287–94), which notes that Hemingway’s initially enthusiastic atti-
tude toward the war and his own wounding had changed by 1929 to
mirror the antiwar stance that had been popular for a decade.
In response to the dubious claim that Hemingway’s ‘‘written descrip-
tions of natural settings’’ are superŽ cial, Steven Florczyk in ‘‘Heming-
way’s ‘Tragic Adventure’: Angling for Peace in the Natural Landscape of
the Fisherman’’ (NDQ 68, ii–iii: 156–65) argues to the contrary that
Hemingway associates ‘‘intense and profound mystery’’ with the natural
world, suggesting ‘‘a desire to recover a past, a world where we may live
according to the rules of a simpler yet more fulŽ lling time.’’ Lawrence H.
Martin supplies generous excerpts in ‘‘Ernest Hemingway, Gulf Stream
Marine Scientist: The 1934–35 Academy of Natural Sciences Correspon-
222 Fitzgerald and Hemingway

dence’’ (HN 20, ii: 5–15), suggesting how Hemingway’s association with
the academy in uenced his writing and documenting his very real contri-
butions to scientiŽ c discovery.
John Clark Pratt’s pleasant memoir ‘‘My Pilgrimage: Fishing for Reli-
gion with Hemingway’’ (HN 21, i: 78–92) documents his evolving appre-
ciation of Hemingway and religion. The low point of his journey was
probably Carlos Baker’s rejection of his dissertation prospectus; the
happy consequence of this denial may have been that Professor Pratt
contemplated Hemingway and religion for half a century rather than half
a decade.

d. Essays on SpeciŽ c Works: Fitzgerald Gatsby garners an essay on

genre and a thorough chapter emphasizing point of view. John Lukacs in
‘‘The Great Gatsby ? Yes, a Historical Novel,’’ pp. 235–44 in Novel History,
perceives ‘‘the increasing historicity of most novels’’ and predicts that ‘‘in
the future the novel may be entirely absorbed by history, feeding the
famished appetites of readers for what really happened, for a past that was
real, for how men and women really were, how they acted and thought at
a certain time —a time that may include the near-present.’’ Praising the
novel as ‘‘the most perfectly crafted work of Ž ction to have come out of
America,’’ Tony Tanner (‘‘ ‘The Story of the Moon that Never Rose’:
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, ’’ pp. 166–200 in The American
Mystery [Cambridge, 2000]) applauds the author’s revisions and provides
a thorough reading that focuses on ‘‘not only the story of Gatsby but the
story of Nick trying to write that story.’’ Dismissing traditional readings
of Tender is the Night, GeoV Dyer in ‘‘Fitzgerald’s Afterglow’’ (ASch 70, ii:
136–41) ‘‘see[s] what happens to Dick almost as the opposite of a collapse:
a standing Ž rm, an assertion rather than a weakening of will.’’ Where
others lament Diver’s failure, his inability to be a ‘‘serious man,’’ Dyer
savors it because failure ‘‘reveals us to ourselves’’ and actually frees Dick
from the obligations that his early success would seem to anticipate.
Detached from his early success, he ‘‘is free, free at last, to realize his true
and wretched destiny.’’

e. Essays on SpeciŽ c Works: Hemingway Max Nänny returns to one of

the earliest stories and traces ‘‘The Use of Natural Objects as Symbols in
Hemingway’s ‘Up in Michigan’ ’’ (NDQ 68, ii–iii: 49–58), demonstrat-
ing that Hemingway employed ‘‘metonymic displacement,’’ not meta-
phoric similarity, ‘‘especially when he uses natural objects to symbolize
Albert J. DeFazio III 223

sexual matters.’’ He concludes that ‘‘in order to suggest the deeply inju-
rious nature of Liz’s de oration subliminally the story is shot through
with a number of natural objects and activities that all involve painful,
hurting penetration.’’ James Nagel brings an appreciation of the short-
story cycle to bear on the rivaling interpretations of ‘‘Big, Two-Hearted
River’’ in ‘‘Hemingway’s In Our Time and the Unknown Genre: The
Short-Story Cycle,’’ pp. 91–98 in American Literary Dimensions. He sensi-
bly argues that in a cycle of stories, each tale bears on the others, so the
fact that war is not mentioned in the collection’s Ž nal pair of stories does
not preclude those stories being about the impact of war. Nagel concludes
that ‘‘Philip Young and Malcolm Cowley were right [in claiming that the
story is about a soldier returned from war], but for the wrong reasons.
The ‘wounding’ of Nick depends not on Hemingway’s adventures in Italy
in World War I, but on Nick’s life experiences as depicted in In Our Time
[where readers see him wounded], a short story cycle of interrelated
stories and vignettes, part of an under-recognized genre in American
literature.’’
Hemingway warned readers that everything that a man writes is not
immediately discernible and certainly this has proven true with The Sun
Also Rises. Fredrik Chr. Brøgger revisits a persistent theme in commentary
on Hemingway’s Ž rst major novel in ‘‘Uses and Abuses of Biographical
Criticism for the Study of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ’’ (NDQ 68, ii–
iii: 59–69), citing speciŽ c examples of the intentional fallacy to expose
simplistic and reductive criticism that fails to distinguish between litera-
ture and life. Brøgger’s point that an author’s biography should not be
cited as the exclusive interpretive justiŽ cation or as literary explication is
well taken; but he discounts the value of biographically based speculation
as an intellectual activity (why is contemplating Jake’s attitude toward
Brett a serious endeavor while re ecting on Hemingway’s attitude toward
DuV merely a biographical fascination?). Greg Forter’s intriguing ‘‘Mel-
ancholy Modernism: Gender and the Politics of Mourning in The Sun
Also Rises ’’ (HN 21, i: 22–37) reads the novel as a struggle between ‘‘an
autonomous and invulnerable masculinity’’ and ‘‘an emotionally expres-
sive and connected one,’’ a battle resolved ‘‘through the fetishization of
style,’’ namely ‘‘codes of speech and forms of ritualized behavior which
compensate for the lack of content or meaning in modern life, while also
protecting their adherents from the dangers of unfettered intimacy.’’
C. Harold Hurley’s ‘‘ ‘But Bryant? What of Bryant in Bryan?’: The Re-
ligious Implications of the Allusion to ‘A Forest Hymn’ in The Sun Also
224 Fitzgerald and Hemingway

Rises ’’ (HN 20, ii: 76–89) explicates an allusion, arguing that Jake’s
‘‘godless friend’’ Bill provides an ‘‘illuminating counterpoint to Jake
Barnes’s spiritual quest’’ in the novel. William Adair’s ‘‘The Sun Also Rises:
A Memory of War’’ (TCL 47: 72–91) ‘‘sees the novel’s events as being
shaped by a recurring story-of-wounding pattern.’’ This pattern entails
climbing a steep hill (a place of threat), followed by an emotional wound-
ing, and ends with a retreat to a room or bed. Certainly this pattern recurs
in The Sun Also Rises and Adair does to a degree demonstrate that the
novel ‘‘is much more narrator Jake Barnes’s memory of war than has been
recognized, in terms of landscape, imagery, allusion, and a recurring story
of wounding.’’ But the slight nature of some of Adair’s allusions and his
practice of using Hemingway’s entire life and canon, including the non-
Ž ction, to support his claim about particular allusions is interesting but
not entirely compelling.
Joseph M. Flora makes a case for ‘‘Men Without Women as Composite
Novel’’ (NDQ 68, ii–iii: 70–84), arguing that Hemingway’s use of Nick
Adams in this collection ‘‘is in marked contrast to the use of him in In
Our Time . . . [where] Nick’s presence is as constant as . . . George
Willard’s in Winesburg, Ohio. In Men Without Women, Nick’s presence
becomes more tentative, more veiled —as if it has become more diYcult
for Hemingway to portray him.’’ Flora observes that the collection is
bound thematically by considerations of the ‘‘aging male,’’ the relation-
ship between profession and marriage, images of a threatening and de-
structive female presence (or the telling absence of a female presence
altogether, as in ‘‘Ten Indians’’), ‘‘writing and not writing, telling or not
telling,’’ and ‘‘the diYculty —often the impossibility —of Ž nding love and
lasting commitment, the loneliness of a world of men without women.’’
Treating the stories as ‘‘stages of a novel,’’ Howard L. Hannum’s ‘‘ ‘Scared
Sick Looking at It’: A Reading of Nick Adams in the Published Stories’’
(TCL 47: 92–113) argues that ‘‘Indian Camp’’ is the core text that Hem-
ingway used to set up sequences of correlatives or leitmotifs ‘‘with the
detail or incident traced through several stories, and complicating with
each repetition.’’ Hannum is especially good as pursuing images of the
Caesarean, explosion, or evacuation; of the trial of courage; and the
challenge of the female in the published Nick stories.
Two other stories from Men Without Women earn careful consider-
ation. In ‘‘ ‘Courting Exposure’: The Composition of Hemingway’s ‘A
Canary for One’ ’’ (RALS 27: 65–77) Hilary K. Justice combines bio-
graphical and critical analysis in her study of the ‘‘compositional context’’
Albert J. DeFazio III 225

of the tale. She chronicles the author’s ‘‘early personal nadir,’’ which
marks the beginning of his self-awareness as a professional author.
Seymour Chatman applies contemporary narratology in a lucid argu-
ment that most undergraduates would Ž nd accessible. ‘‘ ‘Soft Filters’:
Some Sunshine on ‘Cat in the Rain’ (Narrative 9: 217–22) distinguishes
‘‘character’s point of view,’’ called ‘‘Ž lter,’’ from ‘‘narrator’s point of view,’’
called ‘‘slant,’’ observing that Hemingway’s ‘‘Cat in the Rain’’ exempliŽ es
a blending or softening of the points of view. The nuances of this story,
contrasted with ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants,’’ ‘‘rely on carefully modu-
lated inner views, mixed with Hemingway’s usual sparse representation
of scene and speech.’’ Treating a neglected story from Winner Take
Nothing, Charles J. Nolan Jr.’s ‘‘Hemingway’s ‘The Sea Change’: What
Close Reading and Evolutionary Psychology Can Tell Us’’ (HN 21, i: 53–
67) argues that the story shows ‘‘Phil’s gradually coming to terms with the
changed nature of his relationship with his lover,’’ something that is
underscored by irony, repetition, and the protagonist’s jealousy.
A pair of works address Hemingway’s novel of World War I. Gary
Harrington’s ‘‘Partial Articulation: Word Play in A Farewell to Arms ’’
(HN 20, ii: 59–75) identiŽ es numerous puns and reads the novel as a
marginally successful spiritual cleansing for Frederick, who suppresses as
much information as he reveals. Diane Price Herndl’s ‘‘Invalid Mas-
culinity: Silence, Hospitals, and Anesthesia in A Farewell to Arms ’’ (HN
21, i: 38–52) considers the novel as a performance of masculinity wherein
the narrator feels compelled both to tell and to remain quiet, which leads
to his self-medication with alcohol.
Hemingway’s play and his novel of World War II, both often over-
looked, attract thoughtful examination. Linda Stein’s ‘‘Hemingway’s The
Fifth Column: Comparing the Typescript Drafts to the Published Play’’
(NDQ 68, ii–iii: 233–44) traces the evolution of Philip Rawlings ‘‘from
the stereotypically stoic hero of the two early typescripts [the 1937 Univer-
sity of Delaware Library draft and the 1938 Library of Congress type-
script] to the more human protagonist of the published version of the
play.’’ Following a very brief survey of scholarship on the Venetian novel,
Michael Seefeldt’s ‘‘Hemingway’s Paradoxical Protagonist: Colonel Cant-
well, New-World Knight and Old-World Connoisseur’’ (NDQ 68, ii–iii:
303–16) argues that Across the River and Into the Trees is ‘‘more richly
allusive, more fabulist, at other times more memoir-based, more retro-
spective’’ than Hemingway’s earlier works and thus requires a new ap-
proach. Seefeldt pursues the numerous literary and artistic allusions that
226 Fitzgerald and Hemingway

help to deŽ ne Cantwell by their associative appropriateness. Addressing

Hemingway’s next work is Robert Seguin’s ‘‘Into the 1950s: Fiction in the
Age of Consensus,’’ pp. 121–52 in Around Quitting Time. According to
Seguin, Hemingway undermines the ‘‘loftier allegorical levels’’ of The
Old Man and the Sea when Santiago sins against the Ž sh by calculating its
market value; this ‘‘lifts the old man from his place in an ordered universe
[an epic universe] and places him within the full hurricane rush of
American modernity.’’
The posthumously published works continue to earn mixed reviews.
Richard Freadman’s ‘‘Moral Luck in Paris: Luck and Ethical Will in
Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, ’’ pp. 117–39 in Threads of Life: Auto-
biography and the Will (Chicago), focuses on human will that allows
authors or autobiographers to be agents in their own texts. Hemingway’s
role in this text is small and un attering: he and his memoir (which
Freadman describes as devoted to ‘‘the artistic life in Paris in the thirties’’)
are essentially the ‘‘unsatisfactory example.’’ ‘‘A Moveable Feast might at
Ž rst seem too slim a thing to bear the weight of such philosophical
implication,’’ Freadman explains, ‘‘and indeed of the autobiographies
that I consider in this book, this one is the least ‘re ective.’ However it is
not wholly unthinking.’’ Freadman cannot abide the ‘‘Hemingway leg-
end’’ or the author’s propensity for action that ‘‘constitutes an eVort of
simpliŽ cation where the complexities that bedevil the self and its code
can be deferred or dissolved.’’ While I think Freadman grossly under-
values the sophistication of Hemingway’s memoir, his chapter is compel-
ling in its treatment of ‘‘luck’’ and ‘‘ethics.’’ Unlike Brøgger, who main-
tains that biographical and critical discussions should remain distinct,
Donald Junkins in ‘‘Rereading Islands in the Stream ’’ (NDQ 68, ii–iii:
109–22) believes that ‘‘the complexity of Hemingway’s characters is most
easily accessed through the calculus of his many characters.’’ The real
subject of the novel is the creative process: ‘‘This process, never disen-
tangled from all the complicating distractions of action, love, and rela-
tionships, is for me the real subject of the quarternity of novellas that
comprise Islands in the Stream.’’ Ira Elliott’s chapter on gender, sexuality,
and nationality, ‘‘In Search of Lost Time: Reading Hemingway’s Gar-
den, ’’ pp. 251–66 in Modernist Sexualities, ed. Hugh Stevens and Caroline
Howlett (Manchester, 2000), perceives the novel as ‘‘a fractured body/
text, as a commentary on the uses, abuses and various constructions of
the body and its borders.’’ Chris L. Nesmith makes a signiŽ cant contribu-
tion to our understanding of how The Garden of Eden was edited in
Albert J. DeFazio III 227

‘‘ ‘The Law of an Ancient God’ and the Editing of Hemingway’s The

Garden of Eden: The Final Corrected Typescript and Galleys’’ (HN 20, ii:
16–36). Nesmith lists Tom Jenks’s emendations to the novel and calls
Jenks’s line-editing ‘‘even more egregiously oVensive than cutting an
entire plot.’’
After 10 years, I am taking a leave from the privilege of writing this
chapter. Warm thanks to the critics and scholars who have helped readers
appreciate the art and life of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Belated thanks
to my patient wife, Lynn, and to my children, Katherine and John, who
encourage my research in new Ž elds (soccer and baseball).
George Mason University
11 Literature to 1800
William J. Scheick

‘‘Were There Any Puritans in New England?’’ (NEQ 74: 118–38) asks
Michael P. Winship, who dismisses the widely used word ‘‘Puritanism’’
because it suggests nothing of an essential nature about the English
origins or the characteristics of the dominant religion of the colonial
North. Likewise, Philip F. Gura’s ‘‘Writing the Literary History of
Eighteenth-Century America: A Prospect’’ (The World Turned Upside-
Down: The State of Eighteenth-Century American Studies at the Beginning
of the Twenty-Ž rst Century, ed. Michael V. Kennedy and William G.
Shade [Lehigh], pp. 164–85) observes how recent scholarly work has
abandoned a monolithic reading of early American culture. And, in the
same vein, The Literatures of Colonial America, ed. Susan Castillo and
Ivy Schweitzer (Blackwell), represents the diversity of early American
culture.

i Native Americans and Nature in the Colonial Imagination

Edited by Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering, The Language Encounter
in the Americas, 1492–1800: A Collection of Essays (Berghahn, 2000) oVers
14 studies of early cross-cultural communication. Several articles, includ-
ing Margaret J. Leahey’s ‘‘Iconic Discourse: The Language of Images in
Seventeenth-Century New France’’ (pp. 102–18), disclose how Native
Americans applied European visual and oral communication to their
own cultural and spiritual requirements. Other arguments, such as
Pauline MoYtt Watts’s ‘‘Pictures, Gestures, Hieroglyphs: ‘Mute Elo-
quence’ in Sixteenth-Century Mexico’’ (pp. 81–101), detail missionary
adaptations of Native American cultural matter. At Ž rst, according to
Joyce Chaplin’s Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the
Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Harvard), colonists perceived Na-
232 Literature to 1800

tive Americans as civilizable, their culture simply a more primitive stage

of colonial society. With the settlers’ steady acquisition of land and their
better fortune in population growth, however, this notion of a kindred
relationship yielded to a strong sense of biological diVerence. On the
basis of assertion more than evidence, Chaplin concludes that settlers’
conŽ dence in the physical (biological) superiority of their bodies led to
colonial racism.
In England, Heidi Hutner contends in Colonial Women: Race and
Culture in Stuart Drama (Oxford), racism and sexism were combined to
promote imperialism. The symbol of the Native American female repre-
sents the commodiŽ cation and exploitation of both the resources and the
inhabitants of the New World. SpeciŽ c English texts, Rebecca Ann Bach
correspondingly maintains in Colonial Transformations: The Cultural
Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580–1640 (Palgrave, 2000), in u-
enced material changes in the American colonies. Even while celebrating
such transformations, English colonists feared their potential loss of
English identity. But Ann M. Little considers an exception. In ‘‘ ‘Shoot
that rogue, for he hath an Englishman’s coat on!’: Cultural Cross-
Dressing on the New England Frontier, 1620–1760’’ (NEQ 74: 238–73)
Little concludes that during the colonial period the place of clothing was
a  exible marker of gender and cultural identity.
French Jesuit relations of martyrdom, in contrast, insist on traditional
identity markers. As Gordon M. Sayre explains in ‘‘Communion in
Captivity: Torture, Martyrdom, and Gender in New France and New
England’’ (Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 50–63) these accounts cele-
brate the transŽ guration of the mutilated body of the sinner into the
redeemed spirit of the saint. That such early reports of Native Americans
also inherently created a distance between perceiver and perceived is
noted in Bruce R. Smith’s ‘‘Mouthpieces: Native American Voices in
Thomas Harriot’s True and Brief Report of . . . Virginia, Gaspar Pérez de
Villagrá’s Historia de la Nuevo México, and John Smith’s General History
of Virginia ’’ (NLH 32: 501–17). Colonial images of Native Americans
amounted to a falsiŽ ed presence that eVectively served imperial mapping
eVorts designed to claim land.
How the New World land changed both naturally and as a result of
development is documented in Stephen Adams’s The Best and Worst
Country in the World: Perspectives on Early Virginia Landscape (Virginia).
Over time, the settlers’ aesthetic response to land changed as, for exam-
ple, their initial regard for both the garden ideal and small hills gave
William J. Scheick 233

way to an appreciation of wilderness and mountains, both previously

seen as deformities.

ii The Mathers and Early Colonial Prose: Ministers and Politics

Despite their repudiation of Ž gurative language as untrustworthy, Indian
missionaries such as John Eliot unwittingly but necessarily resorted to
metaphor. So concludes Laura J. Murray, whose ‘‘Joining Signs with
Words: Missionaries, Metaphors, and the Massachusett Language’’ (NEQ
74: 62–93) highlights Increase Mather’s inconsistent notion of words as
divine in origin and of Indian sign-language as derived entirely from the
material world. Mather and others, however, quoted the last words of
dying Native Americans to reinforce a sense of the Puritan community’s
viability, explains Kristina Bross in ‘‘Dying Saints, Vanishing Savages:
‘Dying Indian Speeches’ in Colonial New England Literature’’ (EAL 36:
325–52). While such accounts served to reassure the colonial displace-
ment of Native Americans, paradoxically they also instated ethnic speak-
ers as abiding members of the enduring community of believers.
That Native Americans were often included in unacknowledged ways
is indicated in Carla Mulford’s ‘‘New Science and the Question of Iden-
tity in Eighteenth-Century British America’’ (Finding Colonial Americas,
pp. 79–103). Mulford discloses that colonists such as Cotton Mather
were empowered by knowledge of the natural world imparted by Native
Americans and Africans. On the other hand, in the case of John Eliot, as
assessed in Frank Kelleter’s ‘‘Puritan Missionaries and the Colonization of
the New World: A Reading of John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues (1671)’’ (Early
America Re-explored, pp. 71–106), an inability to understand the actual
sociopolitical function and eVect of missionary activities doomed such
undertakings.
John Eliot, among others, appears in Ralph Bauer’s ‘‘Millennium’s
Darker Side: The Missionary Utopias of Franciscan New Spain and
Puritan New England’’ (Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 33–49), which
traces how apocalyptic rhetoric yielded to the jeremiad in tandem with
the displacement of autonomous ecclesiastical authority by a centralizing
governmental power. An opposite possibility —speciŽ cally how diversity
and a common culture coexisted —is considered by Richard Archer,
whose Fissures in the Rock: New England in the Seventeenth Century
(New England) treats such subjects as beliefs, economics, politics, race
relations, and deviant behavior. That all so-called deviant challengers
234 Literature to 1800

to Puritan orthodoxy were antinomians at heart is the main thesis of

Louise A. Breen’s Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among
the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692 (Oxford). Such antinomian
sympathy did not prevail, Breen notes, because it inherently distrusted
what could not be known by the senses. Instead, orthodoxy prevailed
because it legitimized the link between the seen and the unseen world in
accommodating ways more appealing than John Cotton’s harsh doctrine
of salvation.
The connection between the divine and the material orders also in-
forms Mark A. Peterson’s ‘‘Puritanism and ReŽ nement in Early New
England: Re ections on Communion Silver’’ (WMQ 58: 307–46). The
Puritan regard for valuable objects used in the celebration of the Lord’s
Supper, Peterson cogently observes, demonstrates an instance of the ma-
terialization of religious feeling. Such objects as the communion cup in-
vited symbolic implications that enabled the believer to visualize Christ’s
spiritual presence without crossing into idolatry. A gold-plated silver cup,
in another instance, could represent the physical perfection of the Chris-
tic body and at the same time remind communicants of their own
distance from such perfection.
Concerning Southern churches, John K. Nelson uncovers a paradox.
Nelson’s A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican
Virginia (No. Car.) discloses that a surprisingly well-founded religious
establishment arose from the oversight of a decentralized gentry. Until
the 1730s, colonial ecclesiastical appointments were based on expedience,
whereas subsequently parishes were headed by locally born men com-
mitted to reaYrming fundamental Anglican beliefs and even, in some
cases, to oVering religious instruction to slaves. Weekly Sunday service
also provided an occasion for greater general socialization and for com-
municant women to experience a mode of communal equality. Socializa-
tion of another kind is suggested in George Alsop’s A Character of the
Province of Maryland. As read by Jim Egan in ‘‘ ‘To Bring Mary-land into
England ’: English Identities in Colonial American Writing’’ (Finding
Colonial Americas, pp. 125–36), Alsop identiŽ ed the health of the English
political body with the bloodlike circulation of English subjects across the
world.
Precisely what English political body? asks Susan Clair Imbarrato,
whose ‘‘Genteel Confusion: Reading Class Structure in Dr. Alexander
Hamilton’s Itinerarium ’’ (Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 153–69) cata-
logs instances of anxiety over social divisions during the 1740s. Hamil-
William J. Scheick 235

ton’s sensitivity to symptoms of colonial divergence from Britain and his

own class-consciousness as a British gentleman concerned about his
provinciality are likewise reviewed in Klaus H. Schmidt’s ‘‘A Scotsman in
British America; or, Up Against Provincialism: The Construction of
Individual and Collective Identities in Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s Itiner-
arium ’’ (Early America Re-explored, pp. 151–81). A glimpse —not always
attractive —into the inner life of another Southerner who juggled con-
 icting private and personal interests in an eVort to construct an identity
for himself is expertly provided in Keven Berland, Jan Kirsten Gilliam,
and Kenneth A. Lockridge’s edition of The Commonplace Book of William
Byrd II of Westover (No. Car.). Besides presenting 100 pages of wonderful
textual commentary, the editors discuss the cultural position of com-
monplace books as well as Byrd’s sometimes contradictory notions about
science, religion, gender, and literature. The diYculties of reading one
genre of literature, the anatomy, is the topic of Robert Micklus’s ‘‘The
Reception of Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s History of the Tuesday Club, Ten
Years After’’ (Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 170–82).
An acute reading of the impact of local current events, especially
Robert Sanderson’s discourses on Puritan errancy, is provided by Jesper
Rosenmeier, whose ‘‘John Cotton’s A Brief Exposition of . . . Canticles
(1642) in Light of Boston’s (Lincs.) Religious and Civil Con icts, 1619–
22’’ (EAL 36: 149–81) reveals that Cotton was hardly a timid man. In The
Correspondence of John Cotton (No. Car.) Sargent Bush Jr. has collected 73
letters by Cotton and 52 addressed to Cotton spanning a period of more
than 30 years. Each letter is headed by the name of the author, the
identity of the recipient, the date, and a lengthy note contextualizing the
missive. There are also copious notes following every entry, a mono-
graphic introduction reviewing Cotton’s current standing, and an appen-
dix containing several pertinent epistolary enclosures. Besides augment-
ing our appreciation of John Cotton’s place in his time, Bush also
provides a thoughtful discussion of the New Testament authority behind
ministerial letter-writing. All of this matter, besides the rigorously tran-
scribed versions of the letters, is presented with such skill that Bush’s book
is a rich scholarly resource, quite simply a model of its kind.
Concerning one of Cotton’s powerful colleagues, my ‘‘An Inward
Power and Authority: John Davenport’s Seditious Piety’’ (R&L 33: 1–21)
Ž nds that The Saints Anchor-Hold is designed as a Jeremiah-in uenced
passivist meditation on the inner consolations of the renewed soul. How-
ever, the pressure of Davenport’s outlawed sentiments, stirred by the
236 Literature to 1800

Restoration, unintentionally resulted in an ambiguity of nuance that

deforms the intended theme and structure of Davenport’s book. My
related piece, ‘‘The Captive Exile Hasteth: Increase Mather, Meditation,
and Authority’’ (EAL 36: 183–200) considers how in response to the
Restoration Mather ratiŽ ed his voice by meditatively and problematically
coalescing the peace prophesied for a millennially transformed world and
the peace said to characterize the redeemed soul. But Mather’s empower-
ment of selfhood through meditation remained a shaky process, its ongo-
ing crisis in authority evident in instances of semiotic instability. Passages
intended to reinforce his conŽ dence also conversely intimate the pos-
sibility that no actual redemptive (millennial) translation of his life has
been eVected.
Several essays treat sundry issues large and small. In ‘‘Puritan Origins
Revisited: The ‘City upon a Hill’ as a Model of Tradition and Innova-
tion’’ (Early America Re-explored, pp. 31–48) Sacvan Bercovitch reads an
address by John Winthrop as an opening move in a transatlantic discur-
sive ‘‘chess game.’’ Kevin J. Hayes’s ‘‘How Thomas Prince Read Captain
John Smith’’ (Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 367–78) relies on marginalia
in the Generall Historie to indicate Prince’s respect for Smith. An anony-
mous work (1795) that reveals ecclesiastical adaptations of American
independence is reviewed in A. Owen Aldridge’s ‘‘A Mock-Epic on Early
American Methodism’’ (Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 183–98). And a
publisher’s identity is at issue in B. J. McMullin’s ‘‘The Undated Editions
of the Revised Bay Psalm Book’’ (PBSA 95: 355–61), which reaYrms that
these editions were printed in Holland.

iii Rowlandson, Ashbridge, and Early Colonial Prose: Race

and Gender
Susan M. Stabile’s ‘‘A ‘Doctrine of Signatures’: The Epistolary Physicks of
Ester Burr’s Journal’’ (Centre of Wonders, pp. 109–26) identiŽ es Burr’s as-
sociation of gestation and spiritual embodiment in letters that eVectively
equate physical and spiritual deliverance. In ‘‘Contextualizing Mary
Rowlandson: Native Americans, Lancaster and the Politics of Captivity’’
(Early America Re-explored, pp. 107–50) Neal Salisbury speaks of a woman
deŽ ned by unique experiences, family connections, and personal desires.
In ‘‘ ‘American Puritanism’ and Mary White Rowlandson’s Narrative ’’
(Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization, ed. Joyce W. Warren
and Margaret Dickie [Georgia, 2000], pp. 137–58), Teresa A. Toulouse
William J. Scheick 237

reviews several readings of Rowlandson’s account and concludes that

while critics are sensitive to gender issues, they are insuYciently aware of
their explicit or implicit treatment of history. In ‘‘Hannah Duston’s
Bodies: Domestic and Colonial Male Identity in Cotton Mather’s Decen-
nium Luctuosum’’ (Centre of Wonders, pp. 193–209) Toulouse points to
multiple meanings. Mather’s depiction of Duston’s captivity indicates the
need for protective male leadership, yet it also ambivalently identiŽ es
with the socially disruptive female body as representative of the third-
generation colonial male’s desire to overcome his sense of powerlessness
in relation to various ‘‘captivities’’ of colonial aVairs by the English court.
One of Anne Hutchinson’s allies appears in ‘‘From Monster to Martyr:
Re-presenting Mary Dyer’’ (EAL 36: 1–30), Anne G. Myles’s argument
for seeing a feminist identity in this Quaker’s textlike life of female
agency, aYliation, and dissent. Dyer also appears in Michele Lise Tarter’s
‘‘Quaking in the Light: The Politics of Quaker Women’s Corporeal
Prophecy in the Seventeenth-Century Transatlantic World’’ (Centre of
Wonders, pp. 145–62), which focuses on the exemplary role of women
whose martyrdom served Quakerism as a redemptive text expressed in
terms of bodily suVering.
Julie Sievers’s shrewd ‘‘Awakening the Inner Light: Elizabeth Ash-
bridge and the Transformation of Quaker Community’’ (EAL 36: 235–
62) focuses on the rhetoric of strangeness and the inward light in Ash-
bridge’s Life. Ashbridge’s emphasis was particularly apt during the Great
Awakening as a goad to Quakers who had drifted into class-conscious
practices at odds with their religious beliefs. Her immigrant narrative, as
an act of Quaker self-fashioning deŽ ned by the context of the Great
Awakening, is examined in Udo J. Hebel’s ‘‘ ‘A Stranger in a Strange
Land’: Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge
(1774) and the (Inter)cultural Inscription of American Autobiographical
Writing’’ (Early America Re-explored, pp. 183–200). And D. Britton
Gildersleeve’s ‘‘ ‘I had a religious mother’: Maternal Ancestry, Female
Spaces, and Spiritual Synthesis in Elizabeth Ashbridge’s Account ’’ (EAL
36: 371–94) concludes that Ashbridge resolved her ambivalence toward
patriarchal authority, particularly her strict father, by perceiving the
Quaker community as maternal in spirit.
In The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an
American Myth (Knopf ) Laurel Thatcher Ulrich provides numerous case
studies of colonial and early-national women, especially Quakers, who
engaged in household production. While her book loses focus now
238 Literature to 1800

and then, it is nonetheless a rich resource that documents how various

postcolonial groups (sentimentalists, evolutionists, craft revivalists, and
anti-modernists, for example) mythologized pre-national household pro-
duction from 1676 to 1837. Ulrich also documents the gender shift in
cloth-making at the end of the 17th century and, as well, women’s in-
formal ownership of certain household commodities (see AmLS 1997,
pp. 207–08). The stories of 40 impoverished people, usually women, are
recorded in Ruth Wallis Herndon’s Unwelcome Americans: Living on the
Margin in Early New England (Penn.).

iv Bradstreet, Taylor, and Early Colonial Poetry

In ‘‘Negotiations of Cultural Identity and Poetic Agency in Anne Brad-
street’s Seventeenth-Century London and Boston Editions’’ (SPAS 7: 51–
79) Marietta Messmer investigates how the prefatory matter of The Tenth
Muse might have appealed to an English audience, whereas the open-
ing matter of Several Poems would likely have pleased colonial readers.
Bradstreet’s verse re ects a related movement toward independence of
voice, albeit Ž nally it registers the poet’s unresolved struggle to reconcile
her political allegiance to England and her developing awareness of inde-
pendence from Renaissance traditions. That the second edition of her
poetry religiously and aesthetically in uenced three generations of colo-
nial poets who combined Protestantism and ‘‘honor culture’’ is consid-
ered in Philip H. Round’s ‘‘Anne Bradstreet’s Several Poems and the Rise
of Christian Belletrism in Eighteenth-Century New England’’ (SPAS 7:
23–50). And in a similar vein, ‘‘Lexias and Agency in Anne Bradstreet’’
(SPAS 7: 1–22) oVers Robert Daly’s reading of the poet as at once a
representative and an individual agent who orchestrates both sympa-
thetic and unsympathetic textual matter.
The connection between things divine and economic, particularly as
evident in the link between saved money and acquired grace, is empha-
sized in David J. Carson’s ‘‘Edward Taylor and Puritan Entrepreneur-
ship’’ (SPAS 7: 111–41). Just as Taylor’s metaphors coalesce the earthly and
heavenly realms, his attitudes toward economic interests correspond to
his beliefs about spiritual development. That the poet associated the
recovery of Eden with the restoration of human nobility, in both a
Christian and a cultural sense, is detailed in my ‘‘Renaissance Art and
Puritan Heraldry: Edward Taylor’s ‘Meditation 1.15’ ’’ (SPAS 7: 81–109).
In Taylor’s poetry Reformed memory and prophecy register grief over the
William J. Scheick 239

loss of Renaissance legacies —the same artistically empowering heritage

that informs the theatrical performance of voice and the strategically
placed pictorial details characteristic of his poetry.
Nanette C. Tamer’s ‘‘Richard Lewis’s Poetics of Anti-mercantilism’’
(Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 137–52) focuses on a 1732 poem that
celebrates the mutual goals of proprietor and colonist and (in a reversal of
classical panegyric) also suggests the priority of colonial interests over
proprietary concerns. Armin Paul Frank’s ‘‘Ebenezer Cook’s The Sot-Weed
Factor: An Intercultural Reading’’ (Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 64–78)
describes marketing techniques designed to appeal to both pro- and anti-
British readers. Cook[e] participates in a distinctively colonial literary
manner —a simultaneous association with and disassociation from pre-
vailing English cultural patterns. In another instance of such dualism,
Robert D. Arner’s ‘‘The Sources and SigniŽ cance of Joseph Dumbleton’s
‘The Paper-Mill’: Augustan American Poetics and the Culture of Print in
Colonial Williamsburg’’ (Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 199–224), re-
ports that this 1744 work relies on and simultaneously critiques colonial
industry as a mysterious, invisible ‘‘kind Machine.’’ And Wayne Craven’s
interest is clearly stated in his title, ‘‘Washington Allston and Ut Pictura
Poesis: The Romantic Artist as Poet and Cultivated Intellectual’’ (Finding
Colonial Americas, pp. 261–73).
Intellectuals Ž gure in Frank ShuVelton’s ‘‘A Continental Poetics: Sci-
entiŽ c Publishing and ScientiŽ c Society in Eighteenth-Century Amer-
ica’’ (Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 277–91), which considers how early
scientiŽ c writings reveal colonial ideas about the soon-to-emerge nation.
The emergent cultural contest between classical and biblical traditions is
described in John C. Shields’s American Aeneas. Until the suppression of
the classical heritage after the Constitutional Convention, writers as
diverse as Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Phillis Wheatley, among
many others, dialectically engaged both traditions. The promoters of the
new nation severed this relationship, marginalized classical models, and
advanced the story of Adam because the errand into the wilderness
legend was more accessible to the unschooled citizens who substantially
outnumbered the intellectual elite.

v Edwards and the New Divinity

Jonathan Edwards, the inclusion of whose works in philosophical studies
at European universities was once proudly reported by George Wash-
240 Literature to 1800

ington, receives little attention this year. Edwards’s response to occasions

when a redemptive transcendent meaning seems to transŽ x history is
critiqued by William Vaughn. In ‘‘Orality, Divinity, Sublimity: Jonathan
Edwards and the Ethics of Incorporation’’ (CollL 28, i: 127–43) Vaughn
claims that Edwards, like Heidegger, erred in such an approach to history
because it applies a radical subjectivity (self-interest) to the vision of
social transformation when, in fact, ‘‘neither grace nor authenticity . . .
operates en masse.’’ The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 19: Sermons
and Discourses, 1734–1738, ed. M. X. Lesser (Yale), includes A Faithful
Narrative of the Surprising Work of God and many other discourses and
sermons.

vi Franklin, Satire, and Self-Representation

In Franklin on Franklin (Kentucky) Paul M. Zall attempts to recover a
portrait of this legendary Ž gure based on the earliest version of his
autobiography supplemented by letters and journal entries. Zall Ž nds
that Franklin was prone to pride, outbursts of temper, mean-spiritedness,
and dark moods —all of which he sought to hide when revising his
autobiography. A self-revising Franklin, for whom forgetting and death
are prominent themes, is the subject of Jennifer T. Kennedy’s ‘‘Revisiting
the Conceit of Franklin’s Memoir ’’ (EAL 36: 201–34). In the process of
writing his autobiography Franklin ‘‘put to death’’ versions of himself,
ghostly alternative selves whose various pasts haunted him. Kennedy
writes: ‘‘The Franklin who serves as a template for so many reproduc-
tions, in fact reproduces himself many times before he allows himself to
be reproduced by others.’’
A more beneŽ cent man is found by Amy Apfel Kass, whose ‘‘Auto-
biography and American Identity: Another Look at Benjamin Franklin’’
(Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture, ed. Penny Schine Gold
and Benjamin C. Saxe [Rodopi, 2000], pp. 41–61) points to how an
autobiographically fashioned Ž ctional character can serve as a commu-
nally advantageous model. But, as Stephen Carl Arch cautions in After
Franklin: The Emergence of Autobiography in Post-Revolutionary America,
1770–1830 (New England), it is doubtful that Franklin possessed a sense
of self to suppress or Ž ctionalize. The term ‘‘autobiography’’ is a mis-
nomer when applied to Franklin’s famous document, Arch argues, be-
cause his narrative does not depict a truly unique self.
Several essays in Finding Colonial Americas delve into Franklin’s mind
William J. Scheick 241

and life. Bernard L. Herman (‘‘Franklin’s Houses,’’ pp. 249–60) Ž nds

evidence of a ‘‘paradoxical drive toward visual conformity and individual
expression.’’ Thomas J. Haslam (‘‘Benjamin Franklin, David Hume,
Autobiography, and the Jealousy of Empire,’’ pp. 292–306) addresses the
genuine friendship between these two men, who shared (from their
mutual peripheral social position) misgivings about England and views
on faith, skepticism, reason, and human sociability. Daniel Royot (‘‘Long
Live la DiVérence: Humor and Sex in Franklin’s Writings,’’ pp. 307–15)
highlights Franklin’s delight in sexuality. Pattie Cowell (‘‘ ‘Much depends
upon my knowing’: The Education of Polly Hewson,’’ pp. 316–30) ex-
plores a 30-year correspondence with Franklin and detects an emphasis
on the value of communal learning. Barbara Oberg (‘‘Benjamin Frank-
lin’s ‘Observations on the Means of Extinguishing a Fire’: An Addition to
the Franklin Canon,’’ pp. 331–42) attributes a work to him. James N.
Green (‘‘Thinking about Benjamin Franklin’s Library,’’ pp. 343–56)
peeks at some problematic marginalia, while Roy E. Goodman (‘‘A Se-
lected Guide to Printed Materials Relating to the Iconography and Ar-
tifacts of Benjamin Franklin,’’ pp. 357–63) discusses resources.
Between 1724 and 1765, Alison Gilbert Olson reports in ‘‘Pennsylvania
Satire Before the Stamp Act’’ (PennH 68: 507–32), satire progressed from
controlled genteel exchanges to uninhibited popular expression, and also
from personal jabs to partisan stabs. A quatrain by Franklin emerges
brie y in ‘‘The Conjuror’s Trick, or How to Rhyme’’ (LI 3: 184–204), in
which William Flesch detects a humorous allusion to Scripture. And that
an anonymous conduct book printed by Franklin was also written by him
is J. A. Leo Lemay’s claim in ‘‘An Attribution of Re ections on Courtship
and Marriage (1746) to Benjamin Franklin’’ (PBSA 95: 59–96). Lemay
points to subject matter and a persona-determined style as evidence for
his case.
Neither Franklin nor JeVerson was an exemplar of a unique national
identity, Paul Giles maintains in Transatlantic Insurrections: British Cul-
ture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Penn.). Both
men held ‘‘skeptical, paradoxical attitudes’’ that characterized North At-
lantic culture. Franklin, like Samuel Richardson, resorted to double-
tongued narrators who employ inversion and evasion. And JeVerson, like
Laurence Sterne, engaged in an Enlightenment duplicity that enabled his
chameleon-like narrators to adapt to whatever situation was at hand.
Another transatlantic in uence on American culture is identiŽ ed in ‘‘The
World I Ate: The Prophets of Global Consumption Culture’’ (ECLife 25:
242 Literature to 1800

214–24), a fascinating study in which David S. Shields associates the

European move toward the pursuit of pleasure with the American post-
Revolutionary emphasis on self-fulŽ llment.

vii JeVerson and Revolutionary Politics

‘‘ ‘The Earth Belongs to the Living’: Thomas JeVerson and the Problem
of Intergenerational Relations’’ (EnvP 9, ii [2000]: 61–77) presents Ter-
rance Ball’s Ž nding that JeVerson, like Kant and Burke, envisioned an
intergenerational custodial oversight of land. The correspondence be-
tween JeVerson’s sense of the sublime and his aesthetical concept of
virtuous citizenship is analyzed in Matthew Cordova Frankel’s ‘‘ ‘Nature’s
Nation’ Revisited: Citizenship and the Sublime in Thomas JeVerson’s
Notes on the State of Virginia ’’ (AL 73: 695–726). JeVerson’s devaluation of
the imagination of slaves, especially their capacity to appreciate the sub-
lime, informs his disregard for including African Americans in his vision
of the new nation. Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘‘Sowers and Reapers’’ (NY 22 Jan.:
41–45) exposes a horticulturist JeVerson ‘‘who is conŽ dent that he has
covered his tracks.’’ Through his use of passive voice JeVerson conceals
that slaves constructed his garden, an evasion of reality that anticipates
our present-day inclination to restrict appropriate garden discourse to
images of serene retirement.
Some of JeVerson’s contemporaries pointed out his shortsightedness,
as William L. Andrews documents in ‘‘Benjamin Banneker’s Revision of
Thomas JeVerson: Conscience Versus Science in the Early American
Antislavery Debate’’ (Genius in Bondage, pp. 218–41). The Declaration of
Independence and (apparently) the Notes on the State of Virginia inform
Banneker’s epistolary case for abolition. The legendary reserve of the man
John Marshall irritably dubbed ‘‘the great lama of the mountain’’ is
assessed in Paul M. Zall’s ‘‘Thomas JeVerson, Protecting Privacy’’ (Find-
ing Colonial Americas, pp. 379–86), which explores JeVerson’s con icting
impulses to remain silent and to defend his public career. In an eVort to
disclose the man’s private sentiments, E. M. Halliday’s Understanding
Thomas JeVerson (HarperCollins) oVers a thoughtful review of JeVerso-
nian observations about books, paintings, and women.
JeVrey L. Pasley’s ‘‘The Tyranny of Printers’’: Newspaper Politics of the
Early Republic (Virginia) begins with JeVerson’s enlistment of the editor
of the Aurora to assail Alexander Hamilton and then considers other
episodes when newspaper editors such as Philip Freneau not only served
William J. Scheick 243

important political functions but performed as if they were professional

politicians. Whereas Federalist newspapers were directed by party lead-
ers, Pasley observes, their Republican counterparts were more indepen-
dent, their editors far more active in the political sphere. While JeVerson
personally engaged in political scheming, he especially feared the po-
tentially detrimental eVect of female intrigues on the new nation. So
Catherine Allgor Ž nds in Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Wash-
ington Help Build a City and a Government (Virginia, 2000).
The Female American (Broadview), a pseudonymous Robinson Crusoe-
like utopian fantasy informed by surprising feminist elements, is edited
by Michelle Burnham. This 1767 work unfortunately compromises its
dramatization of unrestricted female mobility by resorting to traditional
Christian values, a dislocated female perspective, and a retreat into the
domestic security of marriage. A biography based on the spiritual diary
and letters of a woman who fashioned her own identity during the
Revolutionary era is presented in Joanna Bowen Gillespie’s The Life and
Times of Martha Laurens Ramsay, 1759–1811 (So. Car.). Ramsey’s writings
reveal a discontinuity between her eVort to conform to cultural expecta-
tions and her account of personal emotion.
That John Adams was ‘‘a good husband, a good father, a good citizen,
and a good man’’ is the main thrust of David McCullough’s John Adams
(Simon & Schuster), a work of popular history. Sarah Luria’s ‘‘George
Washington’s Romance: Plotting in the Federal City, 1791–1800’’ (Pros-
pects 26: 1–34) exposes an urban vision in uenced by Federalist political
views and imaginative speculation. A signer of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence who was atypically also an orthodox Christian is featured in
L. Gordon Tait’s The Piety of John Witherspoon: Pew, Pulpit, and Public
Forum (Geneva), which deals less with historical context than with theol-
ogy. Tait highlights the sources, characteristics, and practice of Wither-
spoon’s nearly systematic piety, with a consideration of its role in his
decision to enter Revolutionary politics.
Before the Revolution, Gillian Brown discloses in The Consent of the
Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (Harvard), colo-
nists described themselves as wronged children. After the Revolution
they resorted to the image of misguided or seduced women, a change that
re ected the diYculties they experienced in the area of political consent.
As a result of this Lockean phenomenon, authority has been aYrmed
anew with each rising American generation. A personal attempt to cast
oV such labels —in this instance, ‘‘heathen’’ and ‘‘convert’’ —in order to
244 Literature to 1800

recover a true identity is reported by Polly Stevens Fields. In ‘‘Samson

Occom and/in the Missionary Position: Consideration of a Native
American Preacher in 1770s Colonial America’’ (WC 32: 14–20) Fields
observes Occom’s gradual shift from seeing himself as a colonial agent to
aligning himself with the unacculturated Indian settlement of Brother-
town. Why this Mohegan convert emphasized biblical allusions interests
Keely McCarthy, whose ‘‘Conversion, Identity, and the Indian Mission-
ary’’ (EAL 36: 353–69) explains Occom’s resort to Saint Paul to critique
white prejudice as an impediment to his career eVort to include Native
Americans in the Christian community.

viii Crèvecoeur and the Early National Issues

Stephen Carl Arch’s After Franklin, mentioned earlier, explores writings
by Crèvecoeur (see AmLS 1990, p. 206), Alexander Graydon (see AmLS
1995, p. 205), Benjamin Rush, and Stephen Burroughs, among others.
The narrator’s shift from reliance on tradition to recognition of the
nature of choice as the determinant of self-deŽ nition (identity, selfhood)
in J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters provides a template for Arch’s
thesis: that in the early Republic models of self-fashioning based on class
hierarchy and cultural tradition were replaced by nonimitative examples
of self-invention. Crèvecoeur’s hope that the American rural lifestyle
would in uence Europe, especially through the sharing of botanic and
agricultural knowledge, is the subject of ‘‘Saint-John de Crèvecoeur’s Tale
of a Tuber’’ (ECLife 25: 225–34), in which Beatrice Fink emphasizes the
place of the potato in this anticipated cultural exchange.
Horticulture, combined with architecture, interests Susan Stabile,
whose ‘‘Under the Wisteria: The Topography of Sarah Wister’s Com-
monplace Book’’ (Finding Colonial America, pp. 227–48) identiŽ es rhe-
torical frames of reference for Wister’s recurrent theme of thwarted love.
Botanic metaphors that enabled personal expression particularly pertain-
ing to social change are Fredrika Teute’s topic in ‘‘The Loves of the Plants;
or, The Cross-Fertilization of Science and Desire at the End of the
Eighteenth Century’’ (HLQ 63 [2000]: 319–45).
The political implications of medicine as a source for analogies be-
tween the human and the political body are reported in Jacquelyn C.
Miller’s ‘‘The Body Politic and the Body Somatic: Benjamin Rush’s Fear
of Social Disorder and His Treatment for Yellow Fever’’ (Centre of Won-
ders, pp. 61–74). For Rush, frequent elections reduce political pressure
William J. Scheick 245

just as bloodletting reduces blood pressure. A particular pressure-relieving

act by political enthusiasts appears in David S. Shields’s ‘‘Moving the
Rock’’ (Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 387–402), a close study of the
movement of Plymouth Rock to the center of town in 1774 —a symbolic
act designed to challenge the idea of centralized power (symbolized by
William Bradford’s chair).
In contrast, a 1781 historical account that identiŽ es the political and
commercial self-interest of certain groups as the hidden motive behind
Revolutionary discourse resists the emergent emphasis on individualism.
Edward Larkin reviews this work in ‘‘Seeing Through Language: Narra-
tive, Portraiture, and Character in Peter Oliver’s The Origin and Progress
of the American Revolution ’’ (EAL 36: 427–54), which emphasizes Oliver’s
eVort to devalue the emergent post-Revolutionary view of the individual
as a provisionally adaptive entity and reinstate an older concept of charac-
ter as a Ž xed identity based on social status. Another person’s ambivalence
about individualism interests Lucy Rinehart, whose ‘‘ ‘Manly Exercises’:
Post-Revolutionary Performances of Authority in the Theatrical Career
of William Dunlap’’ (EAL 36: 263–93) maps this playwright’s mounting
fears concerning social disorder. Dunlap’s later theatrical emphasis on
communal coherence was designed to counter anxiety over both his own
desire for rebellion and the anarchistic tendency of American individual
independence.
A related conservative view, that virtuous citizenship required the
tutoring of national reŽ nement, receives attention in Mark Garrett Long-
aker’s ‘‘Timothy Dwight’s Rhetorical Ideology of Taste in Federalist Con-
necticut’’ (Rhetorica 19: 93–124). In an ideology that supported early
American Federalism, Dwight melded his conception of taste with ideas
about rhetoric, mortality, politics, and religion. How early-national men
conservatively altered a female sectarian leader’s early emphasis on re-
ligious enthusiasm is detailed in Julie Nicoletta’s ‘‘The Gendering of
Order and Disorder: Mother Ann Lee and Shaker Architecture’’ (NEQ
74: 303–16). Moreover, some German American women, the subject of
Christine Hucko’s ‘‘Female Writers, Women’s Networks, and the Preser-
vation of Culture: The Schwenkfelder Women of Eighteenth-Century
Pennsylvania’’ (PennH 68: 101–30), employed their unusual level of letter-
writing and copying activities expressly to conserve Old World culture by
maintaining a strong transatlantic bond.
In other instances, however, women relished the ample opportunities
in both print media and the theater to learn about and to participate in
246 Literature to 1800

new freedoms. Susan Branson’s These Fiery FrenchiŽ ed Dames: Women

and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Penn.) especially
addresses how the French Revolution refunded America’s in uence
abroad by catalyzing developments in women’s political participation in
the new Republic. One personal epistolary eVort to deŽ ne early-national
womanhood is documented in Pam Perkins’s ‘‘Writing Republican Femi-
ninity: The Letters of Eliza Southgate Brown’’ (Symbiosis 5: 121–37). A
cluster of essays, edited by Elaine Forman and devoted to the milieu of
Elizabeth Drinker, appears in PennH (68: 408–506). They treat early
national Quaker values, female independence, medical practices, and
interracial relationships.

ix Early National Slavery and African American Voices

Laura LaVrado’s ‘‘Constructing the Subaltern: White Creole Culture and
Raced Captivity in Eighteenth-Century Dutch Suriname’’ (SECC 30:
30–48) delves into a 1765 Dutch work by Pieter Van Dyk (possibly a
pseudonym). Although Van Dyk’s narrative is designed to assail the
brutal treatment of slaves, it nonetheless reinforces plantation (captivity)
culture by depicting runaway slaves as desperate and well-treated slaves as
contentedly compliant. In ‘‘Letters of the Old Calibar Slave Trade, 1760–
1789’’ (Genius in Bondage, pp. 89–115) Paul E. Lovejoy and David Rich-
ardson show that slave traders used a creolized English in uenced by the
language of their captives that strengthened their position and protected
their economic interests. The conventional understanding of race, Joann
Pope Melish explains in ‘‘Emancipation and the Em-bodiment of ‘Race’:
The Strange Case of the White Negroes and the Algerian Slaves’’ (Centre
of Wonders, pp. 223–36), was challenged by white slavery in Barbary and
by African Americans with whitish depigmentation (vitiligo).
Roxann Wheeler’s ‘‘ ‘Betrayed by some of my own complexion’: Cugo-
ano, Abolition, and the Contemporary Language of Racialism’’ (Genius
in Bondage, pp. 17–38) discloses how the revision of Thoughts and Senti-
ments strategically mingles conservative and radical arguments to defend
black complexion as more historically and biblically natural than is com-
monly perceived. Authors who present themselves as typical Englishmen
in speciŽ c resistance to conventional characterizations of black men as
childish, eVeminate, or brutish appear in Felicity A. Nussbaum’s ‘‘Being a
Man: Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho’’ (Genius in Bondage,
pp. 54–71). Equiano’s control of the earnings of the nine editions of
William J. Scheick 247

his book is documented in Vincent Carretta’s ‘‘ ‘Property of Author’:

Olaudah Equiano’s Place in the History of the Book’’ (Genius in Bondage,
pp. 130–50). Autobiographical self-promotion as a sanctioned means to
sponsor the abolition of slavery, among other aims, is a major theme of
Angelo Costanzo’s introduction to The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano (Broadway).
Emphasizing historical context in ‘‘Slavery and the Fashioning of Race
in Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, and Equiano’s Life ’’ (ECent 42: 161–79)
Gary Gautier discusses Equiano’s view of slavery as a racial rather than a
class construction in an economic system deŽ ned by manufacturing.
Featuring religious context, Eileen Razzari Elrod’s ‘‘Moses and the Egyp-
tian: Religious Authority in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative ’’
(AAR 35: 409–25) maps the evolution of Equiano’s Scripture-based sense
of the immorality of slavery. According to Adam Potkay’s contextual
argument in ‘‘History, Oratory, and God in Equiano’s Interesting Narra-
tive ’’ (ECS 34: 600–14), too many critics read Equiano’s book in terms of
latter-day theory when they should be applying 18th-century Christian,
oratorical, and colonial issues.
Autobiography was not the only medium whereby 18th-century Afri-
can Americans sought to enlighten their times. Jacqueline Bacon’s ‘‘Rhet-
oric and Identity in Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s Narrative of the
Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Phila-
delphia ’’ (PMHB 125: 61–90) points to an 1794 text on the yellow fever
epidemic that appropriates the language of the Declaration of Indepen-
dence to suggest a model voice for African Americans, a voice that not
only adapts but also resists white discourse. How a writer usually thought
to be culturally conservative advanced the case for the Enlightenment
potentiality of African Americans by adapting the features of Lawrence
Sterne’s Shandean model of the familiar letter is considered by Markman
Ellis in ‘‘Ignatius Sancho’s Letters: Sentimental Libertinism and the Poli-
tics of Form’’ (Genius in Bondage, pp. 199–217). This article makes an
interesting companion piece to Paul Giles’s claims, noted above, about
JeVerson’s similar use of Sterne’s example.
Adaptation also surfaces in ‘‘ ‘Remarkable Liberty’: Language and
Identity in Eighteenth-Century Black Autobiography’’ (Genius in Bond-
age, pp. 116–29), in which Philip Gould concludes that the as-told-to
narrative of John Marrant reverses the captivity narrative tradition of loss
of freedom while that of Venture Smith shows how someone can be free
when enslaved and also experience compromised liberty when free.
248 Literature to 1800

Adaptation Ž gures as well in Karen A. Weyler’s ‘‘Race, Redemption, and

Captivity in A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Mar-
rant, a Black and Narrative of the Uncommon SuVerings and Surprizing
Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man ’’ (Genius in Bondage,
pp. 39–53). Weyler argues that these books, mutually designed to appeal
to a wide audience, are hybrid works combining the devices of sea adven-
ture tales, captivity narratives, and conversion confessions in ways that
downplay racial diVerence.
That Hammon’s book did not conform to the prevalent literary depic-
tion of the slave as chattel, runaway, or rebel is the thesis of Robert
Desrochers Jr.’s. ‘‘ ‘Surprizing Deliverance’? Slavery and Freedom, Lan-
guage, and Identity in the Narrative of Briton Hammon, ‘a Negro Man’ ’’
(Genius in Bondage, pp. 153–74). Hammon’s image of a diasporic traveler
confutes the concepts of national and racial boundaries. His biblical
allusions, Rosemary Fithian Guruswamy explains in ‘‘ ‘Thou Hast the
Holy Word’: Jupiter Hammon’s ‘Regards’ to Phillis Wheatley’’ (Genius in
Bondage, pp. 190–98), encoded nuanced communication for African
Americans.
Managing codes also informs ‘‘Black and Unmarked: Phillis Wheatley,
Mercy Otis Warren, and the Limits of Strategic Anonymity’’ (TJ 52
[2000]: 465–95), Gay Gibson Cima’s consideration of Wheatley’s pre-
carious use of her performances, in person and in print, to create an
opportunity (disguised by Christian rhetoric) out of coerced racial vis-
ibility. In contrast, middle- and upper-class white women such as Mercy
Otis Warren beneŽ ted from the cultural practice of strategic anonymity
that enabled them to present radical political views without arousing
social anxiety. In ‘‘On Her Own Footing: Phillis Wheatley on Freedom’’
(Genius in Bondage, pp. 175–89) Frank ShuVelton points to the Revolu-
tion’s disruption of the poet’s connection with England and her subse-
quent broadened conception of audience to include a ‘‘cosmopolitan
friendship.’’

x Brown, Rowson, and Early Fiction

The failure of the French Revolution, Nigel Leask contends in ‘‘Irish
Republicans and Gothic Eleutherarchs: PaciŽ c Utopias in the Writings of
Theobold Wolfe Tone and Charles Brockden Brown’’ (HTQ 63 [2000]:
347–67), was a factor in Brown’s locating his utopia in an imagined or
distant place. Brown’s attraction to the British imperial picturesque aes-
William J. Scheick 249

thetic (associated with an idealized English landscape) interests Larry

Kutchen, whose ‘‘The ‘Vulgar Thread of the Canvas’: Revolution and the
Picturesque in Ann Eliza Bleecker, Crèvecoeur, and Charles Brockden
Brown’’ (EAL 36: 395–425) attributes this attraction to Brown’s desire to
arrest, control, and displace post-Revolutionary social disorder. For Ed-
ward Cahill in ‘‘An Adventurous and Lawless Fancy: Charles Brockden
Brown’s Aesthetic State’’ (EAL 36: 31–70), on the other hand, the aes-
thetic work of the imagination can delude as much as it can lead to
‘‘correct judgment, rational speculation, and transformative sublimity’’ —
a con ict resulting in a gap diYcult to negotiate. As a result, Cahill
concludes, the issue of responsibility is compromised by Brown’s under-
standing of the imagination as simultaneously the cause of irrationality
and the source of the moral designs of art.
Brown’s advocacy for the inclusion of American natural wildness
in narratives of colonial experience, according to David Kazanjian’s
‘‘Charles Brockden Brown’s Biloquial Nation: National Culture and
White Settler Colonialism in Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist’’ (AL 73:
459–96), is linked to the larger cultural project of converting, assimilat-
ing, and (in eVect) eliminating the presence of Native Americans. An old
and enigmatic Native American matriarch who is thought to be a witch is
revisited by Matthew Wynn Sivils. Old Deb is not a murderer of inno-
cents, Sivils contends in ‘‘Native American Sovereignty and Old Deb in
Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly ’’ (ATQ 15: 293–304), but is
instead an avenger who tries to restore her ethnic heritage. In having
Huntly marginalize her through humor, Brown emphasizes the injustice
of how the United States has dealt with its indigenous peoples.
Anxiety over cultural contamination informs the Orientalization of a
Brown villain, Leonard Tennenhouse argues in ‘‘Caribbean Degeneracy
and the Problem of Masculinity in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond ’’
(Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 104–21). Nevertheless, Ormond’s violent
actions are oddly sanctioned when they share the objective of the new
nation’s moral sense of its principled Revolutionary history. Mark L.
Kamrath explores Brown’s concept of history in ‘‘Charles Brockden
Brown and the ‘Art of the Historian’: An Essay Concerning (Post)modern
Historical Understanding’’ ( JER 21: 231–60). Although today’s critics
often fail to realize it, Kamrath indicates, Brown shared their skeptical
attitude toward all necessarily subjective interpretations of history.
The homoerotic implications of a ‘‘rhetoric of imposture’’ in Brown’s
personal letters and romances are assessed in Caleb Crain’s American
250 Literature to 1800

Sympathy. Crain focuses on how in the course of literary production

Brown and others at once tapped into and contained their feelings for
other men. Susanna Haswell Rowson’s strategic adoption of the speech of
male ministers is Paul Barton’s topic in ‘‘Narrative Intrusion in Charlotte
Temple: A Closet Feminist’s Strategy in an American Novel’’ (W&Lang
23, i [2000]: 26–33). Ian Finseth also highlights language in ‘‘ ‘A Melan-
choly Tale’: Rhetoric, Fiction, and Passion in The Coquette’’ (SNNTS 33:
125–59), which emphasizes the socially mediating function of words.
I close with a lament by Dr. Alexander Hamilton concerning the
scholarly use of words during the 18th century: ‘‘It has been the custom
among our modern literati and cultivators of arts and sciences to clog and
encumber . . . with certain uncouth and cramp terms . . . to the no small
hindrance and discouragement of the painful, laborious, poring and
brain-beating student . . . [who] must spend much of his precious time in
the dry and tedious toil of turning over many . . . impertinent and
voluminous compositions . . . when such words cannot be found.’’
University of Texas at Austin
12 Early-19th-Century Literature
J. Gerald Kennedy

This year has produced an unusual number of innovative, full-scale

period studies that variously enlarge and complicate our understanding
of American literature during the half-century between 1815 and 1865.
Most explore projects or problems in which literary works (among other
cultural forms) exemplify the sociological, political, and historical forces
shaping antebellum America. Several deploy provocative new models
of intertextuality, though in most cultural critique has altogether sup-
planted textual analysis as the compelling critical objective. One feels
increasingly obliged to add the phrase ‘‘and culture’’ to this chapter’s title.
Jürgen Habermas’s social theory informs several books and articles that
gauge the emerging ‘‘public sphere’’ in the early Republic. Transnational-
ism bids to become the new orthodoxy; some exponents grant the in-
eluctability of national formations while others urge a postnational pro-
gressivism. As interest in broad cultural topics waxes, attention to certain
individual authors has waned. Poe still attracts more critical and scholarly
discussion than any other writer surveyed here, and the surge of interest
in African American women writers seems conspicuous, while work on
Stowe shows a slight decline from last year’s spike in activity, and studies
of such once-popular authors as Irving and Longfellow have, it seems, all
but ceased.

i Period Studies
Easily the most recondite new book is Arthur Versluis’s Esoteric Origins,
which documents the in uence of alchemy, theosophy, Swedenborgian-
ism, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry on a handful of canonical Ž gures.
Versluis insists that alongside the Enlightenment rationalism of the early
Republic, esotericism  ourished and informed such popular practices as
252 Early-19th-Century Literature

spiritualism and mesmerism. In addition to chapters on Poe, Hawthorne,

Melville, Emerson, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Bronson Alcott,
with an English theosophist named J. P. Greaves oddly slipped into the
mix, Versluis discusses the unlikely Ž gure of Ethan Allen Hitchcock, an
‘‘independent Hermetic thinker’’ and admirer of Swedenborg (as well as
Emerson) who during the Civil War served as Lincoln’s military adviser.
Hitchcock brie y taught Poe at West Point, though that connection
yields no new insights on Poe’s esoteric interests, gauged by Versluis to be
skeptical and superŽ cial. ‘‘Often enough,’’ he concludes equivocally,
‘‘Poe’s inspiration was Western esotericism,’’ though he used these sources
‘‘only as points of inspiration and as means for eVect’’ and ‘‘did not believe
in them.’’ Versluis more convincingly documents the assimilation of
arcane knowledge and mysticism in Hawthorne and Emerson and amid
recurrent self-citation concludes that the American Renaissance wit-
nessed the ‘‘intellectualization’’ and ‘‘Americanization’’ and even ‘‘imagin-
ization’’ of esotericism, which proves in the end an incongruous mélange
of practices, mostly sealed oV (in this account) from social and political
controversy.
Precisely the opposite strategy informs Russ Castronovo’s far-reaching
study, Necro Citizenship, which draws on Habermas (as well as Louis
Althusser and Marx) to anatomize the fetishizing of death in antebellum
culture as a symptom of the political death-in-life induced by the disem-
bodied ideals of U.S. democracy. Castronovo notes the equivalence of
liberty and death in narratives by Lunsford Lane, William Wells Brown,
Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass to exemplify both the social death
of slavery and the need to ‘‘think against freedom’’ to imagine an alterna-
tive to ‘‘depoliticized’’ citizenship. He discusses reformist strategies for
containing white male sexuality (as popularized by Sylvester Graham) in
relation to the vice of slaveholding and reads midcentury esotericism
such as mesmerism and spiritualism (brie y noted in Poe and Stowe and
explored in detail in Hawthorne’s Blithedale ) as enactments of the disem-
bodied passivity of white women. Ingeniously, Castronovo juxtaposes
readings of Douglass’s The Heroic Slave and Jacobs’s Incidents against
contemporary séances and spirit-rapping to suggest that ‘‘in popular
discourses of the white unconscious, elements of African mysticism re-
tained by diasporic black populations resurfaced in antipolitical forms.’’
The closing chapter moves to the later 19th century, foregrounding
Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy as an ‘‘allegory of citizenship.’’ At times
rhetorically daunting, Castronovo’s critique of the nationalist ideology of
J. Gerald Kennedy 253

freedom nonetheless suggests new approaches to many authors and texts

not considered in this alluring autopsy of the national body public.
Cultural nation-building receives a diVerent emphasis in Joshua David
Bellin’s Demon of the Continent. Disputing the view of Susan Scheckel
that Indians had become a ghostly absence in antebellum culture, Bellin
asserts that persisting Native American culture shaped the emerging
literature of the United States. He emphasizes ‘‘intercultural’’ interac-
tions, the ‘‘processes of encounter’’ legible in Euro-American and Native
American narratives. Bellin’s closely theorized study spans three cen-
turies but resists chronology as it unpacks such problematic concepts as
‘‘conversion,’’ the ‘‘Noble Savage,’’ and Indian ‘‘myth.’’ As he elaborates
the ‘‘mutual acculturation’’ of native people and whites, Bellin self-
consciously downplays ethnic diVerences (the ideology of ‘‘sides’’) and
mostly ignores concurrent transactions with African American culture.
Yet his study yields pointed commentary on William Apess, Robert Bird,
Lydia Maria Child, Cooper, George Copway, Longfellow, H. R. School-
craft, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, as well as sections on Thoreau and
(somewhat incongruously) on Melville’s Typee. Bellin’s superb penulti-
mate chapter on literary nationalism incorporates a revisionary reading
of Hiawatha that exposes Longfellow’s elegy to a vanished race as a ploy to
silence Copway and other witnesses to the Indian Trickster’s resiliency.
Race and gender converge in Paul Gilmore’s Genuine Article, which
probes the problem of masculinity in a culture of sentiment and sensa-
tion. While noting the ‘‘demonization of feminine, sentimental literary
mass culture’’ by embattled men, Gilmore focuses on ‘‘the centrality of
race to the construction of white manhood’’ and shows how images of
blacks and Indians, promulgated in shows, spectacles, and museums,
enabled male writers to construct forms of authorial masculinity. An
opening chapter aptly juxtaposes Cooper’s ‘‘manly’’ The Last of the Mohi-
cans against Edwin Forrest’s stage performances of Indian manhood in
J. A. Stone’s Metamora. In addition to suggestive chapters on Thoreau
and Hawthorne, Gilmore reads Poe’s ‘‘Hop-Frog’’ alongside P. T. Bar-
num’s 1846 exhibition of an apelike dwarf actor; the tale thus allegorizes
‘‘the male artist . . . gaining revenge against an abusive audience’’ —a ploy
that Ž nds Poe identifying with the freak as racial other to ‘‘satirize the
racial politics of . . . antislavery Bostonian literary circles’’ and (paradox-
ically) to assert his literary manhood. Though mainly concerned with
versions of white masculinity, he devotes one chapter to William Wells
Brown’s Clotel as a response to minstrel versions of black manhood that
254 Early-19th-Century Literature

speakers like Brown sometimes had to perform for abolitionist audiences.

In the intersection of race and gender Gilmore locates a productive site
for rethinking antebellum masculinity.
Glenn Hendler engages related issues in Public Sentiments and —also
following Habermas —considers sentimental culture as a means of creat-
ing a public sphere, illustrating the uses of sympathy in both institutional
and novelistic contexts. Though his analysis extends to the late 19th
century with sections on Twain, James, and the Horatio Alger novels,
several chapters —including a discussion of ‘‘white manhood’’ as articu-
lated by temperance narratives of the 1840s —focus on antebellum social
problems. Hendler’s chapter on Martin Delany registers the appeal to
sentiment in the ‘‘black public sphere’’ where the reformer elaborated
complex ideas of citizenship and black nationalism, tensions manifested
boldly in Blake; or, The Huts of America. Elsewhere Hendler intriguingly
traces James’s Hyacinth Robinson back to Fanny Fern’s Hyacinth Ellet (in
Ruth Hall ) and thence to Nathaniel Parker Willis, Fern’s brother, the
dandy she satirized for the ‘‘disjunction’’ between his public show of
sympathy and private heartlessness. Willis thus emerges as a key Ž gure
who helped to create the modern cult of celebrity, and his novel Paul Fane
tellingly dramatizes personality as a disconnected series of sentimental
performances. Hendler’s study also includes a chapter on Louisa May
Alcott’s use of sentiment to attract feminist readers in her novel Work.
In a fascinating book, Bruce A. Harvey shows in American Geographics:
U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European
World, 1830–1865 (Stanford) that eVorts to articulate an idea of the nation
emerged not only from comparative glances at Europe but also from
smug geographical comparisons between the United States and the Mid-
dle East, Africa, Central America, and Polynesia. In the Ž rst half of
the century Jedidiah Morse, Samuel Goodrich, Arnold Guyot, and
even Harriet Beecher Stowe founded an American geography that ar-
rayed the globe as a ‘‘pedagogical spectacle’’ promoting U.S. ‘‘national
self-deŽ nition’’ through racist generalizations about ‘‘inferior’’ cultures
and peoples. Such views were alternately enforced, modiŽ ed, or over-
turned by the writers featured in this nuanced study, which examines
travel narratives by Bayard Taylor, William F. Lynch, and John L. Ste-
phens as well as transnational novels by Melville (again, Typee ), Maria
Cummins (El Fureidîs ), Ephraim G. Squier (Waikna ), and Martin De-
lany (Blake). The analysis of Delany’s Afrocentric vehemence seems
especially trenchant. Harvey balances incisive readings with cultural his-
J. Gerald Kennedy 255

tory and biography; he theorizes his critique but also resists oversimpliŽ -
cations for the sake of facile moral arraignment. He uses transnationalism
adroitly to rearticulate the imagined American nation of the midcentury.
Almost half of Justin D. Edwards’s Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics
of U.S. Travel Literature, 1840–1930 (New Hampshire) treats a similar
body of writing, though he underscores the way that American travelers
discovered abroad an eroticized contact zone that destabilized desire,
eliciting sometimes homosexual, sometimes heterosexual longings. In
addition to chapters on Melville (once more, Typee ) and Hawthorne (The
Marble Faun ), Edwards discusses William Wells Brown’s Sketches of
Places and People Abroad (1854), an African American version of the
Grand Tour in which Anglophilia sharpens his critique of American
savagery and arouses a fetishized, implicitly sexual desire to ‘‘know En-
gland.’’ Two chapters of a volume ed. Tracy Fessenden, Nicholas F. Radel,
and Magdalena J. Zaborowska, The Puritan Origins of American Sex:
Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (Rout-
ledge), warrant notice here. Gustavus Stadler’s ‘‘Ejaculating Tongues:
Poe, Mather and the Jewish Penis’’ (pp. 109–26) associates Mather’s
‘‘penile’’ meditations on the tongue-tie of Moses with the patently Jewish
Valdemar’s swollen tongue and deathbed ‘‘ejaculations’’ in Poe’s ‘‘The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.’’ In ‘‘Now You Shall See How a Slave
Was Made a Man: Gendering Frederick Douglass’s Struggles with Chris-
tianity’’ (pp. 127–44) Darryl Dickson-Carr examines successive revisions
of Douglass’s life story as an ongoing attempt to shore up his heterosex-
ual, masculine image against both feminized religion and ambiguously
homosocial associations. Two chapters of John Peck’s Maritime Fiction
treat American authors exclusively —one concerns Melville and the other
combines brief discussions of Cooper (The Pilot and Red Rover ), Poe
(Pym ), and Richard Henry Dana (Two Years Before the Mast ). Peck draws
an old distinction between national cultures: ‘‘Whereas the British mar-
itime novel dwells on family connections and social structure, the Ameri-
can maritime novel focuses more on isolated individuals, heroes on the
edge of a new frontier.’’

ii Poe
New books on Poe include my Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (Ox-
ford), which features fresh perspectives by Terence Whalen, David Lever-
enz, Leland S. Person, and Louis A. Renza. Whalen’s ‘‘Poe and the
256 Early-19th-Century Literature

American Publishing Industry’’ (pp. 63–93) explores the economic con-

ditions and cultural politics that shaped the magazinist’s relations to a
mass audience. In ‘‘Spanking the Master: Mind-Body Crossings in Poe’s
Sensationalism’’ (pp. 95–127) Leverenz playfully probes subversive con-
 ations of mind and body, life and death, black and white, and male and
female in Poe’s sensational deregulation of conceptual boundaries. Person
delineates the ‘‘sexual politics’’ of the author’s invariably fated females and
parodic Ž gures of manliness in ‘‘Poe and Nineteenth-Century Gender
Constructions’’ (pp. 129–65), and Louis A. Renza in ‘‘Poe and the Issue of
American Privacy’’ (pp. 167–88) sees the author’s preoccupation with
secrecy and surveillance as re ective of tensions between private life and
an emerging public sphere. Scott Peeples contributes an informative
bibliographical essay (pp. 209–31); my introduction (pp. 3–17) locates
speciŽ c Ž xations that explain Poe’s striking contemporaneity while my
biographical essay (pp. 19–59) emphasizes sociohistorical forces that
shaped the author’s career. This volume, like others in the series, provides
a chronology accompanied by period illustrations.
Focusing on the controversial problem of Poe’s racial attitudes, the
volume Liliane Weissberg and I coedited, Romancing the Shadow: Poe and
Race (Oxford), brings together nine diverse essays, all in some sense
responsive to Toni Morrison’s surprising claim in Playing in the Dark that
‘‘no early American writer is more important to the concept of American
Africanism than Poe.’’ The topics range from Whalen’s incisive discus-
sion of racial politics and the Southern Literary Messenger in ‘‘Average
Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary Nationalism’’ (pp. 3–40)
and Betsy Erkkila’s decoding of color oppositions in ‘‘The Poetics of
Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary’’ (pp. 41–74) to Joan Dayan’s
elucidation of slave law and ‘‘civil death’’ in ‘‘Poe, Persons, and Property’’
(pp. 106–26) and Person’s examination of ‘‘topsy-turvy’’ Ž ctions of race in
‘‘Poe’s Philosophy of Amalgamation: Reading Racism in the Tales’’
(pp. 205–24). The contributors (others mentioned below) engage such
problematic texts as ‘‘Hop-Frog,’’ ‘‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,’’
‘‘The Raven,’’ and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym while reaching
sometimes con icting conclusions about sectionalism, imperialism, rac-
ism, race theory, and slavery as projected in Poe’s writings.
Poe’s major tales have again inspired numerous studies. Adeptly using
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Yonjae Jung’s ‘‘The Imaginary Double
in Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ ’’ (LIT 11: 385–402) locates the ‘‘unpardonable
J. Gerald Kennedy 257

crime’’ of the protagonist in his ‘‘foreclosure’’ of the Father’s Name —his

rejection of paternal authority—which accounts for Wilson’s ‘‘aversion’’
to his ‘‘uncourtly patronymic,’’ his invention of a pseudonym, and (cru-
cially) his violent entrapment in a ‘‘rivalrous Imaginary structure.’’ Yon-
jae also elucidates ‘‘the mirror stage, méconnaissance, [and] aggressivity,’’
showing how Poe’s text ‘‘preŽ gures and illustrates’’ these Lacanian con-
cepts. Also drawing on French theory, Stephen Dougherty presents an
acute rethinking of Poe’s greatest story in ‘‘Foucault in the House of
Usher: Some Historical Permutations in Poe’s Gothic’’ (PLL 37: 3–24).
Re ecting cultural anxieties about miscegenation, degeneracy, and racial
purity, ‘‘Usher’’ emerges here as a fable of the collapse not just of the
Southern slavocracy (à la Harry Levin) but also of an Anglo-Saxon nation
terriŽ ed by blood contamination. Richard D. Rust sheds new light on an
old problem in ‘‘ ‘Punish with Impunity’: Poe, Thomas Dunn English,
and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ ’’ (EAPR 2, ii: 33–52), reconstructing the
literary hostility thought to have inspired Poe’s tale. Rust returns to
English’s novel, 1844, where Poe is parodied as Marmaduke Hammer-
head, to outline the clumsy revenge plot that Poe brilliantly rewrote to
display his intellectual superiority over his antagonist. John A. Dern in
‘‘Poe’s Public Speakers: Rhetorical Strategies in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and
‘The Cask of Amontillado’ ’’ (EAPR 2, ii: 53–70) analyzes the speech of
the respective narrators, showing that rhetorically both reveal themselves
to be abusive, self-interested, and indiVerent to truth. To these studies
one might add John Hughes’s ‘‘Poe’s Resentful Soul’’ (PoeS 34: 20–28),
one of the year’s most penetrating general essays. Hughes analyzes the
‘‘aVective contagion, even contamination, which is perhaps the eVect at
the heart of [Poe’s] texts’’ and draws on Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment
(via Gilles Deleuze) to indicate how Poe’s tales are ‘‘cryptic expressions of
an imprisoning emotional negativity.’’
The tales of ratiocination remain a focus of lively interest in Poe
studies. The essays in Romancing the Shadow by Lindon Barrett (‘‘Pres-
ence of Mind: Detection and Racialization in ‘The Murders in the Rue
Morgue,’ ’’ pp. 157–76) and Elise Lemire (‘‘ ‘The Murders in the Rue
Morgue’: Amalgamation Discourses and the Race Riots of 1838 in Poe’s
Philadelphia,’’ pp. 177–204) engage race theory and the popular hysteria
over racial amalgamation, respectively, in Poe’s Ž rst Dupin tale, while
Liliane Weissberg’s ‘‘Black, White, and Gold’’ (pp. 127–56) establishes
the signiŽ cance of Sullivan’s Island in ‘‘The Gold-Bug’’ for the history of
258 Early-19th-Century Literature

slavery. In ‘‘The Detective Gaze: Edgar A. Poe, the Flaneur, and the
Physiognomy of Crime’’ (ATQ 15: 5–22) James V. Werner Ž nds the
 aneur an indispensable model for Poe’s detective hero, for both assume a
‘‘liminal’’ relation to the surfaces they seek to read. Despite the ‘‘fantasy
of control’’ sustained by Dupin, his method exposes the ‘‘porosity’’ of
‘‘architectural and conceptual boundaries,’’ thus subverting (like the
 aneur’s gaze) cognitive distinctions between inside and outside.
Robert Morrison’s ‘‘Poe’s De Quincey, Poe’s Dupin’’ (EIC 51: 424–41)
explores Thomas De Quincey’s general in uence on Poe but underscores
the former’s anticipations of the ratiocinative tale. Tracing a series of
purloinings (Coleridge from Schiller, De Quincey from Coleridge, Poe
from De Quincey) Morrison Ž nally identiŽ es the minister D—— of ‘‘The
Purloined Letter’’ with De Quincey and suggests that ‘‘in the contest
between Dupin and D——’’ Poe ‘‘rewrites his own intellectual exchange’’
with the English ‘‘Opium-Eater.’’ Françoise Sammarcelli looks at the self-
re exive nature of Poe’s detective tales in ‘‘Re-searched Premises or Intel-
lectual Games with the Other: Notes on Poe’s Tales of Ratiocination’’
(PoeS 34: 13–19), highlighting his digressions on analysis. Building on
John Irwin’s revelations about Poe and French mathematics she argues
that in ‘‘The Murders in Rue Morgue’’ and ‘‘The Purloined Letter’’ the
author problematizes the ‘‘foreground/background hierarchy’’ and re-
deŽ nes the ‘‘text/commentary relationship’’ to make epistemology itself
his subject.
Poe’s minor tales also attract interest. Drawing on an ingenious reading
of ‘‘King Pest’’ by a former student, Louis A. Renza examines the tale’s
problematic allegorical status in ‘‘Poe’s King: Playing It Close to the Pest’’
(EAPR 2, ii: 3–18). Beneath a subversive narrative that mocks the didactic
temperance tale Renza sees the ‘‘scatological allegory’’ of venereal disease
(discovered by Robert B. Mullen) as a ‘‘perverse privatization’’ of literary
publication. Eliding previous scholarship on the topic, Jon Hauss’s
‘‘Manuscripts of the Maelstrom’’ (WHR 55: 139–57) employs a series of
numbered, elliptical re ections (like Nietzsche) to explore the metatex-
tuality of ‘‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’’ He writes equivocally about ‘‘the
geographies of the maelstrom’’ while asserting that the maelstrom ‘‘en-
gulfs and destroys all familiar geographies’’; he nonetheless cites Eureka to
infer the ‘‘recreation’’ of ‘‘another world’’ beyond disaster. In ‘‘Poe’s Fe-
male Narrators’’ (SoQ 39, iv: 49–57) Barbara Cantalupo reexamines the
linked stories ‘‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’’ and ‘‘A Predicament’’
J. Gerald Kennedy 259

as well as ‘‘The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade’’ to note the

dire fate of Poe’s lusty female storytellers. The essay thus interrogates Poe’s
‘‘gentility’’ and presumed idealization of women, revealing a misogyny
that Cantalupo oddly refrains from so naming. Skirting recent argu-
ments that complicate Poe’s views of race, Paul Christian Jones again
positions the author as a defender of slavery in ‘‘The Danger of Sympa-
thy: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hop-Frog’ and the Abolitionist Rhetoric of Pa-
thos’’ ( JamS 35: 239–54). Jones contends that Poe exploits the sentimental
mode of abolitionist writing to trap the reader into sympathy for the title
character before exposing the ‘‘fanged, foamy-mouthed maniac as the
true face of the slave’’ and indicting the King as a careless slave master.
William Freedman’s ‘‘Poe’s Oval Portrait of ‘The Oval Portrait’ ’’ (PoeS 34:
7–12) oVers another look at the story’s much-discussed self-re exivity.
Noting that ‘‘Poe’s art lives in that vital tension between . . . its conscious
and repressed material,’’ Freedman underscores the artist’s refusal to see
his bride’s decline, a denial that nevertheless acknowledges the ‘‘forced
ingress’’ of ‘‘carnal life’’ upon the world of art.
Work on Poe’s longer Ž ction includes my essay in Romancing the
Shadow, ‘‘ ‘Trust No Man’: Poe, Douglass, and the Culture of Slavery’’
(pp. 225–57), which connects the racialized, reciprocal deceptions in Pym
and The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to the volatile slave-
holding culture of the upper South. In ‘‘Poe’s Discovery of the Right
Brain’’ (SLJ 33, ii: 62–79) Mark Canada alternatively oVers a new psycho-
logical reading: Pym maps a journey into ‘‘the realm of the imagination,’’
neurologically located in the right brain. Experiencing vivid visual imag-
ery, suicidal thoughts, and both temporal and linguistic disorientation,
the narrator’s perceptions epitomize right brain thinking, associated by
Canada with ‘‘the most creative period of Poe’s career.’’ John Carlos
Rowe’s essay in Romancing the Shadow, ‘‘Edgar Allan Poe’s Imperial Fan-
tasy and the American Frontier’’ (pp. 74–105), argues that Poe ‘‘developed
an ‘American’ rhetoric of imperial power’’ and deployed it in The Journal
of Julius Rodman and ‘‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’’ to reinscribe
oppressive ‘‘racial hierarchies’’ in his depictions of Native Americans and
the slave Toby in the former work and the Indians of Benares in the latter.
More vehemently, Lee Rozelle links Rodman summarily to a ‘‘molested
ecology,’’ which includes ‘‘the social realities of clear cutting, strip min-
ing, heedless animal slaughter, and genocide in 19th century America,’’ in
‘‘Oceanic Terrain: Peristaltic and Ecological Sublimity in Poe’s The Jour-
260 Early-19th-Century Literature

nal of Julius Rodman and Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Moun-
tains, ’’ pp. 105–22 in From Virgin Land to Disney World: Nature and Its
Discontents in the USA of Yesterday and Today, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath
(Rodopi).
Historical studies include Thomas F. Marvin’s ‘‘ ‘These Days of Dou-
ble Dealing’: Edgar Allan Poe and the Business of Magazine Publishing’’
(AmPer 11: 81–94), which adds new angles to Poe’s association with
William Burton. Marvin reviews Burton’s prior work in periodicals,
interprets title page iconography in The Gentleman’s Magazine, and reads
‘‘The Business Man’’ as a veiled commentary on Poe’s diYculties with
Burton. JeVrey A. Savoye adds new information from Poe’s subscriber list
for The Penn and Stylus, including his contacts with literary societies, and
then presents two short, uncollected Poe letters in ‘‘An Addendum to
Ostrom’s Revised Check List of the Correspondence of Edgar Allan Poe,
and Two ‘New’ Poe Letters’’ (EAPR 2, ii: 19–32). Scott Peeples authorita-
tively reexamines Poe’s perplexing relationship to N. P. Willis in ‘‘ ‘The
Mere Man of Letters Must Ever Be a Cipher’: Poe and N. P. Willis’’ (ESQ
46 [2000]: 125–47). Peeples positions the two as opposites —Willis the
commercial success who fashioned a ‘‘trademark voice’’ and Poe the ne’er-
do-well exponent of multiple voices and poses —but concludes that Poe
saw ‘‘a distorted image of his own career in Willis’s’’ and thus, like
William Wilson, turned on his counterpart and rival. Leon Jackson
examines an overlooked aspect of Poe’s literary practice in ‘‘ ‘The Italics
Are Mine’: Edgar Allan Poe and the Semiotics of Print,’’ pp. 139–61 in
Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation, ed. Paul C.
Gutjahr and Margaret L. Benton (Mass.), calling attention to Poe’s ‘‘ob-
session with printedness’’ —varieties of type and typographical transfor-
mations of handwritten manuscripts. As Jackson notes, Poe tried to
simulate print in his chirography and later hailed ‘‘anastatic printing’’ as
mechanically reproduced handwriting; the latter would, Poe vainly
hoped, bridge the gap ‘‘between manuscript production and mechanical
reproduction, between aura and eYciency.’’
Devotees of Poe should note the special issue of Poe Studies (33, i–ii),
guest edited by Meredith McGill, on ‘‘New Directions in Poe Studies,’’
featuring brief interventions by younger scholars who outline new critical
and theoretical approaches to the author. Leon Jackson emphasizes the
need to place Poe within ‘‘a pervasive, commercialized, and steadily
industrializing antebellum culture of print’’ in ‘‘Poe and Print Culture’’
J. Gerald Kennedy 261

(pp. 4–9). Eliza Richards in ‘‘Women’s Place in Poe Studies’’ (pp. 10–14)
calls for closer attention to Poe’s ‘‘multifaceted dialogue with his female
contemporaries,’’ while Teresa A. Goddu identiŽ es the need to examine
‘‘the diVerent registers of [Poe’s] writing on race —the ways they move be-
tween caricature and critique—rather than reducing them to a single key’’
in ‘‘Rethinking Race and Slavery in Poe Studies’’ (pp. 15–18). Gustavus T.
Stadler concedes in ‘‘Poe and Queer Studies’’ (pp. 19–22) that ‘‘sexuality is
vexed in Poe,’’ though his readings of ‘‘The Man of the Crowd’’ and ‘‘The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’’ identify a ‘‘homoerotic friction’’
generated by ‘‘the resistance of a male body to interpretation.’’ Virginia
Jackson argues the need ‘‘to reclaim Poe as a critic’’ in ‘‘Poe, Longfellow,
and the Institution of Poetry’’ (pp. 23–28) and reexamines his attacks on
Longfellow as evidence of an anxiety about ‘‘lyric prosopoeia,’’ the rhe-
torical power of an imagined or absent subject. Adam Frank in ‘‘The
Letter of the Laugh’’ (pp. 29–32) proposes psychological ‘‘aVect theory’’ as
a way of understanding Poe’s attention to physiognomies in tales such as
‘‘The Purloined Letter.’’
Poe’s in uence on subsequent art and literature remains a popular
topic. The most substantial new discussion of Poe and popular culture is
M. Thomas Inge’s illustrated essay ‘‘Poe and the Comics Connection’’
(EAPR 2, i: 2–29), which appends a chronology of Poe comic book
adaptations since 1944. Inge posits an analogy between the short story
and the comic book and concludes that while comics cannot reproduce
the intensity of Poe’s Ž rst-person narration, they often successfully con-
vey plot suspense. Naming Poe ‘‘the major single literary in uence’’ on
Hitchcock’s American Ž lms, Dennis R. Perry evaluates 40 related com-
mentaries in ‘‘Bibliography of Scholarship Linking Alfred Hitchcock and
Edgar Allan Poe’’ (Hitchcock Annual, pp. 163–73). Poe’s intellectual in u-
ence drives an unusual study, Samuel B. Garren’s ‘‘The ‘Too Long Un-
join’d Chain’: Gilbert Adair’s Use of Edgar Allan Poe in His Translation of
George Perec’s La disparition’’ (CLAJ 44: 373–82), which places Perec’s
experimental narrative of disappearances —in which the letter ‘‘e’’ never
appears —in a Poesque tradition and considers Adair’s ingenious e-less
adaptation of ‘‘The Raven’’ (‘‘The Black Bird’’ by ‘‘Arthur Gordon Pym’’)
as a parodic component of the novel. Jane Blevins-Le Bigot’s ‘‘Valéry, Poe
and the Question of Genetic Criticism’’ (ECr 41, ii: 68–78) also contem-
plates the French face of Poe, reexamining Paul Valéry’s attraction to Poe
and his misreading of ‘‘The Philosophy of Criticism,’’ which engendered
262 Early-19th-Century Literature

French critical emphasis on the creative process. The haunting in uence
of ‘‘The Bells’’ impels Rosemary Lloyd’s ‘‘Mallarmé and the Bounds of
Translation’’ (NFS 40, ii: 14–25).

iii Stowe
Not surprisingly, Stowe’s most famous novel continues to dominate
scholarly discussion, and two signiŽ cant essays consider the Creole and
Caribbean associations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In ‘‘Creole Family Politics
in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ’’ (Novel
33: 328–52) Carolyn Vellenga Bergman sees Stowe’s Louisiana with its
‘‘Americans who are not American, blacks who are not black and . . .
whites who are not white’’ as a racially destabilized culture symptomatic
of French, Caribbean, and speciŽ cally Haitian in uences. Bergman con-
trasts Stowe’s determination to place ‘‘slavery and slaves outside the moral
conŽ nes of the Anglo-American community’’ by evoking the ‘‘Creole
threat’’ to white nationhood with Harriet Jacobs’s insistence that ‘‘the
American family and nation’’ are already Creole (in a diVerent sense) as a
consequence of familiarities between masters and slave mistresses. Citing
the same Stowe references to Haiti and Santo Domingo quoted by Berg-
man, Anna Brickhouse probes the intertextual, transnational connec-
tions between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a Haitian play, Ogé, ou Le préjugé de
couleur, in ‘‘The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
and Beyond’’ (AmLH 13: 407–44). Recalling the 1790 revolt of free men
of color led by Ogé, the play contains several parallels to Stowe’s novel, a
work explicitly cited in Faubert’s introduction; the drama itself embodies
the ‘‘perceived threat of slave insurrection’’ associated by Stowe with
the ‘‘Franco-Africanist shadow cast by New Orleans and its proximity
to Haiti.’’ Brickhouse brilliantly traces this shadow from Uncle Tom’s
Cabin through Melville, Chopin, and Jewett to Faulkner (Absalom, Absa-
lom! ) before conducting a similar search for the more benign ‘‘Franco-
Africanist Ž gure’’ in African American texts from Brown’s Clotel to
Harper’s Iola Leroy and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun.
Other new work on the novel includes Joan D. Hedrick’s ‘‘Commerce
in Souls: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the State of the Nation,’’ pp. 167–83 in
Novel History. Written for a general audience, the essay proposes that
Stowe’s novel ‘‘more than any other . . . is entwined with our national
history,’’ a claim borne out by her use of such contextual sources as slave
narratives by Josiah Henson and Henry Bibb. Hedrick explains that by
J. Gerald Kennedy 263

overturning racial expectations, embodying the national desire for liberty

in a slave, Stowe ‘‘eVected a revolution in consciousness.’’ In a fertile
juxtaposition James Olney links Stowe’s Topsy to the lyrics of Stephen
Foster and the tradition of minstrel blackface in ‘‘I Ain’t Gonna Be No
Topsy Because Paris Is My Old Kentucky Home’’ (SoR 37: 155–67). Tracy
Fessenden oVers a major reconsideration of tensions between Stowe’s
Protestantism and her Catholic sympathies in ‘‘From Romanism to Race:
Anglo-American Liberties in Uncle Tom’s Cabin ’’ (Prospects 25 [2000]:
229–68).
Two essays examine The Minister’s Wooing. The late Jenny Franchot’s
luminous meditation, ‘‘Unseemly Commemoration: Religion, Frag-
ments, and the Icon,’’ pp. 211–28 in National Imaginaries, American
Identities, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Gordon Hutner (Princeton), devotes
four pages to the novel, treating Mary Scudder’s discovery of an engrav-
ing of the Madonna as emblematic of the bemused attachment in secular
modernity to icons of lost religious belief. Mark T. Hoyer conversely
considers the role of science in 19th-century sentimental culture in ‘‘Cul-
tivating Desire, Tending Piety: Botanical Discourse in Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing,’’ pp. 111–25 in Beyond Nature Writings.
Stowe’s work as coeditor of the journal Hearth and Home in 1869–70
comes under scrutiny in Sarah Robbins’s ‘‘Gendering Gilded Age Peri-
odical Professionalism: Reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Hearth and
Home Prescriptions for Women’s Writing,’’ pp. 45–65 in ‘‘The Only EF -
cient Instrument.’’ Robbins construes the disappointing conservatism of
Stowe’s columns as ‘‘savvy’’ advice for aspiring women writers facing a
gendered literary marketplace. More critically, Rachel Naomi Klein dem-
onstrates in ‘‘Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Domestication of Free Labor
Ideology’’ (Legacy 18: 135–52) that Stowe’s blind faith in free labor, under-
lying her attack on slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, guided much of her
postwar writing on household management. In House and Home and
elsewhere, Stowe celebrated the dignity of work and advocated domestic
labor contracts but (Klein concludes) naively misjudged the economic
straits of working women and ignored labor coercion based on class and
race.

iv Douglass
The volume of scholarship of Frederick Douglass underscores his con-
tinuing importance. Wolfgang Mieder’s book ‘‘No Struggle, No Progress’’:
264 Early-19th-Century Literature

Frederick Douglass and His Proverbial Rhetoric for Civil Rights (Peter Lang)
consists of a 100-page essay, ‘‘Frederick Douglass and the Proverb,’’ and a
400-page index glossing recurrent key words and phrases in Douglass’s
proverbial rhetoric. Mieder’s formidable scholarship on the proverb en-
ables him to provide illuminating commentary on the biblical and
folkloristic sources of Douglass’s favorite expressions, producing a new
perspective on his rhetorical retentiveness. In ‘‘ ‘Eye-Witness to the Cru-
elty’: Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in Frederick Doug-
lass’s 1845 Narrative ’’ (AL 73: 245–75), three scenes of violence —Aunt
Hester’s whipping, Demby’s murder, and Frederick’s beating in a Bal-
timore shipyard —mark pivotal events that enable Jeannine DeLombard
to illustrate Douglass’s transition from mute eyewitness to antislavery
speaker. Using Emerson’s Nature to metaphorize the incident in which
Douglass is kicked in the eye, DeLombard distinguishes between two
kinds of seeing: ‘‘Emerson’s ‘transparent eyeball,’ then, with its attendant
associations of universal subjectivity and transcendent poetic vision, pro-
vides a stark contrast to the embodied subjectivity and traumatized eye-
witness perspective represented by Douglass’s ‘burst’ eyeball.’’
Finding in exemplary texts by Douglass ‘‘a doubled, contradictory
perspective on time,’’ Lloyd Presley Pratt’s ‘‘Progress, Labor, Revolution:
The Modern Times of Antebellum African American Life Writing’’
(Novel 34 [2000]: 56–76) disputes the notion that pre-Civil War litera-
ture represents the ‘‘modernization’’ and ‘‘homogenization’’ of time and
identity. Pratt speciŽ cally dismantles the illusion of an essential American
identity by showing how Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and
especially The Heroic Slave evoke a ‘‘revolutionary-messianic time’’ anti-
thetical to the timeless world of slavery and constitutive of a diVerent
national identity. In ‘‘Allegories of Exposure: The Heroic Slave and the
Heroic Agonistics of Frederick Douglass,’’ pp. 31–55 in Racing and (E)rac-
ing Language, ed. Ellen J. Goldner and SaŽ ya Henderson-Holmes (Syra-
cuse), Goldner argues that the subtext of Douglass’s novella ‘‘allegorizes
an emotional struggle between Douglass and his white audience,’’ repeat-
edly restaging the author’s eVorts to tell his story in the face of racism.
Madison Washington’s soliloquy, overheard in the forest by Listwell,
recalls the ‘‘Dialogue Between a Slave and His Master’’ from the Colum-
bian Orator and mirrors Douglass’s faith that, despite his repeated ex-
posure to demeaning gazes, reason would triumph over racism.
Paul Giles in ‘‘Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges: Frederick
Douglass and British Culture’’ (AL 73: 779–810) compares the 1845 and
J. Gerald Kennedy 265

1855 autobiographies to reveal an emerging ‘‘transnational perspective’’

that turns ‘‘nationalism against itself ’’ to ‘‘demystify national identity.’’
The earlier work, Giles argues, fuses categorical opposites in a contradic-
tory national narrative of power through self-reliance, while My Bondage
and My Freedom deploys the cultural perspective Douglass gained in
Britain to ‘‘interrogate the nature of freedom and its inherent contradic-
tions,’’ thus redeŽ ning the ‘‘charmed circle of the nation’’ through a
transnationalism that now deŽ nes both power and domination in rela-
tion to England’s ‘‘Irish question.’’ Similarly concerned with diVerences
between Douglass’s Ž rst two autobiographies, Michael Chaney in ‘‘Pic-
turing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom as
Auto(bio)ethnography’’ (AAR 35: 391–408) contrasts the absent mother
of the 1845 Narrative with the mother pointedly compared in My Bondage
to an ethnological illustration of Ramses II. Chaney maintains that
Douglass ‘‘uses the image of his mother to insert himself into an other-
wise impermeable conversation among antebellum America’s leading
ethnographers,’’ both to deconstruct the specular, racialized gaze of such
writing and to assert a connection between African Americans and Egyp-
tian culture that destabilized fashionable hierarchies of race.
Two additional essays on Douglass bear mentioning. In ‘‘Gratitude
and Social Equality’’ (HedgehogR 3: 62–77) Laurence M. Thomas de-
velops a philosophical inquiry around Douglass’s complaint in the 1845
Narrative about the ingratitude of slaveholders toward his grandmother.
Thomas ponders this odd insistence on ingratitude, concluding that
gratitude is an acknowledgment of another’s moral agency; he adds that
by failing to see the grandmother’s unqualiŽ ed goodness, slaveholders
betrayed their wickedness, which is ‘‘the genius of Douglass’s insight’’
about gratitude. Jon D. Cruz’s ‘‘Historicizing the American Cultural
Turn: The Slave Narrative’’ (EJCSt 4: 303–23) positions accounts such as
Douglass’s Narrative at the start of ‘‘modern cultural interpretation’’ and
hails that work for its commentary on ‘‘the inside meanings of cultural
practices’’ such as slave songs. Such analysis, says Cruz, preŽ gured ‘‘a
sociology of music’’ and let abolitionists grasp ‘‘the collective conscious-
ness of slaves.’’

v Cooper and the New York Literati

Cooper scholarship this year includes a few substantial essays, among
them Wayne Franklin’s ‘‘Fathering the Son: The Cultural Origins of
266 Early-19th-Century Literature

James Fenimore Cooper’’ (RALS 27: 149–78), an authoritative biographi-

cal meditation that principally discusses Cooper’s complex response to
the American Revolution and his shifting religious orientation (between
Quakerism and Anglicanism). Commenting extensively on Alan Taylor’s
William Cooper’s Town (1995), the essay deals as much with Judge Cooper
as with his son and heralds the appearance of Franklin’s new biography of
the novelist. In ‘‘ ‘Snug Stored Below’: The Politics of Race in James
Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers ’’ (SAF 29: 131–58) Andrew Doolen reads
that novel in light of two key events that exposed the contradiction of
slavery: the founding of the American Colonization Society and the
Missouri Compromise. Focusing on the slave Aggy and the free black
Brom Freeborn, Doolen asserts that Cooper ‘‘grapples with racial antago-
nism’’ and injustice in a democratic republic far more honestly than he
would in the later, propagandistic Notions of the Americans. Revising her
initial assumptions, Diane Price Herndl interrogates the politics of senti-
ment in ‘‘Style and the Sentimental Gaze in The Last of the Mohicans ’’
(Narrative 9: 259–82), comparing Cooper’s manipulations of the reader’s
gaze in the novel with Michael Mann’s cinematography in the 1992 Ž lm
based on the novel. Herndl incisively shows how acts of seeing encode
values and validate safe ideological positions; yet while Mann absolves
white viewers from racial guilt by refashioning Nathaniel into a ‘‘sim-
ulacrum Indian,’’ he also produces, according to Herndl, a valuable
‘‘postmodern sentimentalism’’ that invites ‘‘a rethinking of otherness.’’
Martin Buinicki’s brief essay, ‘‘ ‘Mere Articles of Trade’: Literary Property,
Copyright, and Democracy’’ ( JFCSMP 14: 1–6), traces Cooper’s evolving
ideas of property in relation to the copyright controversy and frames a
discussion of the Three Mile Point dispute in Home as Found as an
assertion of general property rights in the face of popular arguments
against ‘‘monopolistic control.’’
In a deft piece of scholarship, Stephanie P. Browner in ‘‘Documenting
Cultural Politics: A Putnam’s Short Story’’ (PMLA 116: 397–408) deline-
ates the New York context of Charles Frederick Briggs’s 1853 tale ‘‘Elegant
Tom Diller,’’ which follows the article. Browner Ž nds in the story ‘‘an
uneasy relation between nationalism and high-brow aesthetics’’ and
shows how Briggs’s bankruptcy tale comments on issues of class and race
in the aftermath of the Astor Place riots. Countering the view of William
Cullen Bryant as an Anglophile traditionalist, Anna Brickhouse under-
lines his contributions to a ‘‘transnational American scene’’ and an ‘‘inter-
American renaissance’’ in ‘‘ ‘A Story of the Island of Cuba’: William
J. Gerald Kennedy 267

Cullen Bryant and the Hispanophone Americas’’ (NCF 56: 1–22). Bry-
ant’s 1829 tale, written while he studied Spanish in New York with the
Salazar family, preŽ gures his ‘‘literary-imperialist vision’’ of an Anglo-
Saxon nation reaching into Latin America while betraying ‘‘unspoken
cultural anxieties’’ aroused by the heterogeneous population of a country
such as Cuba.

vi Child, Sedgwick, and Other New England Writers

In ‘‘ ‘But Maria, did you really write this?’: Preface as Cover Story in Lydia
Maria Child’s Hobomok’’ (Legacy 17: 127–40) Molly Vaux assesses the
claims and concealments of the novel’s opening chapters, delineating
three early sites of self-representation that dramatize the author’s ‘‘literary
anxieties and aspirations.’’ She thus extends somewhat the usual discus-
sion of Child’s male persona. Challenging the now-familiar assertion that
women writers eschewed the narrative of Indian conquest popularized by
Cooper, Bird, and William Gilmore Simms, James H. Cox insists in
‘‘The Power of Sympathy: European American Women Novelists Imag-
ine Indigenous Absence’’ (ATQ 15: 191–207) that whether or not Child
and Catharine Maria Sedgwick (and Susannah Rowson) ‘‘sympathized’’
with oppressed Indians, they were, like their male counterparts, unwill-
ing or unable to imagine outcomes that did not involve ‘‘the absence of
indigenous others.’’ Cox reads white female sympathy as rooted in an
assumption of ‘‘cultural and racial superiority,’’ though he forgets that all
three women were portraying a shameful past rather than a utopian
future.
Focusing on Hobomok and Hope Leslie, respectively, Mark G. Vásquez
contends in ‘‘ ‘Your sister cannot speak to you and understand you as I
do’: Native American Culture and Female Subjectivity in Lydia Maria
Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’’ (ATQ 15: 173–90) that both novels
represent white women learning a ‘‘language of mediation’’ from Native
American Ž gurative discourse that counters the ‘‘disuniŽ cation’’ of white,
patriarchal discourse. Although he notes that Hope Leslie moves from
‘‘monologic’’ to ‘‘dialogic’’ language, Vásquez mostly ignores diVerences
within the respective discourse communities. In ‘‘Comparatist Inter-
pretations of the Frontier in Early American Fiction and Literary Histo-
riography’’ (CLCWeb 3, ii) Barbara Buchenau questions the exclusion of
Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie from critical constructions of the ‘‘national narra-
tive’’ and decides that the author’s refusal to portray the wilderness as
268 Early-19th-Century Literature

dangerous excludes her novel from the frontier paradigm derived from
The Last of the Mohicans. Buchenau notes critical neglect of Cooper’s The
Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, where the author ‘‘substantially reconsidered
some of his own mythic interpretations.’’ Using the work of Elaine
Scarry, Carolyn Sorisio examines the rhetorical dilemma of abolitionist
women writers who had to represent pain in order to curtail it. In ‘‘The
Spectacle of the Body: Torture in the Antislavery Writing of Lydia Maria
Child and Frances E. W. Harper’’ (MLS 30, i [2000]: 45–66) she argues
that in An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans
Child endeavored to redirect attention from ‘‘the sentimental idea of the
universality of pain’’ to ‘‘the mechanisms of power in slave society.’’
Two articles on Sarah Josepha Hale deserve mention. Amy Beth Aron-
son reconstructs Hale’s crucial role in creating a magazine by and for
women in ‘‘Domesticity and Women’s Collective Agency: Contribution
and Collaboration in America’s First Successful Women’s Magazine’’
(AmPer 11: 1–23). Marquita Walker brie y reexamines Hale’s Ž ctional
questioning of slavery in ‘‘Separate Spheres Collide: Slavery’s Economic
In uence on Domesticity in Sarah Josepha Hale’s Northwood [1827 and
1852]’’ (PMPA 25 [2000]: 64–71).
Reviving interest in a once-prominent literary Brahmin, Peter Gibian’s
Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge)
calculates the ‘‘cultural work’’ of Holmes’s ‘‘breakfast table’’ dialogues.
Gibian aims to dispel the notion of his subject’s social conservatism,
emphasizing the polyvocal heterogeneity of Holmes’s Ž ctionalized con-
versations, said to mirror a public sphere shaped by conversational clubs,
organizations, and institutions. This study ranges across the physician-
poet’s diversiŽ ed career, focusing by turns on the interruptive, carnival-
esque, and ‘‘bipolar’’ characteristics of ‘‘boardinghouse’’ colloquies that
oscillate between levity and gravity. Holmes emerges as a ‘‘shaker rather
than a mover,’’ struggling through wit and intellect to exorcize his father’s
Calvinism —a process that drew him into ‘‘intense and intimate dialogue’’
with Hawthorne, Holmes’s ‘‘psychological and spiritual double.’’ A Ž nal
chapter examines Holmes’s dialogue with his own son, the future Chief
Justice, who rejected his father’s concept of conversation as well as his idea
of authority. This revisionary study conveys a vivid sense of 19th-century
Bostonian intellectual culture, yet one comes away with the sense that the
‘‘culture of conversation’’ was the preserve of Eurocentric Anglo-Saxons
(mostly male) who blinked at the major social and political issues of the
J. Gerald Kennedy 269

day. Neither slavery nor Manifest Destiny nor even sectional con ict
seems to have troubled Holmes’s clever badinage.
In ‘‘Longfellow and the Fate of Modern Poetry’’ (NewC 19, iv [2000]:
12–20) John Derbyshire remarks ruefully of his subject: ‘‘Longfellow is
not merely a dead poet, he is a dead dead poet.’’ This review-essay laments
declining interest in the poet, a phenomenon blamed on free verse,
critical theory, the ‘‘dropping’’ of classical studies, and the general decline
of culture in modernity. Derbyshire sketches Longfellow’s life sensitively
and registers his appreciation for ‘‘popular poetry’’ that can be memorized
and recited but also inadvertently explains why Longfellow has inspired
so little recent scholarship.

vii The South and Southwest

Two important books add new resources for the study of Southern litera-
ture. John Caldwell Guilds has edited The Simms Reader (Virginia),
whose 400 pages oVer a rich sampling of Simms’s writing in four genres:
letters, Ž ction, nonŽ ction, and poetry. Guilds introduces the volume
with an illuminating overview of Simms’s career and represents his vast
Ž ctional oeuvre with Ž ve stories (three from The Wigwam and the Cabin ),
asserting that Simms’s ‘‘strongest abilities’’ lay in shorter narratives. The
editor deals frankly with Simms’s racial attitudes and sectional sympa-
thies; the nonŽ ction selections include excerpts from ‘‘Slavery in Amer-
ica’’ and The Social Principle, his attack on American greed, as well as the
complete essays ‘‘Americanism in Literature’’ and ‘‘The Four Periods of
American History.’’ This substantial edition exhibits the diversity and
regional emphasis of Simms’s literary work.
M. Thomas Inge and Edward J. Piacentino edit Humor of the Old
South, an impressive collection of 17 essays (9 written expressly for this
volume) introduced by James H. Justus. The reprinted essays, 2 of which
reach back to the mid-1970s, display the critical insight of such respected
scholars as Leo Lemay, Richard Gray, William E. Lenz, and Piacentino
himself. Only the new essays merit attention here. Scott Romine’s ‘‘Dark-
ness Visible: Race and Pollution in Southwestern Humor’’ (pp. 72–83)
cites a handful of tales and sketches by such authors as A. B. Longstreet
and Joseph Baldwin in which black characters or grotesque black bodies
conjure notions of racial corruption or degradation. In ‘‘The Prison
House of Gender: Masculine ConŽ nement and Escape in Southwest
270 Early-19th-Century Literature

Humor’’ (pp. 87–100) Gretchen Martin asserts that ‘‘Southwest humor

tales celebrate ideals of masculinity vastly diVerent from the very uncom-
promising southern ideal featured in the romances,’’ and she examines
representative stories by Longstreet, George Washington Harris, and
others to show patterns of masculinity largely freed from class division
and domestic gentility, making her title a bit puzzling. Kurt Albert Mayer
and David Rachels mine Longstreet biography to reach discrepant con-
clusions. Mayer’s ‘‘Augustan Nostalgia and Patrician Disdain in A. B.
Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes ’’ (pp. 101–12) emphasizes the ‘‘hardening
conservatism’’ of the collection and the ‘‘patriarchal, biblical’’ ideal that
undergirded the author’s ‘‘patrician’’ desire for ‘‘social order.’’ In ‘‘A Bio-
graphical Reading of A. B. Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes ’’ (pp. 113–29)
Rachels contends, however, that Longstreet’s lower-class origins account
for his close attention to ‘‘lowly characters’’ and their crude or violent
ways.
Valorizing Thompson’s raw early work, David Estes examines the
elimination of rough localisms from 1840s Georgia newspaper sketches to
please ‘‘a national, book-buying audience’’ three decades later in ‘‘Revis-
ing Southern Humor: William Tappan Thompson and the Major Jones
Letters’’ (pp. 154–60). Disputing Kenneth Lynn’s contrast of the ‘‘Self-
Controlled Gentleman’’ to the backwoods ‘‘Clown’’ to explain Old
Southwest humor, James E. Caron asserts in ‘‘Backwoods Civility, or
How the Ring-Taled Roarer Became a Gentle Man for David Crockett,
Charles F. M. Noland, and William Tappan Thompson’’ (pp. 161–86)
that John Chapman’s 1834 portraits of Crockett popularized a paradoxical
Ž gure of ‘‘cultural degeneracy’’ and ‘‘cultural progress’’ that in uenced
subsequent incarnations of a civil ‘‘Roarer.’’ Mary Ann Wimsatt’s ‘‘Bench
and Bar: Baldwin’s Lawyerly Humor’’ (pp. 187–98) identiŽ es Joseph
Glover Baldwin as ‘‘the most neglected’’ of the Old Southwest humorists
and ably analyzes the urbane, patrician style of his ‘‘ironic condemnation
of the sham, fraud, and crimes found on the frontier.’’ Edwin T. Arnold
calls attention to another neglected humorist in ‘‘The Good Doctor:
O. B. Mayer and ‘Human Natur’ ’’ (pp. 199–211), surveying his stories of
Dutch Fork, South Carolina, and the singular mix of ‘‘propriety and
absurdity, of melancholy and merriment, of commiseration and comedy
[that] sets him apart.’’ In ‘‘An Old Southwesterner Abroad: Cultural
Frontiers and the Landmark American Humor of J. Ross Browne’s
Yusef ’’ (pp. 215–21) Joseph Csicsila calls attention to Browne’s book as a
‘‘milestone’’ in American humor for its parody of the veneration common
J. Gerald Kennedy 271

in travel books and for its projection of Old Southwest humor into the
portrayal of Yusef, the ‘‘wily Syrian guide.’’ At the end of the volume
Piacentino provides a research guide, ‘‘Humor of the Old South: A
Comprehensive Bibliography’’ (pp. 263–309), that adds scholarly value
to this Ž ne collection.
One other article on Old Southwest humor warrants recognition:
Ahmed Nimieri’s ‘‘Play in August Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes ’’
(SLJ 33, ii: 44–61). Play as competition or role-playing pervades Long-
street’s Georgia, according to Nimieri, transforming ‘‘agrarian society’’
into ‘‘a civilized haven in which involvement is possible and rewarding for
a gentleman.’’

viii African American and Native American Voices

Apart from Joshua David Bellin’s Ž ne book, cited earlier, little work on
early Native American authors appeared this year. John Carlos Rowe’s
Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World
War II (Oxford, 2000) includes (in addition to a version of the aforemen-
tioned essay on ‘‘Poe’s Imperial Fantasy’’) the reprinting of a 1998 essay
that went unnoticed in AmLS. His ‘‘Highway Robbery: ‘Indian Re-
moval,’ the Mexican-American War, and American Identity in John
Rollin Ridge’s (Yellow Bird) The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta ’’
(pp. 97–119) oVers a sophisticated reading of the ways that Ridge’s novel
condenses the ‘‘contradictory political, social, legal, cultural, and psycho-
logical eVects of colonial conquest,’’ here projecting the contradictions of
Ridge’s position as a Cherokee facing the ‘‘social disorder’’ of California
circa 1850. The only new article on William Apess, Theresa Strouth
Gaul’s ‘‘Dialogue and Public Discourse in William Apess’s Indian Nul-
liŽ cation ’’ (ATQ 15: 275–92), suggests that in its incorporation of mate-
rials opposing and defending Indian rights Apess’s 1835 treatise on the
Mashpee Revolt models the ‘‘toleration and open dialogue’’ he sought in
American public life. Apess thus sought to demonstrate, according to
Gaul, ‘‘the possibilities for cohabitation between white and American
Indian in the nation and in the nation’s letters.’’ Granville Ganter focuses
on the rhetoric of Seneca chief Red Jacket in ‘‘ ‘You are a cunning people
without sincerity’: Sagoyewatha and the Trials of Community Represen-
tation,’’ pp. 165–95 in Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands,
ed. Barbara Alice Mann (Greenwood).
Several new books on African American slave narratives command
272 Early-19th-Century Literature

attention. Dwight A. McBride’s Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism,

and Slave Testimony (NYU) maps the Romantic ‘‘discursive terrain’’ of
abolitionist rhetoric and examines the overdetermined language that
complicated truth-telling for slave narrators. After a chapter on the dis-
course of British and American abolitionists (including Margaret Fuller
and William Lloyd Garrison), McBride turns to The History of Mary
Prince to specify the rhetorical authority of actual slave experience. Inter-
vening chapters on Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano precede a
culminating discussion of Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative that recon-
structs the mixed discursive community addressed by slave narratives.
Likewise concerned with the problem of truth, Christina Accomando’s
‘‘The Regulations of Robbers’’: Legal Fictions of Slavery and Resistance (Ohio
State) focuses on ‘‘legal, political, and literary discourses of slavery and
resistance,’’ employing ‘‘critical race theory’’ to deconstruct Ž ctions of the
slave code while evoking the ‘‘multiple consciousness’’ constituted by
marginalized or silenced voices. Major sections examine the legal activ-
ism of Sojourner Truth (as well as representations by Stowe and Frances
Gage) and the ‘‘legal critique’’ of Harriet Jacobs, whose Incidents chal-
lenged both slave laws and the ‘‘legal Ž ctions of womanhood.’’ Despite
self-referential gesturing, Accomando suggestively probes connections
between law and literature that persist in cultural Ž ctions of race. Finding
work on slave narratives overin uenced by Douglass’s paradigmatic
memoir, Charles J. Heglar shows the importance of family and matri-
mony in Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives
of Henry Bibb and William and Ellen Craft (Greenwood). Acknowledging
the fragility of slave marriages. Heglar nevertheless questions the over-
emphasis on individual self-making in the ‘‘classic’’ slave narrative by
pondering the predicament of Henry Bibb —whose story hinges on devo-
tion to a wife he will later divorce —and the liberating masquerade of the
Crafts (Ellen posing as a white planter), to which their narrative collab-
oration bears witness.
Among the subjects of Jocelyn Moody’s Sentimental Confessions: Spir-
itual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women (Geor-
gia), only Mattie J. Jackson had been a slave, Ž guring her spiritual jour-
ney in relation to the slave narrative. But the antebellum writers discussed
here —including free women of color Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Zilpha
Elaw, and Nancy Prince —all variously exhorted audiences to rise up
against injustice as their Christian duty. While diVerentiating among
the rhetorical styles and emphases of these ‘‘holy women,’’ Moody insists
J. Gerald Kennedy 273

on the signiŽ cance and complexity of spiritual texts, showing how

they collectively confront the theology of submission marshaled to jus-
tify bondage and subdue slaves. Inadvertently overlooked last year, Rob-
ert S. Levine’s new edition of William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The
President’s Daughter (Bedford, 2000) oVers, in addition to a reliable text
of the novel, a useful collocation of sources cited by Brown as well as a
plethora of extracts from contemporary commentaries on race and slav-
ery, thus producing an ideal textbook for studies of these antebellum
controversies.
Following the lead of Paul Gilroy, two essays investigate the travel
writing of the Black Atlantic, and in both the transnational narratives of
Nancy Prince Ž gure importantly. Cheryl Fish contemplates the anxieties
of black mobility in ‘‘Journeys and Warnings: Nancy Prince’s Travels as
Cautionary Tales for African American Readers,’’ pp. 225–43 in Women
at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse, ed. Liz-
abeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesaro (Palgrave). Fish fo-
cuses especially on Prince’s cautionary writings about Jamaica from a
position both ‘‘inside and outside’’ an oppressive American social order
that made emigration dangerously attractive. Gretchen Holbrook Ger-
zina, on the other hand, reads narratives by black travelers such as Prince
as subverting the conventions of Euro-American travel writing (and the
‘‘protected’’ travel of the Grand Tour) in ‘‘Mobility in Chains: Freedom of
Movement in the Early Black Atlantic’’ (SAQ 100: 41–59). She positions
Prince between Equiano, the African who never returned to Africa, and
Paul CuVe, the free black shipowner who visited Sierra Leone, by tracing
Prince’s travels to Russia, back to Boston, then to Jamaica, and Ž nally,
after perilous stops in three Southern ports, home to ‘‘family and safety,’’
to a space she owns and controls.
Work on antebellum Ž ctionalized autobiographies by African Ameri-
can women includes Holly Blackford’s ‘‘Figures of Orality: The Master,
the Mistress, the Slave Mother in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl: Written by Herself ’’ (PLL 37: 314–36), which traces oral ex-
changes in Incidents, emphasizing the ‘‘female food chain’’ —the coercive
as well as subversive functions of cooking and feeding. Sometimes blur-
ring communication and ingestion, she reduces ‘‘the power dynamics of
slavery’’ to moralized categories of race and gender. Jennifer Rae Greeson,
however, produces a compelling revisionary reading of Jacobs’s auto-
biographical novel as a hybrid text in ‘‘The ‘Mysteries and Miseries’ of
North Carolina: New York City, Urban Gothic Fiction, and Incidents in
274 Early-19th-Century Literature

the Life of a Slave Girl ’’ (AL 73: 277–309). According to Greeson, the
author’s 20 years in New York familiarized her with antiprostitution
gothic novels, which politicized ‘‘illicit female sexuality’’ in ways that
enabled her to make ‘‘the sexual order of Southern society . . . intelli-
gible —and intolerable —for Northern readers.’’
Gretchen Short’s ‘‘Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and the Labor of Citizen-
ship’’ (ArQ 57, iii: 1–27) focuses on Frado’s role as a household laborer to
elucidate Wilson’s critique of ‘‘the arbitrary boundaries of the foreign and
the domestic, nativity and nationality.’’ The narrative reveals that ‘‘Frado
has no home, and no nation, because the only homes available to her as
an African American woman . . . place her in a permanently inferior and
disabled position and deny her membership except as an imperial sub-
ject.’’ Probing the social meanings of domestic space, Lois Leveen con-
siders Frado’s locations and movements within the Bellmont home in
‘‘Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial, and Textual
Dynamics of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig ’’ (AAR 35: 561–80). Her percep-
tive reading of spatial relations exposes family divisions as it uncovers
genteel strategies of domination; she sees Mrs. Bellmont’s ‘‘sitting-room
racism’’ as a model of the repressive conditions faced by African Ameri-
cans after the end of slavery.
Roseann M. Mandzuik and Suzanne Pullon Fitch analyze in ‘‘The
Rhetorical Construction of Sojourner Truth’’ (SoCJ 66: 120–38) the pro-
cesses of ‘‘transformation’’ and ‘‘transŽ guration’’ by which Truth has be-
come an icon whose mythic representation seems often at odds with
historical evidence. Noting that she grew up speaking Dutch on a New
York farm yet has been recurrently associated with plantation life and
quoted as speaking in a Southern slave dialect, the authors cite Frances
Gage’s account of Truth’s 1851 Akron address as the chief source of recent
misrepresentations, doubting even the phrasing of her famous question,
‘‘Ain’t I a woman?’’
The subject of early African American stage performances in New York
engages Michael Warner and Ž ve student contributors in ‘‘A Soliloquy
‘Lately Spoken at the African Theatre’: Race and the Public Sphere in
New York City, 1821’’ (AL 73: 1–46). Reprinting a remarkable 79-line
‘‘Soliloquy of a Maroon Chief in Jamaica’’ from St. Tammany’s Magazine,
Warner identiŽ es black theater impresario William Brown, mulatto actor
James Hewlett, or the white coauthor of Yamoyden, Robert C. Sands, as
possible authors. He places the deŽ ant speech —which challenges emerg-
ing race theory as well as conventional notions of blackness and white-
J. Gerald Kennedy 275

ness —within a thick sociohistorical context that includes debates about

voting rights of free blacks. Likewise oVering a fresh approach to ante-
bellum minority writing is Thomas F. Haddox’s ‘‘The ‘Nous’ of South-
ern Catholic Quadroons: Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Identity in Les
Cenelles ’’ (AL 73: 757–78), which reexamines the cultural meanings of an
1845 collection of poetry by free Creoles of color in New Orleans. Haddox
questions Henry Louis Gates’s association of the volume with the African
American tradition by asserting that the collected poems articulate a
heritage ‘‘deŽ ned by race but just as passionately by class, Latin ethnicity,
and by Roman Catholicism.’’ As gens de couleur libres who enjoyed ‘‘mate-
rial privilege’’ and religious acceptance, the Creole poets staked cultural
claims that ‘‘cut against the grain of an African American identity shaped
by the experience of slavery, a communal consciousness, and a vernacular
idiom.’’ Finally, Maurice Wallace investigates the construction of ante-
bellum black manhood in ‘‘ ‘Are We Men?’: Prince Hall, Martin Delany,
and the Masculine Ideal in Black Freemasonry, 1775–1865,’’ pp. 182–210
in National Imaginaries, American Identities. Wallace discusses Delany’s
involvement in Prince Hall Freemasonry, his eVorts to trace the origins of
Freemasonry to Africa, and his unexpected emergence as a Civil War
oYcer before speculating that the Grand Council in Blake re ects a
Masonic principle of architectural seclusion.

ix Midcentury Literary Women

Representative reform tales by such writers as Lydia Sigourney, Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps (Ward), and Caroline Lee Hentz Ž ll Carol Mattingly’s
anthology Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader (So.
Ill.), which complements her critical-historical study, Well-Tempered
Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric (1998). Mattingly’s in-
troduction notes that ‘‘temperance was the largest single organizing force
for women in U.S. history,’’ and stories in her last section (by Stowe,
Alcott, Ellet, and others) re ect the redeŽ ning of women’s social roles in
some temperance narratives.
Scholarship on Louisa May Alcott includes an attractive paperback
reprint of Louisa May Alcott: Selected Fiction, ed. Daniel Shealy, Made-
leine B. Stern, and Joel Myerson (Georgia). First published in 1990, the
new edition makes available a well-chosen selection of Alcott’s stories
in various Ž ctional modes as well as reform essays, autobiographical
sketches, and excerpts from the novels and children’s books —all preceded
276 Early-19th-Century Literature

by Stern’s magisterial introduction. Brief mention might also be made of

a reference work, The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia (Greenwood), ed.
Gregory Eiselein, Anne K. Phillips, and Madeleine B. Stern, that orga-
nizes the life and writings for student researchers. Inadvertently over-
looked last year, Christine Doyle’s book Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte
Brontë: Transatlantic Translations (Tennessee) concerns Alcott’s early
identiŽ cation with Brontë and her literary adaptation of such themes as
spirituality, intimate relationships, and work as they deŽ ne the lives of
women. In contrast to Brontë, Alcott emerges as a more optimistic and
progressive writer, less boggled by Victorian attitudes about gender and
class. Essays on Alcott include Karen Sands-O’Connor’s ‘‘Why Jo Didn’t
Marry Laurie: Louisa May Alcott and The Heir of RedclyVe ’’ (ATQ 15: 23–
41), a source study that undermines biographical interpretations of Little
Women by demonstrating that Alcott derived key plot elements from
Charlotte Mary Yonge’s novel. Sands-O’Connor establishes Alcott’s fa-
miliarity with the novel and draws parallels between Laurie Laurence and
Yonge’s Guy Morville and (more tellingly) between the younger sister,
Amy Edmonstone, who marries Morville, and Alcott’s Amy March,
whose character transformation starkly betrays Yonge’s in uence. In the
same journal Teresa Derrickson sees Alcott purveying ‘‘fears of racial
degradation’’ in ‘‘Race and the Gothic Monster: The Xenophobic Im-
pulse of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Taming a Tartar’ ’’ (ATQ 15: 43–58). The
story’s ‘‘feminist discourse,’’ which positions Sybil as a Ž gure of strength,
is according to Derrickson ‘‘deeply implicated in the racist discourse that
constructs the [Eastern European] Alexis as the depraved Other,’’ indicat-
ing that Alcott ultimately ‘‘reinstates’’ the ‘‘racist thinking’’ she means to
repudiate. Caroline F. Levander questions the critical separation of real-
ism and sentimentalism, suggesting in ‘‘The Science of Sentiment: The
Evolution of the Bourgeois Child in Nineteenth-Century America’’
(MLS 30, i [2000]: 27–44) that Alcott’s Little Men shows the operation of
scientiŽ c laws and indeed the reliance of sentimental bourgeois culture
on emerging evolutionary theories for ideological dominance.
Scholarship on Sara Payson Willis includes Melissa J. Homestead’s
‘‘ ‘Every Body Sees the Theft’: Fanny Fern and Literary Proprietorship in
Antebellum America’’ (NEQ 74: 210–37), which examines the eVect of
reprinting on the ‘‘multiplicity and instability’’ of her journalistic identity
in the mid-1850s. Homestead contrasts Fern’s inability to control the
appropriation of her material and persona in the public prints with her
Ž ctional Ruth Hall’s secure possession of ‘‘her self, her identity and her
J. Gerald Kennedy 277

literary property’’ as well as her congruence with her journalistic persona

‘‘Floy.’’ On a related topic, Elizabethada A. Wright reconsiders rhetorical
strategies in Fern’s writing for the New York Ledger in ‘‘ ‘Joking Isn’t Safe’:
Fanny Fern, Irony, and Signifyin(g)’’ (RSQ 31: 91–109). Relating Gates’s
notion of signiŽ cation to theories of irony, Wright argues that Fern
conveys her ‘‘feminist lessons’’ by blurring the distinction between ‘‘les-
sons and games, between satire and parody.’’ In ‘‘ ‘Pious Cant’ and Blas-
phemy: Fanny Fern’s Radicalized Sentiment’’ (Legacy 18: 52–64) Jaime
Harker ponders Fern’s sentimentalism, examining her subversive Chris-
tian sincerity as a litmus test for feminist critique. According to Harker,
Fern’s ‘‘progressive sentimentalism,’’ her attentiveness to injustice and
hypocrisy, deŽ nes a ‘‘journey to feminism through Christianity that
shows students the relevance of feminist critiques in every aspect of one’s
life.’’
Family ties drive two other studies of midcentury women’s novels.
Sarah Brusky’s ‘‘Beyond the Ending of Maternal Absence in A New-
England Tale, The Wide, Wide World, and St. Elmo’’ (ESQ 46: 149–
76) questions Cathy Davidson’s theory about unprotected ‘‘motherless
daughters’’ in 19th-century Ž ction by identifying in representative novels
‘‘networks of other mothers’’ who guide female protagonists toward
adulthood. Brusky shows that Sedgwick, Susan B. Warner, and Augusta
Jane Evans constructed plots in which surrogate nurturers ultimately
enable heroines to embody authority and maternity by selecting their
own husbands and becoming ‘‘other mothers’’ themselves. In ‘‘ ‘A Sort of
Adopted Daughter’: Family Relations in The Lamplighter ’’ (AmLH 68:
1023–1047) Cindy Weinstein argues that Maria Cummins’s novel re-
produces contemporary legal con icts about divorce and redeŽ nition of
family in the vicissitudes of the ‘‘doubly-orphaned’’ Germy. Her multiple
adoptions and ‘‘indeŽ nable’’ legal status paradoxically enable her to de-
velop what Weinstein calls a ‘‘judicious sympathy,’’ placing her Ž ctional
development in the context of midcentury adoption laws and court
rulings.
Like Child and Sedgwick, Elizabeth Oakes Smith dramatized the
defection of white women to Indian culture, and Caroline M. Wadded
delineates the underlying implications for ‘‘the feminist struggle for gen-
der equality’’ in ‘‘Puritan Daughters and ‘Wild’ Indians: Elizabeth Oakes
Smith’s Narratives of Domestic Captivity’’ (Legacy 18: 21–34). Wadded
shows how Smith’s perception of marriage as ‘‘a miserable institution’’
underlay fantasies of female empowerment in The Western Captive and
278 Early-19th-Century Literature

The Sagamore of Saco, in which unmarried white women achieve some

independence within Indian tribes, using their ‘‘sel essness to resolve
social con icts.’’ In ‘‘ ‘This Dainty Woman’s Hand . . . Red with Blood’:
E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand as Abolitionist Narrative’’
(ATQ 15: 59–80) Paul Christian Jones resolves the discrepancy between
the novelist’s ‘‘strong anti-slavery opinions’’ and her modern reputation
as a proslavery apologist by reexamining her most popular novel. To
explain her ‘‘problematic depictions of slaves’’ and apparent support of
‘‘the slave system’’ in The Hidden Hand Jones notes the abolitionist
implications of Southworth’s earlier novels, Retribution and India, to
suggest that Southern female readers would have recognized in Capitola
LeNoir a Ž gure whose bloodstained hands re ected their own complicity
in slavery and its evils.
Two essays focus speciŽ cally on women’s poetry. Susan Alves considers
the literary values projected in poems by women laborers in ‘‘Lowell’s
Female Factory Workers, Poetic Voice, and the Periodical,’’ pp. 149–64 in
‘‘The Only EF cient Instrument.’’ Published from 1840 to 1845, the Lowell
OVering featured poetry by working-class women that exhibits a ‘‘com-
plex . . . subjectivity’’ sensitive to race, class, and gender and that con-
structs a ‘‘multifaceted poetic voice.’’ Laura C. WendorV ’s ‘‘ ‘The Vivid
Dreamings of an UnsatisŽ ed Heart’: Gender Ideology, Literary Aesthet-
ics, and the ‘Poetess’ in Nineteenth-Century America’’ (ATQ 15: 109–29)
considers the cultural role of the ‘‘poetess’’ an invention of anthologists
such as Caroline May and Rufus Griswold. WendorV surveys editorial
commentary of the era and associates ‘‘privacy, inspiration, genius, senti-
ment, and morality’’ with the Ž gure of the poetess, whose separate sphere
was at least ‘‘intimately and inextricably associated with the male sphere
of poetry.’’

x Other Writers, Other Genres

Paul Gutjahr’s anthology Popular American Literature of the 19th Century
(Oxford) oVers a delicious sampling of popular writing, from best-selling
novels and gift book poetry to works of history, domestic economy, and
phrenology. Twelve of 19 selections predate the Civil War; the phre-
nological text by Orson and Lorenzo Fowler verges on self-parody with
its preposterous illustrated classiŽ cations. Shelley Streeby brie y dis-
cusses popular war novels by Ned Buntline and A. J. H. Duganne before
elucidating the ideological implications of George Lippard’s Legends of
J. Gerald Kennedy 279

Mexico and ’Bel of Prairie Eden in her Ž ne essay ‘‘American Sensations:

Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War’’ (AmLH 13: 1–40). These
last works, according to Streeby, ‘‘expose the scenes of empire building
that supported [Lippard’s] fantasy of white working class freedom’’ while
illustrating the contradictions of his egalitarian imperialism. Finally, Ste-
phen Carl Arch’s valuable study After Franklin: The Emergence of Auto-
biography in Post-Revolutionary America (New Hampshire) concludes
with a chapter on ‘‘Cultivating the Self in America, 1820–1830’’ that
surveys the decade when autobiography as a genre began ‘‘to emerge
fully’’ in our national literature. Among the writers Arch discusses at least
brie y are the printer Mathew Carey, the poet Robert Stevenson CoYn,
the ex-slave William Grimes, the author Hannah Adams, and the itiner-
ant artist James Guild, in each case noting innovative aspects of auto-
biographical re ection in his or her writing.
Louisiana State University
13 Late-19th-Century Literature
Michael J. Kiskis

Increased interest in scholarship that attempts to unveil the complexities

underlying late-19th-century literary culture marks the year: from studies
that focus on the literary and intellectual relationships among (some-
times intimate) groups of writers to studies that detail shifting ap-
proaches to reading and writing, from investigations of the eVects of
audience and public markets on writer and genre to those that resurrect
forgotten literary Ž gures. Scholars continue to broaden our experience
with and understanding of gender, though we seem to have turned a
corner toward more critical work deciphering a complex weave of in u-
ences on writers of both genders. Considerations of race and ethnicity
move beyond the black/white dichotomy to embrace a more complete
spectrum of American writers and interests. Book-length projects are
more likely to oVer extended and comparative analysis of groups of
writers and often of the impact of culture on literary creation. Relatively
few books focus on a single author: the few single-author studies available
are biographies or collections. Scholarly essays, on balance, remain the
venue for intense scrutiny of individual writers or works. That trend may
say more about the present market for books coming out of academic
presses than about the abiding interest of individual scholars.

i Late-19th-Century Literary Culture

Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club was released to loud fanfare. Menand
weaves a complex story of the literary and intellectual lives of late-19th-
century writers and thinkers: from the legal and literary work of Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr. to the philosophical work of Charles Peirce, William
James, and John Dewey. The early chapters on the politics of abolition
and the eVect of the Civil War on a generation of American (mostly male)
282 Late-19th-Century Literature

intellectuals and on the broad cultural argument over science and biology
that informed contemporary theories and policies on race and ethnicity
are especially good in bringing together the threads of debate that shaped
American pragmatism not only as an academic interest but as a method
of thinking that informed movements of social and political reform. The
book is a valuable primer on the questions and anxieties that stretched
through the last half of the 19th century. On a much smaller scale, Rob-
ert K. Nelson and Kenneth M. Price in ‘‘Debating Manliness: Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, William Sloane Kennedy, and the Question of
Whitman’’ (AL 73: 497–524) oVer an interesting gloss on the debate over
Walt Whitman and sexuality. Kennedy’s response to Higginson’s com-
plaints against Whitman (here published in full as an addendum) is
highly protective and exhibits both blindness to Whitman’s homosex-
uality and a deliberate turn to Whitman’s spiritual qualities. Higginson’s
comments portray a growing conservativeness in an aging radical who
sees a deep relationship between politics and poetry. Kennedy’s response
qualiŽ es him as the most loyal of Whitman’s friends and acquaintances.
Questions of authority and how writers approach their role within
American society are prominent this year. The discussion of aesthetics or
genre is no longer separate from the social and political context. For
example, Glenn Hendler’s Public Sentiments examines a complex set of
psychological and social theories to establish the basis for the literary/
social use of sentiment. The distinction between public and private is not
presented in simple opposition; the pairing is seen to prompt both gen-
eral and individual action. The focus is on symbiosis rather than categori-
cal analysis and points to the use of sentiment by both female and male
writers to inform social ties and reform movements. Ultimately, the
question is how identity is shaped and developed by the ideals of sympa-
thy. Hendler is especially good when dealing with the role of sympathy in
creating deŽ nitions of masculinity. His chapter on boys’ books is par-
ticularly useful when we consider how literature or ‘‘media’’ is tied to
the moral instruction of children. Sympathy is also a foundation of
Stephanie Foote’s excellent Regional Fictions. Foote argues that regional-
ism should be seen as a narrative strategy employed by writers to present
the potential for consolidation of various locations/ethnic populations
into a single national culture. With a predominantly urban audience,
regionalism was both nostalgic and assimilationist (or at least an attempt
to unify disparate groups). Writers moved from a genteel style (Howells,
Freeman, Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Harold Frederic) to a harsher urban
Michael J. Kiskis 283

realism ( Jacob Riis, Alfred Henry Lewis). The urban audience’s fascina-
tion with the rural and urban ‘‘other’’ was central; that sense of the other
aVected elite readers’ sense of place and identity.
Authority is the prime consideration in Barbara Hochman’s excel-
lent Getting at the Author. Hochman concentrates on Wharton, James,
Cather, Norris, and Dreiser (with side trips with Owen Wister, Winston
Churchill, and Francis Crawford); her work is most valuable for the
discussion of the interconnectedness of readers and writers through the
19th century and the development of realism and its result —a displaced,
disguised, and self-eVaced author. Hochman tells two stories: Ž rst, the
distancing of the author from the reader —how readers approached their
relationship with an author and how authors approached their relation-
ship with readers; second, the evolution of modern literary culture —how
the shift in narrative theory and the distancing of readers from authors
contributed to the creation of ‘‘high’’ culture. Realism’s movement to
eVace the author, to remove the power of interpretation from the reader,
and to reinforce a turn from highly personal ways of reading contributes
to a form of disciplined and trained reading, all of which results in a more
stable form of cultural capital. Related is Phillip Barrish’s American Liter-
ary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige. Rather than deŽ n-
ing realism as a genre or as a literary movement, Barrish focuses on how
writers (Howells, James, Cahan, and Wharton) concentrate on a reality
that resides below the surface of the narrative, a reality that is more deeply
aVecting because it is tied to aspects of human/individual unease and
suVering. Writer and reader, then, become interpreters who both ac-
knowledge the existence of the real and understand their inability to
change life at its most basic level. The comments on Howells as the
progenitor of later writers are especially good.
The question of a deeper reality informs Todd McGowan’s provoca-
tive The Feminine ‘‘No!’’ The central question is why certain works were
kept outside the canon despite their sophistication and aesthetic value.
McGowan argues that Ž ctional works by Chopin, Gilman, Chesnutt,
and Hurston were set aside because traumatic experiences center them.
The focus is on the psychology of trauma; readers forced to confront their
own complicity in a symbol system that contributes to or causes trauma
use conventional ideologies to explain exclusion. These literary works
challenged the dominant identity structures operating within the society
and were set aside because of their deeper threat to readers forced to
confront the possibility of agency and action within the stories.
284 Late-19th-Century Literature

Several scholars focus their attention on broad social and political

issues and the relationship of literature to national concerns. William E.
Moddelmog examines law and letters in Reconstituting Authority and
traces a shift through the 19th century as the legal and literary profes-
sions attempted to deŽ ne themselves in relation to one another and to the
idea of form that both emphasize. He considers how authority is estab-
lished within and through the contingent nature of narrative. Questions
of the rule of law and of property take on particular importance in his
comments on Howells and Holmes, Helen Hunt Jackson and Pauline
Hopkins. Chesnutt’s focus on deŽ nitions of property is also considered,
especially as ownership of the self becomes a focus for race discussions.
Law and narrative are also part of Mark Elliott’s ‘‘Race, Color Blind-
ness, and the Democratic Public: Albion W. Tourgée’s Radical Principles
in Plessy v. Ferguson’’ ( Journal of Southern History 67: 287–330). Elliott
oVers a detailed exploration of the context leading up to Plessy and
discusses the philosophical approaches taken by Tourgée, especially the
idea of justice that is blind to race. Tourgée is placed within the tradition
of radical abolitionist thinking and activist approach to change. His
novels are discussed for their focus on legal issues and as they relate to
his growth leading up to Plessy, especially in their idea of whiteness as
a possession. Foreign policy is the focus in Gretchen Murphy’s ‘‘De-
mocracy, Development, and the Monroe Doctrine in Richard Harding
Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune ’’ (AmerS 42, ii: 45–66). Murphy presents an
excellent discussion of the in uence Ž ction can have on national policy
debate. The focus is on how the myth of the Monroe Doctrine is interro-
gated and shaped by Davis’s interest in developing professional identity.
The discussion of the novel’s contribution to the atmosphere of political
debate is important.
Class deŽ nition is the focus of Kevin W. Jett’s ‘‘The EVect of Con-
sumer Capitalism on Middle-Class Culture in Fuller’s CliV Dwellers and
With the Procession’’ (MidAmerica 27: 34–48). Jett looks at Henry Blake
Fuller’s novels of Chicago within the context of changes to the post–Civil
War consumerist economy and as representative of the clash of genteel
and consumer values, shown by the contrasting responses of the postwar
generation to Ž nancial growth and class identities. An early battle in the
culture wars is examined by Mary LoeVelholz in ‘‘The Religion of Art in
the City at War: Boston’s Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863’’ (ALH
13: 212–41). LoeVelholz oVers the public celebration of the Great Organ
as the cultural site for a debate over the hold of Puritan tradition, with
Michael J. Kiskis 285

Emerson and Julia Ward Howe on one side and James Fields and Oliver
Wendell Holmes on the other. The battle for authority of public space
and civic relation (and civic redemption) is seen in the poetry written to
mark the occasion. Art becomes the vehicle for a debate over values; the
social occasion is representative of a concern over cultural power and the
authority of public symbols.

ii Popular/Periodical Literature
There is increased interest in the periodical and how writers both adapted
to the general requirements of the market and helped shape the au-
dience’s interest in and taste for short and often topical Ž ction and essays.
Paul C. Gutjahr’s anthology Popular American Literature of the 19th Cen-
tury (Oxford) presents an array of genres and writers from the years 1800–
1897. These are most often complete texts and include not only a sam-
pling of short Ž ction and essays but also political and social tracts. The
juxtaposition within major thematic sections (such as singleness and
marriage, care and education of the young, proper conduct, race, reli-
gion) is valuable, as is the inclusion of material aimed at various age
groups (for example, selections from the 1879 edition of McGuVey’s First
Eclectic Reader ). There are ample illustrations that appeared in the popu-
lar press. The volume is a useful beginning point for reading deeper into
19th-century culture. Kathleen DiZey’s anthology To Live and Die: Col-
lected Stories of the Civil War, 1861–1876 (Duke) oVers 31 stories that
appeared in literary magazines in both the North and South and provides
a more complex view of the period and the ideologies and impressions
that shaped the Ž ction. Selections are divided by years of publication and
the book includes a timeline that places individual stories within the
context of the war and the years that followed. Contemporary illustra-
tions highlight the relationship between prose and accompanying art.
DiZey’s introduction makes a solid case for the anthology and places the
writing in perspective.
Other studies examine how particular writers and projects aVected
popular literary culture. In ‘‘The Only EI cient Instrument ’’ Aleta Feinsod
Cane and Susan Alves have collected 11 essays that spotlight women writ-
ers’ reliance on periodicals to reach an audience. Essays are clustered
under thematic headings: Social and Political Advocacy; Gender Roles,
Social Expectations, and the Woman Writer; Refashioning the Periodi-
cal. Women used periodicals speciŽ cally to advance social/political and
286 Late-19th-Century Literature

aesthetic agendas. Most important, women did not passively accept the
conventional boundaries of the periodical; they reshaped boundaries and
adapted to the genre possibilities in order to reach readers more eVec-
tively. The periodical became an instrument tailored to the demands of
the writer.
Of the 11 essays, 7 focus on writers usually identiŽ ed as late-19th-
century Ž gures. Sarah Robins’s ‘‘Gendering Gilded Age Periodical Profes-
sionalism: Reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Hearth and Home Prescrip-
tions for Women’s Writing’’ (pp. 45–65) highlights Stowe’s ambivalence:
her advice encourages young women writers but also grows from her
recognition of her own status as an established writer. Stowe acts as both
mentor and arbiter of taste and quality and mixes her signals to aspiring
writers. Janet Gebhart Auten’s ‘‘Parental Guidance: Disciplinary Inti-
macy and the Rise of Women’s Regionalism’’ (pp. 66–77) looks to ante-
bellum writers (emphasizing Alice Cary, Stowe, and Rose Terry Cooke) as
early regionalists who used editors’ and readers’ expectations to shape
their tales, to gain access to a broader market, and to set up lessons on
rural life. Their writing set the foundation for the writers of the late
19th century. Bonnie James Shaker in ‘‘Kate Chopin and the Periodical:
Revisiting the Re-vision’’ (pp. 78–91) argues that Chopin was not as
divorced from market concerns as critics have come to think. Using
evidence from Chopin’s journal/ledger, Shaker demonstrates Chopin’s
engagement in marketing her writing. Aleta Feinsod Cane looks at
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s marriage stories in ‘‘The Heroine of Her
Own Story: Subversion of Traditional Periodical Marriage Tropes in the
Short Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Forerunner ’’ (pp. 95–112).
Gilman, of course, had to create her own periodical to advance her social
agenda. Rebecca Harding Davis’s social commentary is the focus of
Michele L. Mock’s ‘‘ ‘An Arbor That Was Human, and the Power That
Was Art’: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Art of the Periodical’’ (pp. 126–
46). Mock looks at Davis’s argument for legislative change in Put Out of
the Way. She argues that Davis interpreted and anticipated the way that
mental institutions became sites of pain and used her art to give voice to
an activist agenda. She shifted her protagonist’s gender to reinforce the
impact of her tale and to suggest the strength and value of samaritan acts.
e
Social and political reform is also part of Charles Hannon’s ‘‘Zitkala-Sa
and the Commercial Magazine Apparatus’’ (pp. 179–201). Hannon de-
e work as an editor and activist, her attempts to use
scribes Zitkala-Sa’s
periodicals in her battle for Native American rights, and her opposition
Michael J. Kiskis 287

to nativist ideals and work to enforce acculturation. Finally, Michelle

Campbell Toohey’s ‘‘ ‘A Deeper Purpose’ in the Serialized Novels of
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’’ (pp. 202–15) argues that the timing and
sequence of serialized publications aVected reactions to Harper’s Ž ction.
Looking at Harper’s Minnie’s SacriŽ ce, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and
Triumph, Toohey suggests that Harper’s social agenda is not only demon-
strated internally in each novel but also shows in Harper’s scheduling of
installments so that publication would more closely tie with political
concerns of (especially African American) readers.
The collaborative work orchestrated by W. D. Howells and Elizabeth
Jordan resulting in The Whole Family also receives attention. The mate-
rial, originally serialized in Harper’s Bazar beginning in 1906, was re-
published in 2001 (Duke) along with a new foreword by June Howard
(Alfred Bendixen’s introduction to the novel is also part of the new
edition). In ‘‘Veribly a Purple Cow: The Whole Family and the Collabora-
tive Search for Coherence’’ (SNNTS 33: 51–79) Susanna Ashton oVers an
argument interesting not only for its insight into the process and context
of the project but also for its idea of American culture as a composite.
Ashton argues that The Whole Family oVers an opportunity to explore
how fragmentation can lead to coherence. She links the literary work to
the larger cultural project of deŽ ning labor and establishing scales of
compensation. Ultimately, the collaborative act becomes more than a
literary exercise as it oVers the potential for coherence out of disparate
perspectives.
Howard’s Publishing the Family is a wonderfully rich companion to the
novel and stands as a detailed account of the collaborative process that
generated the serial novel. Howard spends considerable time and atten-
tion following the web of relationships that aVected the project, a com-
plex mix of competing ego and literary ambition, and is most attentive to
Elizabeth Jordan’s contribution as editor. Howard gives a full picture of
the cultural moment that informed the collaboration and does a Ž ne job
re-creating the general interest in the fate of the American family and the
various tensions brought to bear as women continued to push social and
literary boundaries. Howard highlights the controversy excited by Mary
Wilkins Freeman’s chapter but is careful to detail Jordan’s eVort to keep
the project on track as well as the work of the other writers who contrib-
uted to the serialization: there are fascinating discussions of the contribu-
tions of Howells, Henry James, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cut-
ting, and Alice Brown.
288 Late-19th-Century Literature

iii Howells, Crane, Adams

Howells receives a good deal of attention during 2001. In Speaking for
Howells: Charting the Dean’s Career Through the Language of His Charac-
ters (Univ. Press) Gregory J. Stratman looks at the relationship between
Howells’s uses of language and literary purpose and claims that it is
impossible to have realism without a change in literary language. Fre-
quent references to Howells’s work support Stratman’s thesis, and he
spends considerable time examining Their Wedding Journey as represen-
tative of Howells’s practice. The attempt to identify a variety of categories
Ž nally comes up against the complexity of Howells’s use of dialect and
character voices. The complex link between the work and the life of the
writer is more suggested than demonstrated.
Other scholars focus less on Howells’s language than on the social and
political import of his work. Sämi Ludwig’s ‘‘The Realist Trickster as
Legba: Howells’s Capitalist Critique’’ (Mosaic 34, i: 173–84) compares
Howells and Ishmael Reed. The focus is on Fulkerson of A Hazard of New
Fortunes as a trickster Ž gure. While there is little likelihood that Howells
purposely incorporated the trickster Ž gure, Ludwig demonstrates what is
possible when critics look for comparable images or Ž gures among cul-
tures and work to create a critique of an economic and philosophical
system by combining radically diVerent traditions or canonical perspec-
tives. Politics is also a primary concern. In ‘‘Religion and Politics the
American Way: The Exemplary William Dean Howells’’ (Review of Poli-
tics 63: 107–27) Thomas S. Engeman argues for Howells’s opposition to
progressivism and ties him to a religious liberal tradition that located
solace and promise in ideals of communitarianism and Christian social-
ism. A more complex argument that starts with ideals of sympathy and
compassion is found in John Cyril Barton’s ‘‘Howells’s Rhetoric of Real-
ism: The Economy of Pain(t) and Social Complicity in The Rise of Silas
Lapham and The Minister’s Charge ’’ (SAF 29: 159–87). Barton presents a
solid argument for a complex understanding of Howells’s realism, which
is based on a negotiated reality that comes through characters’ interaction
and juxtaposition and debate. Realism is shaped by the positions taken by
individual characters, each of which needs to be placed in context with
the others. It is more process than pronouncement, and Reverend Sewell
(a prime character in each of the novels examined) should not be em-
braced as the lone voice of Howells’s ideas. The essay oVers a careful
Michael J. Kiskis 289

reading of the exchanges in the novels as well as of the critical tradition

that has shaped our ideas about Howells.
Howells’s relationships with other writers—both personal and liter-
ary —also come under scrutiny. In ‘‘Melville among the Realists: W. D.
Howells and the Writing of Billy Budd ’’ (ALR 34: 29–46) Sanford E.
Marovitz presents a wonderfully complex discussion of the literary and
personal relationship between Melville and Howells, whom Marovitz
places within a swirl of social and family events that tied the two men
together. There is a compelling (if mostly circumstantial) case for the
in uence of realism (and speciŽ cally Howellsian realism) on Melville’s
composition of Billy Budd. This is a carefully constructed argument for
the ways that literary, social, and personal relations build connections
among contemporaries. It is especially eVective because of the probable
and very real tie between two fathers who survived their children. An-
other personal tie is explored by Paul Sorrentino in ‘‘A Re-examination of
the Relationship Between Stephen Crane and W. D. Howells’’ (ALR 34:
47–72). Sorrentino corrects critical convention (most notably Thomas
Beer’s biography of Crane) and reinstates the close friendship between
Crane and Howells. His careful reading demonstrates the intertextuali-
ties among several pieces, especially Howells’s Letters of an Altrurian
Traveller, ‘‘An East-Side Ramble,’’ and ‘‘The Midnight Platoon,’’ and
Crane’s New York City Ž ction. There is also careful attention to Crane’s
last visit to Howells in 1897 and a more exact interpretation of Crane’s
comments about Howells’s election to the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.
Crane studies is marked by work spreading from the most up-to-date
stylistic analysis to a consideration of the Gothic. David I. Holmes,
Michael Robertson, and Roxanna Paez expand their analysis of Crane’s
journalism in ‘‘Stephen Crane and the New York Tribune: A Case Study in
Traditional and Non-traditional Authorship Attribution’’ (CHum 35:
315–31). Starting from research reported last year (see AmLS 2000, p. 257),
Holmes, Robertson, and Paez oVer a more complete description of sty-
lometrics. Making no absolute claims of authentication for previously
unidentiŽ ed works, they argue that stylometric analysis combined with
traditional scholarly interpretation oVers greater precision when analyz-
ing unattributed literary work. This is a fascinating case for a blend of
scholarly intuition and computer analysis. On a very diVerent track, Nick
Lolordo considers Crane’s use of the Gothic in ‘‘Possessed by the Gothic:
290 Late-19th-Century Literature

Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster’ ’’ (ArQ 57, ii: 33–56). Lolordo sees the
Gothic as an underlying foundation for the power and force of the tale.
The Gothic serves as support for the surface realism of the story: Gothic
conventions and language (both mock and essential) set the boundaries
and the controlling images and tropes of the narrative. Crane relies on
conventions to deepen the resonance of the tale.
There are four additional commentaries on Crane. In ‘‘The Publica-
tion of ‘Diamonds and Diamonds’ ’’ (SCS 10, i: 8–10) George Monteiro
oVers a correction to the publication history of this piece. Patrick Dooley
also does careful and valuable bibliographic work in ‘‘Stephen Crane: An
Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Scholarship: Book Chapters and
Articles Through 1999’’ (SCS 10, ii: 12–34). Two essays focus on Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage. In ‘‘Henry Behind the Lines and the Concept
of Manhood in The Red Badge of Courage’’ (SCS 10, i: 2–7) Donald Pizer
argues that four primary experiences move Henry toward the possibility
of reuniŽ cation with his unit and constitute a necessary set of experience
important not because of any potential for Henry’s becoming a ‘‘man’’
but because these lessons in emotion prepare him to reenter a commu-
nity. Weihong Julia Zhu in ‘‘The Absurdity of Henry’s Courage’’ (SCS 10,
ii: 2–11) argues that Henry’s ideas of courage, predicated on romantic and
emotional responses and with no authentic center, lead to an absence of
genuine courage. The novel is a critique of possible manifestations or
deŽ nitions of courage; Henry displays no discernible development or
honor.
Another Henry to whom scholars pay a good deal of attention is
Henry Adams. Notably, Edward Chalfant completes the third volume in
his biographical trilogy. Improvement of the World: A Biography of Henry
Adams, His Last Life, 1891–1918 (Archon) is a massive work. Chalfant is
exhaustive in his review of the Ž nal decades of Adams’s life and oVers an
avalanche of information (the sheer volume of it threatens to overwhelm
the story of the life). Readers will Ž nd an intricate and fascinating portrait
of Adams and his relationships, his energy, and his intellectual blaze.
Most interesting is the Adams/Elizabeth Cameron correspondence be-
cause it shows Adams’s dependence on the friendship and the depth of
caring that each held for the other during their roughly 30-year relation-
ship. This important account of Henry Adams is always told with one eye
on The Education and is always focused on Adams’s drive to understand
and to learn. George Monteiro takes a close look at a portion of Adams’s
story in ‘‘The Washington Houses of John Hay, Henry Adams, and
Michael J. Kiskis 291

Clarence King’’ (EAS 30: 33–44), which is less about the individual
houses than it is about the friendship they signify. The emphasis is also on
the close ties between Adams and Hay and on Adams’s surviving his
friends. The idea of being neighbors animates the friendship; the physical
aspects of the houses remain in the background.
Intellectual neighborhoods are the focus of Crosbie Smith and Ian
Higginson’s ‘‘Consuming Energies: Henry Adams and ‘the Tyranny of
Thermodynamics’ ’’ (ISR 26: 103–11). Crosbie and Smith argue that
Adams’s interest in thermodynamics was both an extension of the intel-
lectual/scientiŽ c climate of the time and, most interestingly, based on his
experience of steamship travel. Allying Adams’s ideas of power to physical
representations in his own experience is intriguing because it personalizes
Adams’s theory. They conjecture that the stroke Adams suVered very
soon after the news of the sinking of the Titanic may have been related
to his interest in the ship (Adams held tickets for the ship’s return to
England as part of its maiden run). Finally, Adams’s Ž ction takes center
stage in Richard C. Adams’s ‘‘Henry Adams’s Sympathetic Economy’’
( JMMLA 34, ii: 29–50), which links Democracy to Henry Adams’s earlier
writings on economics to determine the extent to which notions of
sympathy factored into Adams’s consideration of American economic
and political life. Starting with Edmund Wilson’s criticism of the novel,
the critic traces the legacy of Francis Bowen’s concept of sympathy and
establishes Henry Adams’s role as a mediator between Bowen and the
next generation of intellectuals, a role best played in the Ž ction.

iv Chopin and Gilman

Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman continue to spark consider-
able scholarly interest. Chopin scholarship gets a boost from a source-
book to the short Ž ction, a new biography, and the reissuing of her Ž rst
novel. Robert C. Evans’s Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction: A Critical Compan-
ion (Locust Hill) presents critical commentary on Chopin’s short Ž ction
in a chronological sequence. Clearly, some stories have received consider-
ably more scholarly attention. Evans highlights a tradition within the
scholarship for each story that makes it possible to see how shifting
theoretical emphases aVect the reading of individual stories. The appen-
dix with student responses to the stories is interesting, though it will be
more useful (perhaps) to students seeking guidance reading Chopin than
to scholars.
292 Late-19th-Century Literature

Nancy Walker’s Kate Chopin: A Literary Life (Palgrave) is a very good

introduction to Chopin’s life and works that oVers a solid discussion of
the complex in uences that aVected Chopin personally and profession-
ally. Chapter 1 is especially good in presenting the context of 19th-century
women’s writing and in placing Chopin within that tradition. Through-
out the biography, Walker argues that Chopin’s intellectual life (her
reading, her education, her travel, her business experiences, her personal
relationships) was substantial and vigorous. Walker leads readers through
Chopin’s apprenticeship to The Awakening and attacks the conventional
interpretation that Chopin was so wounded by the reception of the novel
that she stopped writing. While she acknowledges the place of The Awak-
ening in Chopin’s canon Walker also balances the importance of the novel
with Chopin’s continued writing and her still powerful literary repu-
tation. On a related topic, Andrew Crosland in ‘‘Kate Chopin’s ‘Lilacs’
and the Myth of Persephone’’ (ANQ 14, i: 31–34) suggests that Chopin’s
use of the myth of Persephone in earlier stories led her to The Awakening.
He argues that the sense of loss and the absence of real hope in ‘‘Lilacs’’
presage Chopin’s later Ž ction. Donald Pizer in ‘‘A Note on Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening as Naturalistic Fiction’’ (SLJ 33, ii: 5–13) argues that we
should acknowledge plain meanings in the novel and revisit Chopin’s
reliance on the ideas of naturalism. Chopin was well versed in the con-
temporary naturalist theories that aVect Edna’s dilemma and the stresses
she faces. The dual stresses of biology and social structure limit her
options and speak to the powerful tension at the center of the novel.
At Fault, ed. Suzanne Disheroon Green and David L. Caudle (Ten-
nessee), oVers the text of Chopin’s Ž rst novel as well as a collection of
supplementary materials ranging from contemporary reviews to discus-
sions of literary sources; legal, historical, and economic documents; and
commentary on Creole language and customs and social class in South-
ern society. The introduction places the novel in the context of a cata-
logue of issues. The review of the scholarly history is helpful, though
at times the introduction leans toward uncritical praise of Chopin.
Maureen Anderson’s ‘‘Unraveling the Southern Pastoral Tradition: A
New Look at Kate Chopin’s At Fault ’’ (SLJ 34, i: 1–13) oVers a close-
reading and argues that Chopin inverts the conventions of the Southern
pastoral tradition to criticize old beliefs and social boundaries. Chopin
deconstructs the tradition, and her characters either accept change or are
eliminated by the process of change.
Critical treatment of Gilman deals with two prime concerns: Gilman’s
Michael J. Kiskis 293

Ž ction (her earliest and later Ž ction and, of course, ‘‘The Yellow Wall-
paper’’) and continued explorations of Gilman’s feminism. Denise D.
Knight’s ‘‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Lost Book: A Biographical Gap’’
(ANQ 14, i: 26–31) introduces Gilman’s Ž rst book, Art Gems. Most in-
triguing are questions that develop around Gilman’s work on the book
during the period of her depression and breakdown: the contradiction
between Gilman’s description of her complete inability to work and the
book’s publication remains a tantalizing mystery. Gilman’s later Ž ction is
dealt with in Catherine J. Golden and Denise D. Knight’s ‘‘No Good
Deed Goes Unpunished? Victims, Villains, and Vigilantes in Gilman’s
Detective Novel’’ (Clues 22, i: 101–18). Golden and Knight argue that the
novel reaches beyond simple detective Ž ction to explore the atmosphere
and trauma of domestic abuse. They connect Gilman’s writings with
theories on domestic abuse from contemporary and modern specialists
and argue that the novel focuses on the diYculty and pain of abuse and
oVers a rationale for women’s Ž ghting back. One reason the book might
have gone unpublished for so long is its targeting of patriarchal power:
editors could deal with the whodunit, but they could not deal with the
why and the criticism of a home controlled by abuse. Martha Cutter’s
‘‘The Writer as Doctor: New Models of Medical Discourse in Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s Later Fiction’’ (L&M 20: 151–82) is an excellent discus-
sion of how Gilman used her Ž ction to advance the idea of collaborative
treatment in which doctors listen to patients and patients participate in
the process of diagnosis and creation of treatment. Gilman pays attention
to topical medical issues (for example, mental health and syphilis) and
argues against absolutist deŽ nitions of conŽ dentiality that work against
women’s health. Her use of real doctors and real treatments enhances the
authenticity of her Ž ction; even her suicide can be seen as consistent with
the notion of the patient’s participation in health decisions. Gilman’s
‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’ is the topic of Marty Roth’s ‘‘Gilman’s Ara-
besque Wallpaper’’ (Mosaic 34, iv: 145–62), which discusses Gilman’s
story and its relation to 19th-century culture’s interest in arabesque de-
sign. Roth sets the arabesque in opposition to Western art and focuses on
the hallucinatory character of the design; hence material culture contrib-
utes to the atmosphere of the threat in Gilman’s Ž ction. The dual halluci-
nations of paper and drug link Gilman to Edgar Allan Poe and the horror
genre, which is the way many of her contemporary readers approached
Gilman’s tale. The arabesque makes that connection possible.
Several scholars focus on Gilman’s feminism. Patricia Vertinsky’s ‘‘A
294 Late-19th-Century Literature

Militant Madonna: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Feminism, and Physical

Culture’’ (International Journal of the History of Sport 18: 55–72) is a basic
and uncritical presentation of Gilman’s life and her interest in and sup-
port for physical activity as basic to health. Vertinsky relies on ‘‘The
Yellow Wallpaper’’ to focus criticism of male medical beliefs and Herland
to laud the ideal of noncompetitive sport. On the other hand, Charlene
Haddock Seigfried in ‘‘Can a ‘Man-Hating’ Feminist Also Be a Pragma-
tist? On Charlotte Perkins Gilman’’ ( JSP 15: 74–85) examines Gilman’s
ideas as they relate to American pragmatism. Seigfried sets Gilman’s ideas
against those of Ida Tarbell, Ellen Key, and John Dewey. She suggests that
Gilman’s lack of academic training both hindered and strengthened her
ability to challenge social norms and that her discussions of women’s roles
were given resonance by her willingness to deal with a broad human
context. She presents Gilman as much more in the mainstream of the
debate than literary readers may think. Alys Eve Weinbaum’s provocative
‘‘Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Racial Na-
tionalism, and the Reproduction of Materialist Feminism’’ (FSt 27: 271–
92) calls attention to Gilman’s reliance on the nativist and racist work of
Francis Walker and E. A. Ross and argues for a more complex and
therefore more complete reading of Gilman’s feminism. Weinbaum ar-
gues that too often Gilman’s ideas have been elided to present a sanitized
feminist genealogy. Not acknowledging Gilman’s racism creates a less
than honest picture of her life and ideas. It is especially important to read
Gilman’s Ž ction in consort with her social writings and positions; other-
wise there will continue to be a split in Gilman scholarship.
Gilman is also discussed as an ecofeminist. In ‘‘The Ecofeminist Prag-
matism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’’ (EnvE 23: 19–38) Mary Jo Deegan
and Christopher W. Podeschi argue that Herland is an example of Gil-
man’s agreement with ecofeminist ideals and cast her as a foremother of
contemporary ecofeminism. Gilman is tied to the Chicago pragmatists,
the point being to use that connection in the service of ecofeminist
agendas. Essentially, the authors set up contemporary deŽ nitions of eco-
feminism and then turn back to align Gilman with 21st-century femi-
nism. That look backward sets aside with little comment several of the
deeper contradictions within the Herland saga. Susan Stratton in ‘‘Inter-
subjectivity and DiVerence in Feminist Ecotopias’’ (FEMSPEC 3, i: 33–
43) compares Herland with Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground
and Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into the Ocean and sees a continuum
threading from Gilman to the later writers. Gilman’s prejudices are
Michael J. Kiskis 295

noted, but they are seen as representative of her age and her experience as
a Ž rst-wave feminist, which does present an interesting problem since the
sense and lexicon of ecology are not part of late-19th- and early-20th-
century feminism. Gilman’s setting in Herland does serve an undercur-
rent of hegemony as the Herlanders establish a society that is initially
shaped by violence.

v Gender: Women Writers of the Late 19th Century

Scholars continue to explore the metaphors and relationships that reso-
nate among the community of women writers. Suzanne V. Shepard
focuses attention on the quilt metaphor in The Patchwork Quilt: Ideas
of Community in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Fiction (Peter
Lang). Shepard oVers a highly symbolic reading of Ž ction produced by a
sizable group of writers, among them Susan B. Warner, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Sarah Hale, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and
Susan Glaspell. Individual chapters focus on ideals of community and
the family. The Ž nal chapter discusses American regionalism as a marker
for the loss of community. Women’s connection to and use of the ideal of
domesticity is emphasized throughout, especially in the image of the
American quilt and the complex narrative patterns suggested by quilt
designs as well as the relation of the creative process to the hearth and the
garden.
The deŽ nition of community is also part of Terrell F. Dixon’s ‘‘Nature,
Gender, and Community: Mary Wilkins Freeman’s EcoŽ ction,’’ pp. 162–
76 in Beyond Nature Writing. Dixon examines three collections of Free-
man’s short Ž ction and looks at her use of nature not in connection with
local color or regionalism but as demonstrating her growing sense of
ecofeminism. That distinction may say more about our reading of Free-
man and our need to tie her to our contemporary theories than her own
narrative agenda. A diVerent perspective on Freeman is furnished by
George Monteiro in ‘‘The ‘Ordinary’ Poetry of Mary E. Wilkins and
Emily Dickinson’’ (ALR 33: 252–60). Monteiro uses ‘‘A New England
Nun’’ and ‘‘The Poetess’’ to link Freeman to Emily Dickinson’s ideal of
the poet to demonstrate that the two writers were aware of the value and
worth of personal voice. Each writer’s experience of Mount Holyoke
Seminary (especially the fact that most of their classmates went on to
conventional married lives) is counterpoint to their lives dominated by
relations of art and artistry.
296 Late-19th-Century Literature

Literary relationships also get attention. Two essays on Louisa May

Alcott are especially good. Sarah A. Wadsworth’s ‘‘Louisa May Alcott,
William T. Adams, and the Rise of Gender-SpeciŽ c Series Books’’ (L&U
25, i: 16–46) discusses Alcott’s Little Women and its sequels as important
for providing adolescent girls with a genre of their own. Alcott’s writing
gave her female readers a bridge from girlhood to young womanhood.
Wadsworth credits the children’s books of Adams with inspiring Alcott to
write her books. That leads to a fascinating discussion of 19th-century
marketing strategies aimed at adolescent readers. The literary connection
between Alcott and Charlotte Mary Yonge is the topic of Karen Sands-
O’Connor in ‘‘Why Jo Didn’t Marry Laurie: Louisa May Alcott and The
Heir of RedclyVe ’’ (ATQ 15: 23–41). Through close-reading, Sands-
O’Connor argues that Alcott’s reading of Yonge in uenced the decision
to postpone Jo’s marriage. This carefully built analysis of the similarities
between Alcott’s and Yonge’s characters examines Alcott’s eVort to write a
successful novel. The point is to be skeptical of Alcott’s claim of inspira-
tion and to see her work as worldly and market driven.
Personal and literary relationships get their due in George V. GriYth’s
‘‘An Epistolary Friendship: The Letters of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to
George Eliot’’ (Legacy 18: 94–100) and Allison GiVen’s ‘‘Savage Daugh-
ters: Emma Lazarus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and The Spagnoletto ’’ (ATQ
15: 89–107). GriYth comments on four letters Phelps wrote to Eliot
post-Middlemarch (from February 1873 to May 1877). Rather than a
professional correspondence on the intimacies of Ž ction writing, the
letters are more a reaching out based on shared interests. Phelps displays a
genuine and heartfelt admiration for Eliot’s work and a wish that Eliot
could support women’s issues. GiVen explores Lazarus’s playThe Spag-
noletto within the context of her relationship with Emerson. The father/
daughter aspect of the relationship is examined in both literary and social
terms. Lazarus wrote the play in the midst of severe disappointment that
Emerson did not include her work in his poetry anthology, a disappoint-
ment all the more bitter because he acted as her mentor after her Ž rst
collection of poetry was published. GiVen’s analysis is compelling.
The project to resurrect women writers continues. Paula Bernat Ben-
nett’s Palace Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt (Illinois) introduces
Piatt to a new generation of readers and scholars. Piatt’s work has been
anthologized, but sparingly. This collection oVers a substantial number
of Piatt’s poems and helps gain attention for her work. Bennett’s intro-
duction is excellent. Rather than realizing Piatt’s place within her own
Michael J. Kiskis 297

time, readers may be drawn more deeply to the poetry for its psychologi-
cal depth and intricacy and may Ž nd that Piatt speaks intimately of pain
and heartbreak to readers of today.
Victoria Brehm’s edition Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Cen-
tury: Essays (Wayne State) also draws attention to a writer who has been
long in the shadows. The 14 essays are divided into three clusters, each of
which builds a broader context for understanding Woolson and argues
for a deeper appreciation of Woolson’s range. In part 1, ‘‘Precursors and
Contemporaries: The Context of Woolson’s Art,’’ Nina Baym argues for a
more critical and more speculative approach to feminist scholarship.
‘‘Revising the Legacy of 1970s Feminist Criticism’’ (pp. 21–29) is a re ec-
tive piece that sets the tone for the remaining essays. Baym encourages
complexity rather than essentialist ideals and presents learning about
both the past and ourselves as the basis for high-quality scholarship.
Following up on Baym’s essay are Lisa Radinovski’s ‘‘Negotiating Models
of Authorship: Elizabeth Stoddard’s Con icts and Her Story of Com-
plaint’’ (pp. 31–49), John H. Pearson’s ‘‘Constance Fenimore Woolson’s
Critique of Emersonian Aesthetics’’ (pp. 51–65), Richard Adams’s ‘‘Heir
Apparent: Inheriting the Epitome in Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country
Doctor ’’ (pp. 67–81), and Caroline Gebhard’s ‘‘Romantic Love and Wife-
Battering in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Jupiter Lights’’ (pp. 83–96).
Gebhard’s essay is especially good. The connection between domestic
abuse and notions of romantic love and marriage makes way for a strong
argument that sees Woolson as ahead of her time. Gebhard bridges 19th-
century notions of sentimental attachment and modern stresses of gen-
dered relationships. The discussion of the triangular relationships (both
hetero- and homosexual) that structure the novel is provocative.
Part 2, ‘‘Fractured Landscapes, Mordant Travelers: Woolson’s Region-
alism,’’ contains six essays: Victoria Brehm’s ‘‘Castle Somewhere: Con-
stance Fenimore Woolson’s Reconstructed Great Lakes’’ (pp. 99–110),
Dennis Berthold’s ‘‘Miss Martha and Mrs. Woolson: Persona in the
Travel Sketches’’ (pp. 111–18), Kathleen DiZey’s ‘‘ ‘Clean Forgotten’:
Woolson’s Great Lakes Illustrated’’ (pp. 119–39), Sharon Kennedy-Nolle’s
‘‘ ‘We are most of us dead down here’: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s
Travel Writing and the Reconstruction of Florida’’ (pp. 141–59), Kather-
ine Swett’s ‘‘Corinne Silenced: Improper Places in the Narrative Form of
Constance Fenimore Woolson’s East Angels ’’ (pp. 161–71), and Cheryl B.
Torsney’s ‘‘Fern Leaves from Connie’s Portfolio’’ (pp. 173–88). This mid-
dle combination of essays is especially eVective in introducing readers to a
298 Late-19th-Century Literature

more complex and accomplished Woolson; however, Brehm, DiZey,

Kennedy-Nolle, Swett, and Torsney are most helpful. Brehm examines
Woolson’s near-despair that the Great Lakes have been commercialized
and abused as a resource: Woolson’s jeremiad looks at post-Civil War
society as prone to excess and exploitation and oVers a regionalism
marked by edgy characters and an absence of humor. DiZey examines
the illustrations that accompanied Woolson’s Great Lakes writing in
Appletons’ Journal and Appletons’ Picturesque America. The combina-
tion of visual and verbal art suggests broader meanings that can be made
even more complex when the writer does not control the illustrations.
Kennedy-Nolle considers how travel writing set expectations for post-
Civil War citizenship. Woolson’s focus on Minorcan populations in Flor-
ida, while perhaps too optimistic, does aVect Northern readers’ percep-
tions of the South, especially regarding questions of labor and land-
ownership and racial and ethnic diversity. Swett argues that Woolson uses
an uneasy balance between story and description in East Angels to ignite
emotion. Description serves character to focus on the pain of emotional
trauma and culturally bound and determined choice. Torsney presents
Woolson’s interest in collecting botanical samples and considers the rela-
tionship between that collecting and identity in Woolson’s unpublished
poems as well as in various characters from Woolson’s Ž ction. Ferns stand
as a central image and a standard for Woolson’s concept of aesthetic and
artistic value.
Part 3, ‘‘The Figure of the Artist: Woolson, James, and Wharton,’’ of-
fers three essays: Anne E. Boyd’s ‘‘Anticipating James, Anticipating Grief:
Constance Fenimore Woolson’s ‘Miss Grief ’ ’’(pp. 191–206), Kristen M.
Comment’s ‘‘The Lesbian ‘Impossibilities’ of Miss Grief ’s ‘Armor’ ’’
(pp. 207–23), and Sharon L. Dean’s ‘‘Edith Wharton’s Early Artist Stories
and Constance Fenimore Woolson’’ (pp. 225–39). Boyd’s and Comment’s
essays are very good. Boyd suggests that Woolson’s anticipation of her
Ž rst meeting with Henry James aVected ‘‘Miss Grief,’’ which can be
seen as her attempt to create a Jamesian hero. Boyd opposes Leon Edel’s
and Fred Kaplan’s interpretations of Woolson and argues that Woolson
sought literary advice, not a romantic relationship with James, an interest
that in uenced the shape of her story. That hope for a mentor was
essentially quashed by James’s attitude toward women’s writing. Com-
ment provocatively suggests that scholarly interest in ‘‘Miss Grief ’’ is
lacking because of its lesbian undertones. She advises scholars to read
Michael J. Kiskis 299

the code that informed contemporary ideas of inversion to understand

the story.
Though already reclaimed as a formidable regionalist writer, Celia
Laighton Thaxter was also known for the quality of her watercolors and
decorative china. In One Woman’s Work: The Visual Art of Celia Laighton
Thaxter (Randall), editor Sharon Paiva Stephan focuses attention on
Thaxter’s visual art and its relationship to the Isle of Shoals. The essays by
J. Dennis Robinson, H. Mandel, and Jane E. Vallier provide a very basic
introduction to Thaxter’s literary work. The essay by Nancy Mayer Wet-
zel, ‘‘Paradise for a Season: Celia Thaxter’s Garden’’ (pp. 78–86), brings
us into Thaxter’s world of nature and gardening, a world that oVered her
both solace and inspiration. Stephan’s essay ‘‘One Woman’s Work: The
Visual Art of Celia Laighton Thaxter’’ (pp. 88–175) is an excellent and
illuminating discussion of Thaxter’s artistry. The book has ample high-
quality reproductions of Thaxter’s art, some of which demonstrate her
blending of visual and verbal creation. The combination shows Thaxter
at her best. A connection to place is also primary in Olav Thulesius’s
Harriet Beecher Stowe in Florida, 1867 to 1884 (McFarland). Thulesius’s
discussion begins with shifts in health care during the 1840s and 1850s
that were at least partly responsible for a growing interest in Florida as a
healthful escape. There is also a look at Stowe’s connection to the citrus
fruit industry. The discussion is interesting for the basic information
related to Stowe’s interest in the area and also for the possible in uence
Stowe had on early tourism as well as her ties to the movement to improve
state-sponsored education. The book is, however, a mostly uncritical
look at Stowe’s experience. The criticism of gender and race Ž gures into
Lisa M. Logan’s ‘‘Race, Romanticism, and the Politics of Feminist Liter-
ary Study: Harriet Prescott SpoVord’s ‘The Amber Gods’ ’’ (Legacy 18: 35–
51), which argues that SpoVord’s tale questions and challenges patriarchal
notions of women’s place. A postcolonial approach illuminates SpoVord’s
concern with race as she often falls into conventional notions of race and
dominance. That ambivalence toward gender and race questions is,
Logan suggests, one reason why SpoVord is so rarely discussed.

vi Race and Ethnicity

Charles Chesnutt is again a focus for substantial scholarship. Joseph R.
McElrath Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, and Jesse S. Crisler compile Charles W.
300 Late-19th-Century Literature

Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches (Stanford). The anthology presents Ches-

nutt’s work on a wide variety of topics, from basic comments about race
(including questions of identity, the franchise, race prejudice, social
forms, lynching, regional con icts, inter- and intraracial relationships) to
education (tied to Chesnutt’s experience as an educator), to reading,
images of blacks in literature, and manners. Interesting is the taste of
Chesnutt’s humor and wit (in the more complex sense of being able to
create new insights from relationships among ideas). The material is
arranged chronologically, which makes it possible to see Chesnutt change
over time, especially his growing activism and his growing agitation over
the lack of genuine and lasting social and economic progress for blacks.
In addition, several essays examine Chesnutt’s Ž ction. William M.
Ramsey in ‘‘Family Matters in the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt’’ (SLJ
33, ii: 30–43) argues broadly that Chesnutt was not seeking reconciliation
between the races but anticipated racial amalgamation in the future.
Looking at family both biologically and as the larger human family,
Chesnutt used race to challenge the prejudices of both whites and blacks
and was most interested in how the human family can or will adapt.
Earle V. Bryant focuses on Chesnutt’s concern with and criticism of
intraracial prejudice in ‘‘Blue Veins and Black Bigotry: Colorism as Moral
Evil in Charles Chesnutt’s ‘A Matter of Principle’ ’’ (ALR 34: 73–80.
Bryant argues (as he has done previously with other Chesnutt tales) that
Chesnutt underscored his criticism through the use of biblical allusions.
That is particularly clear here in a story whose protagonist fails to see his
own prejudice and fails to see the moral issue at the heart of his actions. In
‘‘Charles Chesnutt and the Epistemology of Racial Violence’’ (AL 73: 311–
37) Bryan Wagner examines the 1898 Wilmington race riot as it is por-
trayed in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition as well as in contemporary
accounts from the white press. Wagner argues persuasively that the vio-
lence was a reaction to the growing black professional middle class and a
result of the trauma to white identity that growth sparked. Chesnutt’s
emphasis diVers from the contemporary coverage: press accounts depict
the restoration of racial balance; Chesnutt describes the use of violence to
reinscribe racist policies in an attempt to eliminate (make invisible on the
one hand and destroy on the other) black progress.
Other scholarship broadens the discussion of race. In ‘‘Race in the
New South: Joel Chandler Harris’ ‘Free Joe and the Rest of the World’ ’’
(ALR 33: 235–50) James Kinney places Harris’s stories within the context
of the New South movement and the ideas of Henry WoodŽ n Grady,
Michael J. Kiskis 301

Harris’s colleague at the Atlanta Constitution. Kinney argues that both

Grady and Harris espoused a conservative approach toward race rela-
tions that they felt helped the argument for sectional reconciliation.
Conservative belief eventually lost to the radical position that insisted on
the need to divide the races. Kinney posits ‘‘Free Joe’’ as Harris’s attempt
to Ž ctionalize a response to that debate and to argue for the conservative
line. The political aspects of emancipation are also the background for
Carla Willard’s discussion in ‘‘Timing Impossible Subjects: The Market-
ing Style of Booker T. Washington’’ (AQ 53: 624–69). In an innovative
reading of style and its in uence on Washington’s relationship to mass
publishing, Willard argues that Washington worked purposefully to cre-
ate a style that would appeal to editors and the public. His descriptions of
black movement into the professional/managerial class presented images
of black success in a less threatening way. Washington also was adept at
using photography to highlight and shape reality, an attempt at ideal
realism. Ultimately, however, Washington saw his eVorts fail and adopted
a more radical position.
The link between race, ethnicity, and class is examined in two essays.
Julie Cary Nerad’s ‘‘ ‘So strangely interwoven’: The Property of Inheri-
tance, Race, and Sexual Morality in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending
Forces ’’ (AAR 35: 357–73) considers Hopkins’s deŽ nition of property.
‘‘Whiteness’’ here is a premium possession that allows characters to deŽ ne
their place within society or allows society to deŽ ne them once they are
relieved of that possession. The essay is most interesting in its argument
that whiteness is a possession rather than a biological category. The ques-
tion of whiteness as a construct is also part of Anna Engle’s ‘‘Depictions of
the Irish in Frank Webb’s The Gairies and Their Friends and Frances E. W.
Harper’s Trial and Triumph’’ (MELUS 26, i: 151–71). Engle sees both
Webb and Harper focusing on racial stereotypes to emphasize the class
basis for discrimination and prejudice. She traces a long tradition of racial
stereotyping that aVected both Irish and African Americans throughout
the 19th century as the Irish gradually left behind racial identiŽ cation to
gain power through class connections and economic power. The issue of
race became potent in the 1890s as the Irish stepped away from and turned
against blacks. Both Webb and Harper focus on the social/legal/cultural
construction of class and race and argue against con ating the two. The
novels treat class as the more important factor and demonstrate how race
as a construct becomes a useful tool of oppression.
The situation of Native Americans is also part of the scholarly debate
302 Late-19th-Century Literature

over the uses and deŽ nitions of race and ethnicity. Margaret Jacobs in
‘‘Mixed-Bloods, Mestizas, and Pintos: Race, Gender, and Claims to
Whiteness in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and María Amparo Ruiz de
Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? ’’ (WAL 36: 212–31) places Jackson
and Ruiz de Burton in opposition in the work to deŽ ne class and race
categories in late-19th-century California. The essay is most interesting in
its discussion of Ruiz de Burton’s attempts to ally herself with white
interests and to deŽ ne herself as white against the dominant deŽ nition of
race propagated by the North in post–Civil War America.
The dual challenges to interpreting race and making way for Western
expansion inform Siobhan Senier’s Voices of American Indian Assimilation
and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria
Howard (Okla.). Senier oVers a carefully contextualized look at late-19th-
century assimilationist policies and at how the treatment of Native Amer-
ican tribes was aVected by the arguments for constraining and ultimately
exterminating their ways of life. Unlike conventional readings of Jackson,
Winnemucca, and Howard that view them as allies of assimilation (or at
best ambivalent), Senier sees in their writing attempts to subvert and
defeat the dominant policies and arguments in favor of Native American
sovereignty and political rights. A close-reading of Ramona, Life among
the Piutes and several of Howard’s stories gives us a much more compli-
cated picture. Jackson, placed in transition between sentimentalism and
realism, uses the design of her novel to undercut assimilationist philoso-
phy and policy. Winnemucca’s writing is multivocal (at times more liter-
ally because of her collaboration with Mary Mann) and has a commu-
nistic focus that reinforces the sovereignty of her tribe and argues for
nationalism, collective action, and agency. Howard, even more strongly
multivocal (with the voice of her translator, Melville Jacobs), often with-
holds meaning or information as a way to keep tribal ways exempt from
outside interpretation. Senier warns us not to ascribe motives to native
writers so quickly. In the end, these women contest patriarchal and
assimilationist agendas within both white and Native American societies.
Sally Zanjani’s biography Sarah Winnemucca (Nebraska) adds to our
understanding of the energy and activism that shaped Winnemucca’s
devotion to her tribe. Her work as translator, scout, negotiator, and
educator demonstrates an allegiance to her tribe. She accepted a public
role as spokesperson for their needs and was a constant and consistent
critic of Christianization and the inherently inhumane reservation sys-
tem. Winnemucca was, in the end, a leader, not as a chief, but as a type of
Michael J. Kiskis 303

shaman or tribal boss. She left a mixed legacy that needs to be acknowl-
edged and understood. Reclaiming a lost legacy is also the goal behind
Craig Womack’s ‘‘Alexander Posey’s Nature Journals: A Further Argu-
ment for Tribally-SpeciŽ c Aesthetics’’ (SAIL 13, ii–iii: 49–66). Womack
begins with a discussion of Posey’s notebooks, then ties them to the
imperative of geography and the concept of home. This is not a mystical
pull to the land but a practical part of the labor of deŽ nition and develop-
ment of both tribe and writer. Womack turns later in the essay to the
demands and challenges of teaching Native American literature when it is
not grounded in speciŽ city but is given only generic or theatrical consid-
eration. Posey, Womack argues, oVers an example of writing from an
awareness of speciŽ city, which is a strength rather than a hindrance.

vii The West

Myth’s impact on the West is considered in Nancy Vogeley’s ‘‘How
Chivalry Formed the Myth of California’’ (MLQ 62: 165–87). Vogeley
begins with Edward Everett Hale’s translation of Seras de Esplanadian to
locate the beginnings of the myth of the name California. Medieval
notions of chivalry come into play because they in uenced the ideology
of settlement and success in California as part of post–Civil War healing.
The relationship between place and history is at the center of Victoria
Lamont’s ‘‘The Bovine Object of Ideology: History, Gender, and the
Origin of the ‘Classic’ Western’’ (WAL 35: 373–401). Lamont juxtaposes
Frances McElrath and Owen Wister and explores how each writer used
Wyoming history to advance an agenda for the ‘‘western’’ and its role in
American myth. Lamont sees gender as basic to both writers’ approach to
myth, either to reinforce male assumptions of gaining status by tran-
scending economic class or to reinforce a female experience of indepen-
dence. Both authors faced resilient social and economic class demands.
The fact that these demands were contested within the ‘‘western’’ demon-
strates that women could and did in uence the genre and that women’s
writing was clearly part of the cultural moment that led to the extension
of the franchise. Place and its relationship to redemption is the focus of
Ann Lundberg’s ‘‘John Muir and Yosemite’s ‘Castaway Book’: The Trou-
bling Geology of Native America’’ (WAL 36: 25–55). Lundberg compli-
cates Muir’s stance toward nature by arguing that geological theory is
complicit in the destruction of cultures. She examines Muir’s marriage of
redemption to geological time and his eliding of Native Americans be-
304 Late-19th-Century Literature

cause they adversely aVected the unity he found in nature. She sees Muir’s
attempt to project a uniŽ ed idea of nature as ultimately a failure.
Other studies focus on writers often tied to the West. Gary Scharn-
horst’s ‘‘A Coda on the Twain-Harte Feud’’ (WAL 36: 81–87) oVers a
poignant example of the depth of the animosity Mark Twain held for
Bret Harte in his refusal, years after his and Harte’s break, to endorse a
public beneŽ t for Jessamy Harte Steele, Harte’s daughter who was by
then in dire Ž nancial and personal trouble. A far less traumatic study is
Robert L. Gale’s An Ambrose Bierce Companion (Greenwood). Gale’s
reference book includes entries on 92 short stories, 161 essays, 19 short
dramas, 5 reviews, 3 assemblies of fables, a novel, and a biographical list of
57 individuals connected to Bierce. The collection is useful for its descrip-
tions of each item and demonstrates Bierce’s very wide interests and
acquaintances.
Several essays on Frank Norris are notable. Sara E. Quay’s ‘‘American
Imperialism and the Excess of Objects in McTeague ’’ (ALR 33: 209–34) is
an ambitious and valuable essay. Quay looks at the relationship of realism
to naturalism and emphasizes material culture’s shaping of individual
characters. Especially interesting is the discussion of ethnic characters’
connection to American material culture and the idea that this connec-
tion extends international imperialist practice to an internal social realm.
Dana Seitler in ‘‘Down on All Fours: Atavistic Perversions and the Sci-
ence of Desire from Frank Norris to Djuna Barnes’’ (AL 73: 525–62)
connects Norris and Barnes in their project to create a more complex and
multilayered narrative of degeneracy. The comparison allows an exam-
ination of the relationship between cultural and scientiŽ c/medical cate-
gories of gender or sex inversion, which makes it possible to consider the
result of degeneracy within social forms or within social/cultural contexts
and to argue against simple dichotomies of values or physical deŽ nition.
Norris is seen as precursor to Barnes. Renata R. Mautner Wasserman’s
‘‘Financial Fictions: Emile Zola’s L’Argent, Frank Norris’s The Pit, and
Alfredo de Taunay’s O encilhamento ’’ (CLS 38: 193–214) uses Zola to
introduce the work of Norris and Taunay and to present their contradic-
tory understandings of the value, function, and eVects of markets. Ques-
tions focus on the impact of economic speculation; Norris is seen as more
interested in the function of markets and in the result when manipula-
tion takes precedence over nature.
Elmira College
14 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s
Donna M. Campbell

Scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois and writers of the Harlem Renaissance,

especially Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset, continues to
 ourish this year, and a comparatively large number of articles on mod-
ernist and regionalist women writers such as Evelyn Scott and Ellen Glas-
gow appear in essay collections. Last year’s centenary of the publication of
Sister Carrie continues to yield articles on Dreiser, and a renewed interest
in biography and autobiography characterizes work on several writers,
including Gertrude Stein, Jack London, and Sherwood Anderson.

i Gertrude Stein
If Stein could not reinvent personal and political history, she could
nevertheless reinvent the forms that shape these narratives, as several of
this year’s articles suggest. The most conventional of Stein’s responses to
history is her early essay, written while she was a RadcliVe student,
entitled ‘‘The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers
Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation’’ (PMLA 116: 416–
28). As Amy Feinstein explains in her introduction to the piece, the essay
is ‘‘one of the few known pieces in which Stein treats directly the question
of Jewish identity’’; its argument for the aYrmative or isolationist posi-
tion supports Feinstein’s position that ‘‘Stein’s essentialization of identity
can be shown to be a constant presence throughout her oeuvre.’’
In his excellent interdisciplinary study Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude
Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford) Stephen
Meyer considers Stein’s development as a writer within the context of the
‘‘literary (Laurence Sterne et al.), philosophical (Emerson, Whitehead),
psychological (William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein), and neurophysi-
ological (Lewellys Barker, Gerald Edelman, Francisco Varela)’’ investiga-
306 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

tions into the nature of consciousness that inform her work. Meyer
claims that Stein ‘‘reconŽ gured science as writing and performed scien-
tiŽ c experiments in writing,’’ so her ‘‘writing practice may thus be viewed
as a form of laboratory science,’’ a stance that explains her rejection of
automatic writing and her insistence on the exact meanings of words.
Thus to interpret the ‘‘dissociative writing’’ of Stein’s middle period is to
perform an act of ‘‘experimental reading’’ that recapitulates the writing
process by forcing the reader to experience each word and letter individu-
ally, as Stein had recommended in the discussion of proofreading in The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In this manner, Stein sought to create
what William James had called ‘‘knowledge of acquaintance’’ rather than
what he described as ‘‘knowledge-about,’’ fostering the reader’s knowl-
edge through the recapitulation of an experience rather than learning
through simply reading a description of it. Dissenting from the ‘‘endless
assertion of resistance or subversion that is attached to Stein’s nonstan-
dard language’’ in Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collec-
tive Identity (Alabama), Juliana Spahr argues that her writings are not
subversive but ‘‘connective,’’ inviting readers to become authors them-
selves and promoting an egalitarian theory of reading. Spahr points out
that Stein, the daughter of immigrants who spent some of her formative
childhood years in Europe, was immersed in a polyglot existence that
brought home to her the experience of reading as one who encounters a
strange language. Stein’s work thus seeks to recapitulate that experience
and invent a new form of reading for her readers through features such as
incomplete sentences, duplicate words, a restricted vocabulary, and word
confusion. Everybody’s Autobiography and The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas thus constitute a means of explaining to readers that ‘‘her writing
(her self ) is not unreadable but rather hyper-readable.’’
Two pieces on Four Saints in Three Acts give equal time to Virgil
Thomson’s music and Stein’s libretto. As Daniel Albright demonstrates in
Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts
(Chicago, 2000), by the time of Four Saints in Three Acts Stein had moved
toward a contemplation of ‘‘divinely arbitrary’’ numbers. Her view of
counting as a uniquely human attribute informs the syntactically rather
than harmonically dissonant music that Thomson composed for the
work. Like Albright, who sees Four Saints in Three Acts as a piece wherein
landscape is central but a void, Brad Bucknell also emphasizes Stein’s
concern with ‘‘the continuous present and landscape’’ in Literary Modern-
ism and Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge). For Bucknell, Stein’s vision of
Donna M. Campbell 307

landscape reconciles ‘‘the temporality of language and the immediacy of

dramatic presentation.’’ Bucknell argues that Stein’s ‘‘wordplay, her un-
usual paradigmatic selections, and the general discontinuity between
units of speech,’’ as well as her habit of ‘‘combining more or less conven-
tional syntactic movement with odd paradigmatic selections,’’ work to-
ward an aesthetic of immediacy that exists in ‘‘ironic dissonance’’ with
Thomson’s retrospective musical idiom.
Other essays associate Stein with Ž lm, celebrity, and the visual arts.
Susan McCabe’s ‘‘ ‘Delight in Dislocation’: The Cinematic Modernism
of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray’’ (MoMo 8: 429–52) pairs the iconic
comic Ž gure of Charlie Chaplin with Stein’s ‘‘Mrs. Emerson,’’ which
appeared in the Ž lm journal Close Up next to Man Ray’s essay on his
experimental Ž lm Emak Bakia; all three exemplify the ‘‘dislocated autom-
aton body of modernity.’’ Chaplin’s characteristic walk, which McCabe
describes as a ‘‘jerky gait,’’ parallels the kind of oV-kilter, disjunctive, and
repetitive movements performed by hysterics, comics, and those practic-
ing the automatic writing described in Stein and Solomons’s early essay
‘‘Motor Automatism’’ —in short, by those functioning in a state of dis-
traction or amnesia rather than willed, purposive movement. Man Ray’s
experimental Ž lm and Chaplin’s persona both gesture toward fragmenta-
tion and away from ‘‘causal plot,’’ suggesting perhaps why Stein, unlike
most modernists, found value in Ž lm. In ‘‘Cameo Appearances; or, When
Gertrude Stein Checks into Grand Hotel’’ (MLQ 62: 117–63) Mark
Goble examines celebrity and ‘‘technologies of communication and rep-
resentation’’ at the intersection of two unrelated events in 1932: Stein’s
writing of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and the release of the star-
studded MGM Ž lm adaptation of Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel. Noting the
400 ‘‘cameos’’ in The Autobiography and the similarly dizzying number of
characters in Grand Hotel, Goble shows that the use of communications
technology in the Ž lm and later in Everybody’s Autobiography inscribes a
particularly American system of social power predicated not only on class
but on celebrity. Both works ‘‘are determined to make the noises of sex as
loudly as possible while demurring from any representations of sex as
such’’ through scenes and anecdotes involving dogs and telephones.
Goble shows that the provocatively coded references (‘‘Has Gertrude
Stein a Secret?’’ ran one title) in the media during Stein and Toklas’s
1934–35 tour of the United States suggest Stein’s pleasure in —and control
over —her ‘‘mediated life of fame and celebrity.’’ Unlike Goble, Gerri
Reaves characterizes the tour as Stein’s progress through a ‘‘landscape of
308 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

anxiety’’ in Mapping the Private Geography: Autobiography, Identity, and

America (McFarland). For Stein as for other autobiographers, revisiting
the sites of trauma from one’s youth threatens identity through the
inevitable evocation of the split between past and present, but Stein’s
response in Everybody’s Autobiography is to eschew the conventional
modes of autobiography (‘‘the conversion narrative, the Eden narrative,
the confession, the journey narrative, the memoir’’) and to transform two
others to suit her own purposes: ‘‘a prophetic attitude toward the reading
public and a quest for self-knowledge.’’
Stein’s constructions of time, space, and meaning also inform Sean P.
Murphy’s ‘‘ ‘Ida Did Not Go Directly Anywhere’: Symbolic Peregrina-
tions, Desire, and Linearity in Gertrude Stein’s Ida’’ (L&P 47, i–ii: 1–11),
which points out that Ida ‘‘foregrounds the dynamic [and circular] mo-
tion of desire’’ by disconnecting symbolism from the real and refusing
temporality and linear narrative. By resisting the readerly desire for sym-
bolic order and by questioning the natural purposes of language, Ida
opens up the spaces between the real and the symbolic for performative
reading. The spatial model of experience in Ida developed gradually from
the more linear construction of identity in The Making of Americans,
according to Jessica Berman (Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the
Politics of Community [Cambridge]). Noting the shifting theories of
geography that bracketed Stein’s Making of Americans, from the infa-
mous concept of ‘‘Lebensraum’’ in Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropo-Geographie
(1899) to the opposition Ratzel’s work faced from the in uential Ellen
Churchill Semple’s American History and Its Geographic Conditions (1903),
Berman argues that Ida and other late works are Stein’s response: a ‘‘non-
teleological wandering history’’ at odds in both style and purpose with
linear texts such as Semple’s. The wandering and dislocation critics have
read in Stein’s works as coded signs of lesbian identity thus become part
of a ‘‘feminist cosmopolitanism’’ that engenders ‘‘a new narrative version
of community.’’ Finally, John Whittier-Ferguson’s ‘‘The Liberation of
Gertrude Stein: War and Writing’’ (MoMo 8: 405–28) presents Stein
traversing a less abstract terrain: as witness to the prelude to World War II,
Stein in such works as Paris France (1940) describes a country that seems
‘‘virtually immune to the motions of time’’ though ‘‘haunted by death.’’
‘‘OV We All Went to See Germany,’’ published in Life on 6 August 1945,
documents her trip to Berchtesgaden and her pose as both a ‘‘famously
incomprehensible artist’’ and an ordinary American tourist. Stein main-
tained her stance primarily as artist and secondarily as witness in ‘‘Re ec-
Donna M. Campbell 309

tion on the Atomic Bomb,’’ published posthumously in 1947. In it, Stein

says that she ‘‘had not been able to take any interest’’ in the atomic bomb,
adding, ‘‘What is the use,’’ an alarming statement that Whittier-Ferguson
glosses as a ‘‘collapse of the poles of her art’’ since such total destruction
also destroys diVerence and meaning.

ii Jack London
Issues of race, class, and gender continue to predominate in this year’s
work on London, directly through studies of his Ž ction and indirectly
through several new studies in London biography. Richard Stein’s ‘‘Lon-
don’s Londons: Photographing Poverty in the People of the Abyss ’’ (NCC
22: 587–629) considers the pictures in the volume, roughly two-thirds of
which London photographed himself, as a counternarrative that ‘‘seems
less to corroborate than to contest his analytic claims.’’ Using photo-
graphs from London’s private album of the trip as well as the pictures pub-
lished in People of the Abyss, Stein substantiates his claim through an exam-
ination of London’s use of techniques such as humor, photographic tricks
(moving the Ž gure of a person from one photograph to another, for
example), and the era’s conventions of staged realism. In ‘‘Slumming,’’
pp. 160–86 in Passing, noting that vocational slumming is a kind of pass-
ing, Peter Hitchcock focuses on London’s quest into the slums and his in-
sistence on authentic clothing as a masquerade, one that ‘‘embod[ies] the
categorical Ž ssures between the counterfeit and the authentic that is the
discursive genealogy of passing.’’ Reminding the reader that slumming
depends on a ‘‘rhetoric of control’’ that, like the gold coin sewn into
London’s clothing, can instantly be produced to reassert class privilege
and stop the masquerade, Hitchcock explains that passing necessarily
produces an ‘‘impasse in class’’ whereby the ‘‘lords of inequity’’ must sup-
press signs of class-consciousness, despite their dependence on it, so that
the masquerade may succeed and their desire for knowledge be satisŽ ed.
On the better-known works, Yung Min Kim’s ‘‘A ‘Patriarchal Grass
House’ of His Own: Jack London’s Martin Eden and the Imperial Fron-
tier’’ (ALR 34: 1–17) provides a persuasive if sometimes overstated analysis
of Martin Eden as a novel of artistic production ‘‘predicated upon the
scene of imperial conquest.’’ In this reading, Martin is both conquered
subject, by virtue of tanned skin and ‘‘savage’’ ways that align him with
the racialized other, and conqueror, ‘‘implicated in these imperialist en-
terprises’’ through his use of experiences in the South Seas to reinvent
310 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

himself as a professional writer. Martin’s suicide following his vision of a

‘‘patriarchal grass house’’ thus re ects what Amy Kaplan has termed
imperialist nostalgia, the conqueror’s wish ‘‘to revisit that which he
has symbolically destroyed.’’ Equally provocative is Juniper Ellis’s ‘‘ ‘A
Wreckage of Races’ in Jack London’s South PaciŽ c’’ (ArQ 57, iii: 57–75),
which shows that London’s response to the disjunction between the
‘‘material PaciŽ c’’ and the textual one of Melville and Stevenson centrally
informs The Cruise of the Snark and Martin Eden. London’s novels com-
plicate traditional ideas about the region by emphasizing the way in
which writing creates rather than re ects ‘‘conceptions of race and tem-
porality.’’ Seen as stylized rather than stereotypical creations, his repre-
sentations of race thus respond to and negate the possibility of deŽ ning
pure representations of race and region. Using William James’s ‘‘critique
of strenuousness,’’ Patrick K. Dooley compares Humphrey Van Weyden’s
physical and moral growth in The Sea-Wolf in ‘‘ ‘The Strenuous Mood’:
William James’ ‘Energies in Men’ and Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf ’’ (ALR
34: 18–28). Dooley Ž nds that the latter lags and that ‘‘little, if any, ethical
development occurs,’’ a fact that has as one consequence Van Weyden’s
reluctance to commit justiŽ able homicide in killing Wolf Larsen.
London’s biography, a perennial topic of interest, is well served this
year by new work on his domestic and professional relationships. Al-
though accounts of London’s life most frequently linger on the male-
dominated, adventure-Ž lled episodes he drew on in his Ž ction, such as
travel to the Klondike and the South Seas, Clarice Stasz’s Jack London’s
Women (Mass.) focuses on the domestic London and his relationships to
his mother, Flora, and foster mother, Jennie Prentiss; his stepsister Eliza;
Bessie and Charmian, his Ž rst and second wives; his close friend Anna
Strunsky, with whom he wrote The Kempton-Wace Letters; and his daugh-
ters, Joan and Becky. Drawing on previously inaccessible documents,
Stasz traces their connections with London but reveals them as autono-
mous individuals whose customary emotional support occasionally alter-
nated with strong-minded resistance to his plans. Read as a supplement
to, rather than a replacement for, biographies that focus on London
himself, including Stasz’s American Dreamers (see AmLS 1988, p. 250), this
work provides an interesting, evenhanded portrayal of the women he
incorporated into his Ž ction and the tangled relationships they shared
with one another. Douglas Robillard’s ‘‘Anna Strunsky and Jack London’’
(EAS 30: 17–31) focuses more on the personal than on the professional
relationship between Strunsky and London. Drawing on a longer un-
Donna M. Campbell 311

published manuscript of her memoir of London, one more detailed than

the short biographical reminiscence Strunsky published in The Masses in
1917, Robillard reads the strikeovers and alterations in the abandoned
manuscript as evidence of the struggles that Strunsky experienced in
presenting his —and their —story for public consumption. OVering an-
other perspective on London biography, this year’s issue of JLJ contains a
newly rediscovered and previously unpublished oral memoir by Yoshi-
matsu Nakata, London’s valet from 1906 until nearly the end of his life.
Transcribed and introduced by Barry Stevens, ‘‘A Hero to His Valet’’ (7:
26–103) also includes an interview with Sekine, who replaced Nakata and
was with London when he died. The largely admiring accounts of both
men shed light on London’s daily life and routines as well as on the
controversial circumstances surrounding his death.
Along with new editions of old classics, several new editions of Lon-
don’s work this year feature his lesser-known works, among them The
Cruise of the Dazzler (Classic) and The People of the Abyss (Pluto). Michael
Oriard’s brief introduction to The Game (Nebraska) places London’s
book in the context of London’s contemporary accounts of the Jim
JeVries–Gus Ruhlin Ž ght of 1901 and other Ž ctional accounts of Ž ghts,
concluding that for London prizeŽ ghting was ‘‘not merely appropriate
for literary allegory; it was itself allegorical,’’ especially in its depiction of
characters representing ‘‘savagery and civilization.’’ The thorough notes
and introduction to Thomas R. Tietze and Gary Riedl’s edition of A Son
of the Sun: The Adventures of Captain David Grief (Okla.), along with
maps and original illustrations, help to contextualize the problematic
racial and imperialist themes of these South Seas tales.

iii Theodore Dreiser

Many of the articles published this year focus on Sister Carrie, including
several responses occasioned by last year’s centenary of the novel’s pub-
lication. Several reassessments, such as Lawrence Hussman’s ‘‘On First
Reading Sister Carrie ’’ (DrSt 32, ii: 49–53) and Joseph Epstein’s ‘‘Sister
Carrie at 101’’ (HudR 54: 15–33), defend Dreiser against 20th-century
criticism of his works. Recalling the critical beating Dreiser’s style took
during his lifetime, Epstein accounts for Dreiser’s power as a novelist
despite this handicap by saying that he ‘‘took on a powerful subject and
proved worthy of it’’ in his rendering of his inarticulate characters con-
fronting their fate. Like Epstein, Paul Orlov defends Dreiser against
312 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

20th-century critics, this time addressing their charges of  awed charac-

terization, in ‘‘An Emersonian Perspective on Dreiser’s Characterization
of Carrie’’ (DrSt 32, ii: 19–37). Taking his cue from Robert Elias’s com-
ment about Dreiser’s reading ‘‘about ‘heroes’ and ‘representative men,’ ’’
Orlov reads Carrie not as a  awed or unŽ nished heroine but as Dreiser’s
attempt to render an ordinary character extraordinary by investing her
with ‘‘emotional greatness’’ of the sort Emerson suggested in Representa-
tive Men. In a similar vein, David T. Humphries reevaluates the conven-
tional view of Ames as a ‘‘static ‘spokesman’ ’’ for Dreiser’s views in ‘‘The
Shock of Sympathy: Bob Ames’s Reading and Re-reading of Sister Car-
rie ’’ (DrSt 32, i: 36–55). In a subtle, closely reasoned argument, Humph-
ries notes that Ames as well as Carrie must develop a diVerent Ž eld of
perception; in order to teach Carrie eVectively, Ames must shift his focus
from the abstract philosophizing that characterizes his speech to a close
consideration of the life and objects around him, just as Carrie more
obviously moves from detailed observation of those around her to an
awareness of the life of the mind that Ames represents. Dreiser’s interest
in class is also the subject of Robert Seguin’s discussion of Sister Carrie in
Around Quitting Time. Seguin argues that the characters and the novel
both illustrate and aspire to ‘‘middle-classlessness,’’ a liminal realm exist-
ing beyond the temporal and spatial constraints of capitalism; signposts
of this realm include the frontier mythology associated with Chicago and
Dreiser’s formation of an ‘‘urban pastoralism’’ between production and
consumption, along with the transitional moment (‘‘around quitting
time’’) between work and relaxation. Seguin identiŽ es a number of ‘‘pas-
toral sites,’’ including the ‘‘mediating spaces’’ of the rocking chair, win-
dow, and porch; also considered are Dreiser’s use of shifting points of
view and the states of distraction to which Hurstwood and Carrie are
subject, states akin to but in Seguin’s view distinct from the much-
discussed habit of daydreaming in the novel.
Among essays focusing on the creation and reception of Sister Carrie,
Jerome Loving argues for the importance of Arthur Henry as an in uence
on Dreiser in ‘‘Notes from the Underground of Sister Carrie’’ (DLB
Yearbook 2001, pp. 360–66), noting that Sister Carrie, written after Drei-
ser and Henry’s summer sojourn on the Maumee River in Ohio, has
certain parallels to Henry’s ‘‘Arcadian romance’’ A Princess in Arcady
(1900), including a scene on a train in which a woman is accosted by a
drummer. Twenty years after the Pennsylvania edition, the controversy
over its publication has been ‘‘rendered largely obsolete,’’ according to
Donna M. Campbell 313

Donald Pizer in ‘‘The Text of Sister Carrie: Where We Are Now’’ (DrSt
32, ii: 42–48). Although the prevalence of cultural studies approaches, the
in uence of deconstruction, and especially the advent of hypertext edi-
tions have facilitated both the theory and the practice of examining
diVerent versions of the same novel, Pizer notes that for practical pur-
poses, teachers are back where they started: trying to make an ‘‘informed
choice’’ about an authoritative edition to bring into the classroom. Re-
 ecting on his editorship of the Pennsylvania edition in ‘‘The Sister
Carrie We’ve Come to Know’’ (DrSt 32, ii: 39–41), James L. W. West III
comments that although he would still seek to restore the text of Sister
Carrie according to what can be known of Dreiser’s intentions, there is
value in the ‘‘collaborative work of art’’ and the picture of the cultural
moment that the 1900 edition represents. West elaborates on the diY-
culty of editing Dreiser’s unpublished works as well in ‘‘Editing Private
Papers: Three Examples from Dreiser’’ in Re-constructing the Book: Liter-
ary Texts in Transmission, ed. Maureen Bell, Simon Eliot, Lynette Hunter,
and West (Ashgate). The diYculties are compounded when, as with
Dreiser’s Russian Diaries and American Diaries, some of the text exists
only as edited typescripts or versions written at Dreiser’s request by a
companion. Stanislav Kolar’s ‘‘The Czech Reception of Sister Carrie ’’
(DrSt 32, i: 56–63) reports that when Sister Carrie was published in
Czechoslovakia in 1931 during an economic crisis, its appearance led to
polarized critical reviews based on politics; later, despite a second and
better translation, the novel was, like the rest of Dreiser’s work, ‘‘exploited
for cheap propaganda purposes.’’ A good cross section of essays re ecting
Sister Carrie ’s critical reception also appears in Richard Lehan’s volume
on Sister Carrie in the Gale Literary Masterpieces series.
A collection of Dreiser’s writings, a book-length study, and a handful
of other considerations of his work further attest to continuing critical
interest. Yoshinobu Hakutani’s collection Art, Music, and Literature,
1897–1902 (Illinois) reprints 33 of Dreiser’s magazine articles, 22 of which
have not been reprinted since their original publication in Truth, Success,
and other periodicals. This collection shows Dreiser’s wide-ranging inter-
ests, from pieces on in uential artists, musicians, and writers such as
Lillian Nordica, W. D. Howells, and Alfred Stieglitz to more conven-
tional sketches in the popular vein of visits to artists’ studios or homes
such as ‘‘A Painter of Cats and Dogs: John Henry Dolph’’ or ‘‘Amelia A.
Barr and Her Home Life.’’ As Hakutani points out in the introduction,
the Dreiser of these early pieces shows an interest in Transcendentalism
314 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

and a ‘‘vitalist philosophy’’ unlike the determinism of his later works.

Shawn St. Jean’s Pagan Dreiser: Songs from American Mythology (Fairleigh
Dickinson) examines two related but not identical concepts of paganism
in Dreiser: paganism as classical tradition, as seen through allusions in
Dreiser’s work, and paganism as an ancient, idealized version of freedom.
Thoroughly documenting Dreiser’s reading in the classics through refer-
ences in published and unpublished materials, St. Jean classiŽ es Dreiser
as a ‘‘protomodernist’’ because of his use of classical references and plots —
references that, although frequently ignored, reveal order and consis-
tency rather than the inconsistent and haphazard philosophizing often
attributed to the naturalists. For example, instead of a series of random or
fated choices, Carrie’s progress from Drouet to Hurstwood to Ames
features a quest structure that a 19th-century audience would have recog-
nized. Although some sections are uneven, substituting one-sentence
identiŽ cations of allusions for analysis or straining the comparisons, as
when Hurstwood’s protest to Carrie that the stage is ‘‘not much of a
profession for a woman’’ becomes ‘‘grasping at the outmoded notion that
the Thespian tradition is suitable only for men,’’ others are illuminating,
especially those dealing with Dreiser’s later work. An ingenious close-
reading of the rowboat scene in An American Tragedy, for example, asserts
that the right, not the left, wale of the boat must have struck Roberta, a
point that St. Jean sees as an aporia in the text suggesting other possibili-
ties, such as that Clyde struck Roberta intentionally.
In ‘‘Anne Estelle Rice and ‘Ellen Adams Wrynn’: Dreiser’s Perspectives
on Art’’ (DrSt 32, i: 3–35) Carol A. Nathanson draws on the unpublished
papers of Rice, the painter who served as the model for ‘‘Ellen Adams
Wrynn’’ in Dreiser’s A Gallery of Women (1929), to show how his ambiva-
lence about the Ž gure of the woman artist shaped his Ž ctional portrait;
unlike the independent spirit of the real-life Rice, Wrynn’s artistic vision
and ability to paint are determined by the state of her romantic relation-
ships. Another article on Dreiser’s ambivalence toward strong women,
Donna Packer-Kinlaw’s ‘‘Life on the Margins: The Silent Feminist in
Theodore Dreiser’s ‘Marriage—for One’ ’’ (DrSt 32, ii: 3–18), analyzes the
‘‘complex male perspective’’ from which Bessie, the adulterous wife of
‘‘Marriage—for One,’’ is seen by her husband and the narrator; although
Bessie is silenced because she is not the point-of-view character, the
narrator sympathizes with her, and his refusal to provide answers about
Bessie’s fate suggests that Dreiser gives her ‘‘the opportunity to write her
own ending.’’ In ‘‘Chester Himes as a Naturalistic Writer in the Tradition
Donna M. Campbell 315

of Richard Wright and Theodore Dreiser’’ (CLAJ 44: 442–50) William E.

Rand adds Himes to the list of writers who, like Wright, used space,
traYc, and deterministic characters in constructing a Dreiserian natu-
ralistic universe. Barbara Hochman’s Getting at the Author draws a useful
distinction between the 19th-century practice of ‘‘friendly reading,’’ in
which readers rely on an omnipresent narrative voice to get to know the
author, and the authorial self-eVacement valued in realism and modern-
ism. While Owen Wister, F. Marion Crawford, and others who eschewed
self-eVacement enjoyed popular acclaim but faced critical neglect, writers
such as Henry James and Edith Wharton gained critical favor for their
refusal to pander to the reader with textual asides. Hochman admits that
Dreiser Ž ts neatly into neither camp; his ‘‘authorial ‘we’ and his digressive
intrusions make him something of an exception in the realist company’’
but do not ‘‘ally him with the popular ‘friendly’ writers,’’ in part because
he enjoyed critical acclaim. Like Wharton and Norris, he does, however,
use the image of the woman onstage who is later removed from the
spotlight as a Ž gure for the author, one who shields himself or herself with
a protective cover of ink and ‘‘life’s blood’’ like the squid in Dreiser’s The
Financier.

iv Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, H. L. Mencken, and John

Dos Passos
Critical work on Sinclair Lewis continues to focus on his satiric views of
class, with new attention to his dystopic visions of America. In ‘‘Sinclair
Lewis’ Primers for the Professional Managerial Class: Babbitt, Arrow-
smith, and Dodsworth’’ ( JMMLA 34, ii: 73–97) Michael Augspurger
places the three novels in a larger cultural debate occurring when the
aims of corporate capitalism began to con ict with the ideals of the
‘‘professional managerial class.’’ From this con ict two competing self-
deŽ nitions arose, the ‘‘corporate professionals’’ who reconciled their in-
ner con icts by seeking material gain, and ‘‘adversary professionals’’ who
recognized that such reconciliation was impossible. For the latter, includ-
ing Lewis’s three protagonists, commercial success is insuYcient reward,
as their dissatisfaction shows; instead, both Dodsworth and Arrowsmith
embrace the ideal toward which Lewis pointed his readers, that of a
technocratic elite that could create something of tangible worth as well as
wealth. Also addressing the dissatisfaction and con ict within Lewis’s
characters is Catherine Jurca’s White Diaspora. Unlike those who see
316 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

Babbitt’s unhappiness and abortive attempt to escape as a ‘‘challenge to

middle-class society,’’ Jurca sees it as expressive of the tensions inherent in
middle-class identity: ‘‘For Lewis, being middle class is indistinguishable
from feeling bad about, impoverished by, the markers and material re-
wards of middle-classness.’’ Babbitt’s house, stuVed as it is with modern
appliances, is still not a home and engenders nothing so much as a restless
desire to escape and to approximate elsewhere, in hotels or on hunting
trips, the ‘‘simulacrum’’ of home that he has never yet experienced.
Lewis’s social satire shades into polemic in Kingsblood Royal and It
Can’t Happen Here. Calling it a ‘‘barn-burning tract,’’ Charles Johnson
introduces the reprinted edition of Kingsblood Royal (Random House) by
praising its knowledge of African American history and saying that the
work ‘‘added a new dimension to the novel of ‘passing’ established as a
literary sub-genre by two generations of distinguished, black American
authors.’’ Despite his overall assessment of It Can’t Happen Here as a
‘‘topical potboiler,’’ Paul C. Peterson’s ‘‘Democratic Envy in Sinclair
Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here ’’ (The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public
Ethics [Lexington, 2000]) Ž nds Lewis’s portrayal of a supporting charac-
ter, Oliver ‘‘Shad’’ Ledue, to be more complex than that of many of
Lewis’s characters. Agreeing with Mark Schorer that Ledue is an ‘‘ill-
mannered lout,’’ Peterson suggests that the character is not as simple-
minded as critics have suggested; in Ledue’s seemingly stupid but actually
deliberate resistance to his superiors and the ugly consequences of his
‘‘democratic envy’’ Lewis demonstrates the dangers of a ‘‘petty soul’’
turned loose in a democratic state and emphasizes the ease with which
‘‘fascist and communist movements . . . build on the pathologies of
democratic times.’’ In ‘‘Two Notes to a Low Dishonest Decade: Sinclair
Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and Saul Bellow’s ‘The Hell It Can’t’ ’’ (SLN
10, i: 3, 8, 10–12) Roger Forseth Ž nds an early response to the novel in
Bellow’s Ž rst published short story, which borrows both title and themes
from Lewis’s book in its tale of a man captured and tortured by the police.
Literary in uences on Lewis are the subject of two essays by Martin
Bucco, ‘‘Poe in Lewis’’ (SLN 10, i: 5) and ‘‘Bernard Shaw in Sinclair
Lewis’’ (Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 21: 133–41); in the
latter Bucco discusses Lewis’s lifelong interest in Shaw and notes that
references to him appear in 17 of Lewis’s 22 novels.
The publication of ‘‘Selections from the Diary of Eleanor Anderson,
1933–40’’ (ShARev 26, i: 1–76) with an introduction by Hilbert H.
Campbell provides insights into Anderson’s politics and processes of
Donna M. Campbell 317

writing as well as his and Eleanor’s views on Dreiser, Mencken, and other
writers. David D. Anderson’s ‘‘Sherwood Anderson’s Midwest and the
Industrial South in Beyond Desire ’’ (Midamerica 26 [1999]: 105–12) also
mentions Eleanor Anderson, who Ž gures in a vignette in ‘‘Book Four:
Beyond Desire’’ of Beyond Desire (1932). Despite the consensus of Ander-
son’s contemporaries that Beyond Desire was ‘‘confused,’’ David Anderson
contends that the book eVectively represents the confusing events of
labor unrest in the industrial South during the Depression. In ‘‘ ‘I Belong
in Little Towns’: Sherwood Anderson’s Small Town Post-modernism’’
(Midamerica 26 [1999]: 77–104) Clarence Lindsay places Anderson in the
more familiar terrain of Winesburg, Ohio, analyzing its digressive impulse
and untold stories as a counterpoint to the linear trajectory of George
Willard’s story and the narrow boundaries of the townspeople’s lives.
Marc C. Conner takes issue with received opinion on the Ž gure of the
father in Winesburg, Ohio in ‘‘Fathers and Sons: Winesburg, Ohio and the
Revision of Modernism’’ (SAF 29: 209–38), arguing that the relationship
between father and son rather than mother and son is at the book’s center.
Instead of confrontation, the fathers and sons in Winesburg, Ohio seek
reconciliation, for only then can Willard become an artist. Looking at
Anderson’s relationship to his real father in ‘‘Sherwood Anderson’s Dis-
covery of a Father’’ (Midamerica 26 [1999]: 113–20) Paul W. Miller sees an
increase in images of reconciliation between father and son in Anderson’s
work as his career progresses from Windy McPherson’s Son to the 1939
essay ‘‘Discovery of a Father.’’
Major work on H. L. Mencken this year includes S. T. Joshi’s edition of
From Baltimore to Bohemia: The Letters of H. L. Mencken and George
Sterling (Fairleigh Dickinson), which covers the years from 1914 to the
day of Sterling’s suicide a day before a visit by Mencken in 1926. Consis-
tent topics include the deplorable fact of Prohibition and the terrible
quality of the alcohol available under the law; the sad state of America;
the men’s mutual acquaintances, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis
among them; and Mencken’s tactful refusals of Sterling’s poetry, although
Sterling did publish some poems in American Mercury. Acknowledging
that it seems an unlikely pairing, Richard J. Schrader compares Mencken
with Whitman in ‘‘Mencken and Other Lone Eagles’’ (Menckeniana 156
[2000]: 1–11), noting especially each author’s use of the catalog as a
literary device.
Adding to biographical information about John Dos Passos, the Sum-
mer 2001 edition of JDPN published four newly available letters from
318 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

Dos Passos to his biographer Charles W. Bernardin, introduced and

annotated by Melvin Landsberg in ‘‘A Novelist and His Biographer’’ (8:
12–17). The same issue includes Jayson P. Harsin’s reading of ‘‘homosex-
ual passing’’ in Dick Savage’s and possibly Sam Margolies’s behavior in
U.S.A. (‘‘Passing and the American Identity Machine: Race, Class, and
Sexuality in U.S.A., ’’ 8: 1–11). Bart Keunen reads Dos Passos through
a Bakhtinian perspective in ‘‘The Plurality of Chronotopes in the Mod-
ernist City Novel: The Case of Manhattan Transfer ’’ (ES 82: 420–36).
Keunen Ž nds Manhattan Transfer, like other modernist texts, to have a
‘‘polychronotopical structure’’ that places four types of heroes —roman-
tic, aestheticist, avant-gardist, and naturalist-realist —in four types of
chronotopes: idyllic, derived from romantic texts; self-referential, de-
rived from aestheticist texts; hyperrealist; and documentary or realist-
naturalist, which includes techniques such as the bird’s-eye view of the
city, the ‘‘topos of the arrival in the city,’’ and the street scene. Joe Nazare’s
‘‘Backtrack to the Future: John E. Stith’s/John Dos Passos’s Manhattan
Transfer ’’ (Extrapolation 42: 37–52) compares Manhattan Transfer with
John E. Stith’s 1993 science Ž ction novel of the same title, Ž nding parallels
in the machine and garbage imagery and concluding that Stith’s novel
consciously extends Dos Passos’s vision.

v Mary Austin and Other Regionalists

The chapter on Austin in Stacy Alaimo’s provocative Undomesticated
Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell, 2000) describes her
as opposed to rather than allied with the conservation-minded clubwom-
en of the Progressive Era; Austin rejected the civic housekeeping model so
prevalent at the time because she did not consider the desert, the land-
scape of her principal works, to be a domesticated space that needed
managing. Instead, Austin’s desert is a ‘‘fertile ground for feminism’’ and a
sexualized, antiutilitarian space that deŽ es mastery, an idea that Austin
emphasizes with ‘‘Ž gures of the land as mistress’’ in her novel Cactus
Thorn. According to Alaimo, despite such ideas Austin avoids positing a
mystical connection between women and nature as do the ‘‘starry-eyed,
nature-infatuated men’’ of her novels, although the catalog of virtues
attributed to the Walking Woman, who resists categories, avoids ‘‘en-
trapment of identity,’’ lives in harmony with nature, and embodies a
‘‘liberatory, self-reliant feminism,’’ suggests an equal degree of romanti-
cism. Amy S. Green makes a similar point about women and ecological
Donna M. Campbell 319

activism in ‘‘Two Women Naturalists and the Search for Autonomy:

Anna Botsford Comstock and the Producer Ethic; Gene Stratton-Porter
and the Gospel of Wealth’’ (WSQ 29, i: 145–54); for Porter and Com-
stock, nature work was a liberation from rather than an extension of the
domestic sphere.
An important addition to the recovery of Native American texts is
Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems and the Sun Dance Opera (Nebraska),
Jane Hafen’s edition of writings by Zitkala-Sa.e In addition to her helpful
biographical introduction, Hafen reproduces a number of Zitkala-Sa’s e
works, including early poems, essays, and The Sun Dance Opera. Of spe-
cial interest are the previously unpublished and newly translated manu-
script versions of tales included in Old Indian Legends (1901), several of
which are longer and more violent than the published versions. This
valuable collection includes notes on the cultural contexts and a selected
secondary bibliography, although more primary bibliographical infor-
mation on the works (such as a production history of The Sun Dance
Opera) would be helpful. Focusing on Zitkala-Sa’s e sense of kinship and
her use of traditional tribal symbols such as stars, Ruth J. He in’s I Re-
main Alive: The Sioux Literary Renaissance (Syracuse, 2000) combines
biography with short readings of Zitkala-Sa’se tales and autobiographical
writings. He in claims that Zitkala-Sae ‘‘creates a new literary tradition,’’
one that, unlike the work of Charles Eastman, Standing Bear, and Black
Elk, never assumes an anthropological perspective toward its subjects.
Ruth Spack’s well-researched ‘‘Dis/Engagement: Zitkala-Sa’s e Letters to
Carlos Montezuma, 1901–1902’’ (MELUS 26, i: 173–204) reproduces
excerpts from her correspondence with Montezuma, to whom she was
engaged during 1901–02. Taking issue with Betty Louise Bell, Robert
Allen Warrior, and other modern scholars who fault Zitkala-Sa e for what
they see as her assimilationist rhetoric and her support of positions now
considered disrespectful to native culture (for example, she promoted
citizenship for native peoples and supported the antipeyote campaign),
Spack argues that even before she turned to activism Zitkala-Sa e defended
traditional culture and fought to preserve it, a position evident in the
anti-assimilationist letters she wrote to Montezuma. Charles Hannon
also looks at her political positions and the strategies she used to promote
them in ‘‘Zitkala-Sae and the Commercial Magazine Apparatus’’ (‘‘The
Only EI cient Instrument, ’’ pp. 179–201). Using ‘‘ ‘apparatus’ in the Al-
thusserian sense of a location for the production and reproduction of
subjects for the state,’’ Hannon looks at Zitkala-Sa’s e writings in the
320 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

context of the periodicals in which they appeared and the illustrations

that framed them: ‘‘The Soft-Hearted Sioux,’’ for example, which ap-
peared in Harper’s in March 1901, was juxtaposed with an installment of
Woodrow Wilson’s History of the People of the United States, a paean to
‘‘Anglo-Saxon nativism.’’ During her journalistic career as editor of Amer-
ican Indian Magazine Zitkala-Sa e exposed the false logic of race as a basis
for citizenship, but a shift in editorial policy from political reform to
ethnology led her to abandon the publication in favor of more direct
activism. Paul Pasquaretta’s ‘‘Gambling Against the House: Anglo and
Indian Perspectives on Gambling in American Literature’’ (Mosaic 34, i:
137–52) compares the metaphors of gambling in Wharton’s The House of
Mirth with those in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, Ž nding that their tradi-
tional use in the latter allows Mourning Dove to critique federal policies
and to warn against ‘‘predatory white speculators’’ such as the novel’s
Alfred Densmore. Carol J. Batker’s Reforming Fictions: Native, African,
and Jewish American Women’s Literature and Journalism in the Progressive
Era (Columbia, 2000) documents the aYliations among African Ameri-
can, Native American, and Jewish American women writers. Noting that
little has been written connecting the journalism and Ž ction of these
writers, Batker demonstrates that their journalism is central to under-
standing both their political aYliations and the resistance strategies com-
e and
mon to their Ž ction. For example, the literary strategies of Zitkala-Sa
Mourning Dove combined a critique of the reservation system with a
subtle manipulation of stereotypes, such as the ‘‘noble’’ Indian (Zitkala-
e or the ‘‘vanishing American’’ (Mourning Dove) to advance self-
Sa)
determination and other political agendas. Similarly, Batker points out
that Jessie Fauset’s activist journalism contributed to her pointed critique
of American racism in There Is Confusion and of French colonialism in
Comedy, American Style (1933).
Regarding Ellen Glasgow: Essays for Contemporary Readers, ed. Wel-
ford D. Taylor and George C. Longest (Library of Virginia), and a
number of individual articles mark a fruitful year for Glasgow scholars.
The subtitle ‘‘Essays for Contemporary Readers’’ indicates the purpose of
Regarding Ellen Glasgow, for this volume includes essays from leading
scholars chronicling the fall and rise of the author’s critical reputation,
issues in Glasgow biography and autobiography, and Glasgow’s use of
such varied themes as Virginia history, the myth of Southern woman-
hood, suVrage, Calvinism, and disability. Two essays acknowledge Glas-
gow’s accuracy as a writer of Virginia history, E. Stanly Godbold Jr.’s
Donna M. Campbell 321

‘‘Ellen Glasgow and Southern History’’ (pp. 13–20), which suggests that
historian C. Vann Woodward may have ‘‘absorbed the thesis for which he
became famous’’ from reading Glasgow’s novels, and Dorothy M. Scura’s
‘‘Ellen Glasgow’s Civil War Richmond in The Battle-Ground ’’ (pp. 21–
34), which conŽ rms the realistic details of Glasgow’s novel in Mary
Chesnut’s Civil War diary and notes her ironic use of the magnolia as a
symbol. Glasgow’s ironic take on the myths of the South is also the
subject of Mark A. Graves’s ‘‘What Ellen Glasgow Meant by ‘Average’:
Southern Masculinity and the Rise of the Common Hero’’ (pp. 63–70),
which analyzes The Voice of the People, The Miller of Old Church, and The
Romance of a Plain Man as chronicling the rise of the rural or middle-class
man rather than the traditional Southern aristocrat as a leader in the new
South. Similarly, Helen Fiddyment Levy shows how Vein of Iron counters
the myths of ‘‘lost patriarchal domains’’ and the empty mansion by
asserting a communal vision that centers on ‘‘the body of the matriarch’’
and that shows the mansion as ‘‘not lost and gone’’ in ‘‘Mining the Vein of
Iron: Ellen Glasgow’s Later Communal Voice’’ (pp. 43–54). Other essays
in the collection address Glasgow’s views of women. Pamela R. Mat-
thews’s ‘‘From Joan of Arc to Lucy Dare: Ellen Glasgow on Southern
Womanhood’’ (pp. 35–41) compares Glasgow’s unpublished story ‘‘A
Modern Joan of Arc’’ with the later ‘‘Dare’s Gift,’’ Ž nding that both show
how the actions of heroic women can ‘‘bind modern women into a cyclic
pattern of powerlessness,’’ while Catherine G. Peaslee describes Glasgow’s
encounters with suVragists and the sympathy she shows for ‘‘oddballs and
outcasts’’ in The Romance of a Plain Man in ‘‘Novelist Ellen Glasgow’s
Feminist Rebellion in Virginia’’ (pp. 55–62). In ‘‘The In uence of the
Tredegar Iron Works’ Owners in Ellen Glasgow’s Novels’’ (EGN 47: 1, 3–
4, 12–15) Peaslee names Glasgow’s great-uncle as a possible source for
Bolingbroke in Romance of a Plain Man.
Biographical and contextual approaches to Glasgow’s work address
race as well as gender. In ‘‘Ellen Glasgow’s In This Our Life: The Novel
and the Film’’ (Regarding Ellen Glasgow, pp. 117–26) David W. CoVey
compares the Ž lm version, which Glasgow disliked, with the book. In the
hands of screenwriter Howard Koch and director John Huston, the
book’s con ict between the Timberlake and Fitzroy families becomes
secondary to the Ž lm’s con ict between sisters Stanley and Roy, and the
role of Parry Clay, the aspiring African American law student whom
Stanley tries to blame for her car accident, is expanded while the character
himself is made less subservient. Two unusual and interesting approaches
322 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

are Susan Goodman’s ‘‘Without the Glory of God: Ellen Glasgow and
Calvinism’’ (pp. 71–84), which reads Barren Ground in light of Glasgow’s
Calvinist heritage, and Linda Kornasky’s ‘‘The Invisible Stigma in Ellen
Glasgow’s The Descendant ’’ (pp. 85–101), which identiŽ es Glasgow’s deaf-
ness as an important factor in her imaginative processes and a possible
source for the treatment of such stigmata as Michael’s illegitimacy and
Rachel’s sexual history in The Descendant. Glasgow’s hearing impairment
as well as her gracious manners and the details of her daily life are recalled
in ‘‘Remembering Ellen Glasgow’’ (pp. 155–71), a series of interviews with
those who knew her. In addition to these reminiscences, Glasgow’s biog-
raphy is addressed in Edgar MacDonald’s ‘‘From Jordan’s End to French-
man’s Bend: Ellen Glasgow’s Short Stories’’ (pp. 103–16), which discusses
the writing and publication history of the stories; Tricia Pearsall’s ‘‘Ellen
Glasgow’s Richmond’’ (pp. 139–54); and Julius Rowan Raper’s ‘‘Ellen
Glasgow: Gaps in the Record’’ (pp. 127–37), which proposes that Wil-
liam Riggin Travers is the mysterious ‘‘Gerald B.’’ who captured her
aVections. Taking issue with Allen Tate’s deŽ nition of regionalism as
‘‘that habit of men in a given locality which in uences them to certain
patterns of thought and conduct handed to them by their ancestors,’’
Ann Kennedy’s ‘‘Regional Properties, Regional Reproductions: Southern
Agrarianism and Glasgow’s Later Novels’’ (EGN 46: 1, 3, 8, 10) proposes
that Glasgow presents a diVerent vision in Barren Ground, one in which
women’s labor must be acknowledged, although Dorinda can accomplish
her reclamation of the land only by suppressing her ‘‘productive and
reproductive’’ self, thus negating the possibility of transferring land from
generation to generation central to the Southern agrarian ideals that Tate
describes.
Another Southern woman writer whose reputation has been neglected
even more than Glasgow’s is the modernist Evelyn Scott, but as Dorothy
Scura suggests in her introduction to Evelyn Scott, with two of her novels,
Escapade (1923) and The Wave (1929), back in print, the time may be right
for a new look at this writer. This well-chosen collection lays the ground-
work for recovery by combining analyses of Scott’s major works and
reputation, a survey of in uences and intertextual connections, and bib-
liographical overviews of shorter pieces. Three essays focus on Escapade, a
work variously described as an ‘‘expressionistic’’ Ž ctionalized autobiog-
raphy, a novel, and a prose poem. Seeing Escapade as expressing, in
Adrienne Rich’s terms, a modern ‘‘matrophobia’’ or fear of becoming
one’s mother, Paul Christian Jones in ‘‘Becoming (M)other: The Anxiety
Donna M. Campbell 323

of Maternity in Evelyn Scott’s Escapade’’ (pp. 37–52) reads the work as the
heroine’s psychological struggle to identify both with and against the
Ž gure of the mother, while Tim Edwards in ‘‘MagniŽ cent Shamelessness:
Recovering (Uncovering) the Female Body in Evelyn Scott’s Escapade’’
(pp. 3–13) analyzes the work’s ambivalence toward aging and pregnant
female bodies through such disturbing images as that of ‘‘pregnant death’’
and Bakhtin’s idea of the ‘‘super uity of the carnivalesque female body.’’
Janis P. Stout’s ‘‘South from the South: The Imperial Eyes of Evelyn Scott
and Katherine Anne Porter’’ (pp. 15–35) compares Escapade with Porter’s
‘‘Hacienda’’ and ‘‘Flowering Judas,’’ Ž nding in both writers evidence of a
condescending imperialist view that reveals itself beneath the seeming
innocence of the works’ protagonists. Drawing on Mary Louise Pratt’s
concept of the contact zone between cultures, Stout shows how, despite
opposition to those exploiting Mexican (Porter) or Brazilian (Scott) cul-
tures, the theme of imperialism reveals itself in such features as the ‘‘ironic
reversal’’ the female protagonists experience when, despite their race and
presumed status as colonizers, they must be subservient to a male other.
Addressing Scott’s other autobiography in ‘‘Background in Tennessee: Re-
covering a Southern Identity’’ (pp. 53–65), Martha E. Cook reads Scott’s
nontraditional memoir as her meditation on the complicity and re-
sistance with which Southern women in general, and Scott in particular,
approached their lives. Scott’s depiction of ‘‘iconic marginalized charac-
ters’’ in accounts of her experiences with African Americans and Native
Americans, her re ections on the power wielded by spunky literary hero-
ines like Annie Fellows Johnston’s The Little Colonel, and a culminating
chapter in which images of entrapment from convents to prisons pre-
dominate suggest the contradictions and restrictions that Scott perceived
in the Tennessee of her girlhood.
Other essays discuss Scott as both heir and in uence in a modernist
literary tradition. Lucinda H. MacKethan’s ‘‘Daughters of the Con-
federacy: Southern Civil War Fictions and The Wave ’’ (pp. 107–22)
demonstrates that like Mary Johnston, Allen Tate, Faulkner, Glasgow,
and Margaret Mitchell in their Civil War novels, Scott focuses on the
unmarried Confederate daughter in The Wave, using sexual transgression
and inward longing as symbols for the larger violence that shatters the
established order. As Karen Overbye shows in ‘‘Resisting Ideologies of
Race and Gender: Evelyn Scott’s Use of the Tragic Mulatto Figure’’
(pp. 123–39) Scott’s recognition of racial as well as gender-based injustice
informs the ‘‘tragic mulatto’’ heroine Eugenia Gilbert in Migrations and A
324 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

Calendar of Sin. In essays tracing Scott’s varied associations with authors

outside the Southern tradition, Marilyn Elkins reviews Scott’s 40-year
friendship with Kay Boyle and the in uence of Scott’s Escapade, The
Narrow House, and Narcissus on the younger writer’s Plagued by the
Nightingale in ‘‘ ‘Another Facet of Herself ’: The Complicated Case of
Evelyn Scott and Kay Boyle’’ (pp. 69–84), while Steven T. Ryan’s ‘‘Evelyn
Scott’s Bohemian Period: Variations of Love and Freedom in The Golden
Door and Migrations ’’ (pp. 85–105) explicates both the biographical
sources of Scott’s earlier works and her methods, such as inverting Whit-
man by ‘‘letting in the darkness.’’ Rounding out the collection, along
with surveys of Scott’s short stories and essays, are examinations of Scott’s
work in other forms: Tim Edwards’s ‘‘Faith Which Is a Liberation’’
(pp. 141–59), an examination of ‘‘Before Cock Crow,’’ an unpublished
symbolic retelling of the Christ story; Caroline Maun’s ‘‘The Loneliness
that Sings: Evelyn Scott’s Precipitations ’’ (pp. 163–75), which analyzes
Scott’s poetry of ‘‘intense isolation’’; and Mary E. Papke’s ‘‘Players in the
Dark: Evelyn Scott’s Drama of Excess’’ (pp. 177–86), which among other
readings connects Scott’s enigmatic part 7 of Escapade with the rest of the
work and with her 1921 drama Love.
Deborah Lindsay Williams’s Not in Sisterhood argues convincingly for
a fresh look at Zona Gale, who despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for
drama in 1921 is better known today for her support of other writers than
for her novels. In addition to insightful readings of Gale’s works and her
friendship with Jessie Fauset, Williams oVers a number of strategies for
reading the gamut of Gale’s work from domestic realism and paciŽ st
stories to ‘‘mystically in ected novels.’’ Unlike her contemporaries Whar-
ton and Cather, Gale chose ‘‘literary sisterhood,’’ allying herself with
political movements like Heterodoxy and assisting rather than distancing
herself from female writers like Fauset and Margery Latimer. Best known
for her long relationship with modernist poet Kenneth Fearing and her
marriage to Jean Toomer, Margery Latimer published only two novels
and two collections of short stories before her death at 33, but Joy Castro
makes a strong case for renewed interest in her work in ‘‘Margery Lati-
mer’’ (RCF 21, iii: 151–94). For example, This Is My Body (1930) brings an
experimental style and structure to ‘‘one of the only female-authored
Künstlerromane of the period,’’ while elements of ‘‘Guardian Angel’’ bear
comparison with Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out. In ‘‘The Feminine
Mystique and Elizabeth Madox Roberts’’ (AJ 28: 188–203) Gina Herr-
ing makes a similar case for Roberts’s The Time of Man, seeing in it the
Donna M. Campbell 325

‘‘con ict between lived experience and language’’ that characterizes mod-
ernism and women’s experiences. Gertrude Atherton and Meridel Le
Sueur are each the focus of an article this year. In Regional Fictions
Stephanie Foote looks at Atherton’s early novel The Californians (1898) as
a text that reveals ‘‘how a nationalizing genre —the realism with which the
novel itself is a self-conscious participant —imagines a Ž ctional, corrupt
‘minor’ literature’’ of California, divisions echoed in Magdalena’s mixed
Puritan and Spanish heritage, the oral stories that Magdalena cannot
write (but that Atherton publishes as The Splendid Idle Forties ), and the
emergent but ultimately suppressed history that she, unlike Atherton,
initially tries to claim but by burning her manuscript refuses to appropri-
ate. Paula E. Geyh explores the ‘‘populist/Marxist/feminist historiogra-
phy’’ of Le Sueur’s last novel in ‘‘Triptych Time: The Experiential Histo-
riography of Meridel Le Sueur’s The Dread Road ’’ (Criticism 43: 81–101).
Its triptych structure on the page features a central narrative of two
women traveling on a bus juxtaposed with excerpts from Poe’s tales on
one side, since Le Sueur treats these as ‘‘underground history,’’ and the
narrator’s re ections on the other. The multiple layers and images, in-
cluding the persistent one of mothers and their dead children killed by
injustices, merge across landscape and history in Le Sueur’s ultimately
utopian ‘‘grand narrative’’ linking individual and communal history.

vi W. E. B. Du Bois
The reprinting of Du Bois’s 1915 volume The Negro (Penn.) and John
Brown (Modern Library) and the publication of The W. E. B. DuBois
Encyclopedia (Greenwood), a collection of essays on Du Bois and race,
and a host of interdisciplinary essays attest to continuing recognition of
Du Bois’s importance. Much of the attention again focuses on The Souls
of Black Folk and Du Bois’s conceptions of race, although in ‘‘Breaking
the Signifying Chain: A New Blueprint for African-American Literary
Studies’’ (MFS 47: 145–63) Bill V. Mullen calls for more analysis of Du
Bois’s novel The Dark Princess (1928) and his ‘‘political manipulations of
literary form and genre’’ in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1919).
In ‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois, Hegel, and the Staging of Alterity’’ (Callaloo 24:
325–33) Winfried Siemerling discusses Du Bois’s literary metaphor of the
veil as originating in his reading of Hegel.
Chester J. Fontenot and Mary Alice Morgan’s W. E. B. Du Bois and
Race: Essays Celebrating the Centennial Publication of The Souls of Black
326 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

Folk (Mercer) includes interdisciplinary essays relating to continuing

issues in Du Bois criticism. Lee W. Formwalt’s reprinting of ‘‘W. E. B. Du
Bois’s View of the Southwest Georgia Black Belt, Illustrated with Photo-
graphs by A. RadclyVe Dugmore’’ (pp. 11–25) features a selection of
recently rediscovered photographs with Du Bois’s captions from his arti-
cle on Dougherty County, Georgia, published Ž rst in World’s Work ( June
1901) and later expanded into two chapters of The Souls of Black Folks.
According to Dolan Hubbard’s ‘‘Riddle Me This: Du Bois, the Sphinx,
and the Crisis of Identity’’ (pp. 26–44), Du Bois was not much interested
in the Sphinx’s riddle or its answer; rather, his use of it in The Souls of
Black Folk is a means of ‘‘re-centering Africa and re-connecting New
World blacks to their ancestral roots.’’ Although there is little overt
discussion of the place of the soldier in The Souls of Black Folk, in ‘‘The
Sweetness of His Strength: Du Bois, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Black
Soldier’’ (pp. 97–121) Mark Braley examines the decades-long implicit
dialogue about masculinity, citizenship, and the black soldier in the
writings of Roosevelt and Du Bois, including the critique of Roosevelt’s
‘‘militaristic approach to world aVairs’’ in The Black Flame. Asking how
critics would view The Quest of the Silver Fleece if it had been written by a
black or white woman instead of Du Bois, Bill Hardwig oVers a reconsid-
eration of the work as a sentimental novel as well as a rewriting of the
myth of the golden  eece in ‘‘The Sentimental Du Bois: Genre, Race,
and the Reading Public’’ (pp. 142–65). Noting that on its publication the
work had been compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hardwig shows that it
can also be seen as a sentimental novel with its traditional plot of sepa-
rated lovers and its critique of a ‘‘capitalist preoccupation with proŽ ts’’
that brings about oppression. In ‘‘Con uence, ConŽ rmation, and Con-
servation at the Crossroads: Intersecting Junctures in The Interesting
Narrative of the Life and The Souls of Black Folk ’’ (pp. 45–69) Wilfred D.
Samuels focuses on the ‘‘sorrow songs’’ and the connection between them
and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, which Du
Bois identiŽ ed as ‘‘the beginning of that long series of personal appeals’’ of
black autobiography.
Several authors address Du Bois’s theories of art and music. The
Harlem Renaissance debates over ‘‘art music’’ versus ‘‘the folk music
inheritance’’ are the subject of Paul Allen Anderson’s Deep River: Music
and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Duke). Despite Carl Van
Vechten’s energetic proselytizing for primitivism as a criterion for judging
authenticity in musical performance, the era made room for both the
Donna M. Campbell 327

classically trained vocal style of Roland Hayes and the equally sophisti-
cated if seemingly more spontaneous style of Paul Robeson. For Du Bois,
the two were decidedly diVerent —as he once wrote, ‘‘Art is not natural
and is not supposed to be natural’’ —but as Anderson shows in his analysis
of the sorrow songs in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois’s awareness of the
social cohesiveness conferred by the songs and his four-stage theory of
musical development led him to believe in ultimate reconciliation be-
tween ‘‘cosmopolitan reŽ nement and the ‘primitive’ authenticity of black
racial expression.’’ Unlike Toomer, who saw ‘‘an unbridgeable rural/
urban rupture’’ and the ‘‘swan song’’ of black culture with the disap-
pearance of the folk music inheritance, Du Bois and Alain Locke believed
early on that the evolution ‘‘from folk spiritual to art songs’’ represented
progress. Another perspective, Du Bois’s belief that ‘‘all Art is propaganda
and ever must be,’’ informs Eric King Watts’s ‘‘Cultivating a Black Public
Voice: W. E. B. Du Bois and the ‘Criteria of Negro Art’ ’’ (Rhetoric and
Public AVairs 4: 181–201); as Watts shows, despite his earlier support of
‘‘pure art,’’ in his essay ‘‘Criteria of Negro Art’’ Du Bois acknowledged
that ‘‘the operations of ‘pure art’ were hardly pure,’’ controlled as they
were by white critics wielding the criteria of racism disguised as disin-
terested aestheticism. In ‘‘ ‘Of Me and of Mine’: The Music of Racial
Identity in Whitman and Lanier, Dvor̀ák, and Du Bois’’ (AL 73: 147–84)
Jack Kerkering makes the provocative claim that Du Bois and Sidney
Lanier’s ‘‘categories of Anglo-Saxon and Negro are structurally identical,
each relying on racialized sound.’’ Just as Lanier claims that American
poems show their ancestry in the Anglo-Saxon sounds (rather than
words) to which white listeners automatically respond, so too does Du
Bois invest the sorrow songs with an African rather than simply American
origin; for Du Bois and Lanier, the essential nature of sound was racially
linked and identiŽ ed, placed by its nature on one side or the other of the
color line. As Alessandra Lorini notes in ‘‘ ‘The spell of Africa is upon me’:
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Notion of Art as Propaganda,’’ pp. 159–76 in Temples
for Tomorrow, Du Bois’s ‘‘Ethiopianism,’’ his belief that ‘‘the Negro is
essentially dramatic,’’ and his conviction that art must also be propa-
ganda combine in The Star of Ethiopia, Du Bois’s historical pageant of the
African people. Unlike most pageants of the day Du Bois’s work features
rather than conceals the social con icts of slavery and oppression and
places African achievement, rather than white conquest and culture, at
the center of the historical narrative.
Du Bois’s perspective on race and political action is the subject of four
328 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

works. In The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Harvard) Matthew

Pratt Guterl examines the historical transformation of a multiply-deŽ ned
concept of race based in nationhood to a biracialist view —a binary —of
black and white. Guterl discusses Du Bois’s novels in light of the author’s
disillusionment with the ‘‘white leviathan,’’ his move from assimilationist
positivism to disillusioned Marxism, and his con icts with Booker T.
Washington and Marcus Garvey. Zhang Juguo’s W. E. B. Du Bois: The
Quest for the Abolition of the Color Line (Routledge) also sees Du Bois’s
political growth as a gradual process with a Ž ve-stage progression toward
radicalization. Growing out of this radicalization is Du Bois’s little-
studied early publication The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line (1907–
10) which, as Susanna Ashton shows in ‘‘Du Bois’s Horizon: Document-
ing Movements of the Color Line’’ (MELUS 26, iv: 3–23), held the white
mainstream press accountable for its reporting on African American
issues. The Horizon caused its readers to question the very idea of docu-
mentary evidence as constituted in the white press of the day. Its unusual
format, its editorial policies, its function as a watchdog magazine, and its
position as a journal that transcended geographic and class boundaries
contributed to the ‘‘acute self-consciousness’’ that Ashton terms ‘‘meta-
critical,’’ an attitude that exposes the mainstream publications’ assump-
tions of truth. Reading Du Bois through the work of Anthony Appiah,
with whom he disagrees, and Lacan, Sheldon George sees Du Bois as
clinging to a vision of race that is at once biologically determined and
socially constructed; the preserving of race as a concept, says George,
‘‘masks an eVort to conserve the trauma of a racial history’’ —in this case,
slavery. Du Bois evidences the ‘‘traumatic real of slavery,’’ which must
enter the realm of symbolization before healing can occur (‘‘Trauma and
the Conservation of African-American Racial Identity,’’ JPCS 6: 58–72).

vii The Harlem Renaissance

Two books edited by Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith, Jean Toomer and
the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers) and Temples for Tomorrow, collect essays
from a conference on the Harlem Renaissance held in Paris (1998) and
should be read as complementary volumes, since Temples for Tomorrow
provides a broader historical perspective in contrast to the other work’s
narrower focus. For example, in addition to articles on major Ž gures and
more peripheral ones such as Ethel Waters, Oscar Micheaux, Aaron
Douglas, and Florence B. Price, Temples for Tomorrow includes illumi-
Donna M. Campbell 329

nating critical reviews of responses to and historical accounts of the

movement. Arnold Rampersad’s ‘‘Racial Doubt and Racial Shame in the
Harlem Renaissance’’ (pp. 31–44) and Feith’s ‘‘The Syncopated African:
Constructions of Origins in the Harlem Renaissance (Literature, Music,
Visual Arts)’’ (pp. 51–72) provide intellectual and artistic backgrounds to
the movement, while Brent Hayes Edwards’s ‘‘Three Ways to Translate
the Harlem Renaissance’’ (pp. 288–313), Françoise Charras’s ‘‘The West
Indian Presence in Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925)’’ (pp. 270–87),
and Michel Fabre’s ‘‘The Harlem Renaissance Abroad: French Critics and
the New Negro Literary Movement (1924–1964)’’ (pp. 314–32) examine
the international origins of and responses to the Harlem Renaissance.
Fabre and Feith’s other volume, Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renais-
sance, focuses more on Toomer than on the Renaissance. Implicitly re-
jecting the premise that, as one author puts it, ‘‘close textual analysis is a
form of political denial,’’ Fabre and Feith state that a primary purpose of
the volume is to provide close-readings of Cane. Yves-Charles Grandjeat’s
‘‘The Poetics of Passing in Jean Toomer’s Cane ’’ (pp. 57–67) argues that
the poetics of Cane ‘‘involve a choice of textual politics’’: Toomer’s choice
of elements of transformation, as in his use of secondary colors and times
of day such as dusk, his verbs of expansion and diVusion, and his lexi-
cal compounds suggest the migration of elements from one state to
another —their passing rather than their division into discrete parts, a
structure that re ects Toomer’s racial politics. Narrowing her focus to one
such symbol, in ‘‘ ‘The Waters of My Heart’: Myth and Belonging in Jean
Toomer’s Cane ’’ (pp. 68–84) Françoise Clary sees the symbol of water as a
primary means through which Toomer uniŽ es his text: it is by turns an
‘‘event,’’ a part of Toomer’s ‘‘incantatory style,’’ and a ‘‘spatial and social
referent’’ that draws on universal symbolism as well as on speciŽ c African
American realities, such as the image of the middle passage and Frederick
Douglass’s use of water as a symbol. In an illuminating feminist reading,
Monica Michlin demonstrates that ‘‘Karintha’’ anticipates the rest of
Cane by announcing absences and dissonances not only textual, such as
Karintha’s missing voice and her dead baby, and symbolic (the image of
smoke), but stylistic, as in the use of ‘‘parataxis, minimalism, and primi-
tivism’’ that undercuts even as it evokes an illusory pastoral landscape
(‘‘ ‘Karintha’: A Textual Analysis,’’ pp. 96–108). Fabre’s ‘‘Dramatic and
Musical Structures in ‘Harvest Song’ and ‘Kabnis’: Toomer’s Cane and
the Harlem Renaissance’’ reads ‘‘Kabnis’’ as drama and satire, with Kab-
nis’s performance of ‘‘a mock-heroic piece that is both a self-parody and a
330 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

pastiche of a theater form’’ as metaphoric of racial masquerade; appearing

as they do during dramatic moments, the songs re ect a ‘‘call and re-
sponse’’ pattern of summoning characters. Seeing a diVerent kind of call
and response between characters and their unarticulated longings, in
‘‘Feeding the Soul with Words: Preaching and Dreaming in Cane ’’
(pp. 84–95) Cecile Coquet links dreaming and preaching as Ž gures for
the poet’s eVorts at transcendence, including his experience of visions and
his attempts to communicate them. Although the two are antithetical,
because dreaming is ineVectual by itself whereas preaching may eVect
change, the poet requires both in the ominous political landscape of the
South, symbolized by the ‘‘insistent presence of the fringe of pines’’ that
everywhere surrounds the characters.
Other essays address Toomer’s ambivalent stance toward the binary
concept of race and his relationships with other artists. In an insightful
reading from this volume that also examines Cane ’s structure —its divi-
sions, its ‘‘double curve’’ —and its aesthetic experiments Werner Sollors
places Toomer Ž rmly in the modernist canon with Pound, T. E. Hulme,
and Gertrude Stein in ‘‘Jean Toomer’s Cane : Modernism and Race in
Interwar America’’ (pp. 18–37), a connection that Martha Jane Nadell,
George Hutchinson, and Wolfgang Karrer conŽ rm in evaluating Toomer
among his contemporaries. Nadell’s ‘‘Race and the Visual Arts in the
Works of Jean Toomer and Georgia O’KeeVe’’ (pp. 142–61) draws on
unpublished papers to discuss Toomer’s friendship with O’KeeVe and
Alfred Stieglitz. The photographic images and color in Cane, part of
Toomer’s modernist experimentation with form and description, parallel
the objective methods of visual representation employed in O’KeeVe’s
paintings and Stieglitz’s photographs. Hutchinson reviews Toomer’s early
life and his friendship with Waldo Frank, whom Toomer described as
‘‘the only modern writer who has immediately in uenced me,’’ in ‘‘Iden-
tity in Motion: Placing Cane ’’ (pp. 38–56). Toomer’s well-known reluc-
tance to be pinned down to the binary (and exclusionary) model of race
that had become the norm in the early 20th century marks a Ž gure who
was ‘‘in rapid transition, vocationally, geographically, socially, and intel-
lectually, between identities.’’ Contemporary concepts of race are also
central to Diana L. Williams’s argument in ‘‘Building the New Race: Jean
Toomer’s Eugenic Aesthetic’’ (pp. 188–201). Noting, as have George
Hutchinson and other critics, that in Cane Toomer may have reacted
speciŽ cally to the removal of the category ‘‘mulatto’’ from the 1920 U.S.
Census, Williams argues that Toomer’s nonŽ ction writings re ect his
Donna M. Campbell 331

vision of eugenic struggle, especially as exempliŽ ed in the tropes of

buildings and women’s bodies. According to Karrer in ‘‘Black Modern-
ism? The Early Poetry of Jean Toomer and Claude McKay’’ (pp. 128–41),
Toomer and McKay, ‘‘outsiders to the Harlem Renaissance,’’ refused to
cut their work to Ž t the patterns of poetry available in 1920 —the ‘‘roman-
tic school,’’ ‘‘domestic or local color realism,’’ primitivism, or the ‘‘classi-
cal or Renaissance revival.’’ McKay’s subversive sonnets, such as his ‘‘po-
etic editorial’’ protesting colonialism, ‘‘The Little Peoples’’ (1919), and
Toomer’s ‘‘modernist aesthetic of collage,’’ shown in ‘‘Conversion,’’ sug-
gest a complex position on race responsive to ‘‘various pressures from an
early modernist Ž eld.’’ The eVects of Toomer’s refusal to be featured as a
‘‘Negro writer’’ when Cane was published are the subject of Michael
Soto’s ‘‘Jean Toomer and Horace Liveright; or, A New Negro Gets ‘Into
the Swing of It’ ’’ (pp. 162–87). In an extended look at Boni and Live-
right’s advertising campaign for Cane, Soto shows that, contrary to popu-
lar belief, ‘‘[r]ace was but one of many factors deployed by B & L in its
sales pitch for Cane, ’’ with the work variously positioned as a story of
‘‘Negro life’’ like Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones; a serious work to be
considered alongside those of such heavy-hitting authors as Dreiser,
Hendrik van Loon, Edgar Lee Masters, and Ludwig Lewisohn; and a
‘‘Southern vaudeville,’’ an idea that some disapproving reviewers used to
deride the book.
In ‘‘Jean Toomer and Kenneth Burke and the Persistence of the Past’’
(AmLH 13: 41–66) Charles Scruggs examines a major and mutual in u-
ence between Toomer and Burke. When Toomer reviewed Burke’s White
Oxen, his criticism ‘‘forced Burke to expand his deŽ nition of rhetoric ’’ to
consider the ‘‘human action’’ that Toomer had charged Burke with omit-
ting from his Ž ction; similarly, Burke ‘‘helped Toomer to see dramatist
possibilities within Cane ’s historical focus.’’ Reginald Dyck provides sug-
gestions for teaching the web of social relations, including race, in Cane
by using Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents in ‘‘Cane and Its Discon-
tents’’ (Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 1, i: 57–73).
General studies and articles on individual Harlem Renaissance authors
stress the multiple viewpoints that the movement encompassed. Work-
ing from a sociological perspective, in The Ideologies of African American
Literature: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Nationalist Revolt
(Rowman and LittleŽ eld) Robert E. Washington examines the ideologi-
cal functions of, and the implications of white critical engagement in,
African American literature during Ž ve eras, of which the Ž rst, the primi-
332 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

tivist school, is roughly coterminous with the Harlem Renaissance; ex-

ploiting primitivism for sensation’s sake explains the popularity of Van
Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and the comparative failure of the primitivist
but nonsensational Cane. Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey’s
Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (Rutgers) at-
tempts to redress the imbalance of works published by women authors
during the Harlem Renaissance by including equal rather than represen-
tative numbers of works by women. Like Fabre and Feith, Patton and
Honey extend the temporal and generic boundaries of the era, including
works from Angela Weld Grimké’s play Rachel (1916) through Zora Neale
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as well as works from the
visual arts, such as drawings from The Crisis. Edward J. Mullen’s The
Harlem Group of Negro Writers (Greenwood) reprints for the Ž rst time in
its entirety ‘‘The Harlem Group of Negro Writers,’’ the master’s thesis
(written 1931–32; submitted for the degree at Columbia University, 1940)
of Melvin B. Tolson (1898–1966). Less celebrated than other Harlem
Renaissance Ž gures, Tolson is best known for his poetry: Rendezvous with
America (1944), Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), A Gallery of
Harlem Portraits (written 1935; published 1979), and Harlem Gallery:
Book 1, The Curator (1965). Sonia Delgado-Tall’s overview of Harlem
Renaissance writers, ‘‘The New Negro Movement and the African Heri-
tage in a Pan-Africanist Perspective’’ ( Journal of Black Studies 31: 288–
310), notes that even after overcoming racist stereotypes about African
culture and learning more about African heritage, none of the writers
promoted the back-to-Africa movement; instead of providing a ‘‘com-
mon style and philosophy,’’ the rediscovery of African heritage enhanced
these artists’ individualism.
An interesting cast of characters and a variety of essays from all phases
of George Schuyler’s long life animates JeVrey B. Leak’s Rac[e]ing to the
Right: Selected Essays of George S. Schuyler (Tennessee), which shows
Schuyler’s political development from the early, Mencken-in uenced
satires such as ‘‘The Negro and Nordic Civilization’’ (1925) to the cultural
and political conservatism revealed in a late interview with Ishmael Reed
and Steve Cannon (1973). Despite such deliberately outrageous state-
ments as Schuyler’s famous pronouncement that ‘‘the Aframerican is
merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon’’ (‘‘Negro Art Hokum,’’ 1925) and his
‘‘Pan-African critique’’ of Liberia and emerging nations in ‘‘Uncle Sam’s
Black Step-child’’ (1933) Schuyler trenchantly condemns racism and
Yankee imperialism in the Caribbean in his more serious essays such as
Donna M. Campbell 333

‘‘The Caucasian Problem’’ (1944), one of his ‘‘Ž nal liberal salvos’’ before
his shift to the far right. Along with Leak’s biographical introduction, the
highlights of the collection include a new transcript of a radio discussion,
‘‘The Black Muslims in America: An Interview with George S. Schuyler,
Malcolm X, C. Eric Lincoln, and James Baldwin’’ (1961). Darryl Dickson-
Carr compares Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) with Rudolph Fisher’s The
Walls of Jericho (1928) and Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932)
in African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (Missouri), Ž nding
it to be a more bitter absurdist satire than the other two. Thurman’s In-
fants of the Spring is also the subject of Terrell Scott Herring’s ‘‘The Negro
Artist and the Racial Manor: Infants of the Spring and the Conundrum of
Publicity’’ (AAR 35: 581–97). The conundrum Thurman satirizes, as
Herring shows, was a common one for Harlem Renaissance writers: as the
‘‘New Negro project’’ promoted artists as examples of racial uplift, the
individual artist’s right to privacy was lost. The artist cannot win, whether
trying to break out of stereotypical racial frames of primitivism, as Thur-
man’s Paul Arbian does by becoming a ‘‘brilliant bohemian,’’ or trying to
break free from ‘‘race consciousness’’ and seeking status simply as an
American rather than as an African American artist, as Ray does.
Fewer articles on James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay appear
this year. Alessandro Portelli’s ‘‘The Tragedy and the Joke: James Weldon
Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man ’’ (Temples for Tomorrow,
pp. 143–58) suggests that Johnson signiŽ es not only on political and racial
discourses of the color line but also on such common symbols from the
dominant culture as gold, music, spending, passing, and even James’s
international theme; in signifying, to ‘‘play his joke, Johnson needs to
evoke and exorcise the tragedy.’’ Observing the frequency with which
racial passing appears as analogous to gay passing, Siobhan B. Somerville
links Johnson and Toomer in Queering the Color Line: Race and the
Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Duke, 2000). In The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, among other features, the narrator’s
relationship with his patron suggests an ambiguous erotic attraction, a
reading reinforced by Van Vechten’s 1927 introduction to the novel,
which gave the book greater prominence and because of Van Vechten’s
bisexuality also encouraged ‘‘queer reading.’’ Despite resisting categoriza-
tion, Toomer related racial passing to male homoeroticism in ‘‘Kabnis’’
and unpublished works such as ‘‘Sheik and Anti-Sheik.’’ Drawing on
Peter Hulme’s concept of an ‘‘extended Caribbean’’ stretching from Vir-
ginia to Brazil and even the United Kingdom and France, Carl Petersen
334 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

in ‘‘The Tropics in New York: Claude McKay and the New Negro Move-
ment’’ (Temples for Tomorrow, pp. 259–69) argues that such a reŽ guring
would highlight the signiŽ cance of the ‘‘Afro-Caribbean canon’’ as an
entity in its own right. McKay and others shared a Pan-African philoso-
phy, according to Petersen, ‘‘based in large measure on the dissemination
of Africanized musical expression’’ as well as in publications such as The
Crusader. In addition to the volume of his correspondence with Hughes,
Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van
Vechten, 1925–1964 (Knopf ), Van Vechten is discussed brie y in George
Monteiro’s ‘‘Expatriate Life Away from Paris’’ (AR 59: 587–607). Mon-
teiro points out that Van Vechten’s ‘‘On Visiting Fashionable Places Out
of Season’’ anticipates Hemingway’s ‘‘oV-season stories,’’ ‘‘Out of Season’’
and ‘‘Cat in the Rain,’’ a connection especially suggestive since Heming-
way’s library in Cuba contains a copy of Van Vechten’s Excavations: A
Book of Advocacies (1926), in which the essay was later collected.
Interest in Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset continues to grow. In ‘‘Nella
Larsen and the Intertextual Geography of Quicksand ’’ (AAR 35: 533–60)
Anna Brickhouse reads the segments of Helga’s journeys as a ‘‘patch-
work,’’ a map of allusions, responses, and satiric takes on works and ideas
ranging from the tragic mulatto Ž gures of Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola
Leroy (1892), W. D. Howells’s An Imperative Duty (1892), T. S. Stribling’s
Birthright (1922), and Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha (1909) to other Ž gures
and ‘‘treacherous landscapes’’ in works by Dreiser, Van Vechten, and
Anatole France. For example, Helga’s train journey to Chicago recalls
Carrie Meeber’s in Sister Carrie, a borrowing that Brickhouse sees as a
deliberate reference to Sister Carrie ’s status as a controversial text with a
sexualized heroine much like Helga. An equally compelling reading
based on cultural context is ‘‘Shopping to Pass, Passing to Shop: Bodily
Self-Fashioning in the Fiction of Nella Larsen,’’ pp. 97–120 in Recovering
the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women,
ed. Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson (Rutgers, 2000), in
which Meredith Goldsmith addresses another system of signiŽ cation,
this time Larsen’s use of color and tropes of consumption. Both Quick-
sand and Passing oVer the reader ‘‘a style of politics that shows the inter-
relationship of black middle-class female subjectivity, consumerism, and
passing’’ through the use of color and consumer goods ranging from, for
example, Quicksand ’s use of red and green to indicate sexuality to the
white china teacup that Irene smashes in Passing, destroying at once her
own history, ‘‘Clare’s near whiteness, her own bourgeois gentility, and the
Donna M. Campbell 335

history of miscegenation that both women share.’’ Frank Hering sees the
teacup incident as just one among many episodes that equate the prom-
ises of ideal domesticity with enslavement, an identiŽ cation reinforced by
the ‘‘panoptic visibility’’ in which the characters exist, in ‘‘Sneaking
Around: Idealized Domesticity, Identity Politics, and Games of Friend-
ship in Nella Larsen’s Passing ’’ (ArQ 57, 1: 35–60). In ‘‘Larsen’s Quick-
sand ’’ (Expl 59: 103–06) Michael Lackey sees the ‘‘jazz club’’ scene not as
Helga’s regrettable succumbing to internalized stereotypes about black
experience but as Larsen’s critique of civilized life: without jazz and its
restorative powers, civilization would ‘‘be a lifeless machine.’’ Beth Mc-
Coy looks beyond the substance of Larsen’s Passing to its appearance on
the page in ‘‘Perpetua(l) Notion: Typography, Economy, and Losing
Nella Larsen,’’ pp. 97–114 in Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary
Interpretation, ed. Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton (Mass.). Taking
issue with the idea that typography is irrelevant to the consumption and
reception of a text, McCoy proposes that just as Passing originally gained
readership through its publication by Knopf, a prestigious publishing
house whose attention to the physical appearance of books was well
known, so too did its republication in the American Women Writers
Series (Rutgers) in the more modern-looking Perpetua typeface instead
of the older, original Caslon give the book renewed life even at the risk of
erasing the original circumstances of its publication. Jessica Wegman-
Sanchez’s ‘‘Rewriting Race and Ethnicity Across the Border: Mairuth
SarsŽ eld’s No Crystal Stair and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing ’’
(ECW 74: 136–66) contrasts the Ž xed ‘‘bipolar’’ deŽ nitions of race cri-
tiqued in Larsen’s novels with the more  uid and complex versions
available to the multiracial Canadian heroine of Mairuth SarsŽ eld’s re-
cent novel No Crystal Stair (1997); unlike Larsen, SarsŽ eld insists that in
racial terms ‘‘the in-between can exist.’’
Trying to transform the limiting description of Fauset as ‘‘midwife of
the Harlem Renaissance,’’ four essays work to restore her novels to critical
parity with her editorial work for The Crisis. Cheryl A. Wall addresses the
issue directly in ‘‘Histories and Heresies: Engendering the Harlem Re-
naissance’’ (Meridians 2, i: 59–76) by telling the story of the famous Civic
Club dinner for assembled Harlem Renaissance luminaries and pub-
lishers in 1924: although it was ostensibly an occasion to honor Fauset,
she was virtually ignored in a manner that Wall argues is ‘‘emblematic of
ways in which African American and literary scholars long treated female
artists.’’ After an overview of scholarship on the treatment of female
336 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Wall shows how Fauset, like her
character Angela’s real-life prototype, the sculptor Augusta Savage, em-
phasizes an aesthetic of types based in psychology rather than ‘‘a unitary
racial subject.’’ Arguing that Fauset is ‘‘neither anachronistic nor mar-
ginal,’’ Kathleen PfeiVer contends that Plum Bun uses passing as a means
of racializing the era’s other debates, such as the shift from Victorian
ideals to modernism and from rural to urban culture in ‘‘The Limits of
Identity in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun ’’ (Legacy 18: 79–93). Angela’s wish to
compartmentalize her social spheres is doomed to failure, but her identity
emerges intact precisely because as ‘‘a quintessentially American individ-
ualist’’ she deŽ nes herself by individuality, not by arbitrary racial classi-
Ž cations. Mary Jane Schenck reads Fauset’s Ž rst novel, There Is Confusion,
in light of Addie Hunton and Kathryn Johnson’s memoir Two Colored
Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (1920) and Hemingway’s
comments on the Lost Generation in ‘‘Jessie Fauset: The Politics of
FulŽ llment vs. the Lost Generation’’ (SoAR 66, i: 102–25). For Schenck,
Fauset’s novel exhibits a ‘‘politics of fulŽ llment,’’ sometimes misread as
sentimentality, that opposes conventional deŽ nitions of modernism and
allows Fauset to fashion her own. Anthony Hale compares Fauset’s posi-
tion as midwife to the Harlem Renaissance with Lady Gregory’s similar
position in the Irish Renaissance in ‘‘Nanny/Mammy: Comparing Lady
Gregory and Jessie Fauset’’ (Cultural Studies 15: 161–72); he further shows
how mammy/nursemaid Hetty Daniels in Plum Bun is ‘‘at once guardian
and child,’’ representing both the fate that Angela attempts to avoid as
she passes for white and an irrefutable fact of racial truth to which Angela
must return.

viii Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Immigrant Fiction

Interest continues to grow in cross-cultural or immigrant Ž ction, with
essays on Cahan, Yezierska, Sui Sin Far, Onoto Watanna, Ole Rölvaag,
and Joseph Vogel. In ‘‘ ‘The American of the Future’: Fictional Immi-
grant Children and National Ethnic Identity in the Progressive Era’’ (SAF
29: 189–208) Tim Prchal provides a useful overview of the debates over
restricting immigration, cultural pluralism, and assimilation before turn-
ing his attention to another interesting issue: the ways in which popular
magazine Ž ction used the subject of immigrant children —who were,
after all, future citizens —to play out for a national audience a surprising
variety of perspectives on issues surrounding immigration. Reading
Donna M. Campbell 337

Cahan’s work through his character Yekl’s boast of ‘‘shpeaking plain,’’

Hana Wirth-Nesher’s ‘‘ ‘Shpeaking Plain’ and Writing Foreign: Abraham
Cahan’s Yekl ’’ (PoT 22: 41–63) demonstrates that Cahan was caught
between two traditions of ‘‘plain speaking’’: the use of exotic dialect to
guarantee authenticity in Howellsian realism and the direct use of oral
language associated with masculinity and Americanism at the turn of the
century. Noting that Cahan originally wrote Yekl in English and trans-
lated it into Yiddish when it failed at Ž rst to Ž nd a publisher despite
Howells’s eVorts, Wirth-Nesher shows how Cahan wrote from ‘‘two
linguistic, literary, and cultural frameworks.’’ Through the use of devices
such as eye dialect, ‘‘translational mimesis’’ or ‘‘verbal transposition,’’ and
the use of words that can only be understood if read aloud, thus ‘‘re-
producing the sound made by the immigrants,’’ Cahan succeeds both in
conveying the sense of dual cultures that his characters experience and in
undercutting Jake/Yekl’s anti-intellectual Americanism in contrast with
the foreign, scholarly bookishness of Mr. Bernstein. Cahan’s use of a simi-
lar self-division in The Rise of David Levinsky drives Levinsky’s dualistic
perspective of himself as existing between ‘‘base materiality,’’ a category to
which he assigns both his ethnicity and his American commercialism,
and ‘‘a something discrepant with that materiality,’’ according to Phillip
Barrish in American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual
Prestige. Barrish concentrates on Levinsky’s social capital as constituted
both by his distance from his ethnic origins and by his display of those
origins as proof that he is ‘‘the genuine article.’’ Like Wirth-Nesher, he
focuses on Cahan’s use of language: Levinsky is careful to mark his
translated idioms with quotation marks to signify that he knows better,
yet as used by Dora or Gitl in Yekl, these signal an ‘‘ethnic realness’’ that
adds value to the women in the eyes of the discerning —Levinsky, or in
Yekl the intellectual Bernstein.
The question of assimilation, this time in Yezierska’s works, appears in
Adam Sol’s ‘‘Longings and Renunciations: Attitudes Towards Intermar-
riage in Early Twentieth Century Jewish American Novels’’ (American
Jewish History 89: 215–30). Sol Ž nds that despite pressure for assimilation
from Progressive Era social theorists, novels like Yezierska’s Bread Givers,
Salome of the Tenements, and Arrogant Beggar show the heroines rejecting
intermarriage as a form of assimilation and instead choosing men who
have achieved success in America without rejecting their Jewish heritage.
Edna Ferber’s Fanny Herself, Ludwig Lewisohn’s The Island Within, and
Sidney Nyburg’s The Chosen People likewise present ‘‘intermarriage as a
338 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

problematic solution to the temptations of assimilation in America.’’ Lisa

Botshon looks at how the producers of Hungry Hearts, a movie adapted
from three of Yezierska’s short stories, required unassimilated Jewish
characters, or at least the appearance of them, in making and marketing
the movie in ‘‘Anzia Yezierska and the Marketing of the Jewish Immigrant
in 1920s Hollywood’’ ( JNT 30 [2000]: 287–312). In Hollywood’s view,
authenticity was best served by re ecting stereotypes of Jewish characters
and promoting Yezierska as a relatively new immigrant; according to
Botshon, ‘‘the ethnicity of the actors themselves was secondary to the way
in which they were believed to look to mass audiences,’’ an approach that
resulted in the Jewish actress Ethel Kaye being Ž red for looking ‘‘too
Irish’’ and the gentile actress Helen Ferguson being hired in her place.
Noting that Reb Smolinsky in Yezierska’s Bread Givers retains his mas-
culine authority despite his refusal to work whereas Dorothy CanŽ eld
Fisher’s Lester Knapp in The Home-Maker would be ostracized if his
reluctance to work were not excused by his physical limitations, Kathryn
Reisdorfer contrasts the Old World autocratic model of fatherhood with
the feminized American model in ‘‘Generating Alternative Representa-
tions of Fatherhood: Anzia Yezierska and Dorothy CanŽ eld Fisher’s Nar-
rative Spaces for Male Others’’ (Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealogies,
and Explorations of Fatherhood in Modern and Contemporary Literature
[Lexington, 2000], pp. 169–89). A more general discussion of Yezierska
in the context of other writers appears in Labor’s Text. In it, Laura Hapke
extends her examination of working-class Ž ction begun in Tales of the
Working Girl (see AmLS 1992, p. 178) and Daughters of the Great Depres-
sion (see AmLS 1995, p. 300) to include a broader range of workers, from
the problematic depictions of ethnicity and class in earlier decades to
the ascendancy of proletarian Ž ction in the 1930s. Wharton’s The House
of Mirth, for example, can be seen as part of a series of ‘‘Lady Bounti-
ful’’ novels featuring the ‘‘mill-girl protégé,’’ such as Marie Van Vorst’s
Amanda of the Mill (1904), and Yezierska’s Bread Givers bears comparison
with Samuel Ornitz’s Allrightniks Row (1923).
Vanessa Holford Diana analyzes the ways in which Sui Sin Far/Edith
Maud Eaton’s ‘‘Pat and Pan’’ and its ‘‘Ž gurative sequel’’ ‘‘Its Wavering
Image’’ mark a revising of ethnic stereotypes in ‘‘Biracial/Bicultural Iden-
tity in the Writings of Sui Sin Far’’ (MELUS 26, ii: 159–86). The use of
shifting points of view and mixed genres parallels the destabilizing eVects
of racism on Sui Sin Far’s biracial characters raised in Chinese commu-
nities but caught between worlds. RedeŽ ning ‘‘exile’’ as a separation from
Donna M. Campbell 339

self rather than simply as political or social disconnection from others,

in ‘‘ ‘A Chinese Ishmael’: Sui Sin Far, Writing, and Exile’’ (MELUS 26, iii:
3–29) Joy M. Leighton examines the ‘‘home/exile dialectic’’ in one of
Sui Sin Far’s most enigmatic stories. ‘‘A Chinese Ishmael’’ tells of the
double suicide of a slave girl, Ku Yum, and her mandarin lover, Leih
Tsieh, after her scorned and vengeful lover, Lum Choy, kills himself in
such a way as to pin the blame on Leih Tsieh. Leighton suggests that all of
the characters in part resemble the biblical Ishmael but that the ‘‘Chinese
Ishmael’’ of the title is Ž nally a ‘‘wandering signiŽ er with multiple refer-
ents,’’ an appropriate ambiguity given that for Sui Sin Far, herself an
‘‘exile,’’ only writing could create a home. Huining Ouyang records a
reversal of the self-sacriŽ ce plot in ‘‘Rewriting the Butter y Story: Trick-
sterism in Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale and Sui Sin Far’s ‘The
Smuggling of Tie Co,’ ’’ pp. 203–17 in Alternative Rhetorics: Challenges to
the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Laura Gray-Rosendale and Sibylle Gruber
(SUNY ). Noting the race and gender-in ected power relations as well as
the paradigm of colonialism inherent in the ‘‘Butter y story,’’ in which
the Asian female sacriŽ ces herself for the European male, Ouyang shows
how both of the Eaton sisters transform the plot in their writings, Onoto
Watanna through her heroine’s trickster behavior that reverses the power
relations with her white lover in A Japanese Nightingale and Sui Sin Far
through the cross-dressing behavior of her female protagonist in ‘‘The
Smuggling of Tie Co.’’ Another work that sheds light on both writers is
Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton (Illinois), a lively, well-
researched biography by Diana Birchall, Watanna’s granddaughter and
Sui Sin Far’s grandniece. Although scholarship on Watanna has focused
on her popular Japanese-themed romances, Birchall provides a rounded
picture of Watanna’s long and busy career, including her time in Hol-
lywood as a screenwriter; her life in New York and Calgary, Alberta; and
the Western novel she wrote after the market for her Japanese romances
declined.
Essays on Rölvaag and Vogel round out the publications on immigrant
Ž ction. Sara Eddy’s ‘‘ ‘Wheat and Potatoes’: Reconstructing Whiteness in
O. E. Rölvaag’s Immigrant Trilogy’’ (MELUS 26, i: 129–49) uses white-
ness theory to analyze the ‘‘white-on-white racism’’ with which Per Hansa
and Beret treat the Irish immigrants. Initially apprehensive about the
Sioux, the Norwegian settlers in Giants in the Earth transfer their fears to
the ‘‘uncivilized’’ Irish. Their fears are realized when Per and Beret’s son
Peder marries and loses an Irish girl, Susie, in Peder Victorious, a breakup
340 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

that the ‘‘racial purist’’ Rölvaag saw as inevitable since ‘‘wheat and po-
tatoes’’ cannot be kept ‘‘in the same bin.’’ Noting a paucity of Polish
American literature in the middle of the 20th century, Frank Bergman
oVers Man’s Courage (1938), the second of Vogel’s novels, as a voice for
Polish Americans in ‘‘Empty Promise, Empty Threat: The Polish Immi-
grant in Joseph Vogel’s Novel Man’s Courage ’’ (Polish American Studies 58,
ii: 7–21). Of its three structural symbols —the  ower, the Ž st, and the
gun —expressing the contrast between the American dream and its failed
promise, Man’s Courage, unlike some other Depression-era labor novels,
chooses the  ower of nonviolence.

ix Other Figures and Books of General Interest

Although at Ž rst glance the phrase ‘‘Tarzan, Lord of the Suburbs’’ might
seem a contradiction in terms, in White Diaspora Catherine Jurca makes a
persuasive case for interpreting Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic Tarzan as a
work that shows ‘‘racial and political issues . . . more plausibly understood
as domestic,’’ especially given ‘‘Tarzan’s peculiar obsession with the free-
standing, single-family house.’’ Seen in the context of the increasing
growth of suburbs, including Burroughs’s own Tarzana, the Ž gure of
Tarzan’s house —the seat of his Anglo-Saxon identity and a ‘‘portrait of a
white home under siege’’ —reinforces the book’s message about the dan-
gers of ‘‘alien expansion and interracial contact.’’ Another compelling
look at the Tarzan series is William Gleason’s ‘‘Of Sequels and Sons:
Tarzan and the Problem of Paternity’’ ( JACC 23, i [2000]: 41–51). Rather
than seeing the sequels to the original Tarzan as simply weaker and more
improbable than the original, Gleason argues that they demonstrate
Burroughs’s commitment to the evolutionary recapitulation plot; in later
volumes, for example, Tarzan and Jane’s son Jack (Korak), through a
series of plot twists, reenacts much of his father’s life in a series of
repetitions: ‘‘Everything Tarzan as ape-man had done, it seems, Korak
will accomplish on a gorier scale.’’ Burroughs banishes the recapitulation
plot, however, as the emphasis shifts to regression: knocked unconscious
in one book, Tarzan loses his memory and reverts to his primitive self
with an even more violent attitude toward blacks. As Gleason shows, the
series gradually forecloses on other, less racist possibilities for social or-
ganization, reinforcing ‘‘Tarzan’s exterminatory violence’’ and, by depict-
ing Korak as the ‘‘cheerfully submissive son,’’ soothing the consciences
of middle-class fathers unable to participate in their sons’ upbringing.
Donna M. Campbell 341

John F. Kasson’s Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male
Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (Hill and Wang) traces
Burroughs’s conceptions of masculinity and identity as arising from sev-
eral sources: Burroughs’s position at the business magazine System, with
its Social Darwinist advice to readers; Ishi, last of the Yahi tribe, called a
‘‘wild man’’ by the press of the day; Richard L. Garner, who claimed to
have taught chimpanzees to talk; and Joseph Knowles, who lived as a
‘‘forest man’’ for two months to demonstrate that civilized man had not
lost primitive knowledge. Noting other sources, Frank Puncer identiŽ es
the origins of Burroughs’s two Apache novels in Bourke’s The Medicine
Men of the Apache (1892) in ‘‘On the Border with Bourke: Captain
John G. Bourke’s In uence on Edgar Rice Burroughs’’ (Burroughs Bul-
letin 45: 21–29), and Vishwas R. Gaitonde discusses Burroughs’s use of
leprosy and the Khmer legend of the leper king in Jungle Girl in ‘‘Leper
Kings, Witch Doctors and Stricken Artists: Leprosy in Burroughs and
Maugham’’ (Burroughs Bulletin 46: 7–13). Other work on Burroughs
includes David A. Ullery’s The Tarzan Novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs:
An Illustrated Reader’s Guide (McFarland) and the revised edition of
H. H. Heins’s A Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs
(Grant).
The connections between masculinity, race, and empire are also the
subject of essays on Zane Grey and Owen Wister. In ‘‘The Cowboy
Businessman and ‘The Course of Empire’: Owen Wister’s The Virgin-
ian ’’ (Cultural Critique 48, i: 98–128) Jane Kuenz observes that Wister’s
Virginian does not actually exemplify the values of the formula western;
rather, this ‘‘colonial romance’’ centers on issues of masculinity, work,
and race, with an ‘‘antidemocratic vision’’ of the nation in which natural
aristocrats such as the Virginian will rule and, instead of riding out of
town in the classic way, become part of the power structure of the town.
William R. Handley’s ‘‘Distinctions Without DiVerences: Zane Grey
and the Mormon Question’’ (ArQ 57, i: 1–33) examines the role that
‘‘paranoia about Mormon polygamy’’ and a massive anti-Mormon cam-
paign in the press in 1911 played in ensuring the popularity of Zane Grey’s
Riders of the Purple Sage. All these cultural factors less obviously but no
less emphatically address the issue of Mormons as ‘‘white’’ and as ‘‘Ameri-
can’’ as well as exposing the uncomfortable parallels between the Mor-
mon empire and U.S. westward expansion, parallels the nation was able
to avoid by focusing on the most signiŽ cant diVerence: polygamy.
In an impressively thorough reading of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce
342 Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

(White Diaspora, pp. 76–98) Jurca shows that Cain envisioned standard-
ization and mass production as the ally rather than the enemy of home-
making; Mildred’s success derives from her ability to replicate and market
the comforts of home for the restless Californians who (like Babbitt in
Zenith) prefer the manufactured pretense of home to its reality. In keep-
ing with the rise of the concept of interior design in the ’30s, with its
emphasis on individualism in décor amid the era’s ‘‘standardized ‘vari-
ety,’ ’’ Cain proposes his own version —that a room should mean some-
thing to someone if it is to be any good —in the voice of Monty Beragon,
the Pasadena aristocrat who becomes the ‘‘ideal decorator’’ in developing
Mildred’s middle-class taste. Paula Rabinowitz brie y mentions the novel
Mildred Pierce in her discussion of the Ž lm version in ‘‘Domestic Labor:
Film Noir, Proletarian Literature, and Black Women’s Fiction’’ (MFS 47:
229–54); shifting the character of Lottie, the maid, from white in the
book to black in the Ž lm helps to ‘‘undercut’’ Mildred by linking her
perpetually to servitude.
Gonzaga University
15 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s
Catherine Calloway

The phrase ‘‘a writer’s life’’ is especially applicable to this year’s schol-
arship, with substantial biographies on Richard Wright, Carson Mc-
Cullers, Peter Taylor, Edward Abbey, and Conrad Richter. Fifteen other
writers receive book-length critical studies, essay collections, or bibliogra-
phies. Overall, this year’s scholarship indicates no major changes in
direction. Modernist scholars still favor studies of gender, race, culture,
religion, politics, psychology, and genre. Considering the universality of
these topics, one can predict that their appearance in this chapter will
continue.

i General
Women’s writing has been a concern of this year’s critical debate. In
American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter,
StaVord, and Hellman (Virginia) Thomas Carl Austenfeld seeks to pro-
vide a missing link in the literature of the 1930s —that of women expatri-
ate writers. Positioning Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean StaVord,
and Lillian Hellman together for the Ž rst time, Austenfeld explores the
political experiences that aVected these four women ethically while they
lived in Austria and Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, recording ‘‘the
eVects of [their] encounter with totalitarian politics in general and Naz-
ism in particular.’’ Because they lived in Europe during this time, their
‘‘expatriate adventures’’ took on serious political and ethical dimensions.
More speciŽ cally, these authors developed a ‘‘feminist ethic of care’’ as a
result of their experiences with German totalitarianism, an ethic that
emerges in both their lives and their writing.
The imagery of urban containment in post-World War II Ž ction and
344 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Ž lm is the subject of Elizabeth A. Wheeler’s Uncontained: Urban Fiction

in Postwar America (Rutgers). Wheeler ‘‘challenge[s] the predominant
postwar story in which city living inevitably produces violence,’’ espe-
cially in ‘‘the Ž gure of the lone, violent man.’’ Wheeler Ž nds two types of
containment that transform the image of the city in postwar Ž ction:
emotional or ‘‘repressed trauma’’ and geographic or ‘‘urban segregation.’’
Focusing on cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans,
and New York and on works by Kerouac, Ellison, Salinger, William Bur-
roughs, Chester Himes, and Hisaye Yamamoto, among others, Wheeler
demonstrates how ‘‘postwar Ž ction transfers diYcult memories from the
individual to the urban landscape’’ and oVers alternatives to the barriers
of containment through the shift from the subterranean to ‘‘the Open
City.’’ Sexual, gender, and racial containment are subjects of the texts as
are a plethora of literary and societal Ž gures, including the noir detective,
the drag queen, the housewife, the war veteran, the Beat hipster, and the
lone male. According to Wheeler, containment culture was ‘‘a sensual
force reshaping the American landscape.’’
In From Richard Wright to Toni Morrison JeVrey J. Folks focuses on the
way that post-1920s African American, Southern, and immigrant authors
portray ethical issues in an attempt to recover ‘‘collective identity and
ethical knowledge.’’ Using both modern and postmodern works, Folks
examines ethical questions that derive from ‘‘social exclusion and cultural
hegemony,’’ demonstrating how writers frequently turn to the gothic
mode to depict alienation, displacement, social terror, or cultural assim-
ilation. Works treated that are relevant to this chapter are Wright’s The
Color Curtain, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and The
Morning Watch, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep and Mercy of a Rude Stream,
and Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge.
Authors important to this chapter also surface in Gary Adelman’s
Retelling Dostoyevsky: Literary Responses and Other Observations (Buck-
nell), a treatment of 20th-century Ž ctional reactions to the works of
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. According to Adelman, authors ‘‘creative[ly] reuse’’
Dostoyevsky because they are attracted to his moral dilemmas, not his
Christian ideology. Bernard Malamud, for instance, ‘‘recasts Dostoyev-
sky in terms of his own Jewishness,’’ and Vladimir Nabokov ‘‘creates an
ingeniously intricate parody, ostensibly as a monument to his contempt
for, and freedom from, Dostoyevsky.’’ In addition to Malamud’s The
Assistant and Nabokov’s Despair, Wright’s The Outsider is also considered.
Catherine Calloway 345

ii Proletarians
a. John Steinbeck and Nelson Algren Steinbeck is the subject of one
article. Using a number of works by Steinbeck and Amado, Earl E. Fitz in
‘‘The Vox Populi in the Novels of Jorge Amado and John Steinbeck,’’
pp. 111–23 in Jorge Amado: New Critical Essays, ed. Keith H. Brower,
Earl E. Fitz, and Enrique Martínez-Vidal (Routledge), demonstrates that
the two writers are most alike in their representation of the ‘‘vox populi’’
or the voice of the people.
Thanks to the University of Chicago Press, the 1964 edition of H. E. F.
Donohue and Nelson Algren’s Conversations with Nelson Algren has been
reprinted. The volume’s Ž rst four sections cover the period between
Algren’s childhood and his army career, his relationship with Hollywood,
his travels abroad, and such controversial subjects as American radicals
and people of color. Algren’s views on writing and other writers dominate
the last part. Overall, the interviews oVer an honest portrait of Algren the
man and the writer.

b. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Others A substantial addition to

this year’s scholarship is Hazel Rowley’s Richard Wright: The Life and
Times (Holt). More than 600 pages in length, the volume oVers an
engaging chronological account of the life and writing of a very private
man. Among the topics covered are Wright’s migration to Chicago; his
attraction to white women; his travels to Europe and other continents;
the generation of his ideas for writing; his political activities; his involve-
ment with the Illinois and Federal Writers’ Projects; his reaction to
Ellison’s publication of Invisible Man; the Ž lming of Native Son; and his
friendships with other writers such as Chester Himes, Gertrude Stein,
Langston Hughes, and Nelson Algren. Rowley also notes the periods in
Wright’s life for which substantial information is lacking, such as his time
in Jamaica. Excerpts from Wright’s journals and personal correspon-
dence, re ections from other writers, and dialogue enhance the volume,
which is endorsed by Wright’s widow.
Virginia Whatley Smith in Richard Wright’s Travel Writings brings
together nine original essays that respond to four 1950s works on travel:
Black Power, The Color Curtain, Pagan Spain, and ‘‘French West Africa.’’
Collectively, the essays by such well-known Wright scholars as Keneth
Kinnamon, Jack B. Moore, Yoshinobu Hakutani, and Smith draw on
346 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

postcolonial, formalist, and postmodern theory to explore how Wright,

who was in uenced by African American slave narratives, anticolonial
texts, and their sociopolitical themes, modiŽ ed and adapted the Anglo
travel narrative, making it an African American form of expression rather
than a conventional narrative of captivity, exploration, or exile. As Smith
notes, the contributors’ ‘‘viewpoints con ict as well as harmonize during
their determination of what is right, what is wrong, what is acceptable,
and what is normative about Wright’s brand of travel writing.’’ One
certainty, however, is that Wright’s contributions to the travel narrative
were signiŽ cant; he ‘‘magniŽ ed, modiŽ ed, and personalized a nascent and
dormant, African American genre by anchoring the motif of travel to a
foreign culture,’’ oVering his audience a Ž rsthand account of his thoughts
and experiences.
Yoshinobu Hakutani in ‘‘Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and the
African ‘Primal Outlook upon Life’ ’’ (SoQ 40, i: 39–53) examines Pagan
Spain and Black Power in conjunction with Beloved. The three texts are
similar in that they ‘‘examine the tradition-bound Western myths as
enshrined in religious, political, and legal discourses and as re ected in
such institutions as Christianity, slavery, and marriage.’’ In ‘‘Movies,
Marxism, and Jim Crow: Richard Wright’s Cultural Criticism’’ (TSLL 43:
142–68) Vincent Pérez studies Native Son, Lawd Today, and Twelve Mil-
lion Black Voices as cultural works that re ect Wright’s con icting atti-
tudes toward works of the 1930s and 1940s media cultures. Despite his
attraction to media culture, Wright recognized its tendency toward rac-
ism. James Smethurst in ‘‘Invented by Horror: The Gothic and African
American Literary Ideology in Native Son ’’ (AAR 35: 29–40) argues that
despite its many gothic elements Native Son is an antigothic text because
the end of the novel oVers a chance to go beyond a gothic view. Wright
not only ‘‘raises the possibility of an alliance of the oppressed across racial
lines’’ but suggests that Bigger Thomas could take charge of his own
narrative voice. In ‘‘African-American Writing, ‘Protest,’ and the Burden
of Naturalism: The Case of Native Son, ’’ pp. 189–215 in Culture, Genre,
and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell sums up the well-known
‘‘protest debate’’ that surrounded Native Son and then turns to the novel’s
‘‘strange moments of narrative indeterminacy.’’ Bell argues that Wright’s
‘‘repeat[ing] and modif[ying] the essential narrative structure of natural-
ist convention’’ is the mark of a good writer and is not merely ‘‘a distinctly
‘racial’ phenomenon.’’ Alexander Nejako in ‘‘Bigger’s Choice: The Fail-
ure of African-American Masculinities in Native Son ’’ (CLAJ 44: 423–41)
Catherine Calloway 347

notes how Wright re ects the views of sociologists and white writers
‘‘who deprecate the survival values and diversity of African-American
communities’’ when he portrays the lack of adequate black male role
models in the lives of characters such as Bigger Thomas. In ‘‘What Bigger
Killed For: Rereading Violence Against Women in Native Son ’’ (TSLL
43: 169–93) Sondra Guttman contrasts Wright’s portrayals of the acts of
sexual violence against his two female characters in that novel: Bessie
Mears and Mary Dalton. According to Guttman, the word ‘‘rape’’ in
Native Son is representative of sexual violence against black women, not
just women in general. Clare Eby in ‘‘Slouching Toward Beastliness:
Richard Wright’s Anatomy of Thomas Dixon’’ (AAR 35: 439–58) demon-
strates that Wright parodies the stereotype of ‘‘the black male ‘beast’ ’’
found in the novels of Dixon which assumes that black males lustfully
desire to prey on white women. In Native Son Bigger Thomas murders
because he is afraid, not because he desires to rape Mary Dalton; thus
Wright revises ‘‘the ‘beast’ plot so as to show how whites fuse sex with fear
in the consciousness of black males.’’ In ‘‘ ‘I could never really leave the
South’: Regionalism and the Transformation of Richard Wright’s Ameri-
can Hunger ’’ (AmLH 13: 694–715) JeV Karem surveys the publication
history of Black Boy, especially the way that publication trends and
the political climate of the 1940s dictated the book’s revisions and mar-
keting strategies. It was considered essential that Black Boy not ‘‘compro-
mise America’s self-image.’’ The way that Black Boy allegorizes American
race relations is brie y considered in Robert Young’s ‘‘The Linguistic
Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an Aesthetics of Crisis’’ (Callaloo
24: 334–45).
Wright is treated along with Ellison in two essays. Shelly Eversley in
‘‘The Lunatic’s Fancy and the Work of Art’’ (AmLH 13: 445–68) focuses
on Wright and Ellison’s endorsement of the Lafargue Clinic, a Harlem
mental health facility that was especially interested in those whose neu-
roses may have resulted from racial discrimination, poverty, and cramped
housing. In works such as Rite of Passage and The Outsider, Invisible
Man and ‘‘King of the Bingo Game,’’ Wright and Ellison, respectively,
turn to social psychology, treating such subjects as insanity and sanity
and ‘‘ethical schizophrenia’’ to show the madness of a social order
that actively supports racism and inequality. In ‘‘Ralph Ellison, Richard
Wright, and the Case of Angelo Herndon’’ (AAR 35: 615–36) Frederick T.
GriYths discusses the in uence of the political activist Herndon on the
writing of Ellison and Wright, whose works, like Herndon’s, include
348 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

beating narratives, racial demonstrations, communist beliefs, and black

cultural violence.
Ellison is the subject of Horace A. Porter’s Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison
in America (Iowa), a study of the in uence of jazz and blues on Ellison’s
life and writing. From his childhood in Oklahoma City to his study of
music at Tuskegee Institute to his time in New York City, Ellison was
inspired by jazz. Porter devotes two chapters to Ellison’s essays on such
jazz musicians as Charlie Parker, Jimmy Rushing, Duke Ellington, Benny
Goodman, and Louis Armstrong and one to Ellison’s friendships with
fellow artists Romare Bearden and Albert Murray before turning to
Ellison’s Ž ction. Porter examines Invisible Man as ‘‘a jazz text’’ which
‘‘consciously riVs upon or plays countless variations on familiar literary
and cultural themes,’’ and then devotes two chapters to Juneteenth, which
places jazz at its center. The book concludes with discussions of Ellison’s
con icts with such critics as Irving Howe. Verner D. Mitchell in ‘‘Elli-
son’s Invisible Man ’’ (Expl 60: 44–47) focuses on the use of father Ž gures
in that novel to show that neither the characters of Norton and True-
blood nor the Founding Fathers of America are portrayed as Ž gures
worthy of emulation or high regard. D. J. Kehl Ž nds connections be-
tween Dali’s The Invisible Man and chapter 11 of Ellison’s Invisible Man in
‘‘Ralph Ellison’s Surrealism and Salvador Dali’s Invisible Man ’’ (NConL
31, ii: 5–7); both the painting and the novel include ‘‘invisible’’ men,
exotic imagery, Freudian allusions, and childbirth imagery and ‘‘illustrate
the process of depaysement. ’’ In ‘‘Intersections of Literary History and
Cultural History: Towards a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse on
Identity’’ (REALB 17: 289–98) Jonathan Arac explores Ellison’s connec-
tions to Kenneth Burke and Erik Erikson in regard to the concept of
American identity.
Baldwin is represented this year by one book and two articles. In The
Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American
Democracy (Cornell) Lawrie Balfour considers Baldwin’s contributions to
multiracial democracy. According to Balfour, Baldwin’s greatest political
accomplishment ‘‘resides in his ability to identify and articulate the
meanings of . . . race consciousness’’ or ‘‘the ways in which ‘whiteness’ and
‘blackness’ are noticed (or not noticed) in daily life.’’ After noting Bald-
win’s work as an author and a public activist, Balfour moves to a consider-
ation of Baldwin’s political views as they are set forth in his essays,
concluding that the essays ‘‘expose  aws in presumptions of race blind-
ness’’ while trying ‘‘to deŽ ne an authoritative racial identity.’’
Catherine Calloway 349

MikkoTuhkanen takes a psychoanalytic approach in ‘‘Binding the

Self: Baldwin, Freud, and the Narrative of Subjectivity’’ (GLQ 7: 553–91),
which investigates how characters in Another Country relate sexuality to
the construction of textual narratives that possess some of the same
simplistic qualities as the ‘‘false[ly] redemptive’’ protest novel. In ‘‘Pul-
pitic Publicity: James Baldwin and the Queer Uses of Religious Words’’
(GLQ 7: 285–312) Michael L. Cobb comments on Baldwin’s use of re-
ligious rhetoric to provide gay characters with a safety zone that enables
them ‘‘to have the privileges of publicity without having to reveal any-
thing speciŽ c or ‘really’ painful about minority sexuality.’’
William E. Rand in ‘‘Chester Himes as a Naturalistic Writer in the
Tradition of Richard Wright and Theodore Dreiser’’ (CLAJ 44: 442–50)
compares Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go with Native Son and An
American Tragedy to show that Himes, like Wright, through such ele-
ments as deterministic characters, images of socioeconomic entrapment,
and ‘‘themes of Darwinian struggle’’ applies Dreiser’s naturalistic tradi-
tion to his later African American works.

iii Southerners
a. Robert Penn Warren In Understanding Robert Penn Warren (So. Car.)
James A. Grimshaw Jr. gives a useful overview of Warren’s oeuvre. Con-
tending that love was Warren’s main concern, Grimshaw considers how
‘‘Warren explored the in uence people with power or position impose on
others’’ and identiŽ es such additional Warren themes as time, self-
knowledge, identity, greed, pride, the past, and alienation. Two chapters
are devoted to Warren’s Ž ction.
In ‘‘Climbing Out of ‘The Briar Patch’: Robert Penn Warren and the
Divided Conscience of Segregation’’ (SoQ 40, i: 109–20) David A. Davis
explores the ways in which Warren’s moral view of segregation changed
after the publication of ‘‘The Briar Patch’’ in 1950. Mike Augspurger in
‘‘Heading West: All the King’s Men and Robert Rossen’s Search for the
Ideal’’ (SoQ 39, iii: 51–64) discusses Rossen’s ‘‘(mis)reading’’ of Warren’s
text in his Ž lm version of that novel: ‘‘By creating an Adam who has never
fallen, Rossen refutes the doctrine of original sin so necessary to Warren’s
novel.’’ In ‘‘Sex, Love, and Literary Allusion in Robert Penn Warren’s A
Place to Come To ’’ (NConL 31, i: 2–4) Bill McCarron and Paul Knoke
note how the allusions to the Inferno, Aucassin et Nicolette, the Aeneid,
Proverbs, the Satyricon, and Othello emphasize the profane nature of Jed
350 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Tewksbury’s sexual liaisons. Tewksbury acknowledges and turns from this

spiritual emptiness at the end of the novel.

b. Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty Three books and several

articles attest to O’Connor’s continuing popularity among scholars. Gen-
der is the subject of Katherine Hemple Prown’s Revising Flannery O’Con-
nor: Southern Literary Culture and the Problem of Female Authorship (Vir-
ginia), which insightfully explores O’Connor’s suppression of the female
gaze. Because she was raised in a white, patriarchal, Southern society and
because she desired approval from the Fugitive/Agrarians and the New
Critics, O’Connor chose ‘‘to use masculinist narrative forms and male
characters as vehicles for encoding representations of female identity and
experience.’’ However, her aesthetic, ‘‘while hardly feminist, was nev-
ertheless peculiarly ‘female.’ ’’ In addition to explaining the variety of
mentors O’Connor encountered, from the Southern Agrarians to her
teachers at Iowa, Prown devotes a chapter to Caroline Gordon, the writer
who was most in uential in helping O’Connor to deal with the tension
faced by a female author in a largely masculine profession and to learn to
write with a male gaze. Prown provides a thorough study of the evolution
of O’Connor’s gendered hierarchies, demonstrating that a ‘‘female-sexed
voice’’ exists in both the published and unpublished versions of such
works as The Violent Bear It Away and Wise Blood, despite O’Connor’s
attempts to suppress her own female identity.
Cynthia L. Seel in Ritual Performance in the Fiction of Flannery
O’Connor (Camden House) takes an archetypal approach to O’Connor’s
oeuvre. Seel begins her analysis with a case study of Ruby Turpin’s rite of
passage and then turns to six O’Connor stories, investigating the way that
O’Connor ‘‘establishes ritual performance as the central playing ground
of her art’s form and vision,’’ especially in the journey-to-the-underworld
motif. Seel provides the necessary exposition on archetype and ritual
landscape and grounds her study in such well-known theorists as Mircea
Eliade, Carl Jung, Father Victor White, and Victor Turner.
In Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination: A World with Everything
OV Balance (Paulist) George A. Kilcourse Jr. reads O’Connor’s Ž ction
from the point of view of a Catholic priest, showing how O’Connor’s
canon is valuable to both church leaders and literary critics. According to
Kilcourse, O’Connor’s works oVer ‘‘religious educators and catechu-
mens’’ insight into ‘‘the lifelong ongoing conversion process’’ and the
opportunity to better their ‘‘own homiletic skills.’’ Kilcourse draws from
Catherine Calloway 351

O’Connor’s novels and short stories to explore her Catholic imagination,

viewing her as ‘‘a contemporary American Doctor of the Church’’ whose
‘‘diagnosis of the malaise of the American Catholic imagination’’ is as
valid today as it was four decades ago.
In ‘‘Gone with the Wind in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard
to Find’: An Anagogical Biblical Allusion’’ (ELN 38, iv: 73–76) David J.
Piwinski points out that the grandmother’s use of the phrase ‘‘gone with
the wind’’ is not necessarily an allusion to Margaret Mitchell’s novel by
that name; instead, the phrase may relate to the biblical book of Psalms
and the idea of divine salvation after death. The tornado symbol in
O’Connor’s writing is the subject of Anne Elizabeth Carson’s ‘‘ ‘Break
forth and wash the slime from this earth!’: O’Connor’s Apocalyptic
Tornadoes’’ (SoQ 40, i: 19–27). Drawing on the physical shape and the
punitive nature of the funnel in Dante’s Inferno and the gyre in William
Butler Yeats’s mythology, O’Connor uses the tornado in The Violent Bear
It Away, ‘‘Revelation,’’ and ‘‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’’ to
point out to her characters their spiritual waywardness and their need for
moral regeneration. In ‘‘Responses to God’s Grace: Varying Degrees of
Doubt in Flannery O’Connor’s Character Types’’ (CLAJ 44: 471–79)
Mary NeV Shaw applies Michael Polanyi’s categories of agnostic and
contradictory doubt to ‘‘The Displaced Person,’’ ‘‘A Good Man Is Hard
to Find,’’ and ‘‘Good Country People’’ to show the diVerent types of
doubt or ‘‘imperfect faith’’ that O’Connor’s characters display.
Welty’s Ž ction is the subject of one essay collection and a number of
individual articles. In Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade?
(LSU) Harriet Pollack and Suzanne Marrs bring together 10 essays that
contend that Welty was indeed a political writer. Such well-known Welty
scholars as Peggy Prenshaw, Noel Polk, Rebecca Mark, Pollack, and
Marrs consider the political aspects of Welty’s writing by exploring gen-
der, race, power, and class issues. Using short stories, novels, nonŽ ction
essays, and letters by Welty, the essayists correlate Welty’s writing to
political issues such as McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, educa-
tional integration, Medgar Evers’s murder, the Rosenberg trials, and the
Cold War. SigniŽ cantly, the essays in the volume challenge previous
readings of Welty that accuse her of ‘‘having averted her eyes from the
political issues of her time and place.’’
In ‘‘Phoenix Has No Coat: Historicity, Eschatology, and Sins of Omis-
sion in Eudora Welty’s ‘A Worn Path’ ’’ (IFR 28: 32–41) Dean Bethea
debunks previous optimistic portrayals of Phoenix Jackson, asserting that
352 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

in the story Welty ‘‘attack[s] the debased Bible Belt Christianity that does
not eradicate but instead accommodates racism through sins of both
commission and omission.’’ Jim Owen in ‘‘Phoenix Jackson, William
Wallace, and King MacLain: Welty’s Mythic Travelers’’ (SLJ 34, i: 29–43)
explores Welty’s skillful use of myth and epic allusion to make excep-
tional such usual protagonists as those who take journeys in ‘‘A Worn
Path,’’ ‘‘The Wide Net,’’ and The Golden Apples. In ‘‘Ties that Bind: The
Poetics of Anger in ‘Why I Live at the P.O.’ by Eudora Welty’’ (SoQ 39, iii:
34–50) Géraldine Chouard studies displacement and the causes and
eVects of anger in that story, suggesting that Sister’s anger may ‘‘stem from
the dread of going unrecognized and unheard’’ and from the displace-
ment of the relationships within her dysfunctional family. ‘‘The threat of
the abject to maternal power and ideology’’ is the focus of Joel B. Peck-
ham Jr. in ‘‘Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples: Abjection and the Mater-
nal South’’ (TSLL 43: 194–217), which examines ‘‘the maternal carceral
network’’ that women used to protect their female sphere and acquire
social power. Studying such stories as ‘‘Shower of Gold’’ and ‘‘Moon
Lake,’’ Peckham concludes that it is through the character of Virgie
Rainey that Welty most eVectively portrays a balanced Southern society.
In ‘‘Rewriting Violence in Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles ’’ (MissQ 54: 23–
36) Sarah Ford examines Welty’s reversal of sexual violence in that novel.
In the watermelon scene both the rapists and the victim are women, and
in the wedding dress scene nursing and sewing are presented as forms of
feminine violence. Because Welty ‘‘de-genders’’ the text, she ‘‘suggests
that the threat to women is not from male power but from other fe-
males.’’ In ‘‘Some Notes on the Remembering of Remembering: Eudora
Welty (1909–2001)’’ (SoR 37: 831–35) Lewis P. Simpson re ects on Welty’s
life and work, noting in particular her skill at making time ‘‘a dimension
of place and place a dimension of time.’’ A special July 2001 issue of
EuWN (pp. 1–12) pays tribute to Welty by reprinting memorial commen-
tary from her 26 July 2001 funeral service. Remembrances include those
of Suzanne Marrs, Ellen Douglas, Danièle Pitavy-Souques, Reynolds
Price, and Peggy Whitman Prenshaw.

c. Zora Neale Hurston In ‘‘Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Eatonville’ and the

Greeks’’ (NConL 32, i: 4–5) George Monteiro Ž nds parallels between The
Greek Anthology and Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and
Hurston’s story collection ‘‘The Eatonville Anthology’’; all three works
provide ‘‘glimpses into the lives of inarticulate people . . . through
Catherine Calloway 353

the details of their otherwise unrecorded histories.’’ Chris Roark in

‘‘Hurston’s Hamlet: ‘My Own Bathtub Singing’ ’’ (CLAJ 44: 317–40)
considers Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a source for ‘‘Isis,’’ ‘‘Spunk,’’ and Dust
Tracks on a Road. According to Roark, Hurston alludes to Hamlet ‘‘to
complicate issues of gender and narrative voice’’ in her short Ž ction and
to comment on the alienation she faced in trying ‘‘to develop a distinct
voice as an African-American woman writer’’ in her autobiography. In
‘‘Socioeconomics in Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston’’ (SoQ
40, i: 79–92) Laurie Champion points out that such stories as ‘‘Drenched
in Light,’’ ‘‘Black Death,’’ ‘‘Sweat,’’ and ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ reveal
Hurston’s concern with the oppression of African Americans through
economic exploitation, ethnicity, and gender. In ‘‘The Logic of Expendi-
ture in Their Eyes Were Watching God ’’ (Mosaic 34, i: 19–34) Thomas F.
Haddox demonstrates that in both Hurston’s Their Eyes and Georges
Bataille’s ‘‘The Notion of Expenditure’’ ‘‘expenditure emerges as a deŽ n-
ing characteristic of folk culture, an organizing principle of religion, and
a force that has the capacity to reconŽ gure class relations.’’ Deborah
Clarke in ‘‘ ‘The porch couldn’t talk for looking’: Voice and Vision in
Their Eyes Were Watching God ’’ (AAR 35: 599–613) studies Hurston’s use
of the visual to suggest the potential of sight as a means of African
American power and expression. Because Hurston controls the visual in
the novel, she ‘‘looks back, challenges white dominance, and documents
its material abuse of African Americans.’’ Jürgen C. Wolter in ‘‘From His-
tory to Communal Narrative: The Merging of Cultural Paradigms in
Their Eyes Were Watching God ’’ (Amst 46: 233–48) looks at how Hurston
merges the Western ‘‘linear quest pattern with the African-American cir-
cular form of call-and-response’’ to create a movement ‘‘not from silence
to voice . . . but from pulpit to back porch.’’ In ‘‘Mule Bone: Langston
Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Dream Deferred of an African-
American Theatre of the Black Word’’ (AAR 35: 77–92) Carme Manuel
underscores the signiŽ cance of Hughes and Hurston’s collaborative play,
which in its reliance on African American vernacular encouraged later
black writers to unashamedly draw their themes and techniques from
their own cultural experience. Leigh Anne Duck in ‘‘ ‘Go there tuh know
there’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Chronotope of the Folk’’ (AmLH 13:
265–94) examines Mules and Men and Tell My Horse in conjunction with
Their Eyes Were Watching God in order to show how Hurston creates a
tension between regional folkloric practice and modern, urban cultural
values in Their Eyes. Because Janie, Hurston’s protagonist, ‘‘manipulate[s]
354 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

space and time to create an imaginative chronotope of the self,’’ she

retains her ‘‘folkloric selfhood’’ and ‘‘displaces the enforced racial segrega-
tion of the South.’’ Kevin Meehan in ‘‘Decolonizing Ethnography: Zora
Neale Hurston in the Caribbean,’’ pp. 245–79 in Women at Sea: Travel
Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse, ed. Lizabeth Paravisini-
Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo (Palgrave), surveys the form and
content of Tell My Horse and discusses Hurston’s use of ethnography ‘‘to
criticize dominant narratives of decolonization and to expand the scope
of cultural decolonization by equating this goal with the struggle to
author a female subject.’’ In ‘‘ ‘DiVerent by Degree’: Ella Cara Deloria,
Zora Neale Hurston, and Franz Boas Contend with Race and Ethnicity’’
(AIQ 25: 181–202) Roseanne Hoefel explores the relationships of Hurston
and Deloria, an American Indian ethnographer, with Boas, their mentor.
As women of color, Hurston and Deloria were more sensitive to the issue
of cultural preservation than was Boas.

d. Katherine Anne Porter and Others Porter is honored with one essay
collection, From Texas to the World and Back: Essays on the Journeys of
Katherine Anne Porter, ed. Mark Busby and Dick Heaberlin (TCU).
Originally presented at a 1998 Porter conference at the Center for Study
of the Southwest at Southwest Texas State University, the volume’s 16
essays lean heavily toward biographical material, especially that concern-
ing Porter’s ambivalence toward her native Texas as well as her troubled
marriages, her forays into Mexico, her relationships with Roger Brooks
and William Humphreys, and her misunderstanding with the University
of Texas Library. Porter’s Ž ction is more fully treated in the second half of
the volume. In ‘‘Knowing Nature in Katherine Anne Porter’s Short Fic-
tion’’ (pp. 149–63) Terrell F. Dixon takes an ecocritical approach to
Porter’s nature stories, which reiterate ‘‘the importance of knowing na-
ture’’ and encourage us to rethink the meaning of the concept of ‘‘a sense
of place.’’ Rob Johnson in ‘‘A ‘Taste for the Exotic’: Revolutionary Mexico
and the Short Stories of Katherine Anne Porter and María Cristina
Mena’’ (pp. 178–98) compares Porter’s treatment of a revolutionary love
plot in ‘‘The Dove of Chapacalco’’ with that of Mena in ‘‘The Sorcerer
and General Bisco,’’ noting that reading each author against the other not
only oVers insight into both works but reveals attempts to make Mexican
plots antiromantic. In ‘‘Gender and Creativity in Katherine Anne Porter’s
‘The Princess’ ’’ (pp. 199–212) Christine H. Hait views that story as one of
‘‘female modernism in which Porter creates a corollary to the woman
Catherine Calloway 355

writer’s war against the physical and social forces that discourage her art.’’
Robert K. Miller in ‘‘Cover-ups: Katherine Anne Porter and the Eco-
nomics of Concealment’’ (pp. 213–24) discusses Porter’s emphasis on the
impact of economic and political factors on domestic life in ‘‘The Lean-
ing Tower.’’
In ‘‘The Dis-ease of Katherine Anne Porter’s Greensick Girls in ‘Old
Mortality’ ’’ (SLJ 33, ii: 80–98) Lorraine DiCicco examines Porter’s fe-
male adolescent character in the context of ‘‘greensickness’’ or ‘‘chlorosis,’’
a form of rebellion related to ‘‘a girl’s ambivalence’’ at having to move
‘‘from a liberating, almost gender-neutral childhood into a restrictive
womanhood.’’ According to DiCicco, in ‘‘Old Mortality’’ this female
illness can be traced from one generation to another and re ects the
female tendency to shy away from the cultural pressure of marriage and
maturity that casts young women in the roles held by their mothers.
Janis P. Stout in ‘‘South from the South: The Imperial Eyes of Evelyn
Scott and Katherine Anne Porter,’’ pp. 15–35 in Evelyn Scott, argues that
Porter’s Mexican stories and Scott’s Escapade reveal that women, ‘‘how-
ever unconscious[ly],’’ were involved ‘‘in Euro-American imperialist as-
sumptions’’ and ‘‘express[ed] overtly racist views.’’ In a second article,
‘‘ ‘Practically Dead with Fine Rivalry’: The Leaning Towers of Katherine
Anne Porter and Glenway Wescott’’ (SNNTS 33: 444–58) Stout views
Porter’s ‘‘The Leaning Tower’’ and Wescott’s ‘‘The Pilgrim Hawk’’ as
‘‘texts in conversation.’’ The two novellas parallel in their hidden com-
mentary on cases of writer’s block, their inconclusive conclusions, their
thematic use of hunger, and their allusions to war.
Josyane Savigneau in Carson McCullers: A Life (Houghton MiZin),
originally published in France and translated by Joan E. Howard, seeks to
oVer a more positive portrait of McCullers than the one found in Virginia
Spencer Carr’s The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (see
AmLS 1975, pp. 316–17). Since the volume is the Ž rst signiŽ cant study to
be fully endorsed by McCullers’s estate, Savigneau had access to many
previously unpublished letters and manuscripts. Interspersed with nu-
merous interview excerpts, critical book reviews, and letters, the text
covers McCullers’s marriage to Reeves McCullers, their wartime corre-
spondence, their travels in Europe, Reeves’s death, McCullers’s declining
health, her relationship with her friend and psychotherapist, Dr. Mary
Mercer, the staging of her plays, and both the popular and critical recep-
tions of her work. By calling attention to these events as well as record-
ing the impressions of McCullers expressed by such writers as Richard
356 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, Anaïs Nin, Alfred Kazin, Tennessee

Williams, and Edward Albee, Savigneau’s biography oVers us an insight-
ful gaze into the ‘‘young girl’s heart’’ that is alluded to in the volume’s
French subtitle, Un Coeur de jeune Ž lle.
In ‘‘The Put-down in Carson McCullers’s ‘Correspondence’ ’’ (NConL
31, iii: 4–5) George Monteiro suggests that Manoel, the character who
does not answer Henky Evans’s letters, is an adolescent portrayal of
Reeves, McCullers’s own husband, who did not answer McCullers’s let-
ters because he had left with another woman. Cynthia Wu in ‘‘Expanding
Southern Whiteness: Reconceptualizing Ethnic DiVerence in the Short
Fiction of Carson McCullers’’ (SLJ 34, i: 44–55) argues that while African
American characters are missing from The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and
Other Stories McCullers does not fail to explore the issue of race; rather
the lack of black characters in that work serves as ‘‘a strategic way of
isolating white ethnic diVerence in reconceptualizing white identities in
the New South,’’ especially through the character of the European immi-
grant, which demonstrates that ethnic diVerences may exist even within
the white race. In ‘‘Revisiting the Southern Grotesque: Mikhail Bakhtin
and the Case of Carson McCullers’’ (SLJ 33, ii: 108–23) Sarah Gleeson-
White challenges previous critical views of the Southern grotesque as an
allegory of ‘‘existential anguish.’’ According to Gleeson-White The Mem-
ber of the Wedding and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter are ‘‘powerful
narratives of the dynamics of being human,’’ not just ‘‘Ž ctional accounts
of volatile childish rebellion.’’
In Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre
Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray (Virginia) Darlene O’Dell
examines Lumpkin’s The Making of a Southerner, Smith’s Killers of the
Dream, and Murray’s Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family and
Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer,
Priest, and Poet. O’Dell’s interest is in ‘‘sites of memory’’ such as grave-
yards, bodies, and memoirs that are used by these three writers ‘‘to discuss
how segregation divided not only the southern landscape and the south-
ern people but southern minds and bodies as well.’’ To Smith, Lumpkin,
and Murray, segregation was a form of death that denied relationships
between people and, as such, should be denounced. In ‘‘The Language of
Sexuality and Silence in Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit ’’ (Signs 27: 1–22)
Cheryl L. Johnson suggests that it is the novel’s ‘‘narrative ‘noise’ of race
and sex taboos [that] gives voice to the silence of homoerotic desire.’’
McKay Jenkins in ‘‘Metaphors of Race and Psychological Damage in the
Catherine Calloway 357

1940s American South: The Writings of Lillian Smith,’’ pp. 99–123 in

Racing and (E)Racing Language: Living with the Color of Our Words, ed.
Ellen J. Goldner and SaŽ ya Henderson-Holmes (Syracuse), sees in post-
modernist racial tenets such as psychological fragmentation a focus of
Smith’s writing.
In ‘‘Migration, Material Culture, and Identity in William Attaway’s
Blood on the Forge and Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker ’’ (CE 63: 712–
40) Stacy I. Morgan Ž nds parallels between Attaway’s and Arnow’s novels
of social realism: ‘‘both authors employ detailed explorations of material
culture as a central technique in characterizing the cultural landscape of
rural Kentucky, the migration journey itself, and the experiences of their
protagonists in new urban locales.’’

e. Peter Taylor, Thomas Wolfe, and Others A signiŽ cant addition to

the Taylor canon is Hubert H. McAlexander’s Peter Taylor: A Writer’s Life
(LSU). Beginning with the Taylor family history in Tennessee, McAlex-
ander chronicles Taylor’s life and writing, paying special attention to his
academic career at various institutions; his friendships with Jean StaVord,
Robert Lowell, Welty, Porter, and numerous other literary Ž gures; his
marriage of more than 50 years to Eleanor Ross Taylor; and his establish-
ment of ‘‘the dysfunctional family as a major subject in American Ž c-
tion.’’ McAlexander intersperses the narrative with dialogue, excerpts
from poems and letters, sketches of family portraits, and photographs.
The volume was endorsed by Taylor prior to his death and by his widow,
who shared Taylor’s private papers with McAlexander. In addition to
family, friends, and editors of Taylor, McAlexander also consulted the
papers of authors who were contemporaries of Taylor, such as Lowell,
Warren, Caroline Gordon, and StaVord. The portrait of Taylor that
emerges is a well-painted and intimate one. Susan Copeland Henry in
‘‘Blasphemy in Blackwell: Peter Taylor’s ‘The Decline and Fall of the
Episcopal Church (in the Year of Our Lord 1952)’ ’’ (SoQ 40, i: 54–66)
demonstrates that Taylor’s overlooked story is a good example of how he
reveals ‘‘the ironic chasm between pretension and reality’’ present in the
small-town environments his Ž ctions portray.
Wolfe’s role in the modernist movement is the subject of Shawn Holli-
day’s Thomas Wolfe and the Politics of Modernism (Peter Lang). Drawing
from Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River, The Web and the
Rock, You Can’t Go Home Again, and Wolfe’s later short Ž ction, Holliday
places Wolfe squarely in the middle of the modernist tradition. Holliday
358 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

asserts that Wolfe’s novels ‘‘are excellent high-modernist texts that build
upon the narrative experiments, textual diYculty, and rhetorical inge-
nuity of Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and Pound’’ and that they in uenced such
later writers as Edward Abbey, Henry Miller, Ray Bradbury, Jack Ker-
ouac, and Pat Conroy.
Inez Hollander Lake in ‘‘Thomas Wolfe and Marcel Proust: The
Importance of Smell in Look Homeward, Angel ’’ (TWN 25, i–ii: 23–30)
compares Wolfe’s use of smell in the novel with that of Proust in Time
Regained. Unlike Proust, Wolfe’s use of smell is not nostalgic. Instead,
Wolfe employs the sense of smell to make Eugene Gant’s world more
visual for the reader; to measure Gant’s maturation; and to symbolize the
seasons, birth, and death. D. G. Kehl in ‘‘Writing the Long Desire: The
Function of Sehnsucht in The Great Gatsby and Look Homeward, Angel ’’
( JML 24: 309–19) suggests that the works of Fitzgerald and Wolfe re-
veal more than just nostalgia; instead there is a deeper quality, that of
Sehnsucht or ‘‘an addiction of longing and to longing’’ that constitutes a
subtext in their works, expanding the scope of their novels and moving
them in the direction of archetype. In ‘‘Is Blood Thicker than Artistry?
Nativist Modernism and Eugene Gant’s Initiation into Blood Politics in
Look Homeward, Angel ’’ (TWN 25, i–ii: 44–52) Abbey Zink studies
Gant’s realization that the artist must come to know and accept his ties
and responsibilities to his working-class ancestry. James W. Clark Jr. in
‘‘Esther in ‘Dark October’ ’’ (TWN 25, i–ii: 14–22) explores the sim-
ilarities between that story and ‘‘In the Park’’ and examines the way that
Wolfe’s allusions to British literature ‘‘suggest the character and fate of
both Esther’s father and Monk Webber.’’ In ‘‘Through Imagination’s
Third Eye: The Creative Seer in Thomas Wolfe’s Passage to England ’’
(TWN 25, i–ii: 3–11) Swarnalatha Rangarajan considers Passage to En-
gland ‘‘a manifesto of artistic creation as well as a metaphysical treatise on
the nature of reality.’’
In ‘‘Tate’s The Fathers ’’ (Expl 60: 41–42) James T. Bratcher notes that
physically Jarman Posey in The Fathers is a self-caricature of Allen Tate’s
own facial features.

iv Expatriates and Émigrés

a. Vladimir Nabokov Simon Karlinsky provides a carefully annotated,
expanded, and revised edition of the correspondence between Nabokov
and Edmund Wilson. Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson
Catherine Calloway 359

Letters, 1940–1971 (Calif.) adds 59 letters discovered between 1980 and

1993 to the 1979 edition of the text, originally entitled The Nabokov-
Wilson Letters. The volume’s 323 letters, written over two decades, oVer
insight into the intimate friendship between the two writers, especially
into the work on which they had planned to collaborate and on the
nature of their disagreements on Russian history, Russian versiŽ cation,
and Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin that contributed to the eventual
disintegration of their friendship.
Timothy McCracken in ‘‘Lolita Talks Back: Giving Voice to the Ob-
ject,’’ pp. 128–42 in He Said, She Says, focuses on the textual silences in
Lolita, noting the signiŽ cance of hearing Lolita’s story from her own
point of view and oVering a concise overview of ‘‘Lo-centricism’’ and ‘‘the
‘white ink’ rewritings’’ of the novel. According to McCracken, ‘‘The new,
white ink history of Lolita is that it was never magic or love or paradise for
her, just lust.’’ In ‘‘Lolita: Fiction into Films Without Fantasy’’ (LFQ 29:
297–302) Sarah Miles Watts posits that the Ž lm versions of Lolita fail to
capture the skillful linguistic wordplay so signiŽ cant in the novel. As a
result, Humbert Humbert is viewed mainly as a pedophile, not a poet. In
‘‘Sprites’’ (ANQ 14, i: 44–46) Samuel Schuman notes that Nabokov’s
allusions to Shakespeare began with his Ž rst published short story, ‘‘The
Wood-Sprite.’’

b. Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, and Others Djuna Barnes is the subject of
two essays in Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and JeV Wallace
(Palgrave). In ‘‘Strolling in the Dark: Gothic Flânerie in Djuna Barnes’s
Nightwood ’’ (pp. 78–94) Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik place the novel in
the tradition of the Gothic. Especially signiŽ cant, they argue, are Robin
Vote and Dr. Matthew O’Connor, characters who while ‘‘enacting the
identity of the  âneur, a distinctive modernist Ž gure . . . also evoke
Gothic resonances of monstrosity and vampirism.’’ Deborah Tyler-
Bennett in ‘‘ ‘Thick Within Our Hair’: Djuna Barnes’s Gothic Lovers’’
(pp. 95–110) explores Barnes’s use of the Gothic in her Ž ction and poetry,
noting that Barnes’s works incorporate gothic images from art as well as
from vampire Ž ction, Romantic and Victorian writers, and expressionist
cinema and prophesy the horriŽ c rise of fascism. In ‘‘Down on All Fours:
Atavistic Perversions and the Science of Desire from Frank Norris to
Djuna Barnes’’ (AL 73: 525–62) Dana Seitler examines Vandover and the
Brute and Nightwood in the context of ‘‘a degeneration narrative —a
regressive ‘story.’ ’’ Both novels are hybrids of beasts and humans that
360 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

represent ‘‘a widespread cultural fascination with, and fear of, modern
sexual perversity.’’ Nightwood especially revises ‘‘sexological narratives’’ as
it depicts a society of morally depraved and bestialized characters. Jean
Gallagher in ‘‘Vision and Inversion in Nightwood ’’ (MFS 47: 279–305)
argues that Barnes’s novel ‘‘asks visual outsiders or ‘onlookers’ to abandon
their detached, voyeuristic position at the ‘peephole’ to enter a circum-
scribed, often menacing or disturbing visual Ž eld and thereby to enter the
queer spaces of modernist visuality.’’ In ‘‘Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood: The
Cruci-Fiction of the Jew’’ (Paragraph 24, i: 32–49) Mairéad Hanrahan
concentrates on ‘‘the uncertainty of the distinction between Jew and non-
Jew’’ in that novel. The Jew’s situation is, to Barnes, a universal one: ‘‘the
failure of representation itself,’’ whereby the Jew is ‘‘cruciŽ ed between the
particular and the general. ’’
In Anaïs Nin’s Narratives (Florida) Anne T. Salvatore collects 11 essays
that seek to establish Nin as more than a cult Ž gure. The volume’s con-
tributors, including Suzette Henke, Diane Richard-Allerdyce, Sharon
Spencer, and Salvatore, oVer essays that approach Nin’s work from the
point of view of contemporary critical theory and narrative strategy. The
essays, which are arranged thematically, treat subjects such as incest,
sexual exploitation, social action, and patriarchal issues. Especially inter-
esting are Philippa Christmass’s ‘‘ ‘Dismaying the Balance’: Anaïs Nin’s
Narrative Modernity’’ (pp. 189–212) and Maxie Wells’s ‘‘Writing the
Mind in the Body: Modernism and Écriture Féminine in Anaïs Nin’s A
Spy in the House of Love and Seduction of the Minotaur ’’ (pp. 213–52),
which attempt to place Nin in the modernist tradition.
To the Boyle critical canon we can add M. Clark Chambers’s Kay Boyle:
A Bibliography (Oak Knoll). Aside from a ‘‘capsule biography’’ of Boyle’s
life, the majority of the text consists of a descriptive bibliography of the
physical format of Boyle’s works —title pages; collation information; con-
tents; copyright pages; plates; types of binding; dust jackets; publication
information for the various editions of books, pamphlets, short stories,
articles, poems, essays, book reviews, and interviews; and dust jacket
blurbs written or translated by Boyle. In the remainder of the volume
Chambers brie y annotates books, articles, reviews, and doctoral disser-
tations written about Boyle and her works. Exhaustively researched,
Chambers’s chronological listings are compiled from the point of view of
a book collector who seeks to Ž ll a descriptive gap in the Boyle canon
rather than from that of an academician. Marilyn Elkins explores the
literary friendship of Scott and Boyle that spanned four decades in ‘‘ ‘An-
Catherine Calloway 361

other Facet of Herself ’: The Complicated Case of Evelyn Scott and Kay
Boyle,’’ pp. 69–84 in Evelyn Scott. While Scott in uenced Boyle’s choice
of themes and development of strong female characters, Boyle eventually
went beyond Scott to tackle political issues.
In James Jones and the Handy Writers’ Colony (So. Ill.) George Hen-
drick, Helen Howe, and Don Sackrider narrate the story of Lowney and
Harry Handy, Jones, and the founding of their Illinois-based writers’
colony. In addition to giving a history of the colony, the book recounts
Jones’s friendship with Norman Mailer, his publishing career, his mar-
riage to Gloria Mosolino, and his break with Lowney Handy. The vol-
ume includes excerpts from letters, photographs, notebooks, and per-
sonal memoirs. Both Howe and Sackrider, a former student in the
colony, had Ž rsthand experience with Handy, her husband, and Jones.
They succeed in their quest ‘‘to tell —both dispassionately and sympa-
thetically —the story of the three founders of the colony and of the writers
who came there to work.’’

v Easterners
a. Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud Gender is the focus of Gloria L.
Cronin’s A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of
Saul Bellow (Syracuse). Cronin posits that ‘‘Bellow’s androcentric texts
represent a search for the absent mother, lover, sister, female friend,
female psyche, and anima.’’ In their quest to Ž nd the female Ž gures that
elude them, Bellow’s male characters ‘‘simultaneously erase’’ the feminine
that they so desire and in doing so ironically imprison themselves.
Cronin insightfully traces the Ž gure of the marginal woman throughout
Bellow’s oeuvre, from ‘‘dreadful mothers’’ to ‘‘destructive wives and
lovers’’ to the ‘‘dreaming, orphic, or yet-to-be imagined feminine self ’’ to
Bellow’s comic depiction of the misogynist, demonstrating that Bellow
creates ‘‘mostly androcentric, single-voiced texts that silence and exclude
the voices of femininity.’’ Michael Greenstein in ‘‘Secular Sermons and
American Accents: The NonŽ ction of Bellow, Ozick, and Roth’’ (Shofar
20, i: 4–20) studies how these three writers ‘‘synthesize and reinvent a
Jewish-American covenant’’ in their nonŽ ction writing. Bellow, for in-
stance, reiterates in his essays that it is necessary for those of immigrant
ancestry to strive even harder for their Americanness than those of purely
American descent.
Malamud’s Ž ction is the topic of one essay collection. In The Magic
362 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Worlds of Bernard Malamud (SUNY) Evelyn Avery brings together 17

essays and a bibliography of Malamud’s life and works. Divided into four
sections, the majority of the text examines Malamud’s life, analyzes spe-
ciŽ c works, and explores themes and motifs. Malamud’s son Paul, for
instance, oVers memories of his father and Joel Salzberg discusses Mala-
mud’s correspondence with Rosemarie Beck. Other essays treat individ-
ual texts such as ‘‘The Last Mohican,’’ The Assistant, God’s Grace, and
Dubin’s Lives or explore Malamudian themes and motifs, among them
Yiddish archetypes, the Holocaust, romance, and the Ž gures of the men-
schen, the chiasmus, and the polyptoton. The volume concludes with
Eileen H. Watts’s ‘‘Annotated Select Bibliography’’ (pp. 189–208) of rela-
tively recent Malamud scholarship.
A signiŽ cant addition to the Malamud canon is Daniel Walden and
Eileen H. Watts’s ‘‘Prospects for the Study of Bernard Malamud’’ (RALS
27: 1–16). In addition to noting Malamud’s extensive collection of Ž ction
and nonŽ ction, Walden and Watts survey a half-century of Malamud
scholarship, dividing critical works by the subjects treated; give a useful
overview of the materials contained in the Malamud holdings at Oregon
State University, the Library of Congress, and the Harry Ransom Center
at the University of Texas at Austin; and suggest new directions for future
Malamud study.

b. J. D. Salinger and Others Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller edit With
Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J. D. Salinger (Broad-
way), which will delight Salinger enthusiasts. Kotzen and Beller oVer 14
writers an open invitation to comment frankly on Salinger’s life and
work. Some contributors, like Aimee Bender, Walter Kirn, and Karen E.
Bender, recount public school experiences with Salinger’s work, while
others, like Lucinda Rosenfeld and Beller, comment on their rereading of
Salinger’s works as adults. Casually written and conversational in nature,
the essays constitute an interesting tribute to Salinger, whether through
parody or more straightforward commentary. Lawrence E. Ziewacz in
‘‘Holden CaulŽ eld, Alex Portnoy, and Good Will Hunting: Coming of
Age in American Films and Novels’’ ( JPC 35, i: 211–18) argues that The
Catcher in the Rye and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint are recaptured in
the Ž lm Good Will Hunting.
In ‘‘Language as an Isolating Factor in the Fiction of Paul Bowles’’
(POMPA: 26–34) Amanda Cagle demonstrates how Bowles’s characters
Catherine Calloway 363

in Let It Come Down, The Sheltering Sky, ‘‘A Distant Episode,’’ and
‘‘Pastor Dowe of Tacate’’ are frustrated and isolated by the limitations of
communication.
Richter enthusiasts will welcome David R. Johnson’s Conrad Richter: A
Writer’s Life (Penn. State). Relying on Richter’s meticulous personal cor-
respondence, journals, Ž rsthand accounts from a variety of individuals
associated with Richter and his family, and more than four decades of
personal journals and writing notebooks provided by Richter’s daughter,
Johnson weaves an informative biography of Richter’s life and writing.
The volume, which contains photographs, recounts Richter’s Pennsylva-
nia childhood, his marriage to Harvena and her tuberculosis, their lives
in Florida and New Mexico, the Depression years, his work at MGM in
Hollywood, the publication of his major works, his receipt of the Na-
tional Book Award, his relationship with Alfred Knopf, and his anxieties
and superstitions. Johnson explores both the public and private Richter,
oVering a penetrating psychological account of an author who is often
overlooked by the critical canon.
May Sarton receives brief notice this year. In Understanding May
Sarton (So. Car.) Mark K. Fulk provides a useful overview of Sarton’s
Ž ction, poetry, and memoirs, noting such themes as solitude, love, aging,
family life, the pain of relationships, and departures. Three chapters are
devoted to Sarton’s Ž ction.

vi Westerners
a. Wallace Stegner and Others In ‘‘(Re)valuing the Work of Wallace
Stegner: Western Literature and the American Literature Classroom’’
(CEA 63, iii: 1–12) Jeannette E. Riley discusses the beneŽ ts of teaching
Stegner in American literature courses. Students reading a work such as
Angle of Repose learn to challenge their preconceived notions of the
American West, to consider ‘‘constructions of identity of both people and
places,’’ and to become more environmentally conscious. Oliver B. Pol-
lack in ‘‘Wright Morris and the Jews’’ (Shofar 20, iv: 18–35) notes a gap in
previous Wright scholarship: the vital role of the Jew. Throughout his
works, Wright employs the Ž gure of the Jew to comment on such subjects
as ethnicity, fascism, the Holocaust, McCarthyism, and anti-Semitism.
Jeri Zulli in ‘‘Perception in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded: A Postco-
lonial Reading,’’ pp. 71–81 in Telling the Stories, points out that traditional
364 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

readings of McNickle’s novel are too limited; McNickle’s emphasis on the

diVerent perceptions held by characters, whether the colonizers or the
colonized, calls into question the very notion of binarism.

b. Edward Abbey Abbey is honored with a substantial biography,

James M. Cahalan’s Edward Abbey: A Life (Arizona). Seeking ‘‘to separate
fact from Ž ction and reality from myth,’’ Cahalan tries to paint an
objective, honest portrait of Abbey’s life and work. Spanning the period
from Abbey’s birth in Pennsylvania in 1927 to his death in Arizona in
1989, the volume covers Abbey’s Appalachian roots; his army career; his
marriages; his opposition to the Vietnam War, feminism, and illegal
immigration; his growth as a Ž ction writer, an essayist, and a public
speaker; his friendships with such writers as William Eastlake, Robert
Creeley, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Charles Bowden; his love of the West;
his environmental interests; and, above all, his restless spirit. Contrary to
popular belief, Cahalan notes, Abbey did not hate women or people of
color, nor did he label himself a ‘‘nature writer.’’ In fact, Abbey himself
perpetuated the ‘‘Cactus Ed’’ myth that attracted cult followers. Cahalan
captures well ‘‘the double-edged nature’’ of Abbey, who ‘‘was publicly racy
and sardonic but privately shy, somber, and self-conscious.’’

vii Iconoclasts and Detectives

a. Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs In ‘‘On the Road: Cassady,
Kerouac, and Images of Late Western Masculinity,’’ pp. 211–30 in Across
the Great Divide, Craig Leavitt explores Neal Cassady’s role as a Western
cultural icon and ‘‘new existential hero’’ in Kerouac’s life and work. In On
the Road Cassady becomes ‘‘a new icon of masculine western freedom
and sexual power, an archetype for the Beat and hippie movements.’’
Marc Deneire in ‘‘A Quest for Language: Jack Kerouac as a Minor Au-
thor’’ (SLSc 31, i: 253–67) discusses Kerouac’s quest for an identity, espe-
cially as an author, a search that was never quite fulŽ lled. In ‘‘Kerouac’s
On the Road ’’ (Expl 59: 209–10) Douglas H. King Ž nds parallels between
On the Road and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, including similarities in
the way the novels begin and end and their emphasis on the incomplete
nature of America. Erik R. Mortenson in ‘‘Beating Time: ConŽ gurations
of Temporality in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road ’’ (CollL 28, iii: 51–67)
studies the way that characters perceive time in that novel. Because the
Catherine Calloway 365

novel’s critique of the nature of time is not consistent, On the Road oVers
only a modern, not a postmodern, questioning of temporality.
Burroughs’s relationship to the gay literary canon is the subject of
Jamie Russell’s Queer Burroughs (Palgrave). Interestingly, while such
terms as ‘‘avant-garde,’’ ‘‘beat,’’ and ‘‘cult’’ have been applied to Bur-
roughs’s work, the label ‘‘queer’’ has not. Because Burroughs’s works have
not been read as gay literature, Russell seeks to provide ‘‘the Ž rst extensive
reading of Burroughs’ novels in terms of their queer thematics, gay
political commitment, and gay social concern.’’ Russell speculates that
Burroughs’s works have been ignored due to Burroughs’s own reluctance
to place his work solely within either the gay or the straight canon.
Drawing on a number of Burroughs’s novels, Russell examines the ‘‘gay
politics’’ that surround Burroughs’s texts and contribute to their invis-
ibility. Joseph McNicholas in ‘‘William S. Burroughs and Corporate Pub-
lic Relations’’ (ArQ 57, iv: 121–49) argues that in Naked Lunch Burroughs
‘‘simultaneous[ly] attempt[s] to criticize the eVects of public relations and
corporations while adapting and employing their means of communica-
tion to the compositional and stylistic techniques of literature.’’
A linguistic approach is taken by Paul Jahshan in Henry Miller and the
Surrealist Discourse of Excess: A Post-Structuralist Reading (Peter Lang).
Jahshan argues that scholars have erred in ‘‘treating the so-called ‘surreal-
ist elements’ in Miller’s text as a supplement, a margin, a sub-writing that
is not the ‘real’ Miller.’’ In an eVort to call attention to this problem,
Jahshan explores the nature of the surrealist image itself, showing how
this ‘‘image, by its excess techniques, slips into stylistic saturation and
ends up defeating its own avoided aim of surprise and shock,’’ a problem
that can best be seen when this surrealist image is placed side by side with
one of Miller’s images. Jahshan then turns to Miller’s own images, which
prior to the 1940s are excessive, yet which, Jahshan argues, have certain
aspects that reveal a distinctly unique Millerian style despite being la-
beled ‘‘surrealistic’’ by critics.

b. H. P. Lovecraft and Others Wildside Press oVers a modestly revised

and updated edition of Discovering H. P. Lovecraft, ed. Darrell Schweitzer.
Last published in 1987, the volume adds one essay, Lin Carter’s ‘‘H. P.
Lovecraft: The Books’’ (pp. 107–47), originally included in The Shuttered
Room and here annotated and updated by Robert M. Price and S. T.
Joshi. In ‘‘Lovecraft’s ‘The Picture in the House’ ’’ (Expl 59: 140–42) Scott
366 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Connors notes that Lovecraft’s inclusion of an archaic New England

dialect in that story turns ‘‘what might otherwise be a mundane tale of
cannibalism into a meditation on the paradoxes of time.’’
Rafeeq O. McGiveron in ‘‘Heinlein’s Have Space Suit—Will Travel ’’
(Expl 59: 144–47) focuses on that novel’s timeline, which reinforces
Heinlein’s optimistic approach to future space travel. In a second article,
‘‘From Free Love to the Free-Fire Zone: Heinlein’s Mars, 1939–1987’’
(Extrapolation 42, ii: 137–49) McGiveron notes that in continually focus-
ing on the planet Mars Heinlein was asserting that the qualities of justice
and wisdom should be paramount to human beings.

c. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler In ‘‘Hammett’s The

Maltese Falcon and Chandler’s The Big Sleep ’’ (Expl 60: 35–37) Daniel
Linder asserts that hard-boiled writers such as Hammett and Chandler
rely on a blend of authentic slang terms used by underworld Ž gures of
their era and fresh literary terms of their own creation.
Chandler critics will Ž nd useful Toby Widdicombe’s A Reader’s Guide
to Raymond Chandler (Greenwood). The bulk of the volume consists of
numerous alphabetical annotations of the main ideas, characters, and
locations in Chandler’s Ž ction, including topic and cultural reference
entries. In addition, Widdicombe includes a brief history of Chandler’s
life and appendices that explain media portrayals of Chandler’s detec-
tives, his contributions to screenwriting, and the continuation of his
material by other writers. The volume concludes with a bibliography of
resources for Chandler studies.
In ‘‘Raymond Chandler and the Art of the Hollywood Novel: Individ-
ualism and Populism in The Little Sister ’’ (SNNTS 33: 95–109) Chip
Rhodes argues that Chandler’s novel is a prime example of the way in
which ‘‘modernist Ž ction is deeply imbricated in the very ideologies
of mass culture that realism sought to distance.’’ Daniel Linder in
‘‘Chandler’s The Big Sleep ’’ (Expl 59: 137–40) explores the way that the
words ‘‘cute’’ and ‘‘giggle’’ contribute to the linguistic irony that occurs in
the climactic scene of the novel. In ‘‘Being Boss: Raymond Chandler’s
The Big Sleep ’’ (SoR 37: 211–48) John T. Irwin points out that Chandler
modeled The Big Sleep after Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon in his use of a
dual con ict. Not only does the detective have an external con ict with a
criminal, but the detective also has an internal con ict with himself.
Arkansas State University
16 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present
Jerome Klinkowitz

Once upon a time, scholars assumed there was one American Ž ction.
Then other voices asserted themselves, from those of multiculturalist
authors to critics with speciŽ c agendas, all arguing for their own current
in the mainstream. Can a new consensus develop that does not slight any
of these important interests? A good orientation for answering such a
question is provided by David Madden, who in his preface (pp. vii–xi) to
the seventh edition of editors Neil Schlager and Josh Lauer’s Contempo-
rary Novelists (St. James) surveys the special factors making Ž ction from
the 1960s to the present a complex Ž eld. In our day and age, there really
seem to be no master novelists (of the order of Hemingway, Faulkner,
Ellison, and Porter); mastery, Madden believes, is now a property of
Ž ction itself, creating a communal sense of literary art to which many
voices contribute. Having created the categories that inform this chapter
of AmLS, authors and critics may have eased up in their contentious play
for space, but few seem desperate for consensus —and none would argue
for a forced agreement. Instead, a wide range of tonalities blends into a
chorus that is contemporary American Ž ction, an art form Madden and
many others Ž nd now at its healthiest best.

i General Studies
A ‘‘postmodern challenge to the Cold War narratives of containment’’ is
how Marcel Cornis-Pope sees Ž ction developing in the decades since the
1960s. His Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War
Era and After (Palgrave) practices a postmodern inclusivity by refusing to
reject innovative Ž ction for its presumed ‘‘self-re exive gaming,’’ recog-

My thanks to Julie HuVman-Klinkowitz for help with the research toward this essay.
368 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

nizing the ‘‘complex cultural Ž liation of self-re ection that has emerged
at the conjunction of a Lacanian psychoanalytic moment’’ (with its
concerns for the problematics of self and other) and ‘‘the deconstructive
moment’’ (with its concerns for textuality), not to mention ‘‘the feminist
moment’’ (whose protest at the exclusion of women from traditional
discourse calls the authority for that discourse into question). All three
‘‘moments’’ share characteristics with the innovations of Ronald Su-
kenick, Raymond Federman, Steve Katz, Clarence Major, Marianne
Hauser, Kathy Acker, and Robert Coover, who are the most frequently
analyzed novelists in this study noteworthy for its breadth of theoretical
background. Cornis-Pope, an émigré from Romania a few years before
Iron Curtain distinctions collapsed, is sympathetic to narrative responses
that involve ‘‘solutions to ontological divisions, sociocultural opposi-
tions,’’ and other dualities that unfairly isolate aspects of the full human
experience. What for most Western thinkers is an academic exercise has
been for Cornis-Pope a very personal experience. He has little use for
‘‘the ‘agonistic’ consciousness imputed to postmodern experimentation,’’
Ž nding it to be a re ection of criticism’s own obstreperous behavior in the
face of ‘‘norm-breaking art.’’ Instead, he values ‘‘a transactive model of
innovation’’ that uses the imagination to transform the conditions of
narrative, even to the extent of ‘‘intervening’’ in historical formulations.
‘‘Especially when confronted with traumatic historical events, innovative
Ž ction produces radical disturbances in our representational frame-
works,’’ Cornis-Pope writes, ‘‘foregrounding those repressed human po-
tentialities and alternative histories that never made it into the dominant
History.’’ By reading Toni Morrison’s work with an eye toward issues
customarily associated with Federman and Sukenick, and by redeŽ ning
Thomas Pynchon’s polysystem theory and postmodern cartographies in
the light of Steve Katz’s reformulation of textuality itself, the critic is able
to generalize on Ž ction’s success with ‘‘alternatives to language of power.’’
Christian Moraru’s Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Cri-
tique in the Age of Cloning (SUNY) joins Cornis-Pope’s work in an
appreciation of innovative Ž ction’s ability to restructure (in this case by
rewriting) codes of existence. When an author redoes a text, more is
involved than simply producing the new work, because both the older
narrative and readers’ expectations are aVected. Again, Federman’s and
Sukenick’s reformulations of discourse are helpful in reaching this under-
standing. Moraru also oVers close-readings of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime,
Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, and Paul Auster’s ‘‘antidetective’’
Jerome Klinkowitz 369

novels to show how something as immense as America’s national narra-

tive is open to rewriting, an act that is able to ‘‘pinpoint narrative strat-
egies and intertextual ploys that critique the prevailing American story.’’
African American postmodernists are especially adept at critically recon-
structing identity, as is evident in the novels of Trey Ellis, Ishmael Reed,
and Charles Johnson. Whether the method be one of ‘‘cross-fertilization’’
( Johnson), ‘‘out-writing and ventriloquizing’’ (Reed), or ‘‘hip-hop’’ (El-
lis), these authors ‘‘step across cultural lines’’ in order to create exchanges
that are as aesthetic as they are political. Then there is the playful aspect of
postmodernism, its penchant for ‘‘engrafting’’ and ‘‘plagiarism’’ (the lat-
ter used in Federman’s sense of textual play) as practiced by Kathy Acker
and Mark Leyner, each expanding Sukenick’s theory of ‘‘avant-pop’’ by
subjecting commercial artifacts to aesthetic deconstruction. As with
Cornis-Pope’s study, Moraru’s work demonstrates that these radical inno-
vators have been much closer to the center of literary concerns than many
scholars have been willing to admit.
The historical romance is one form novelists have used for centuries to
exercise imaginative superiority over materials from the real world. In
Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Hopkins) Amy J. Elias
takes axioms of this form as practiced by Walter Scott and tests them
against Ž ctive practice during the past four decades. Without embracing
the innovators as warmly as do Cornis-Pope and Moraru, Elias neverthe-
less agrees ‘‘that the metahistorical romance reverses the dominant focus
of the classical historical romance genre from history to romance, and
that it does so because, like the postmodernist historiography and post-
modernist philosophy of its own time, it turns from belief in empirical
history to a reconsideration of the historical sublime.’’ What more radical
authors propose as imaginative reconstruction (for speciŽ cally social and
political reasons, as Cornis-Pope and Moraru have explained), Elias’s
more traditionalist writers accept as ‘‘the humanist value of fabula, ’’ a
storytelling impulse they at once desire and now, because of postmodern-
ist concerns, distrust. A post-traumatic consciousness can thus be seen
inhabiting such works as Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man and Toni
Morrison’s Beloved, whose narrative strategies are modeled on traditional
history’s inability to deal with the realities being faced. Positively inclined
reconstructions, such as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada and N. Scott
Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, ‘‘recuperate the historical sublime,’’ an
act that involves spatializing history by embracing the paratactic and the
simultaneous. Elias’s special interest is in the spate of recent novels actu-
370 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

ally set in the 18th century and using this perspective to interrogate
rationalist values directly. Here is where the ‘‘desire’’ of her title becomes
most evident, as narratives by authors as diverse as Steve Erickson and
Susan Sontag join ranks in seeking ‘‘an alternative to history in the form
of the aesthetic or historical sublime.’’ Another alternative is found in
First World novelists who write from a Third World perspective, a group
including William T. Vollmann, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Madison
Smartt Bell. As a coda to her study Elias compares John Barth’s The Sot-
Weed Factor with Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, novels written 30
years apart (the distance between 1967 and 1997 encompassing an im-
mense amount of cultural change) which maintain virtually identical
postmodern attitudes toward 18th-century aesthetic and historical values.
Looking back at the terms of cultural engagement 200 years ago, the
culprit seems to be ‘‘the First World colonial gaze’’; correcting it in-
volves ‘‘inverting its dominant, melding fantasy, anachronism, metaŽ c-
tionality, and other fabulatory techniques with the facts of history,’’ an
approach somewhat regressive compared with the tactics Cornis-Pope’s
and Moraru’s authors favor.
Addressing himself to the Ž ction of the 1980s and 1990s, Robert Re-
bein writes deliberately in the shadow of the literary events that Moraru
and Cornis-Pope examine. His Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American
Fiction after Postmodernism (Kentucky) casts the developments they de-
scribe as passing fancies, products of a very small group of writers who
were almost totally unread outside universities, and even there by just a
few critical radicals. Whereas these radicals once raged against tradition’s
inhibiting force, now Rebein fumes over the presumed obstacles innova-
tion sets up against the enjoyable reading of novels characterized by ‘‘their
relative accessibility and ties to a native tradition that predates postmod-
ernism.’’ By letting his vision be shaped by the more extreme commenta-
tors on the radical and conservative fringes (Larry McCaVery and Charles
Newman, respectively), Rebein allows the debate to degenerate to the
level that makes Tom Wolfe’s call for a truce sound quite reasonable.
Before readers accept Wolfe’s position (that novelists should return to
portraying the broad canvas of social life in the manner of Dickens and
Flaubert), they should note the nonexistent impact of Wolfe’s similar
attempt to discredit the triumph of American painting in abstract expres-
sionism. The points that Wolfe and Rebein in his wake miss are that
traditions, once challenged, can be reembraced, but not naively; and that
conventions, once exposed as arbitrary artiŽ ces, can never again be ac-
Jerome Klinkowitz 371

cepted as gestures of natural authority. Without such an understanding,

the achievements of minimalism (so much better described by Arthur
Saltzman), dirty realism (the critical province of Elizabeth Young and
Graham Caveney), and the New West of both Anglo- and Native Ameri-
can authors (handled so well by Carlton Smith and Catherine Rainwater)
seem emptied of their real purpose. It is unfortunate that Saltzman and
these other critics, who address their topics with a sense of postmodern
inclusion rather than of reactionary exclusiveness, have no voice in this
study.
A more balanced treatment of Ž ction since the 1960s is provided by
Cecelia Tichi in Embodiment. The represented Ž gure is something that
has rewon its place in both postmodern Ž ction and art only by grappling
with the concerns of those who would eVace it, and (unlike Rebein) the
critic here engages the problematics (rather than simply accepting the
presumed successes) of such work. Consider Norman Mailer’s attempts
to reclaim President Kennedy’s sense of a New Frontier in Of a Fire on the
Moon, a work Tichi reads in the enlightening context of An American
Dream. Or how Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo generate a ‘‘toxic
discourse’’ that works to thwart what they fear is a feminine ‘‘re-mything’’
of existence. Especially interesting is Tichi’s demonstration of how the
novelist’s discourse in Underworld, surely the most toxic of DeLillo’s
works, is rooted in Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, a narrative strategy
that ‘‘inadvertently problematizes the Mother Sea by working to discredit
its actual authority.’’
Postmodern Ž ction’s penchant for fragmentation has led writers to
organize some of their larger works as story collections, but this same
inclination has prevented readers from appreciating how cyclic structures
function in these works, says James Nagel in The Contemporary American
Short-Story Cycle (LSU). His range of examples is impressive, amounting
to a comprehensive survey of the genre in recent times: Louise Erdrich’s
Love Medicine, Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, Susan Minot’s Monkeys,
Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Tim O’Brien’s The Things
They Carried, Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Amy
Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a
Strange Mountain. The key to Nagel’s appreciation of a story cycle is that
each individual work must be able to stand alone, yet also beneŽ t from its
larger context. Chronology is not important; what matters are the high-
lighting of incidents and ‘‘a narrative modulation in perspective.’’ Reach-
ing back to earlier examples, Rolf Lundén Ž nds precedents for a style of
372 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

work that emphasizes a tension between separate stories and the larger
work. His The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Com-
posite (Rodopi) names John Barth, Robert Coover, and Raymond Carver
as masters of this technique.

ii Women
‘‘Historicity depends upon writing,’’ Jacques Derrida famously in-
structed, and women have taken this lesson to heart. In Against Amnesia:
Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory (Penn.)
Nancy J. Peterson Ž nds that history itself can be painful. Its wounds are
evident in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, recorded in the exclu-
sionary acts of U.S. immigration history. Before a Chinese American
Ž ction writer can produce stories, she must therefore narrate a history to
make them intelligible. The same task exists for Native American writers,
who must deal with the loss of sovereignty over land (Louise Erdrich),
and for African Americans, who face the almost unbelievable legacies of
passage and enslavement (Toni Morrison). The traumatic imprisonment
of Japanese Americans during World War II is another narrative that
must be made intelligible, as the work of Joy Kowaga demonstrates.
The dual careers of Joyce Carol Oates and Rosamond Smith (her
pseudonym) are studied by Helene Myers in Femicidal Fears: Narratives
of the Female Gothic Experience (SUNY). Here is it seen how a plot worthy
of Jane Eyre can emerge from an otherwise common gothic format,
catching the heroine ‘‘between the scripts of sisterhood and female com-
petition for men’’ and letting her embody ‘‘the paradoxes of postfemi-
nism.’’ Soul/Mate is thus seen to be written in the light of Oates’s identity
as the author of Lives of the Twins, a consideration that may explain how
the ending ‘‘short-circuits rather than sharpens feminist consciousness.’’
Of principal interest is the ‘‘fantasy of insularity’’ that can allow a charac-
ter to indulge in both prefeminist nostalgia and postfeminist fantasy.
How ‘‘early second wave feminism’’ put rich dimensionality into
woman characters, including those who would exhibit ‘‘anger, wit, and
ruthless survival instincts,’’ is shown by Sarah Appleton Anguiar in The
Bitch Is Back: Wicked Women in Literature (So. Ill.). Two novels are
especially noteworthy for their challenge of Jungian archetypes that
would limit such dimensionality: Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and
Toni Morrison’s Paradise. The former gives the sisters a voice while
providing the King Lear text with an ending, picturing the kingdom after
Jerome Klinkowitz 373

his ruin. Paradise plays with the hotter notion of ‘‘bitch’’ itself, an idea
which if rejected is a loss for a woman’s dimensionality. Each novelist
provides her female characters with an alternative to the Jungian indi-
viduation process.

iii Jewish American Fiction

The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Seth L. Wolitz (Texas), presents
essays oVering new interpretations of this master’s work based on studies
of his original Yiddish texts. Singer celebrates a unique culture in this
language that includes ‘‘distinct Yiddish environments’’ in which the
author ‘‘lived, observed, and created.’’ A stimulus to narrative can be
found in the fracture between tradition and secular accommodation.
Singer’s iconic stature (as a virtual grandfather) derives at least in part
from his position as spokesman for what endures after the ruin of alien
conquest.
Co-authors Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glezjer Ž nd a rich
complexity in the vision of Cynthia Ozick, one that resists the ‘‘idolatry
of the image’’ yet also seeks to understand how the Holocaust ‘‘stands in
the way of language or knowledge at all.’’ Their Between Witness and
Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation (SUNY) sug-
gests that ‘‘The Shawl’’ and ‘‘Rosa,’’ two parts of Ozick’s novella The
Shawl, are an intentionally impossible pairing, one given to the language
of presence, the other to an articulation of absence.
While Singer and Ozick write of loss and silence, Philip Roth cele-
brates the way ‘‘America has Ž nally become a legitimate homeland for
Jews,’’ according to JeVrey Rubin-Dorsky’s ‘‘Philip Roth and the Ameri-
can Jewish Identity: The Question of Authenticity’’ (AmLH 13: 79–107).
In this author’s recent work there is a ‘‘contemporary spirit of Jewish self-
examination and cultural inquiry, a Ž ctional essaying that in itself ex-
empliŽ es a new dynamic in American Jewish life.’’ Exile, it is suggested,
has become an acceptable deŽ ning principle, evident between Roth as a
character in Operation Shylock (who is shown to be so happily accom-
modative of exile) and the Mossad agent Smilesburger, who is drawn as
the ‘‘kind of Jew’’ more evident in Roth’s earlier work. The breadth of
Roth’s Ž ction is seen in his literary interests evident in Shop Talk: A Writer
and His Colleagues and Their Work (Houghton MiZin). Here Mary
McCarthy chides him for reducing Christianity ‘‘to Christmas,’’ an ac-
cusation he feels is refuted by his characterization of Zuckerman. He also
374 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

appreciates the need to write beyond ‘‘the story of my life,’’ an orientation

that Ž ction (as opposed to autobiography) provides (even though the
story is still very much there). He also appreciates, as do so many of the
writers he favors, how the postwar loss of central Europe to Soviet control
‘‘caused Western culture to lose its vital center of gravity,’’ something
Roth’s own work hopes to correct. Above all, Roth is the writer who in
Margaret Scanlan’s view will admit that terrorism, that terrible exercise of
the individual imagination on the convention of society, is as ineVective
as is art, imagination’s other presumed weapon. Her Plotting Terror:
Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Virginia) contrasts Roth’s
Operation Shylock with Don DeLillo’s Mao II, a more facile exercise with
the notion of the writer as a terrorist, a Foucauldian idea that in Roth’s
hands is easy to dismiss.

iv African American Fiction

Thanks to a wide range of materials focused on his work, Clarence Major
is the most frequently studied African American Ž ction writer this year —
indeed, the most commented upon of any American in the post-1960
period. His quest to deŽ ne and liberate the self is central to James W.
Coleman’s Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban (Kentucky), a
treatment that Ž nds Major’s embracing of the black male writer’s role as
providing the technical fulŽ llments of John Edgar Wideman’s themes of
Calibanic discourse and anticipating Charles Johnson’s philosophical
response. Major’s special status is due to his unique use of postmodern
and poststructuralist methods. In his early novels, these methods suggest
that an empowering narrative voice can liberate his protagonists from the
constraints of racism. In the second phase of Major’s work, these narra-
tives become increasingly self-referential, creating what Coleman consid-
ers an ‘‘imprisoning reality.’’ What saves the situation are these narrators’
commitments to deŽ ne their freedom ‘‘against the reality of the self-
referential.’’ Calibanic discourse ‘‘denotes slavery, proscribed freedom,
proscribed sexuality, inferior character, and inferior voice. In summary,
the black male is the slave or servant who is the antithesis of reason,
civilized development, entitlement, freedom, and the power of white
men, and he never learns the civilized use of language.’’ Whereas Major’s
early characters reinscribe this discourse, subsequent protagonists de-
construct it through the act of writing. The foundation for this approach
in the techniques of innovative Ž ction (as also practiced by Sukenick and
Jerome Klinkowitz 375

Federman in pursuit of other means of discourse) is examined in Cole-

man’s contribution to editor Keith Clark’s Contemporary Black Men’s
Fiction and Drama (Illinois). ‘‘Clarence Major’s All-Night Visitors: Cal-
ibanic Discourse and Black Male Expression’’ (pp. 89–107) is a pivotal
argument in the volume’s larger scheme of describing the ‘‘expansion and
liberation of the black text from the shackles of protest or race-uplifting
literature, literature with a circumscribing set of critical and artistic im-
peratives.’’ (Supporting this thesis are essays on such writers as Randall
Kenan, Wideman, and Reed as well.)
Major’s most technically complex and thematically involved novel, My
Amputations, Ž gures in M. W. Smith’s Reading Simulacra: Fatal Theories
for Postmodernism (SUNY). Here the protagonist’s allegorical quest for
identity runs the gamut of cultural representations that threaten to make
authenticity impossible. Throughout the narrative, various masks are
tried on and then discarded —‘‘amputated,’’ as the novel’s title says. Be-
cause these fragments of identity are simulacra rather than realities,
Major suggests that his character’s only playable role is as an impostor, a
situation he himself experiences as an author writing in the wake of
others, alternately adopting and discarding their literary forms. ‘‘What
we discover from Major’s novel,’’ Smith concludes, ‘‘is the hyperreal
author who in his life and writing can never escape the presence of the
past and can only reproduce the story of what it means to be an author.’’
The many facets of Major’s career (which include poetry, commentary,
lexicography, textbook editing, and painting, as well as Ž ction writing)
are studied in the essays collected by editor Bernard W. Bell in Clarence
Major and His Art (No. Car.). Bell himself Ž nds that Major’s strength lies
in his mastery of the ‘‘transgressive’’ mode for both voice and conscious-
ness. By employing so many styles of voice (African male, Southern
matriarch, Zuni singer) the author tests limits of reception while at the
same time exercising a ‘‘double consciousness’’ on matters of race that
challenges conventional wisdom and acculturated understandings. Bell’s
‘‘Clarence Major’s Transgressive Voice and Double Consciousness as an
African American Postmodern Artist’’ (pp. 1–9) also makes the point that
while for white culture modernism announced a loss of faith in certain
19th-century verities, African Americans during these same years were
embracing ideal values that in the previous century had been denied
them. Therefore, Bell argues, postmodernism has diVerent implications
for black writers who embrace it; it must be transgressive before it can be
transformative. Essays by other contributors expand on this theme, par-
376 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

ticularly those that discuss Major’s painting: ‘‘Reading and the Painterly
Text: Clarence Major’s ‘The Slave Trade’: View from the Middle Passage’’
(pp. 101–31) by Linda Furgerson Selzer and ‘‘The Double Vision of
Clarence Major: Painter and Writer’’ (pp. 161–73) by Lisa C. Roney.
Major’s own critical writings have proved to be of great use to schol-
ars working to deŽ ne his unconventional Ž ction. Hence his Necessary
Distance: Essays and Criticism (CoVee House) is valuable for the author’s
self-examination. The title piece (pp. 13–28), devoted to Major’s ‘‘after-
thoughts on becoming a writer,’’ includes notes that often elude the best-
intentioned commentators. Why, for example, should Major worry
about his novels being compared to jazz? ‘‘I’ve never doubted that critics
had the right to do this,’’ he observes. ‘‘But what was I to make of the fact
that I had also grown up with Tin Pan Alley, bluegrass, and European
classical music? I loved Chopin and Beethoven.’’ Also interesting (and to
some, surprising) will be Major’s comments on growing up as a young fan
of John O’Hara’s work and his professional understanding of such mod-
ernist journals as the Dial and the Yale Review.
Much work, of course, continues on Toni Morrison, the freshest of it
being Cyrus R. K. Patell’s Negative Liberties. Treating Morrison in tan-
dem with Pynchon instead of with other African American women
writers is just the clarity of approach Clarence Major encourages, and in
examining how these two authors cover concerns that are mainstream,
postmodern, technical, racial, and sexual, Patell helps compile an index
to the general concerns of a new world. His focus is the ‘‘ongoing reliance
on Emersonian modes of thinking,’’ especially on self-reliance as ‘‘the
oYcial narrative of U.S. individualism.’’ Certain problems, however,
‘‘prove resistant to methodologically individualist solutions’’ and hence
seem unsolvable. Here is where Morrison and Pynchon come into play,
their narratives acknowledging the limitations of this oYcial cultural
line, within which certain  aws arise such as rationalism and domina-
tion. A hope of freedom nevertheless prevails —pathologically in Mor-
rison, and  awed with regard to discovering central truths in Pynchon,
yet in each case with an understanding of how community can be cor-
rupted by claims of individualism while marginalized interests ‘‘yield
narratives equally oppressive.’’
Robert Samuels places Morrison in a broader context; his Writing
Prejudices: The Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy of Discrimination from Shake-
speare to Toni Morrison (SUNY) studies attempts in literature and in
education to undermine racism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia. In
Jerome Klinkowitz 377

The Bluest Eye he Ž nds American cycles of prejudice reenforced by class

structure as it relates to subjective prejudice. Beloved is ‘‘a postmodern
slave narrative’’ dealing with elements of the past that are too commonly
repressed. His view of Morrison is in uenced by his beliefs in psychoana-
lytic theory as a tool of communal healing and that literature (through
the enablement of literary criticism) must not just diagnose problems but
solve them by positing other social forms of interaction. A similar engage-
ment is found in Anthony Cunningham’s The Heart of What Matters:
The Role for Literature in Moral Philosophy (Calif.). Here Beloved is read as
a richly ‘‘moral tapestry,’’ its structure working like memory with a lesson
about moral cost: ‘‘if we are to be good, we must be vulnerable.’’ Mor-
rison’s work shows that it is impossible to ‘‘remain clean and whole’’ in a
world systematically dedicated to evil, a position enriched by Cun-
ningham’s reference to Kant’s views on moral con ict and the emotions.
A more speciŽ c topic is treated by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R.
Wallace in ‘‘The Novels of Toni Morrison: ‘Wild Wilderness Where
There Was None’ ’’ (pp. 211–30), part of the collection they edited,
Beyond Narrative Writing. Tar Baby shows that ‘‘wildlife needed human
protection to exist at all’’; in its narrative, nature functions as a chorus,
with a life and perspective of its own. African Americans have a unique
relation to the natural world, these critics suggest, having existed in cir-
cumstances where ownership and passing on property were impossible.
Reading Africa into American Literature (Kentucky) by Keith Cart-
wright uses scholarship on texts from the Senegambian/Old Mali region
of Africa to establish in uences in Morrison’s work. Such antecedents
have always been acknowledged, but readers may not be aware of how
prevalent they are in works by authors as diverse as Du Bois, Faulkner,
Melville, and Joel Chandler Harris. At the other extreme of history and
culture, John Young examines the phenomenon of Morrison’s adaptation
to public space and popular markets in ‘‘Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey,
and Postmodern Popular Audiences’’ (AAR 35: 181–204), where the key is
not just publicity and consumption but the reader’s experience of these
books. In similar manner Morrison uses motifs of improvisation to inter-
twine themes of vulnerability with more positive aspects, as Yeonman
Kim establishes in ‘‘Involuntary Vulnerability and the Felix Culpa in
Toni Morrison’s Jazz ’’ (SLJ 33, ii: 124–33).
Retrospection is a popular critical theme for critics of African Ameri-
can Ž ction. Seodial F. H. Deena detects a shift from memories of race (in
the case of Richard Wright) to gender (Alice Walker) in Canonization,
378 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

Colonization, Decolonization: A Comparative Study of Political and Crit-

ical Works by Minority Writers (Peter Lang). Walker’s solution to gender
problems, Deena Ž nds, is ‘‘to revolutionize the traditional modes of
love.’’ Religion and marriage are faulted, yet love can be redeeming when
suYciently ‘‘decolonized.’’ Paule Marshall’s work Ž gures importantly in
Simone A. James Alexander’s Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-
Caribbean Women (Missouri). Con ict sets the tone for narratives based
on the author and her own mother and between characters and their
mothers, part of Marshall’s blurring of the boundaries between written
and spoken words, Ž ction and oral history. Her characters need to rewrite
history as a way of getting at the truth of their own lives; sometimes
mothers are casualties of this determination, and sometimes their tradi-
tions are recovered as folk materials. Editors Geneviève Fabre and Michel
Feith include Dorothea Löbbermann’s ‘‘Harlem as a Memory Place:
Reconstructing the Harlem Renaissance in Space’’ (pp. 210–21) in their
Temples for Tomorrow; Löbbermann’s survey of recent portraits of Harlem
in such Ž ction as Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Toni Morrison’s Jazz,
and Samuel Delany’s ‘‘Atlantis: Model 1924’’ suggests that Harlem itself
may be a place of recurrent renascence, whether of the 1920s, Reed’s
1960s, or the present age. (Morrison, she Ž nds, is most in line with her
Harlem Renaissance precursors.) Slavery is ‘‘the American family secret,’’
according to Ashraf H. A. Rushdy in Remembering Generations: Race and
Family in Contemporary American Fiction (No. Car.); among the works he
studies, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Inci-
dent, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred excel as ‘‘palimpsest narratives’’ that
relate past and present in terms of slavery’s impact while also portraying
‘‘enduring afterlives’’ in historical events. Of special interest is the ‘‘cryp-
tonomy’’ employed to discover the ‘‘generational force’’ of transgenera-
tional narratives.
James V. Catano compares John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers
with Connie Porter’s All-Bright Court in his Ragged Dicks: Masculinity,
Steel, and the Rhetoric of the Self-Made Man (So. Ill.). Whether in Wide-
man’s Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh or in Porter’s BuValo, a
rhetoric of the city both establishes and challenges masculinity. Both
novels rely on motifs of self-marking such as ‘‘separation, immigration,
entrepreneurial authenticity,’’ and ‘‘middle-class upward mobility’’ for
their characters to maintain themselves even when their supporting con-
text is lost. Studying Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo in the contexts of Charles
Wright’s The Wig and John Oliver Killens’s The Cotillion lets Darryl
Jerome Klinkowitz 379

Dickson-Carr Ž nd a certain timelessness in this novel; African American

Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (Missouri) shows Reed making fun of
‘‘the black aesthetic’’ as just another kind of monocultural thinking,
whereas Mumbo Jumbo maintains a continual tension in its own text
between the canonical and the marginal, creating space for what Reed
calls a ‘‘Neo-HooDoo aesthetic,’’ something Dickson-Carr appreciates as
a syncretism of non-Western cultures. Wright’s work, unfairly overlooked
since the 1970s, is given productive attention by Elizabeth A. Wheeler in
Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America (Rutgers). In an era when
it took some daring to break out of Cold War containment culture,
Wright (along with Paule Marshall) was one of the few urban novelists to
show how the city provides not just trauma but also a new space for
freedom, joy, and the enrichment of multiculturalism —an early sugges-
tion of how containment had perverted rather than preserved the true
American spirit.
Another less-studied novel from the 1960s, The System of Dante’s Hell, is
related to both the author’s career and the development of Ž ction by Jerry
GaŽ o Watts in Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art (NYU). The central fact
of Baraka’s life during the time his name was LeRoi Jones, Watts suggests,
was the tension of his simultaneous insider/outsider status. Race was just
one element in this tension, larger parts of which included artistic con-
cerns with modernist literature and an emerging postmodernism. Not
strictly autobiographical, The System of Dante’s Hell is best read ‘‘as an
excursion through the psychological torment that Jones experienced from
the upward mobility-premised journey of his youth in Newark to his
decision to embrace the downward mobility of a bohemian writer.’’

v Asian American Fiction

The many aspects of loyalty inform Leslie Bow’s critiques in Betrayal and
Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Wom-
en’s Literature (Princeton). Her major concern is ‘‘the gendered nature of
literary rhetoric.’’ AYliations are constituted through speciŽ c mecha-
nisms, and women who transgress borders are drawn by multiple loyal-
ties. Hence the act of betrayal is in fact ‘‘a subversion of repressive
authority that depends upon upholding strict borders between groups
and individuals.’’ Identity formation does not take place in a value-free
space, Bow reminds readers, pointing out how works by Jeanne Waka-
tsuki Houston and Bharati Mukherjee play aspects of femininity against
380 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

pressures for ‘‘American national enfranchisement.’’ Then there are works

that portray American culture ‘‘as less oppressive to women than their
ethnic cultures,’’ notably Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. On the other hand, ‘‘texts with an immi-
grant focus serve to validate First World Conceptions about the Third
World if they mark the connection between economic liberalism and ‘pri-
vatized’ issues of self-fulŽ llment as a logical and inevitable result of
Western modernization.’’ Raising the issue of human rights politicizes a
work —Bow’s examples of this are Wendy Law-Yone’s Irrawaddy Tango
and Fiona Cheong’s The Scent of the Gods. In general, Bow Ž nds a ‘‘mutual
dependency of discourses that draw a connection between Asian immi-
grant writing engaging engendered rhetoric and American literature on
Asia that employs that same rhetoric as a tool of political persuasion.’’
Ramona Fernandez notices an interesting play on politics in Imagining
Literacy: Rhizomes of Knowledge in American Culture and Literature
(Texas), which examines Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
with political eVect in mind. By giving voice to a story that is ‘‘tradi-
tionally voiceless,’’ Kingston produces a text that is considered ‘‘great.’’ Its
voice is thus oppositional by nature; it is a voice that feels it had better be
armed. The result? As Fernandez puts it, ‘‘Your literacy is at the service of
your politics.’’

vi Fiction of the South

A happy integration of both Southern and African American Ž ction into
the broader mainstream is accomplished by JeVrey J. Folks in From
Richard Wright to Toni Morrison: Ethics in Modern and Postmodern Ameri-
can Narrative (Peter Lang). For Folks, the key Ž gure in accomplishing
this melding is Walker Percy, whose narratives confront moral truths that
may have been elided in novels by earlier writers. Yet even in Percy’s best
work there can be a subconscious repression of moral failings, just as
William Styron uses the form of the Gothic romance to displace them.
Richard Ford puts community in a new light with his treatments of terror
and violence while Ernest J. Gaines redeŽ nes the nature of community
with his emphasis on distinct identities. Ford himself has grown from his
roots in Mississippi and Arkansas to become a more general realist;
residency in Montana has prompted him to write less of region than of
dreams, according to sentiments expressed in editor Harry Guagliardo’s
Conversations with Richard Ford (Miss.).
Jerome Klinkowitz 381

Yet regionalism still has its hold on this literature. In Swinging in Place:
Porch Life in Southern Culture (No. Car.) Jocelyn Hazelwood Donlon
makes the important distinction that there are ‘‘many’’ black Souths,
contrasting the region Ernest J. Gaines explores in Catherine Carmier
(with its ‘‘intracommunity struggles’’ that speak against a black monocul-
ture) with Gloria Naylor’s South in Mama Day, ‘‘a racially separate, but
still creolized, culture.’’ The uniqueness of one state, thanks to its posi-
tion at the crossroads of many in uences, is celebrated in editors Suzanne
Disheroon Green and Lisa Abney’s Songs of the New South: Writing Con-
temporary Louisiana (Greenwood). Especially noteworthy are Sally B.
Blanton’s ‘‘The Spell of the Swampland: The Tales of Shirley Ann Grau’’
(pp. 47–55), which studies the rhythms of good and evil nature in the
folktale, and Mary A. McCay’s ‘‘Ellen Gilchrist’s Heroines: The Scourge
of New Orleans’’ (pp. 173–81), a treatment of the author’s characters who
deŽ ne themselves so ably without taking male roles (exploring new ways
to ‘‘make’’ themselves beyond the constricting bonds of New Orleans
society). The biography of a writer whose sole novel closely associates him
with the city, Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole (LSU) by
René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy, tells of sexual feelings
redirected toward a love of his mother. The authors are candid about
Toole’s Ž nal madness and speak frankly about his mother’s role in bring-
ing his novel to publication. The strongest parallel between novel and
novelist would seem to be the dualities of day and night life that create a
proŽ le for each.
Harry Crews ‘‘has the reputation for being the baddest bad boy of
American letters,’’ editor Erik Bledsoe admits in his Perspectives on Harry
Crews (Miss.). Among the other reasons he has such a devoted following
are the new readers attracted to his works as supplements to younger
favorites such as Larry Brown and Dorothy Allison, who also write about
the ‘‘Rough South.’’ Brown oVers an appreciation of the older writer
here, ‘‘Harry Crews: Mentor and Friend’’ (pp. 3–10), but of greatest
originality is Richard Rankin Russell’s ‘‘Travels in Greeneland: Graham
Greene’s In uence on Harry Crews’’ (pp. 29–45), an unusual source for
this sometimes freewheeling writer’s sense of structure.

vii Chicana/ o, Latina/o, Native American, and Western Fiction

Chicana/o literature, Ž rst recognized as a contemporary form in the
1960s, has grown 40 years forward but also a century back with the
382 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

rediscovery of earlier works helping critics understand the dynamics of its

tradition. In Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana
Narrative (Peter Lang) Monika Kaup traces a Ž ction made prominent by
cultural nationalism that grew to become a more inclusively North
American form. ‘‘The new was available before the old,’’ she notes;
focusing this distinction on the notion of ‘‘border,’’ she shows how Ž ction
writers were thus inclined to treat space as political, not natural. In
migrant narratives, a later phenomenon, the border becomes a line to be
crossed, inviting time to dominate space. The combination of feminism
and multiculturalism in mestizaje writers leads to modiŽ cations of both
border and immigrant novels, contrasting family domesticity (in which
ancestral roots may be rediscovered) with the impulse to leave home and
create one’s own identity. Kaup emphasizes that the border is not a
wilderness but an area of cultural encounter and exchange, a circum-
stance that favors the dialogical forms of narrative.
Readers of Rudolfo A. Anaya and especially of Gloria Anzaldúa know
that the subject of Charles M. Tatum’s Chicano Popular Culture: Que
Hable el Pueblo (Arizona) is central to an understanding of their writing.
In Anzaldúa’s work, music is especially important, as popular forms
emerging within the borderlands culture undertake a restructuring of
cultural materials similar to that undertaken in her Borderlands/La Fron-
tera. In Anaya’s Ž ction, folk tradition and cultural history are as impor-
tant as daily reality; quite often, the latter is predicated by the former,
something the protagonist of Bless Me, Ultima must learn. Chicana
authors such as Sandra Cisneros and Denise Chávez turn more directly to
the coming-of-age novel, but always with a strong sense of cultural
heritage (which from a women’s perspective may be modiŽ ed) and popu-
lar culture (which provides a nurturing context). The task Cisneros sets
for herself is evident in one of her stories, according to Barbara Brinson
Curiel’s ‘‘The General’s Pants: A Chicana Feminist (Re)vision of the
Mexican Revolution in Sandras Cisneros’s ‘Eyes of Zapata’ ’’ (WAL 35:
403–26), where the author reshapes the narrative of the great revolution-
ary by contrasting his masculine power with the role played by his
companion, Inés Alfaro. How a withdrawal from ‘‘face-to-face sociality’’
is a special virtue in this writer’s work, particularly in The House on Mango
Street, is demonstrated by GeoVrey Sanborn in ‘‘Keeping Her Distance:
Cisneros, Dickinson, and the Politics of Private Enjoyment’’ (PMLA 116:
1334–48).
The 14 volumes of the Klail City Death Trip series pay close attention to
Jerome Klinkowitz 383

the 250 years of Spanish presence in both the ‘‘protracted predicament of

Texas Mexicans in the [Lower Rio Grande] Valley and ethnic Americans
in the United States at large,’’ says Klaus Zilles in Rolando Hinojosa: A
Reader’s Guide (New Mexico). Hinojosa’s progression of texts traces new
stages in a constantly changing order, and Zilles is adept at studying both
the serial and individual eVects, especially the fact that there is a ‘‘disinte-
grated’’ nature to the project that is apparent from a postmodern view-
point but explainable more simply as properties of oral memory and the
organic growth of these works. The complex sources for a Latina author’s
work are examined by Silvio Sirias in Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion
(Greenwood). Alvarez employs techniques of the historical novel at
times, yet also draws on facets of magical realism for her eVects. She
values such classical forms as the Bildungsroman and Künstleroman, but
enriches their formats by experimenting with point of view.
Two good essays on Louise Erdrich reaYrm her importance. Tom
Matchie’s ‘‘Tales of Burning Love: Louise Erdrich’s ‘Scarlet Letter,’ ’’
pp. 153–65 in Telling the Stories, deals with the way Erdrich uses Haw-
thorne’s themes and techniques, especially romantic tropes. Claudia Gut-
wirth’s ‘‘ ‘Stop Making Sense’: Trickster Variations in the Fiction of
Louise Erdrich,’’ pp. 148–67 in Trickster Lives, argues that the trickster
element works best when its story is elevated to community level, resist-
ing closure ‘‘in favor of an unending stream of narrative.’’ Erdrich’s Tracks
practices a ‘‘local pedagogy,’’ according to Joni Adamson in American
Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle
Place (Arizona). Among other works studied here are Edward Abbey’s
Desert Solitaire (for its argument against mainstream perceptions that
separate nature from culture), Simon Ortiz’s Fight Back (and its ‘‘more
multiculturally inclusive concepts of nature’’), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Almanac of the Dead (where in the context of the Zapatista uprising self-
preservation is seen as a key).
Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry,
Fiction, and Drama (Oxford) is Therese SteVen’s testament to this writer’s
‘‘crossover’’ ability. Dove’s crossings include those of color, gender, cul-
ture, continental boundaries, and genres. The critic acknowledges a
crossing of her own, employing a conjunction of Houston Baker’s and
Henry Louis Gates’s methods. Noteworthy is the study of Through the
Ivory Gate as a work of ‘‘artistic enspacement’’ drawing on Greek tragedy
for its modes of simultaneity and reversibility. Tribal laws interest Tom
Quirk, whose Nothing Abstract reads Tony Hillerman’s The Dance Hall of
384 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

the Dead with an eye to involvements and procedural diYculties unique

to the reservation. ‘‘It is amidst this dizzying complexity of jurisdiction
and the sometimes absurd discrepancies in laws and penalties,’’ Quirk
writes, ‘‘that the Navajo tribal policeman works on a day-to-day basis.’’
Wendell Berry, Cormac McCarthy, and Edward Abbey continue to be
favorites of scholars of New West Ž ction. Of major importance is Janet
Goodrich’s The Unforeseen Self in the Works of Wendell Berry (Missouri).
Berry is an autobiographical writer in all genres, Goodrich believes, re-
doing Ž ctive events in essays as a way of producing ‘‘ongoing re-creations
of his own life.’’ The result is ‘‘a medley of coexisting voices,’’ including
those of autobiographer, poet, farmer, prophet, and neighbor. This auto-
biographical tradition is derived from Edwards and Franklin, with the
modern in uence of Faulkner. Yet Berry never calls himself a leader;
instead, as Goodrich clariŽ es, he wants to be just one ‘‘of the rest of us,’’ a
kinship he shares with his readers.
Editors Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce provide A Cormac
McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy (Miss.), presenting essays by
various hands that celebrate the dialogical eVect of this writer’s narrative
voices. Themes in the trilogy include pastoral loss, cowboy codes, and the
tension between masculine and feminine. This last concern is treated by
Nell Sullivan in ‘‘Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Will Be Gone: The Circuit
of Male Desire in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy’’ (pp. 228–55). In
these novels gender identiŽ cation is destabilized, with the male often
performing the feminine role, but in a possibly misogynist way. More
positively, McCarthy’s males occupy female space, establishing ecocriti-
cal, technical, and thematic links to other McCarthy works; the question
remains whether or not these male characters replace women. For John
Blair, McCarthy’s novels center on the Ž gure of ‘‘the isolato —the man
alone in a naturalistically indiVerent and shockingly violent world, trying
to keep  esh and soul together in the face of existential doubt and terrible
tribulation and suVering.’’ Blair notes, however, that in the Ž rst of the
borderland novels, All the Pretty Horses, the author adopts for the Ž rst
time the Bildungsroman form, in which the crossing into Mexico repre-
sents the adoption of a second homeland that facilitates the maturation
process. Thus ‘‘Mexico and the Borderlands in Cormac McCarthy’s All
the Pretty Horses ’’ (Crit 42: 301–07) argues for an ethic no more or less
sexually controversial than Hemingway’s similar embrace of Africa. With
James M. Cahalan’s Edward Abbey: A Life (Arizona) readers have a con-
ventional biography that they can supplement with the memoiristic
Jerome Klinkowitz 385

Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey (New Mexico) by Jack LoeZer.

Cahalan draws heavily on the author’s letters and journals, Ž nding a
candor than allows the scholar to separate myth from facts. Abbey was no
racist or misogynist, for example, and also took great care with his
manuscript revisions. The Appalachian East is as crucial an in uence as
the Southwest. The key to understanding Abbey as a person, Cahalan
believes, is to allow for his double-edged nature, an example of which is
his proclivity to attack the Ž gure of the cowboy because it is already
antiheroic; it is the type and not the individual that draws Abbey’s ire.
LoeZer’s memoir admirably Ž lls in Abbey’s love life and has words of
praise for the positive in uence of his last, much younger wife. As a
drinking and adventure companion, LoeZer heard a great many of
Abbey’s campŽ re stories and retelling them seems to be the essence of
this work. Because they are so good, Adventures with Ed merits serious
attention.

viii Realistic Fiction

The harvest of work on John Updike continues to reaYrm his impor-
tance as a man of letters, which may soon rival that of W. D. Howells. In
John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain (Missouri)
D. Quentin Miller Ž nds that ‘‘Rabbit’s curse’’ is the way the Soviet
Union, a dire threat during this character’s lifetime, set limits to what
could have otherwise been a more thoroughly American search for iden-
tity. Once the Cold War ended, Updike faced a thematic vacuum, Miller
suspects, as he then became interested in futuristic situations. It is the
evolving nature of American history during the Cold War years rather
than the imaginative properties of a culture of containment that engages
Updike’s characters, as there is little in Miller’s study that re ects Alan
Nadel’s deŽ nitive treatment of the subject, Containment Culture (see
AmLS 1995, pp. 331–33). The perfection of a cycle now completed is
appreciated by Marshall Boswell in John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mas-
tered Irony in Motion (Missouri). Derived from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or,
‘‘mastered irony’’ results from faith in a ‘‘perfect artistic submission’’ to
the ‘‘present sides of an unresolvable tension.’’ In this manner a dialectical
vision can encompass contradictory validities that relate to a wide range
of current issues. Bound as a tetralogy, the Rabbit texts function as a
meganovel rich with interior relations and given an interesting rhythm by
Rabbit’s  uctuations, which are not meant to be synthesized or resolved.
386 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

Updike’s other recurrent protagonist is the  ip side of Rabbit Ang-

strom. Now that the volumes devoted to him are being presented to-
gether as The Complete Henry Bech (Everyman/Knopf ), readers can do as
Malcolm Bradbury does in his introduction (pp. ix–xxi) and consider
how Rabbit and Bech are ‘‘two alter egos’’ of Updike himself. Whereas
Updike’s characterization of Rabbit probes the nuances of American
popular culture (like Boswell, Bradbury calls this ‘‘meganovel material’’),
Bech provides the opportunity to examine this same culture from the
writer’s side, which is occasionally cruel and bitter but more often holds
great promise. The Bech stories also allow Updike the use of ‘‘more
casual, ambiguous, and eclectically chosen forms.’’ As for Rabbit himself,
his role is to suVer the ‘‘veneer stripping’’ that characterized his pre-
decessor, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Catherine Jurca suggests in White Dias-
pora. For her, the tetralogy resolves itself on the note of The Man in the
Gray Flannel Suit ‘‘and reinforces the ineluctable truth’’ of the entire
series, that ‘‘Rabbit will only ever be ‘at Rest’ when Rabbit is dead.’’
Updike’s talents as a historian and a demonstration of his interest in
historiographic concerns emerge in Paul Boyer’s ‘‘Notes of a Disillu-
sioned Lover: John Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration ’’
(AmLH 13: 67–78).
Richard Russo’s ‘‘Introduction: Secret Hearts’’ (pp. xi–xx), which be-
gins The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (Holt), deŽ nes this writer’s
special subject as ‘‘our most tragic human blindness, our eager willingness
to confuse what is true with what we want to be true.’’ Although Yates’s
characters often willfully blind themselves to reality, in the rare moments
when they do see the truth it is with ‘‘the clear light of self-hatred.’’ Yates
himself is valued for his ‘‘seemingly congenital inability to sugarcoat.’’
Dan WakeŽ eld, Yates’s close friend during his years in Boston, was a
student and assistant of C. Wright Mills at Columbia University and got
his start as a writer by emulating his teacher’s somewhat lyrical style of
sociology. WakeŽ eld’s introduction (pp. 1–18) to editors Kathryn Mills
and Pamela Mills’s C. Wright Mills: Letters (Calif.) Ž nds a personal ele-
ment in Mills’s work that anticipates the method of WakeŽ eld’s Ž ction
and recalls how he attracted Mills’s attention by comparing sociological
work with Ž ction.
A nostalgia diVerent from that of the author’s other novels is detailed
in Todd McGowan’s ‘‘ ‘In This Way He Lost Everything’: The Price of
Satisfaction in E. L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair ’’ (Crit 42: 233–40). It is not a
lost radical past but ‘‘a lost past of entrepreneurial capitalism’’ that is
Jerome Klinkowitz 387

treated here, Ž tting into Doctorow’s canon as an explanation of why

radicalism has faded away. Karen Rood examines a writer who devotes
extended research to her Ž ction, even to detailed studies of cider and
grapes, in Understanding Annie Proulx (So. Car.). Proulx Ž nds Ž ctive
insights in how people cook and eat, seeing these as indices of how they
handle life in changing circumstances, an approach used with great
success by John Dos Passos. Silvianne Blosser tackles a more technical
complexity in A Poetics on the Edge: The Poetry and Prose of Sylvia Plath
(Peter Lang), tracing a movement from monology to dialogy as guided by
Plath’s self-consciousness of the writing process. A poetics of the ‘‘open
hand’’ as opposed to that of the ‘‘closed Ž st’’ is most evident in her short
stories and in The Bell Jar, although the process does not re ect distinc-
tions between her poetry and prose. The key is that Bakhtin’s notions of
speech and utterance are most easily expressed in the novel, given that
form’s space for dialogue and polyphony.
Russell Banks, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Maxine Hong Kingston
wrote novels that prove central to the concerns of Christopher Douglas
in Reciting America: Culture and Cliché in Contemporary U.S. Fiction (Illi-
nois). American solipsism indicates problems with identiŽ cation, Doug-
las believes, from the degraded discourse of the American dream (Banks)
and reexaminations of what is worth saying again (Kingston) to the
cultural miscommunications on the level of clichés (Boyle). Douglas
argues that ‘‘a productive dialogue can be held between ethnic minority
and ethnic majority writers at the end of the twentieth century.’’ ‘‘Parti-
tioned canons,’’ he suggests, are important only for bringing certain
works to attention, and not for examining their full impact. Two writers
famous for having received their training at the University of Iowa
Writers Workshop —John Casey and Andre Dubus —are celebrated for
what the workshop teaches, the professional exploitation of academic
trends. Casey’s Spartina Ž lls the bill by grounding its more apparent
theme of human ethics in a subtle environmental awareness that senses
‘‘culture as a given form’’ shaped by ‘‘the guiding in uence of nature,’’
according to Kent C. Ryden in Landscape with Figures: Nature and Cul-
ture in New England (Iowa). Dubus, who was run over and crippled while
searching for a presumed accident victim (he had seen a motorcycle left
unattended on a freeway shoulder and feared the worst, not knowing that
its rider had stopped to answer nature’s call in a nearby bush), has his
Ž ction (with its quite similar sensibilities) celebrated in Andre Dubus:
Tributes, ed. Donald Anderson (Xavier). Among the eulogizers who oVer
388 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

insights into the man’s literary art are Lee K. Abbott, Doris Betts, Tobias
WolV, David R. Godine (his publisher), and Philip G. Spitzer (his
agent).

ix Innovative Fiction
Several major contributions to scholarship are found in the pieces com-
missioned by editor Kevin Alexander Boon for At Millenium’s End: New
Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut (SUNY). Especially valuable is ‘‘Von-
negut and Aesthetic Humanism’’ (pp. 17–47) by David Andrews. In this
thorough study of the author’s increasing reliance on painting (especially
abstract art) as a theme in his novels, Andrews explores how, in Von-
negut’s view, ‘‘it is incumbent upon the artist to express himself to some-
one else,’’ expression being the vehicle which transforms individual
therapy into a social good. Bluebeard shows this, and is also able to
‘‘dissect the various historical processes that corrupt art.’’ Other essays in
Boon’s collection treat Vonnegut’s essays, his use of science (especially in
the short Ž ction), and how his novels have fared when adapted to Ž lm.
New in uences are Jon Woodson’s domain in A Study of Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22 (Peter Lang). Although the novel beneŽ ts from its innocence of
immediately previous critical trends such as social satire, black humor,
absurdism, and antiwar sentiments, it does reveal the in uence of New
Criticism from the 1940s and a mythic tenor derived from Eliot and Joyce
(particularly as writers of their type were treated by Brooks and Warren).
Especially noteworthy are parallels between Catch-22 and Gilgamesh. Zen
Buddhism is the inspiration for the simple forms used in Trout Fishing in
America and A Confederate General from Big Sur, according to Kathryn
Hume in ‘‘Brautigan’s Psychomania’’ (Mosaic 34, i: 75–92). Later novels
strive for an obvious inner peace, but So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away
tests the author’s methods against ‘‘explosive feelings,’’ a reminder that
‘‘Brautigan’s whole novelistic output is an ongoing experiment in which
intense emotion is channelled into plots whose surface concerns only
glancingly re ect the causes of the emotion’’ that ‘‘well up at a distance
from those characters and  ow through them as their actions or their Zen
observations attempt to contain the psychic energies.’’
In Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion (Nebraska) by Irene
Kacandes, John Barth’s ‘‘Life-Story’’ is read in the context of works by
Michel Butor, William Gass, Julio Cortázar, and Italo Calvino, where the
dynamic is one of ‘‘talk by performance.’’ This form of apostrophe draws
Jerome Klinkowitz 389

attention to the mechanics of the telling/hearing orientation, producing

a ‘‘jolt of absolute recognition, which then engages a stronger vigilance
about levels of identiŽ cation.’’ There is an awareness, Kacandes believes,
of what Ž ts and what does not, and texts such as Barth’s play games trying
to make things accommodate their form. (Barth’s work is contrasted to
Naylor’s Mama Day, where storytelling is meant to serve the commu-
nity.) J. Kerry Grant’s A Companion to V. (Georgia) presents a mass of
data from Pynchon’s novel, particularly data related to the news media.
Grant’s scholarship is informed by the thesis that the novel resists closure,
sustained narrative momentum, and even complete characterization, but
that these functions are less pessimistic than exuberant in terms of work-
ing with information when conclusiveness is not demanded.
The most complete treatment of an important Ž ction writer is sup-
plied by David Andrews in ‘‘Gilbert Sorrentino’’ (RCF 21, iii: 7–59). For
Andrews, Sorrentino excels at pitting the drive for pure art against the
constraints of content (with the latter inevitably coming out worst).
Besides art (which for this writer has no use beyond itself ), what Sorren-
tino cares about are the past and matters of loss. His interest in metaŽ c-
tion is a property of his elitist modernism; unlike Barth and Vonnegut,
Sorrentino ‘‘kept going, pushing metaŽ ction to a kind of limit’’ rather
than resting with a delight in the form. Andrews also conducts ‘‘The Art
Is the Act of Smashing the Mirror: A Conversation with Gilbert Sorren-
tino’’ (RCF 21, iii: 60–68), whose topics include the author’s belief that
characters can be aVective without sentimentality and that Nabokov
functioned as the ‘‘straw man’’ for Sorrentino’s irritation with shallow
avant-gardism. Twenty-Ž ve of Sorrentino’s critiques are added to the new
edition of Something Said (Dalkey Archive), making this author’s literary
essays indispensible for measuring the aesthetic of this turbulent era of
innovation.
A rare special issue of Crit (42, iv) devoted to Don DeLillo gives space
to newer critics, whose originality speaks for this author’s ability to shape
critical trends well beyond those initiated by previous writers (among
whom established scholars try to place him). ‘‘Image proliferation, often
engendered by Ž lmic, televisual, or photographic repetition, aVects our
conception of the world,’’ says JeVrey Karnicky in ‘‘Wallpaper Mao: Don
DeLillo, Andy Warhol and Seriality’’ (pp. 339–56), an especially thor-
ough study that relates repetition to the  ow of power. Another special
interest of this author is handled by Jesse Kavadlo in ‘‘Recycling Author-
ity: Don DeLillo’s Waste Management’’ (pp. 384–401), in which author-
390 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

ial persona is seen to foster ‘‘an ambiguity toward authority that borders
on ambivalence.’’
Self-conscious use of narrative techniques by Stephen Dixon, Grace
Paley, Michael Stephens, and Alice Walker are my own subject in You’ve
Got to Be Carefully Taught: Learning and Re-learning Literature (So. Ill.).
Dixon’s work is especially demonstrative of how with a minimal start a
Ž ctive action can proceed largely by its own momentum.

x Fiction of War and Sport

How the experience of Vietnam was shared half a world away from the
Ž ghting is explored by Fred Turner in Echoes of Combat: Trauma, Mem-
ory, and the Vietnam War (Minnesota). Recalling the past means recon-
structing it, a typical task for writers. But when it comes to U.S. Ž ction,
one must remember that ‘‘the facts of the Vietnam War undermined a
series of understandings about what it meant to be an American that had
long cut across particular communities and their local interests.’’ A pre-
sumption of righteousness would be the Ž rst to fall, followed by disillu-
sionment with technology. When the success of the enemy’s Tet oVensive
compounded suspicion of our ally’s integrity with worry for our own
vulnerability, the conditions of cultural trauma were in place. It is the
concept of trauma that models so much artistic response to the war.
‘‘Only fairy tales’’ is how pitcher Henry Wiggen in Mark Harris’s novel
The Southpaw dismisses baseball Ž ction. Richard Peterson considers the
validity of this claim in Extra Innings: Writing on Baseball (Illinois).
Readers probably suspect that much baseball Ž ction from earlier in the
20th century relied on either idealism or outright fantasy, but Peterson
Ž nds that even recent examples, written with an awareness of postmod-
ern theory, still fail to take advantage of one of the simplest rules for
Ž ction, which in the case of this subject would be ‘‘a consideration of
baseball as an ordinary event on an ordinary day —not all games are the
Ž nal or seventh game —or an interest in turning the ordinary, the com-
mon, and the routine in baseball into the extraordinary through a narra-
tive art limited by an air of reality or the ring of truth, rather than in ated
by the traditional belief in the generative and transformative power of the
game itself.’’
One of America’s best critics of sports literature, Neil D. Isaacs, takes
on an interactive variety of the contest in You Bet Your Life: The Burdens of
Gambling (Kentucky). To his social and psychological concerns Isaacs
Jerome Klinkowitz 391

adds an interest in the literature of gambling, using the novels of William

Murray (the ‘‘Shifty Lou Anderson’’ series) to examine ‘‘certain primary
issues regarding diagnosis and treatment of pathological gambling.’’
When the Fat Man Sings, for example, portrays a high-paid opera singer
who feels compelled to bet very large amounts at the racetrack. The
‘‘thrill of the action’’ for this man overwhelms almost everything —but his
case is not pathological because his art always comes Ž rst, an insight
Isaacs credits to Murray’s close understanding of gamblers’ lifestyles, to
the extent that his novels actually lay out long-term treatment plans ‘‘that
can delay or prevent the emergence of pathology.’’
University of Northern Iowa
17 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s
E. P. Walkiewicz

A variety of studies continue to indicate overtly or implicitly the limited

usefulness of retaining ‘‘modernism’’ as a clearly deŽ ned and internally
consistent category. Some endeavor to draw attention to alternative ex-
pressions of modernity. Others call into question the notion that post-
modernism is a distinct successor to modernism, disclosing the presence
of postmodern attitudes or politics in the work of several poets. A handful
of critics examine the appropriation by modern poets of the literature and
culture of classical antiquity, while others analyze the relationship be-
tween the poetry of the period and the thought of such philosophers
and political philosophers as William James, Benedetto Croce, Donald
Davidson, John Dewey, and Hannah Arendt. Considerable attention is
paid to the lives and works of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and the
writers of the Harlem Renaissance, especially Langston Hughes, and two
biographies of Edna St. Vincent Millay shed light on that charismatic
poet’s personality and career. Gender issues remain a popular focus, as
does the reevaluation of the political stances of a number of poets. The
slant of several essays attests to the growing prominence of the still eclectic
approach known as ‘‘ecocriticism,’’ something that may account for the
increasing interest in the poems and verse dramas of Robinson JeVers.

i A Companion to 20th-Century Poetry

A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry is a useful compendium that,
by virtue of its breadth, meets a real need in an academic environment in
which an increasing number of scholar-instructors are both encouraged
to narrow their research interests and assigned to teach a wide variety of
courses. One of the latest Blackwell Companions to Literature and Cul-
ture, the collection is nothing if not ambitious in scope, containing
394 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

chapters by no fewer than 48 British and American scholars, treating

subjects ranging chronologically from the genesis of modernism to the
work of contemporary postcolonial poets. The book is divided into Ž ve
sections: ‘‘Topics and Debates,’’ ‘‘Poetic Movements,’’ ‘‘International and
Postcolonial Poetry in English,’’ ‘‘Readings’’ (focusing on in uential vol-
umes by individual poets), and ‘‘The Contemporary Scene.’’ Each of the
relatively brief chapters is followed by a separate bibliography.
In the Ž rst essay in the volume, ‘‘Modernism and the Transatlantic
Connection’’ (pp. 7–20), Hugh Witemeyer reexamines the ‘‘dynamic
interaction of cross-cultural energies’’ that generated and perpetuated
transatlantic modernism in the Ž rst quarter of the 20th century. It is
ironic, he reminds us, that this interaction was made possible by im-
provements in technology since those modernists who espoused a cos-
mopolitan model for culture often excoriated the growing materialism
and commercialism those technological advances also engendered. Wit-
meyer details the activities of the American expatriates who became
energized in the two major European ‘‘vortices,’’ London and later Paris,
then proceeds to describe the contributions of the New York and Chicago
modernists. Witemeyer’s brief account of D. H. Lawrence’s pilgrimage to
the New World, along with the emphasis he places on ‘‘indigenist’’
innovation in American centers of cultural activity, clearly supports his
view that the ‘‘transatlantic bridge’’ was a ‘‘two-way street.’’
Focusing on chronology rather than geography, in ‘‘Modernist Poetry
and Its Precursors’’ (pp. 21–36) Peter Brooker and Simon Perril also
promote the revised version of literary history according to which the
term ‘‘modernism’’ is viewed as having been retroactively applied to ‘‘a
sometimes violently heterogeneous and unstable set of initiatives’’ with
multiple points of origin. Tracing the continuity of Victorian and mod-
ernist emphases on ‘‘subjectivity’’ and ‘‘introspection,’’ the authors cite
the in uence of not only Henri Bergson and F. H. Bradley but also
Walter Pater. Approaching imagism as another ‘‘retrospective construct,’’
they distinguish H. D.’s imagist poems, which reclaim the work of Sap-
pho, from the eVorts of male poets, which, by reifying women, express
the anxiety generated by the destabilizing of masculinity in the modern
city.
In ‘‘The Non-modernist Modern’’ (pp. 37–50) David Goldie further
interrogates and expands the concept of modernity. Although Goldie for
the most part examines the works of British poets, he does include two
E. P. Walkiewicz 395

Americans, Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay, in his list of writers
who were able to devise ‘‘a viable modern, but not necessarily modernist,
poetry.’’ Frost’s powerful diction and his mastery of the tension between
meter and rhythm permitted him to surpass the Georgians by lending a
complex ‘‘voice’’ to a modern, rural culture. Millay, too, moved beyond
Georgianism, transforming the sonnet not only by dismantling tradi-
tional romantic discourse but also by investing her female speakers with a
distinctly modern cynicism.
While the two subsequent chapters in the volume also concentrate
mainly on poets who fall outside the purview of this essay, both touch on
the subject of W. H. Auden’s politics. In ‘‘Poetry and Politics’’ (pp. 51–63)
Reed Way Dasenbrock argues that Auden and his ‘‘gang,’’ unlike Yeats,
were unable to reconcile nationalism and their ‘‘revolutionary politics’’
and reiterates the opinion that Auden’s decision to exclude much of the
poetry he wrote in the 1930s from his Collected Shorter Poems may be read
as an acknowledgment that he saw it as having failed as both poetry and
politics. In ‘‘Poetry and War’’ (pp. 64–75) Matthew Campbell oVers a
reading of ‘‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’’ in which Auden’s ‘‘riposte to the
political eVorts of Yeats,’’ his rejection of the Shelleyan conception of the
public role of the poet, may be seen as a response to the onset of World
War II.
Taking up another topic, ‘‘Poetry and Science’’ (pp. 76–88), Tim
Armstrong Ž rst summarizes some modernist reactions to future shock,
noting that not all poets rejected the advancements in science and tech-
nology that began in the 19th century. Unlike Ezra Pound and Wyndham
Lewis, who repudiated relativity theory, Archibald MacLeish and Mar-
ianne Moore lauded Albert Einstein, the former depicting him as a
modern Prometheus, the latter viewing him as ‘‘the embodiment of
scientiŽ c open-mindedness.’’ In The Bridge Hart Crane drew distinctions
between diVerent applications of scientiŽ c knowledge, while William
Carlos Williams was capable not only of producing a futurist-inspired
celebration of industry in ‘‘Classic Scene’’ and of drawing on Einstein’s
ideas in ‘‘The Poem as a Field of Action,’’ but also of recording, as in
Paterson, the ‘‘horror of technology disarticulated.’’ Armstrong mentions
Williams in other sections of his essay as well. He singles him out as one
of those writers, along with Pound and Marianne Moore, who empha-
sized the need for linguistic ‘‘eYciency’’ and as one of those, along with
Lawrence, Stein, Pound, and Mina Loy, who in the vitalist tradition
396 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

equated creativity with sexual energy. According to Armstrong, vitalism

is one of two ‘‘currents’’ in modern poetry that were generated in response
to Darwinism, the other being a tendency to analyze the world as ‘‘system
and incipient order,’’ as exempliŽ ed by Frost’s proclivity for representing
existence as ‘‘ ow.’’
The second section of the Companion consists of chapters focusing on
various movements. In the Ž rst of these, Jacob Korg provides a useful,
straightforward version of what one might term the standard ‘‘received’’
history of imagism (pp. 127–37). In the second, covering ‘‘The New
Negro Renaissance’’ (pp. 138–52), William W. Cook seems more com-
mitted to revising literary history. After establishing the sociopolitical
context by oVering data disclosing the size and eVects of the ‘‘Great Mi-
gration,’’ he asserts that many accounts and studies of the Harlem Renais-
sance fail to re ect the artistic and ideological diversity of the work
produced by the ‘‘New Negro’’ poets. Although Countee Cullen and
Langston Hughes, for instance, are often ‘‘grouped together as the bright-
est lights of Renaissance poetry,’’ Cook sees them as members of distinct
camps. Cullen and ‘‘his cohort’’ espoused ‘‘assimilation and accultura-
tion’’ and embraced the concept of poetic ‘‘universality.’’ Hughes, in con-
trast, adopted an ideology and an aesthetic that were much more ‘‘Her-
derian,’’ committed as he was to the expression of the African American
Volksgeist. Cook also argues for uncovering or recovering the diversity of
the ‘‘New Negro Renaissance’’ by other means, such as a serious reconsid-
eration of the contributions of Mae Cowdrey, who, unlike her ‘‘closeted
sisters,’’ confronted in her poetry ‘‘the reality of her lesbian life.’’ Two of
the other chapters on movements take the reader up to and past midcen-
tury America. Exploring the relationship between ‘‘Poetry and the New
Criticism’’ (pp. 153–67) Stephen Burt and Jennifer Lewin begin by re-
counting the origins and foundational principles of New Critical meth-
odology, then proceed to demonstrate the ways New Critical taste mani-
fested itself in the poetry of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn
Warren, and Yvor Winters. The authors also highlight the irony of the fact
that a group of poet-critics who sought to maintain a strict separation be-
tween art and politics should ‘‘now be impeached or dismissed’’ for hold-
ing ‘‘reactionary’’ political views. After providing an extended deŽ nition
of ‘‘Confessionalism’’ (pp. 197–208) Lucy Collins turns to the lives and
poetry of the usual suspects, including Theodore Roethke. Emphasizing
his ‘‘spirituality,’’ she compares his explorations of ‘‘childhood experi-
ence’’ with those of Wordsworth, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz.
E. P. Walkiewicz 397

ii Robert Frost
The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen (Cam-
bridge), is one of the most stimulating books in what has become a rather
extensive series, in part because the well-established scholars who have
contributed to this collection supply rather extensive close-readings of
Frost’s verse in support of their eVorts to place his work in context,
whether that context be biographical, literary, or more broadly cultural.
As is standard for the series, the volume contains a chronology as well as a
select bibliography. The essays are of uniformly high quality, presenting
much that the nonspecialist will Ž nd new and intriguing. Taken as a
whole, they seek either to locate Frost within a vital tradition that pre-
dates modernism or to situate his aesthetics and ideology somewhere
between modernism and postmodernism. The eVort to augment Frost’s
reputation by continuing in this manner to redeŽ ne his place in literary
history is a distinguishing feature of all the studies of his work published
in 2001.
The Ž rst two chapters in the Companion add fuel to the still smolder-
ing debate over Frost’s biography. In ‘‘ ‘Stay Unassuming’: The Lives of
Robert Frost’’ (pp. 7–33) Donald G. Sheehy notes that ‘‘biographical
revision’’ has produced a ‘‘richer, more intriguingly complicated Frost.’’
Working from Lawrance Thompson’s unpublished research material,
including the extensive typescript of ‘‘Notes from Conversations with
Robert Frost,’’ and delving into the Frost family Ž nances, Sheehy reex-
amines the often-revised tale of the poet’s ‘‘removal’’ from industrialized
Lawrence to rural Derry in 1900, disclosing the possible motivations
behind the metamorphoses of this ‘‘self-deŽ ning narrative of indepen-
dence.’’ In ‘‘Frost Biography and A Witness Tree ’’ (pp. 35–47) William
Pritchard looks at a much later period in Frost’s career. Pritchard, of
course, oVered what Faggen in his introduction calls a ‘‘strong corrective’’
to Thompson’s three-volume biography via his own Frost: A Literary Life
Reconsidered (see AmLS 1984, pp. 356–58). Here Pritchard’s target is
JeVrey Meyers’s Robert Frost: A Biography (AmLS 1996, p. 359). In particu-
lar he criticizes what he sees as Meyers’s naive and heavy-handed treat-
ment of Frost’s relationship with Kay Morrison, asserting that much is
lost by reducing the ‘‘true meaning’’ of the poems in A Witness Tree to
autobiographical references. In order to convey a sense of what is over-
looked in such a reading, Pritchard presents a case for the value of
analyzing the ‘‘prosodic rhythms’’ of the poems.
398 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

Three essays near the end of the collection either proceed from bio-
graphical assumptions or draw rather extensively on biographical details.
A key premise of Mark Richardson’s chapter on ‘‘Frost’s Poetics of Con-
trol’’ (pp. 197–219), for instance, is that Frost’s wariness of ‘‘admitting
contingencies’’ is a manifestation of a ‘‘fear of insanity’’ as he conceived it.
He might  irt with confusion, but only to ‘‘stay’’ it, might lose himself in
order to Ž nd himself. Subjecting his own concept of authorship to some-
thing like Nietzsche’s questioning of the notion of an integrated, present
subject, he reaYrmed his faith in the belief that the creation of poetry
‘‘actually uniŽ es the self,’’ holding a position that cannot be fully recon-
ciled with poststructuralist thought. Casting light on the subject of
‘‘Frost’s Politics and the Cold War’’ (pp. 221–39) George Monteiro reex-
amines the details of the poet’s 1962 visit to the Soviet Union and his
private meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. Frost and Soviet premier, Mon-
teiro notes, shared an aYnity for proverbs and aphorisms, and while their
interaction did not concretely aVect the confrontational climate of the
times, their conversation was wide-ranging, encompassing political issues
as well as cultural matters. In ‘‘ ‘Synonymous with Kept’: Frost and
Economics’’ (pp. 241–60) Guy Rotella refers at key junctures to the poet’s
changing Ž nancial circumstances as he discloses Frost’s attitudes toward
economics, his use of economic tropes, and the various ‘‘economies’’ of
his verse. Neither a ‘‘constructivist’’ nor an ‘‘essentialist,’’ producing work
that exhibits both modernist and postmodernist characteristics, Frost
had faith in language yet at times articulated doubts about ‘‘perception,
conception and representation’’ that may be linked closely to the ‘‘money
debates’’ of his times.
The third and fourth chapters in the volume examine the poet’s rela-
tionship to his literary precursors, both ancient and more recent. Sound-
ing the depths of the poet’s classicism, the authors present a Frost who
was in his own way just as learned, if less ostentatiously so, than Eliot
and Pound. Taking for his topic ‘‘Frost and the Questions of Pastoral’’
(pp. 49–74) Robert Faggen not only places Frost’s variations on tradi-
tional pastoral motifs and attitudes within an American context, but also
demonstrates the ways his works ‘‘reanimate’’ Vergil’s Eclogues and em-
ploy references to Darwinian competition to counteract any apparent
optimism or simplistic celebration of nature and the country life. As
Faggen approaches them, Frost’s versions of the pastoral seem to be
informed by an ideology that anticipates poststructuralism as they inter-
rogate our nostalgia and desire for a return to origins and dramatize the
E. P. Walkiewicz 399

forces that dismantle all hierarchies. In ‘‘Frost and the Ancient Muses’’
(pp. 75–100) Helen Bacon further measures the extent of Frost’s famil-
iarity with classical literature and thought, asserting that the subtle man-
ner in which his knowledge of Greek and Latin texts permeates his poetry
has been largely neglected. In order to start us on the path toward reme-
dying this oversight she explores, among other things, the complex ways
in which ‘‘Hyla Brook’’ interacts with a Horatian ode, ‘‘Wild Grapes’’ and
‘‘One More Brevity’’ ‘‘rely for their ‘ulteriority’ ’’ on Bacchae and the
Aeneid respectively, and ‘‘The Trial by Existence’’ draws on the ‘‘myth of
Er’’ in Plato’s Republic. In a short piece appearing in Critical Ireland: New
Essays in Literature and Culture, ed. Alan A. Gillis and Aaron Kelly (Four
Courts), Rachael Buxton focuses not on Frost’s precursors but on one
of his descendants. In ‘‘ ‘Structure and Serendipity’: The In uence of
Robert Frost on Paul Muldoon’’ (pp. 14–21) Buxton points out that
Muldoon admires his predecessor’s work for its control and capricious-
ness and for its manifest acceptance of the randomness of experience.
Several pieces that appeared during the year address Frost’s con-
nections with New England. In his contribution to the Cambridge Com-
panion, for instance, Lawrence Buell begins situating ‘‘Frost as a New
England Poet’’ (pp. 101–22) by tracing Frost’s self-conscious ‘‘ ‘reinhabita-
tion’ of New England.’’ He then proceeds to reinvestigate the poet’s
aYnities with Bryant, Longfellow, and Emerson and concludes with the
proposal that, rather than validating Frost’s oeuvre by considering him a
kind of quasi-modernist, we might instead stress the importance of ‘‘the
unfashionable Fireside-Frost continuum.’’ Examining ‘‘Regional and
National Identities in Robert Frost’s and T. S. Eliot’s Criticism’’ (CLCWeb
3, ii) Angela M. Senst concludes that, unlike Eliot, Frost believed his
identity was based on his aYliation with a speciŽ c region and nation, and
that, ironically, it was the ‘‘regionalist’’ Frost rather than the ‘‘cosmo-
politan’’ Eliot who espoused ‘‘the permeability of cultural boundaries.’’ In
addition, two of the essays collected in Beyond Nature Writing take eco-
critical approaches to Frost’s depiction of New England scenes and activi-
ties. Discussing ‘‘Robert Frost, the New England Environment, and the
Discourse of Objects’’ (pp. 297–311) Kent C. Ryden proposes that by
combining descriptions of ‘‘vernacular artifacts’’ with descriptions of
natural settings and the New England cultural milieu, Frost gave readers
of his poetry access to the ‘‘environmental attitudes’’ of the rural inhabi-
tants of that region as well as to a knowledge about nature that is ‘‘en-
coded in the landscape itself.’’ His essay is followed in the volume by John
400 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

Elder’s ‘‘The Poetry of Experience’’ (pp. 312–24), a piece that Ž rst ap-
peared in NLH in 1999 in which the author attests that the experience of
actually scything a Ž eld produced a new understanding of poems such as
‘‘Mowing.’’
Two of the other chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost
concern themselves with critical elements of the New England poet’s
craftsmanship—his mastery and manipulation of traditional forms and
his concept of the nature and function of metaphor. Demonstrating that
Frost’s technical ability equals that of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and
Wordsworth, Timothy Steele conducts an illuminating close analysis of
his prosody and rhyme schemes in ‘‘ ‘Across Spaces of the Footed Line’:
The Meter and VersiŽ cation of Robert Frost’’ (pp. 123–53). Drawing our
attention to the multiplicity of ways in which Frost balances ‘‘likeness
and unlikeness, coherence and diversity,’’ he also proVers the possibility
that study of Frost’s artistry will encourage and enable the poets of this
century to mend the ‘‘breach between rhythm and meter’’ that developed
in the last one. Judith Oster’s ‘‘Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor’’ (pp. 155–77)
also relies on a perceptive close-reading of a number of poems —such as
‘‘Birches,’’ ‘‘The Silken Tent,’’ and especially ‘‘Maple’’ —that appear in
one way or another to explore or demonstrate self-consciously the scope,
limits, and possibilities of thinking and writing metaphorically. One of
Frost’s many metaphors for metaphor is ‘‘the prism of the intellect’’ and
his may, indeed, help us arrive at new ways of envisioning things, but they
also, Oster concludes, encourage us to ‘‘join in the game,’’ become im-
mersed in linguistic play.
Frost may have been a playful trickster, a master of misdirection, a
devotee of language games who often found delight in design, but as
contributor after contributor to this collection makes clear, those designs
at times could become tangibly, appallingly dark. Blanford Parker’s ‘‘Frost
and the Meditative Lyric’’ (pp. 179–96) consists for the most part of an
extended reading of ‘‘Directive’’ that arrives at the conclusion that
‘‘Frost’s great poem of old age’’ situates itself in opposition to late mod-
ernism and its reliance on the ‘‘teleological structures’’ of the romance.
Accepting the insuYciency of human vision and agency to shape and
master the material world, Frost was, in Parker’s view, the only major poet
of his time ‘‘who spoke for science.’’ Examining ten poems published in
the period 1916–42 John Cunningham traces the delineation of the
‘‘Human Presence in Frost’s Universe’’ (pp. 261–72), a universe ‘‘charac-
terized by mindless forces and unconscious obstacles.’’ Though in poems
E. P. Walkiewicz 401

such as ‘‘Design’’ Frost ironically contrasted the human desire to discover

or provide ‘‘value’’ with the purposelessness of the cosmos, he continued
to describe in his verse ‘‘heroic acts of presence that face otherwise univer-
sal absence.’’ The chapter on Frost in A Companion to Twentieth-Century
Poetry also serves as a survey of some of the poet’s ‘‘desert places.’’ In
‘‘Robert Frost: North of Boston’’ (pp. 369–80) Alex Calder concludes his
overview of that deŽ ning volume by looking at moments in the verse
when the poet evokes the otherness of nature or indulges in the serious
‘‘game of imagining the absence of human boundaries.’’
Although critics, including Faggen in his introduction to the Compan-
ion, continue to refer to the impact of William James’s work on Frost’s
thinking, a pair of articles in ArQ advance the argument that the poet’s
more profound skepticism impelled him beyond pragmatism. In ‘‘ ‘The
More I Say I’: Frost and the Construction of the Self ’’ (57, ii: 93–115) Jason
Isaac Munro asserts that Frost may often have sounded like a pragmatist
but in doing so took ‘‘pragmatism to its limits,’’ moving beyond James by
undermining any ‘‘stable sense of Self.’’ Reading ‘‘A Servant to Servants’’
in the spirit of the ‘‘radical and ultimately liberating negation’’ that he be-
lieves informs Frost’s best verse, Munro produces a convincing interpre-
tation of the poem that might strike some readers as feminist in orienta-
tion. David H. Evans, too, sees the poet engaging the philosopher in a
dialogue that discloses Frost’s greater capacity for accepting discontinuity
and uncertainty. In ‘‘Guiding Metaphors: Robert Frost and the Rhetoric
of Jamesian Pragmatism’’ (57, iii: 61–90) Evans analyzes James’s rhetorical
strategies, Ž nding that he relied in key places throughout his writings on
‘‘the Ž gure of the continuous path.’’ The poet’s responses to the philoso-
pher recount journeys that are characterized instead by discontinuities,
bifurcations, and interruptions, calling into question James’s eVorts to
naturalize the ‘‘truth process’’ through his use of metaphor.

iii Langston Hughes

Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van
Vechten, 1925–1964, ed. Emily Bernard (Knopf ), is only the second vol-
ume of Hughes’s correspondence to appear in print. That alone would
make its publication a noteworthy event. But this edition oVers more
than additional insights into the life and opinions of one of America’s
most important writers. It conveys the variety and vitality of the African
American arts scene during the Ž rst half of the last century, and it
402 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

functions as a kind of psychological study of a usually productive and

symbiotic but sometimes vexed and problematic relationship between
writer and patron. Having selected from nearly 1,500 extant letters, Ber-
nard provides a rich and generous sampling of a correspondence that
spanned nearly the entire length of Hughes’s professional life. Although
Van Vechten persisted from time to time in assuming the role of mentor
instructing protégé, a role that inevitably involves some degree of conde-
scension, Bernard insists that ‘‘Langston loved’’ the novelist, critic, and
photographer until the very end, when Van Vechten had become embit-
tered by what he felt was a lack of recognition for, among other things, his
eVorts in establishing and building the James Weldon Johnson Collec-
tion at Yale.
As is widely known, Van Vechten served as midwife to The Weary
Blues, establishing the long-lasting pattern of Hughes voluntarily submit-
ting his manuscripts to the older man to be not only critiqued and but
also, if necessary, ‘‘pitched’’ to the Knopfs. Van Vechten also provided
sound advice regarding the business of publishing and producing plays.
On several occasions, when Hughes’s personal circumstances became dire
or when he was drumming up Ž nancial support for a cause and he wrote
to ask for a loan or a contribution, Van Vechten almost always came
through. This is not to say that the relationship was one-sided by any
means. Hughes never forgot his debt to Van Vechten. He provided him
with material for his articles on African American culture, refused to
desert him following the Nigger Heaven controversy, sent him checks
when he possessed the means to do so, and presented an address in tribute
to him to the National Institute of Arts and Letters shortly after his death.
Nor is it to say that the two men always saw eye to eye. When, for
instance, Van Vechten conveyed that he disliked most of the poems in the
manuscript that would become A New Song, citing a lack of artistic merit
and questioning the rationale behind attacking the Waldorf in ‘‘Adver-
tisement for the Waldorf-Astoria,’’ the poet Ž rmly asserted that he liked
his ‘‘proletarian poems’’ and defended both his taste and his politics.
In several of his communications, Van Vechten remarks on the quality
of Hughes’s letters to him, at one point surmising that their correspon-
dence will be the best thing in the Yale collection, and a number of the
poet’s missives display his considerable knowledge and understanding of
jazz and the blues, his developed sense of humor, his characteristic lin-
guistic facility, and his eye (and ear) for detail. Early on in the correspon-
dence he oVers a profoundly personal explanation of the ‘‘monotonous
E. P. Walkiewicz 403

melancholy,’’ the ‘‘animal sadness’’ he feels in the blues, drawing on a

childhood memory and an experience in the Kameroon. His account of
his stint as a Hollywood screenwriter exhibits his sensitivity to and accep-
tance of the absurd, and his descriptions of Haiti, Mexico, and the Soviet
Union are rich and evocative.
Bernard indicates that ‘‘this is a book about a friendship,’’ a friendship
that endured for approximately 40 years despite the fact that Hughes’s
reputation waxed as Van Vechten’s waned. It is indeed that. But the letters
recount more than the ebbs and  ows of the complex relationship be-
tween the two men. From the correspondence one could reconstruct a
partial chronology of the lives and professional activities of some of the
most prominent African American cultural icons of the 20th century,
including Marian Anderson, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul
Robeson, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters. Furthermore, they provide
additional insights into the grounds and dynamics of the personal, politi-
cal, and public relations battles among some of the most prominent
critics of and contributors to the Harlem Renaissance.
The already considerable interest in Hughes’s poetry will only be
augmented by the release of the Ž rst three volumes of his collected
works —The Poems: 1921–1940, The Poems: 1941–1950, and The Poems:
1951–1967 (Missouri). Ed. Arnold Rampersad, chair of the editorial board
for the series as a whole, each of these volumes contains the complete
texts of the books of poetry Hughes produced during the period in
question as well as a section or sections presenting uncollected poems
arranged in chronological order by original publication date. Thus the
Ž rst volume includes The Weary Blues (1926), Fines Clothes to the Jew
(1927), Dear Lovely Death (1931), and A New Song (1938); the second,
Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Jim Crow’s Last Stand (1943), Fields of
Wonder (1947), and One-Way Ticket; and the third, Montage of a Dream
Deferred (1951), Ask Your Mama (1961), and The Panther and the Lash
(1967). Author of The Life of Langston Hughes (1986), Rampersad provides
a chronology as well as separate biographically oriented introductions for
each volume, rendering a very valuable resource even more useful.
Daniel T. McGee Ž nds similarities between Hughes’s jazz-in uenced
poetics and T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitic brand of ‘‘linguistic universalism’’ in
‘‘Dada Da Da: Sounding the Jew in Modernism’’ (ELH 68: 501–27). The
Waste Land seeks to eliminate the ‘‘cultural diVerences’’ between the
multiple languages it employs as they are subsumed into one universal
language, foregrounding instead the ‘‘metaphysical diVerence between
404 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

language and absence.’’ A similar concept of language, McGee asserts,

‘‘along with a lesser degree of the anti-semitism that informed it,’’ was
basic to the Harlem Renaissance aesthetic. Poems in Hughes’s Fine
Clothes to the Jew, in particular, install jazz as a ‘‘single, universal medium
of meaning.’’ Moreover, although Hughes’s anti-Semitism is bound up
with his Marxist assault on what he believes to be a ‘‘racist economy,’’
both he and Eliot equate the word ‘‘Jew’’ with ‘‘barbaric liberalism,’’
further confounding eVorts to maintain a clear line of demarcation be-
tween African American modernism and the ‘‘projects’’ of Eliot or Joyce.

iv Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Robert Hayden

A number of other pieces endeavor to place in context the poetry of
African American writers, both those who were to a greater or lesser
degree aYliated with the Harlem Renaissance and one who was not. In a
note on ‘‘Countee Cullen, Keats, and ‘Uncle Jim’ ’’ (NConL 31, ii: 4–5)
George Monteiro sheds some new light on Cullen’s commitment to tradi-
tional forms, pointing out that the poem demonstrates the extent of his
uneasiness with the title ‘‘the ‘black’ Keats’’ and that in it the poet tries to
convince himself that his allegiance to ‘‘high Art’’ will prevent him from
‘‘suVering an Uncle Tom’s abasement.’’ Two of the essays included in Jean
Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance focus for the most part on the poems
in Cane. That diverse and experimental work should be seen as a ‘‘fore-
runner’’ rather ‘‘than a direct emanation of the renaissance,’’ as Geneviève
Fabre emphasizes in ‘‘Dramatic and Musical Structures in ‘Harvest Song’
and ‘Kabnis’: Toomer’s Cane and the Harlem Renaissance’’ (pp. 109–27).
Experimenting with the work song in ‘‘Harvest Song,’’ Toomer paid
homage ‘‘to that part of the rural and folk tradition’’ that was largely
ignored by the poets of Harlem. In ‘‘Black Modernism? The Early Poetry
of Jean Toomer and Claude McKay’’ (pp. 128–41) Wolfgang Karrer,
following a theoretic agenda somewhat similar to McGee’s, questions why
we analyze the two writers’ verse in the context of the Harlem Renaissance
rather than in the context of ‘‘international modernism.’’ Indeed, Karrer
argues, ‘‘retrospective’’ association of Toomer and McKay with the New
Negro group ‘‘distorts their trajectories’’ through the ‘‘early modernist’’
literary and cultural ‘‘Ž eld.’’ McKay’s ‘‘trajectory,’’ which is clearly ‘‘left-
wing,’’ is obscured by the diYculty of gaining access to many of his more
political poems. Toomer’s description of his eVorts to bring together the
various parts of Cane re ects a stance that is ‘‘clearly modernist,’’ and he
E. P. Walkiewicz 405

adapted a ‘‘modernist aesthetic of collage.’’ Moreover, Karrer suggests, the

two writers’ status as outsiders to the movement is underscored by the fact
that neither modernism nor socialism had more than ‘‘a  eeting or
marginal’’ in uence on the Harlem Renaissance after 1924.
Robert Hayden certainly admired the work of renaissance writers, but
the metropolis with which he is associated, of course, is not New York but
Detroit. Hayden, Frank Rashid indicates, Ž rst began writing poetry
about his childhood neighborhood, Paradise Valley, in the 1930s, then
revisited the locale in his work after several decades had passed and the
area had been ‘‘sacriŽ ced to urban renewal.’’ In ‘‘Robert Hayden’s Detroit
Blues Elegies’’ (Callaloo 24: 200–226) Rashid argues that the poet drew
on both ‘‘Afro-American and European artistic traditions,’’ especially the
blues and the elegy, in responding to the lives and deaths of the residents
of Paradise Valley. As Rashid deŽ nes the diVerence, blues compositions
frequently oVer a means of changing the conditions being addressed or
make some eVort to ‘‘mollify the sadness,’’ while elegies express an eVort
‘‘to make sense of an irrevocable loss.’’ As Hayden grew older, he tended
in his Detroit poems to focus more on the elegiac, although the blues
tradition remained an in uence on his work. In Paradise Valley he found
‘‘models of integrative experience’’ that were not based on race, and by
exploring in his poetry the particulars of urban existence in all its diver-
sity Hayden makes us intensely aware of those things that separate and
unite us and ‘‘discovers the common source of the elegy and the blues.’’

v Amy Lowell, H.D.

Three long articles challenge or enlarge on established feminist narratives
and interpretations of aspects of the lives and works of Amy Lowell and
H.D., thereby making signiŽ cant contributions to the Ž eld of gender
studies. In ‘‘Amy Lowell’s Keats: Reading Straight, Writing Lesbian’’ (YJC
14: 319–51) Margaret Homans contends that if one can clear one’s mind of
preconceptions and resist the impulse to ‘‘map’’ one’s ‘‘own concerns’’
onto her work, one will discover ‘‘a lack of Ž t between much of Lowell’s
writing and the ‘lesbian theme’ for which she is now known.’’ Referring
often in this intricate and groundbreaking essay to both the histori-
cal context and salient biographical facts, Homans demonstrates that
Lowell’s identities as ‘‘lesbian’’ and ‘‘woman poet’’ were generated ‘‘dy-
namically’’ and remained in  ux throughout her life. A committed collec-
tor of the poet’s books and manuscripts, Lowell would have much pre-
406 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

ferred ‘‘lover of Keats’’ to either of those two labels. Keats’s poetry and
‘‘imagined person,’’ Homans argues, ‘‘supplied and possibly also helped
create’’ Lowell’s evolving ‘‘needs,’’ ‘‘including her recognition of her desire
for women and her identiŽ cation across an array of gendered positions.’’
Analyzing Lowell’s biography of Keats as well as her poetry, Homans
reveals how she endeavors to aYrm his masculinity and virility, reverse
the process of his ‘‘transformation into a gay male icon,’’ in order to
validate ‘‘her choice when she appropriates’’ him ‘‘to voice erotic feeling
for the woman she loved.’’ While Lowell identiŽ ed with Keats as a ‘‘lover
of women,’’ she also defended and identiŽ ed with the women he ‘‘wrote
about, loved, and mistreated’’ and turned the tables on him by making
him into both a ‘‘feminized art object’’ and an ‘‘object’’ of her class
condescension, again eVecting a ‘‘reversal of genders.’’ Having succeeded
in achieving her expressed goal of showing what can be gained by focus-
ing on texts other than those feminist critics usually examine, Homans
concludes that categories such as ‘‘ ‘woman’ and ‘lesbian’ will gain fresh
usefulness if and as they open up to the endless variability of gender and
sexuality, now as in the past.’’
Joanna Spiro also makes and carefully substantiates some provocative
claims in ‘‘Weighed in the Balance: H.D.’s Resistance to Freud in ‘Writ-
ing on the Wall’ ’’ (AI 58: 597–621). Feminists, Spiro reminds us, have for
some time esteemed H.D.’s memoir Tribute to Freud for its defense of
female selfhood and creativity and for ‘‘its critique of male gender author-
ity in the theorization of female sexuality.’’ Spiro proposes, however, that
we reexamine H.D.’s response to the father of psychoanalysis to evaluate
whether we wish to endorse the means by which she achieves these ends,
for she creates the ‘‘resistance substructure’’ of ‘‘Writing on the Wall’’ (the
title of the original version of the memoir) by invoking ‘‘classical texts of
Jewish-Christian disputation’’ and she dismisses Freud’s diagnosis of her
by insisting that when he delivers it he is ‘‘speaking ‘like a Jew.’ ’’ Rein-
terpreting the signiŽ cance of the spearless statue of Athena that Freud
passed to her during analysis, H.D. turns it into a symbol of his ‘‘essential
Jewish materialism’’ rather than of her ‘‘essential female inadequacy.’’
Enlarging on H.D.’s references to the Book of Daniel and The Merchant
of Venice, Spiro Ž nds, moreover, that she assumes the roles of both Daniel
and Portia as she suppresses and appropriates Freud’s otherness in order
to divest him of his ‘‘interpretive authority’’ and, in a sense, ‘‘forces an
undesired —indeed posthumous —‘conversion’ ’’ on Freud-Shylock, re-
casting the psychoanalyst’s ‘‘work in Christian terms.’’ Whereas Freud
E. P. Walkiewicz 407

‘‘failed or refused to understand’’ and acknowledge H.D.’s ‘‘feminist self-

understanding,’’ she responded by employing the tactic of ‘‘subsuming’’
his ‘‘Jewish identity.’’
Edward P. Comentale examines the activities of militant suVragettes
such as Christabel Parkhurst and employs Jane Ellen Harrison’s studies of
classical ritual to elucidate H.D.’s aesthetics in his tripartite article
‘‘Thesmophoria: SuVragettes, Sympathetic Magic, and H.D.’s Ritual
Poetics’’ (MoMo 8: 471–92). According to Comentale, ‘‘suVrage protest,
Harrison’s anthropology, and H.D.’s poetry’’ comprise a ‘‘charged matrix
of worldly and aesthetic praxes’’ that opposes the ‘‘rigidly oppositional
logic’’ of 20th-century avant-gardism. Con ating ‘‘deeds and words,
power and knowledge,’’ militant suVragettes embraced the notion of a
‘‘radically positive’’ and ‘‘closely integrated community.’’ Harrison, Com-
entale explains, ‘‘explored this collective’’ mode as embodied in Greek
ritual as well as ‘‘suVrage protest,’’ providing ‘‘an explicit account of the
feminist turn to classical practice.’’ In her texts she ‘‘celebrates an early
primitive society deŽ ned by female practice,’’ by ‘‘the ritual performance
of desire.’’ Like Parkhurst and Harrison, H.D. came to view ‘‘sexual
restraint’’ as positive, and as a result of the mystical experiences in Greece
which she discussed with Freud she began to ‘‘link desire, restraint, and
vision.’’ Quoting Adalaide Morris, Comentale echoes her assertion that
the poetry H.D. produced from that point on is akin to ritual in that it
‘‘not only means but does.’’ Her poems, like all works of ‘‘classical mod-
ernism’’ as he deŽ nes it, blur not only ‘‘the distinctions that inform the
logic of modernity at large’’ but also the distinction between ‘‘modernism
and its legacy, namely the politics of postmodernity.’’

vi Wallace Stevens
The 25th anniversary issue of WSJour, ed. Bart Eeckhout, presents an
assortment of ‘‘International Perspectives on Wallace Stevens.’’ The ini-
tial three essays form a cluster, for all touch in one way or another on how
Stevens and others deŽ ned his ‘‘Americanness.’’ As the title of his contri-
bution makes evident, this topic is central to Stephen Matterson’s ‘‘ ‘The
Whole Habit of the Mind’: Stevens, Americanness, and the Use of Else-
where’’ (25: 111–21). Matterson reviews the in uence of Roy Harvey
Pearce’s The Continuity of American Poetry (1961) in establishing Stevens
as an archetypal American poet, a gesture that was impelled to a degree by
Cold War ideology. Later critics such as Harold Bloom, Milton J. Bates,
408 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

and Frank Lentricchia have continued to identify his work with various
American traditions or align it with wider American ‘‘cultural narratives,’’
overlooking the extent to which his poetry enacts ‘‘a struggle to be an
American,’’ one that led him to fabricate an identity when his fascination
with the foreign and exotic led him to doubt the assumption that his
Americanness was innate. As Carolyn Masel makes clear in ‘‘Stevens and
England: A DiYcult Crossing’’ (25: 122–37) British writers and aca-
demics, ironically, have not, for the most part, recognized Stevens’s own
exoticism and ties to European poetic movements, placing him, as a
typical American romantic, in the midst of what they view as a ‘‘great
néant. ’’ A variety of additional factors have contributed to the coolness
with which his work has been received in England, including the vagaries
of the publishing business and the segregation of the study of British and
American literatures in many English institutions. According to Mervyn
Nicholson in ‘‘Stevens and Canada, 1903’’ (25: 138–47), the 23-year-old
poet’s camping trip in the wilderness of British Columbia was a formative
experience, an American ‘‘gender ritual’’ that not only helped to prepare
him for the competitive rigors of adulthood but also imprinted a percep-
tion of the bigness and starkness of the North American landscape that
in uenced his characteristic representation of nature as ‘‘sublime but
austere.’’
Until rather recently Stevens was largely ignored in Poland as well,
according to the account Jacek Gutorow provides in ‘‘Stevens and Po-
land’’ (25: 183–92). In part this was because after 1945 the Polish literary
establishment rejected poetry that did not have an overt social or political
content, in part because the translation of Western poetry was oYcially
forbidden from 1945 to 1956, and in part because of the diYculty of
translating Stevens’s work into Polish. Oddly enough, Stevens’s reputa-
tion has beneŽ ted from the considerable popularity of the poetry of John
Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, both of whom mentioned him in a New
York School issue of the most important Polish journal devoted to non-
Polish literature, and in 2000 the same journal published a special Ste-
vens issue designed to present the older poet as contributing signiŽ cantly
to the transition from ‘‘the hard modernism of Eliot’’ to the poetics of
postmodernism. Despite his manifest francophilia, Stevens has fared no
better among the French, as Christian Calliyannis recounts in ‘‘The
Sound of Wallace Stevens in France’’ (25: 193–210). His work is infre-
quently cited and no thorough, coordinated attempt has been under-
E. P. Walkiewicz 409

taken to translate it, for the most part as a result of the belief that
translating it into ‘‘cognate French’’ is impossible, not only because the
‘‘signiŽ cations’’ diVer but also because the attempt automatically calls
attention to the major diVerences between the two poetic traditions. In a
heavily theoretical discussion, Calliyannis argues that contemporary
French culture does not contain an ‘‘equivalent for the American concept
of imagination’’ and that it has responded diVerently to its more recently
acquired awareness of the fragmentary and ‘‘fortuitous,’’ an awareness
that has been a part of the American tradition since Whitman, impelling
quests for a fundamental unity.
Massimo Bacigalupo and Milton J. Bates, on the other hand, deliver
accounts of more successful eVorts to translate Stevens’s poetry into
Italian and to teach it in China. In ‘‘ ‘A New Girl in a New Season’:
Stevens, Poggioli, and the Making of Mattino domenicale ’’ (25: 254–70)
Bacigalupo describes the collaborative eVorts of Stevens and Renato
Poggioli to produce Mattino domenicale ed altre poesie (1954), the only
volume of Stevens’s verse to appear in a language other than English
before his death, and according to Bacigalupo an anthology that perhaps
remains ‘‘unequaled for its editorial as well as critical quality.’’ An expert
on Russian and comparative literature, Poggioli was in the audience
when Stevens gave his 1947 lecture ‘‘Three Academic Pieces’’ at Harvard,
and the Florentine man of letters began writing to the American poet a
few days later. Not only did Poggioli obtain Stevens’s permission to
translate a sampling of his poems for an Italian edition, but he also
elicited a series of glosses, some of which still can be found only at the
back of Mattino domenicale. Summarizing his experience with ‘‘Teaching
Stevens in China’’ (25: 173–82) Bates attests that Stevens’s poetry is not
inaccessible to intelligent Chinese undergraduates and graduate students
because they have been extensively exposed to Western culture and be-
cause they are capable of Ž nding in their own poetic inheritance ana-
logues of Stevens’s ‘‘metonymic method.’’
Both William W. Bevis and Zhaoming Qian explore additional con-
nections between Stevens’s verse and Asian culture. Addressing the sub-
ject of ‘‘Stevens, Buddhism, and the Meditative Mind’’ (25: 148–63) Bevis
draws parallels between the poet’s ‘‘meditative habits of mind’’ and the
practices of Mahayana Buddhism. Stevens’s late work, characterized by a
‘‘Buddhist meditative approach’’ which calmly accepts discontinuity, un-
certainty, and an improvisational concept of subjectivity, is ‘‘more radi-
410 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

cally postmodern than is usually recognized.’’ In ‘‘Late Stevens, Nothing-

ness, and the Orient’’ (25: 164–72) Qian cites a letter Stevens wrote to
Peter Lee a few months before his death as evidence that he was conscious
of the in uence of the Orient on the ‘‘sensibility’’ of his Ž nal lyrics.
Examining, like Bevis, Stevens’s representations of the ‘‘merging of the
thing itself and the nothing’’ (or of ‘‘voidness and suchness,’’ as Bevis puts
it), Qian suggests that Stevens’s evocations of this state may re ect the
poet’s familiarity with not only Guo Xi’s 11th-century essay ‘‘The Noble
Features of the Forest and Stream’’ but also with certain masterpieces of
Chan painting owned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Three additional contributions to the special international issue of
WSJour also touch on the poet’s appropriation of linguistic or other ele-
ments from non-American cultures. In ‘‘ ‘A Funny Foreigner of Meek Ad-
dress’: Stevens and English as a Foreign Language’’ (25: 211–19) Natalie
Gerber argues that Stevens self-consciously employed foreign words,
especially French ones, in his poetry because of the diVerence in ‘‘stress
pattern.’’ In early poems his intention was often to create comic eVects, in
later ones to ‘‘draw attention to the variable nature of description,’’ a
realization that ‘‘provokes play’’ rather than ‘‘anxiety’’ in Stevens. The
motivation behind Stevens’s fascination with ‘‘things Cuban’’ is explored
by Lázaro Lima in ‘‘Haunting the Corpus Delicti: Rafael Campo’s What
the Body Told and Wallace Stevens’ (Modernist) Body’’ (25: 220–32).
Stevens ‘‘defamiliarizes’’ the United States and re-creates it in Cuba in
‘‘Academic Discourse in Havana’’ in order to interrogate ‘‘his own anxie-
ties about things American’’ and confront the modernist problem of re-
constructing a culture out of the remains of a decadent tradition. In
‘‘Stevens and Croce: Varieties of Lyrical Intuition’’ (25: 233–53) T. J. Mor-
ris contends that the poet’s reading of works by the Italian philosopher re-
sulted in them sharing two ‘‘concerns’’: ‘‘the priorness of the value-term in
poetic utterance’’ and ‘‘the resistance of poetic language to conceptual de-
termination.’’ Benedetto Croce and Stevens shared the belief that ‘‘the
concept’’ is to be taken as ‘‘an evasion of a base state of pure intuitive
knowledge’’ which frequently manifests itself as ‘‘ ‘an emptying’ or ‘Ž rst-
ness,’ ’’ a position that certainly resonates with the attitudes the poet may
have absorbed from Asian sources.
Philip Hobsbaum’s chapter, ‘‘Wallace Stevens: Harmonium,’’ pp. 414–
26 in A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, points out the sim-
ilarities between Stevens’s early poetry and that of some of his ‘‘French-
iŽ ed’’ contemporaries and isolates passages that bear signs of his reading
E. P. Walkiewicz 411

of Jules Laforgue and Paul Verlaine. Stevens’s Ž rst book, Hobsbaum

states, is uniŽ ed by the conviction that but for the ‘‘enlivening vision of
poetry,’’ life is sterile and dreadful. In ‘‘Stevens and Davidson’s Concept
of Metaphor’’ (English Studies 82: 247–52) Clive Stroud-Drinkwater sug-
gests we read Stevens’s poetry in the light of the contemporary American
philosopher Donald Davidson’s notion that the sole ‘‘meaning of a meta-
phor is the literal one.’’
Two critics consider the ideological aspects of Stevens’s later poetry.
James Lucas focuses his attention on one of the poet’s lesser-known works
in ‘‘Fiction, Politics, and Chocolate Whipped Cream: Wallace Stevens’s
‘Forces, the Will, & the Weather’ ’’ (ELH 68: 745–61). He character-
izes the poem as a blatant artiŽ ce marked by a ‘‘whimsy’’ and ‘‘elab-
orate defensiveness’’ that manifest themselves in an ‘‘absurdist pseudo-
epistemology.’’ It exhibits ‘‘Stevens at his most ideologically evasive,’’
perversely including political allusions at the same time that it ‘‘pursues a
radically apolitical agenda.’’ Barbara L. Estrin’s Stevens is politically en-
gaged to a signiŽ cantly greater degree. In The American Love Lyric after
Auschwitz and Hiroshima (Palgrave) Estrin proceeds from Stevens’s impli-
cation in ‘‘Three Academic Pieces’’ (1947) that there is a causal connection
between ‘‘the woman-denying conventions’’ of the Petrarchan love poem
and ‘‘the other-denying impulses’’ that led to Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
Seemingly a logical outgrowth of her earlier investigation of Petrarchan-
ism in Thomas Wyatt, John Donne, and Andrew Marvell, this book dis-
closes the complicated ways in which Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Adri-
enne Rich ‘‘turn against’’ the inevitably death-dealing ‘‘European poetic’’
they desire to embrace in their verse. She begins her multistranded argu-
ment by drawing parallels between Stevens’s ‘‘subversion of Petrarchan
idealization’’ and the sculpture of Alberto Giacometti. Proceeding to oVer
an extended analysis of ‘‘Auroras of Autumn,’’ Estrin argues that it defers
‘‘Petrarch’s Ovidian transmutations,’’ thereby conŽ rming Stevens’s ‘‘pre-
sumption’’ in ‘‘Three Academic Pieces’’ that ‘‘the songs poets sing’’ make
possible the Bomb. In ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’’ Stevens
advances the project of subversion by conceiving a woman writer who
might recast the existing narcissistic ‘‘forms of desire,’’ but the undertak-
ing fails because of the diYculty of erasing ‘‘cultural memory.’’ Having in
those two poems worked his way ‘‘through the desire for desire,’’ he revises
the aubade in ‘‘The World as Meditation,’’ rewriting the Petrarchan
poetic and producing a postwar poem that ‘‘challenges the narrative ex-
clusions’’ of not only his own verse but that of his European predecessors.
412 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

vii William Carlos Williams

In the excellent chapter on Williams in A Cambridge Companion to Po-
etry, ‘‘William Carlos Williams: Spring and All ’’ (pp. 403–13), Lisa M.
Steinman aptly points out the ‘‘openness’’ of his experimental text, the
‘‘spring’’ that functions as his answer to ‘‘Eliot’s April.’’ Providing a per-
ceptive review of the text’s multiple ‘‘concerns and discursive registers,’’
she concludes that no single approach can successfully pull together the
book’s various strands, that no one Ž gure suYces to serve as its ‘‘cen-
tral emblem.’’ She suggests that John Dewey’s notion that thought must
be considered a process that includes ‘‘doubt and suspension’’ is one
source of the ‘‘open-endedness’’ of Williams’s response to the European
avant-garde.
John Beck conducts a more protracted investigation of this particular
convergence of American letters and American pragmatism in Writing
the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American
Cultural Politics (SUNY). Beck approaches the similarities he discovers in
Williams’s and Dewey’s diagnoses of and aspirations for American de-
mocracy as a case of ‘‘ideological con uence.’’ Both employ a vocabulary
of ‘‘holism, organicism, and mediation’’ as they attempt to spell out
‘‘radical alternatives’’ to the culture of corporate America while retaining
the more salutary elements of modern life. In so doing they end up
relying on a discourse that is shaped by not only the goals but also the
shortcomings and contradictions of ‘‘a progressive liberalism.’’
Beck begins by examining what he sees as the two men’s similar
conceptions of democracy and of the role of the artist in a democracy.
Both believed in the basic importance of community and communica-
tion; both rejected dualism and embraced cultural pluralism. Dewey, like
Williams, eschewed the kind of art that functions as merely ‘‘the adorning
legitimation of the status quo’’; for both, ‘‘life and art’’ must fuse as
‘‘experience.’’ Relying on several studies of the history of the American
educational system and focusing on Williams’s The Embodiment of
Knowledge Beck next looks at the ways the poet and the philosopher
sought to re-wed knowledge, experience, and agency, to reopen ‘‘channels
of communication’’ that have been obstructed by ‘‘forces of incorpora-
tion.’’ Dewey’s ‘‘consummatory experience,’’ Beck argues, Ž nds its equiv-
alent in Williams’s ‘‘contact,’’ a concept inextricably bound up with the
poet’s emphasis on the primacy of the local environment, his campaign
for ‘‘recognition of the American idiom.’’ Although Dewey and Williams
E. P. Walkiewicz 413

moved toward the political left in the 1930s, neither could accept the
teleological bent of communism, which Williams saw as an un-American
ideology. Beck concludes his analysis with a close scrutiny of Paterson, to
his mind the consummate expression of Williams’s pragmatic conception
of the political role of art in a democracy.
Perhaps the most interesting passages in Beck’s study are those that call
attention to the contradictions and tensions in, the limitations of Wil-
liams’s ideas and attitudes. The question of whether or not to ‘‘ground
cultural production in the everyday,’’ for example, represented a real
dilemma for Williams. Similarly, his ‘‘poetics of contact’’ was challenged
by a fear of loss of control and absorption into the masses, as ‘‘Light
Becomes Darkness’’ and ‘‘At the Ball Game’’ suggest. Moreover, the kind
of ‘‘cultural criticism’’ in which both he and Dewey engaged combines
‘‘fervent belief and optimism with a hopeless vagueness over speciŽ cs.’’

viii Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop

David W. Gilcrest’s partly biographical article on Marianne Moore’s
‘‘The Camperdown Elm’’ is further evidence both of the increasing vis-
ibility of ecocritical approaches to 20th-century texts and of the fact that
such approaches need not be theoretically naive. In ‘‘Rhetorical Redemp-
tion, Environmental Poetics, and the Case of the Camperdown Elm’’
(ISLE 8: 169–80) he treats Moore’s composition as a ‘‘specimen’’ of ‘‘en-
vironmental poetry,’’ which he deŽ nes as poetic endeavors that transcend
‘‘mere environmental mimesis’’ to somehow re ect ‘‘a global ecology
conditioned by environmental stress.’’ Moore’s poem exhibits some of the
‘‘central ambitions’’ and ‘‘dilemmas’’ of environmental poetry because it
seeks to remedy a situation, to make something happen, yet displays the
awareness that any ‘‘symbolic appropriation’’ of nature, even by a poet
who manifests ‘‘green sympathy,’’ encourages degradation of the environ-
ment. Although Moore tries to minimize this eVect by employing her
‘‘poetics of restraint,’’ she cannot completely eliminate it. In the Ž nal
analysis, to paraphrase Gilcrest, she sinned to help save a part of the
natural world, for her appeal to the citizens of Brooklyn had its desired
eVect and the tree still survives in Prospect Park. In ‘‘Marianne Moore:
Observations,’’ pp. 427–36 in A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry,
Elizabeth Wilson also emphasizes the poet’s ‘‘engagement with the mate-
rial world’’ and her preoccupation with the problem of ‘‘how to describe
without owning.’’ Engaging at length ‘‘When I Buy Pictures,’’ Wilson,
414 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

like Gilcrest, exposes the techniques Moore uses to limit the violence
done to ‘‘autonomous things,’’ including the strategy of calling attention
to the ‘‘materiality and constructedness of her art.’’ Turning her attention
to ‘‘England,’’ Wilson points out the connection between Moore’s ab-
sorption in the ‘‘problematic of possession and ownership’’ and her cri-
tique of colonialism. While Moore was committed to making poetry
matter, she also was attracted to purely linguistic challenges, as Marité
Oubrier Austin meticulously illustrates in ‘‘Marianne Moore’s Transla-
tion of the Term galand in the Fables of La Fontaine’’ (Papers on French
Seventeenth Century Literature 28: 81–91).
Moore’s politics are further scrutinized by Lorrie Goldensohn in ‘‘To-
wards a Non-Combatant War Poetry: Jarrell, Moore, Bishop,’’ pp. 213–35
in Dressing Up for War: Transformations of Gender and Genre in the
Discourse and Literature of War, ed. Aránzazu Usandizaga and Andrew
Monnickendam (Rodopi). Although Moore composed ‘‘staunchly anti-
militarist’’ works in the ’30s, once World War II began she displayed, as
Goldensohn puts it, ‘‘a guilt-tinged fealty’’ to the Allied combatants.
Harshly criticizing Moore for what he viewed as her credulous, ‘‘civilian’’
elevation of soldiers to heroes, Randall Jarrell in his own verse evokes
pilots who are at once innocent victims and guilty ‘‘murderers.’’ Unlike
Wilfred Owen, Jarrell does not render erotic the youthful dead in his
poems but rather displays a ‘‘maternal tenderness’’ for the young pilots
that is ‘‘matched by a tenderness’’ for the people and cities they destroyed
on their bombing raids. Elizabeth Bishop, however, ‘‘bypasses’’ even this
‘‘dialectic,’’ viewing any kind of militarism as a sort of contagious disease,
any depiction of ‘‘heroic masculinity’’ as a source of profound ‘‘social
injury.’’ Instead, in ‘‘Roosters’’ she exposes allegorically the ‘‘gender econ-
omy’’ that produces warriors and rewrites ‘‘the Christian myth of holy
sacriŽ ce’’ that Ž nds its expression in Jarrell’s war poetry as well as Owen’s.
The poems Bishop wrote during the war ended up in her Ž rst collec-
tion, a book she took more than a decade to complete. Surveying that
volume in ‘‘Elizabeth Bishop: North & South,’’ pp. 457–68 in A Compan-
ion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Jonathan Ellis focuses on the relevance of
biography, highlighting especially her many travels. Indeed, as he sees it,
the ‘‘runaway poet’’ who escapes those who would label or ‘‘capture’’ her
work ‘‘is obviously related to the traveler’’ attempting to evade her editors
and public. Bishop’s elusive poetry, continually in  ux, is neither here nor
there, existing in the ‘‘faultline’’ between modernism and confessional-
ism. Toying with the traditional, blurring the margins of boundaries and
E. P. Walkiewicz 415

categories, the poems included in North & South suggest that in ‘‘art as in
life, she was always running on,’’ searching ‘‘for that elusive something
else.’’ As she moved about, Bishop ‘‘took local topography seriously,’’
something she concretely conveyed to her creative writing students at
Harvard, including the poet Dana Gioia, who describes with fondness
the experience of ‘‘Studying with Miss Bishop,’’ pp. 203–24 in Passing the
Word: Writers on Their Mentors (Sarabande), a memoir which Ž rst ap-
peared in the New Yorker in 1986. Although Bishop’s pedagogical ap-
proach was anything but conventional, she managed, Gioia recalls, to
teach him to experience rather than interpret a poem, how ‘‘to experience
it clearly, intensely, and, above all, directly.’’

ix W. H. Auden
According to Peter McDonald in ‘‘W. H. Auden: Poems,’’ pp. 448–56 in A
Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, the Ž rst commercially produced
collection of Auden’s poetry must also be considered his most important,
not only because it immediately established the credentials of its author
but also because it in uenced an entire generation of British poets. It
exhibits a uniquely eVective type of ‘‘opacity’’ that is distinctly diVerent
from the ‘‘apparent obscurity’’ of Pound and Eliot, while also evoking for
the Ž rst time the ‘‘Northern landscape’’ that would become a characteris-
tic feature of much of his work. His preoccupation with the North is
explored at length in Paul Beckman Taylor’s largely biographical essay,
‘‘Auden’s Icelandic Myth of Exile’’ ( JML 24: 213–34). Recounting the
details of Auden’s two visits to Iceland in 1936 and 1964 and illuminating
his use of Norse mythology, Taylor provides substantial evidence to
support his assertion that Auden’s engagement with Iceland as both
actual and mythological locale is apparent in works produced over the
entire course of his career. It manifests itself not only in the diction and
rhythms of his poems but also in his steadfast commitment to the oral
tradition and his notion that poetry is ‘‘a confrontation with ragnarök.’’ A
locus in which ‘‘art and life are bonded,’’ the Iceland which Auden
experienced and envisioned became for him ‘‘a friendly place for an exiled
poetic imagination.’’ Another of Auden’s travels is the subject of Sean C.
Grass’s ‘‘W. H. Auden, from Spain to ‘Oxford’ ’’ (SoAR 66, i: 84–101),
which focuses on the little-discussed poem in order to demonstrate that
Auden quickly came to believe that his disillusioning journey to the
‘‘Spanish frontier’’ began at the English university. In ‘‘Oxford’’ he revisits
416 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

his university years to indict the institution for fostering the ‘‘political
idealism and naïveté’’ that impelled him to involve himself in the Spanish
Civil War, for misguiding both him and ‘‘an entire generation of middle-
class intellectuals.’’ Although her approach is considerably more abstract,
Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb focuses on another of Auden’s eVorts to free
himself of the past, his ‘‘struggle with the spirit of Romanticism’’ in
‘‘Canzone.’’ In ‘‘ ‘Re ection on the Right to Will’: Auden’s ‘Canzone’ and
Arendt’s Notes on Willing’’ (CL 53: 131–50) she argues that Auden’s 1942
imitation of a poetic form employed only once before (by Dante) clearly
demonstrates that he, like Hannah Arendt, came to possess ‘‘a sensitivity
to the dialectic of novelty and repetition’’ and to ‘‘the Nietzschean para-
dox’’ that when ‘‘the Will’’ has overcome all else, ‘‘there is nothing to will
but return.’’ For Auden as for Arendt, the way to avoid this condition was
to realize that the will must relinquish ‘‘necessity’’ in order to be free.

x Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg

The publication of two biographies of Edna St. Vincent Millay in the
same year invites comparison, of course. The more comprehensive of the
pair is Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Random
House) by Nancy Milford, author of Zelda: A Biography (1970). Having
been selected by Norma Millay in 1972 to produce the authorized biogra-
phy of her sister, Milford not only was aVorded access to all of the poet’s
papers but also was granted interviews with the only surviving member of
her family. Although it too covers the entire span of the poet’s lifetime,
Daniel Mark Epstein’s book is more narrowly focused on her amorous
relationships, as its title announces: What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The
Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Holt).
One way to distill the material presented in the two books is to view
Millay’s life as characterized by a dynamic of conŽ nement and escape.
The astonishing early success of ‘‘Renascence,’’ for instance, became the
vehicle that carried her away from her role as surrogate mother to her
sisters in Maine to Vassar and later Greenwich Village. Through her
numerous aVairs she may have freed herself from a certain gender stereo-
type to become the epitome of the New Woman, but, particularly in
Milford’s telling, one senses a compulsiveness that borders on sexual
addiction or a desperation to forget the intimations of mortality con-
veyed by her frequent illnesses. Having become perhaps the most famous
poet in America, she also became one of the Ž rst to earn considerable
E. P. Walkiewicz 417

income by taking her show on the road. This often grueling routine,
however, became a kind of trap for her, and between tours she would
retreat to the sanctuary of Steepletop, the estate in New York’s Columbia
County at which her husband, Eugen Boissevain, catered to her every
whim. In the end, Steepletop itself became a place of conŽ nement where
Boissevain administered alcohol, morphine, and other pharmaceuticals
to both of them and from which both escaped only by dying within six
weeks of one another.
The two biographies trace similar arcs, but there are diVerences be-
tween them. Epstein alone, for instance, surmises that Millay’s morphine
addiction resulted from an overadministration of the narcotic by her
doctors. Milford discloses to a much greater degree the poet’s complex
interaction with her mother and her often competitive relationships with
her sisters. In her account, furthermore, Millay remains actively bisexual
well beyond her Vassar years, and Boissevain becomes at least a tri e
sinister as he sinks into the role of co-dependent caretaker during their
Ž nal months together. Both Epstein and Milford make numerous appre-
ciative statements about Millay’s verse, commenting on the beauty or
artistry of individual poems. Both, moreover, repeatedly draw attention
to the relationship between her biography and her poetry. Yet neither
makes a concerted eVort to place it in a larger cultural context or to
employ close-reading in the service of demonstrating her contributions
to or subversion of literary tradition. Indeed, it often seems that we are
being coaxed into valuing Millay’s work because of the richness and
intensity of the life experiences that motivated her to write it. While they
do not ignore her  aws and frailties, and although they abundantly
document her neediness, egocentrism, and addictive behavior, both bi-
ographers Ž nally assume a neo-Romantic posture, conveying their awe in
the face of Millay’s charisma and creativity, her ‘‘genius.’’
The appearance of three pieces on Carl Sandburg also attests to the
continuing eVort to refocus attention on poets previously dismissed as
‘‘popular.’’ The most substantial of the three is Sally Greene’s ‘‘ ‘Things
Money Cannot Buy’: Carl Sandburg’s Tribute to Virginia Woolf ’’ ( JML
24, ii: 291–308), in which she contends that Woolf ’s death led Sandburg
after some two decades to reevaluate his adaptation to ‘‘the dominant
culture.’’ He contributed an homage to Woolf in the Chicago Times, later
transforming it into a poem in which one may Ž nd echoes of the dis-
course of ‘‘his radical youth.’’ Unlike many, he was willing to consider
Woolf ’s suicide ‘‘a valid response’’ to World War II. Looking closely at
418 Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

‘‘Sandburg’s ‘They Will Say’ ’’ (Expl 59: 134–37) J. G. Johansen argues

that the poet displays a great deal of craftsmanship as he concretely
conveys the damaging impact of ‘‘industrial capitalism.’’ In the published
version of an address he delivered in 2000, ‘‘You Can’t Get There from
Here’’ (AJ 28: 222–26), poet and Ž ction writer Robert Morgan expresses
his own admiration for Sandburg, whom he calls ‘‘the true heir of Whit-
man.’’ Sandburg, he notes, developed a ‘‘witty, optimistic, populist’’
version of modernism, one Morgan clearly prefers to the more European
and academic strain invented by Eliot and Pound.

xi E. E. Cummings, Robinson JeVers

Michael Webster focuses on the signiŽ cance of ‘‘iconicity’’ in ‘‘Magic
Iconism: Defamiliarization, Sympathetic Magic, and Visual Poetry
(Guillaume Apollinaire and E. E. Cummings)’’ (EJES 5: 97–113). Accord-
ing to the author, Apollinaire’s ‘‘Coeur couronne et miroir’’ diagrams a
‘‘magic ritual’’ that the reader is invited to enact. Many of Cummings’s
‘‘iconic poems,’’ Webster contends, contain similar spells, on occasion
employing ‘‘language, icon,’’ and ‘‘homeopathic magic’’ or encouraging
the reader to engage nature actively. In all such instances of ‘‘magic
iconism’’ the reader experiences a sense of enchantment that is a product
of the ‘‘ritual reenactment of the writer’s experience and being.’’
Another kind of ‘‘magical’’ interaction with nature is exhibited in
Stones of the Sur: Poetry by Robinson JeVers/Photographs by Morley Baer, ed.
James Karman (Stanford). As Baer wished, his stunning black-and-white
photographs of the dynamic and craggy California coast are reproduced
side by side with JeVers’s verse, creating what Karman calls in his intro-
duction ‘‘a visual and literary meditation on the life-experience of stone.’’
Providing a brief descriptive catalogue of the sacred stones of a number of
cultures, Karman describes JeVers’s special ‘‘kinship’’ with the granite
rock of Carmel Point, his experiencing the ‘‘oneness and unity’’ that
comes from venerating the ‘‘transhuman.’’ Alan Johnston also proposes
that JeVers’s poetry serves as a ‘‘medium for place’’ in ‘‘Ecology and
Aesthetics: Robinson JeVers and Gary Snyder’’ (ISLE 8, ii: 13–38). Adopt-
ing the term Kenneth Rexroth used to label Gary Snyder’s work, John-
ston classiŽ es both Snyder and JeVers as practitioners of an ‘‘ecological
aesthetic’’ that combines ‘‘art, ethics, and political actions’’ in a manner
consonant with some of the corollaries of poststructuralism. In his ap-
plication of his concept of ‘‘inhumanism’’ JeVers deconstructs ‘‘the en-
E. P. Walkiewicz 419

lightenment equation of reason and enlightened self-interest.’’ His work,

like Snyder’s, can form the basis of an ‘‘aesthetics of communal experi-
ence’’ that in valuing diversity would not distinguish between the human
and the natural. In ‘‘JeVers, Rexroth, and the Trope of Hellenism’’ (WAL
36: 153–69) Robert Zaller indicates that it is JeVers’s pantheism that dis-
tinguishes his classicism from Rexroth’s. Despite Rexroth’s well-known,
vociferous criticism of JeVers’s verse, Zaller considers him to be in many
ways a disciple of the older poet whose adaptations of Greek dramas
establish a dialogue with JeVers’s works. Although Rexroth’s worldview
remained at base human centered, both poets emphasized recurrence,
and both turned to ‘‘the trope of Hellenism’’ in response to ‘‘the huge
displacements’’ caused by 20th-century science. Finally, as part of its
considerable contribution to the  urry of JeVers-related activity this year,
Stanford University Press completes its edition of JeVers’s verse with the
publication of The Collected Poetry of Robinson JeVers, V: Textual Evidence
and Commentary, ed. Tim Hunt.
Oklahoma State University
18 Drama
James J. Martine

The more things change the more they remain the same; the more things
change, the more they, well, change. Some changes are minor and perhaps
transient. This year David Mamet and August Wilson replace Tennessee
Williams and Arthur Miller as the attractions. These cycles in scholarly
fashion have happened before —Sam Shepard, for example, once recently
raged as the prodigy apparent, only to pass even more recently from favor.
Other alterations, however, are disconcerting. Stephen Greenblatt, presi-
dent of MLA, dispatched a letter to organization members concerning the
task of scholarly evaluation at university departments and the circum-
stances at university presses which might place in jeopardy a generation of
young scholars in some areas of language and literature. Academic presses
which cannot aVord to publish some books have eliminated editorial
positions in traditional disciplines; libraries have cut back on the number
of books they purchase. We are advised the situation is diYcult for junior
faculty who will be reviewed for tenure in English departments.
Things they are a-changin’. The University of Minnesota Press features
volumes on art house cinema, televised life, feminist Ž lm and video,
classic Hollywood. SUNY Press advances books on gender in Ž lm. And,
not to gnaw at the kindly paw that feeds me, Duke University Press, the
safe haven of American literature, this year produces books on popular
media and postwar suburbs but not on American drama. Let us hope that
these trends too, like some scholarly tastes, are transitory. Those books
and articles that did make the cut this year are itemized herein.

i Theater History
The intent of Thomas S. Hischak’s American Theatre: A Chronicle of
Comedy and Drama 1969–2000 (Oxford) is to continue Gerald Bordman’s
422 Drama

previous three volumes (see AmLS 1994, p. 366; AmLS 1995, pp. 406–07;
AmLS 1996, p. 410). Like its predecessors, this volume may be a bit
inconvenient for use as a research tool, although two indices will help
scholars —a ‘‘Titles Index’’ (pp. 463–76) and a ‘‘People Index’’ (pp. 477–
504). As well, the format is inconsistent. For example, the inclusion of
random highlighted brief entries on Sam Shepard, John Guare, Terrence
McNally, David Henry Hwang, oV-Broadway director Gerald Gutierrez,
and others seems superŽ cial and questionable if not purposeless. The
entries are heavy at the book’s beginning, become less frequent as the
volume moves along, and then disappear altogether after the Gutierrez
piece, 89 pages before the volume’s conclusion. These quibbles aside, this
book is valuable as a history because Hischak does a remarkable job of
cataloging the three-ring circus of Broadway, oV-Broadway, and oV-oV-
Broadway that New York theater has become. Hischak covers nearly
3,000 plays, good and bad, moving season by season: ‘‘Act One, 1969–
1975: Getting Through by the Skin of Our Teeth’’ (pp. 1–90); ‘‘Act Two,
1975–1984: Everything Old Is New Again’’ (pp. 91–235); ‘‘Act Three,
1984–1994: Playacting During a Plague’’ (pp. 237–361); and ‘‘Act Four,
1994–2000: A Modest Renaissance’’ (pp. 363–462). This is a convenient
place to read of, to illustrate, the 1984–85 revival of Arthur Miller’s After
the Fall, the notices for Terrence McNally’s It’s Only a Play, the basics
about Tennessee Williams’s Not About Nightingales, or the vitriolic recep-
tion for director Ivo van Hove’s 1999–2000 revival of Williams’s A Street-
car Named Desire. This is Hischak’s most ambitious and successful under-
taking since his Stage It with Music: An Encyclopedic Guide to the American
Musical Theater (see AmLS 1993, p. 315) and is as enjoyable as his The
Theatregoer’s Almanac (see AmLS 1997, pp. 374–75). If the present volume
like its predecessors has small faults, it is wonderfully readable for people
who love American drama.
While the scope of Hischak’s book is wide and ‘‘plays with music’’ are
dealt with, productions with enough songs for ‘‘musical numbers’’ to be
listed in the program are considered musicals and are not included.
Robert Emmet Long’s Broadway, The Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and
the Great Choreographer-Directors, 1940 to the Present (Continuum) will in
some measure Ž ll that gap, for the author contends that future chron-
iclers of New York theater will point to the period as the age of the
choreographer-director ‘‘sungods,’’ and the Apollonian names will be
Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, Michael Bennett, and Bob Fosse.
Long throws in Agnes de Mille as one who established the tradition along
James J. Martine 423

with Robbins, and adds Tommy Tune to the pantheon; ‘‘Epilogue:

Broadway Today’’ (pp. 274–87) accounts for Graciela Daniele and Susan
Stroman. Americans, we are told, spend more of their lives being an
audience than working or sleeping. Richard Butsch’s The Making of
American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge,
2000) looks not at artists or writers but at audiences and compares
elements as diverse as admission prices and wages during diVerent eras as
the supply of entertainment increased in quantity and frequency. Butsch
is interested in the public manifestation of the changes in audiences’
participation in their own entertainment and the consequent division
between producers/performers and consumers/audiences, from active to
passive. Particularly interesting are the early chapters on privileged au-
diences and colonial theater (pp. 20–31); drama and early republic au-
diences (pp. 32–43); the Jacksonian era, roughly from 1825 to 1850, when
the theater belonged to the common man (pp. 44–56); subsequent regen-
dering of theater as women’s presence increased as a part of fundamental
cultural shifts (pp. 66–80); and an eventual turn-of-the-century develop-
ment of ‘‘legitimate’’ and ‘‘illegitimate’’ drama as theater subdivided
along class lines (pp. 121–38). While the bulk of the book is devoted to
sociology and the history of mass communication —nickelodeon au-
diences, radio, television, and home video —the early chapters make for a
curious view, sort of looking out from the proscenium at American
society. An even better book from the same publisher is Roger A. Hall’s
Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906 (Cambridge), which exam-
ines how the American frontier was presented in theatrical productions.
In chronological order the book explores the post-Civil War resurgence
of interest in drama about the frontier which led to the host of melo-
dramas that constituted the majority of works. Hall’s study begins in 1870
with the emergence of three popular productions that ushered in a wave
of frontier plays: Oliver Doud Byron’s Across the Continent, Augustin
Daly’s Horizon, and Kit, the Arkansas Traveller, credited to Edward
Spencer. This study documents the advances in playwriting skills and
thematic depth until later plays such as Rachel Crothers’s The Three of Us,
Edwin Milton Royle’s The Squaw Man, William Vaughn Moody’s The
Great Divide, and David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West and The
Rose of the Rancho, the only Ž ve dramas by American-born authors to run
more than 200 performances in 1905 and 1906 —despite the contempt of
the critical establishment —brought the genre respectability of sorts. Hall
succeeds in his primary objectives to demonstrate the variety of subject
424 Drama

matter and style represented by frontier dramas and to examine the

critical response to them.
TJ provides a half dozen items of interest: Sonja Kuftinec’s ‘‘Staging
the City with the Good People of New Haven’’ (53: 197–222) and
Judith A. Sebesta’s ‘‘Spectacular Failure: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Midway
Gardens and Chicago Entertainment’’ (53: 291–309) are collected in a
special issue on ‘‘Theatre and the City’’ which seeks to demonstrate the
signiŽ cance of theaters in the making of community. Kuftinec describes
the attempts of the Long Wharf Theatre to produce theater that would
engage the immediate communities in New Haven and makes a contri-
bution to how we think, broadly, of community-based performance.
Sebesta’s essay on the Midway Gardens in 1910s and 1920s Chicago is
about an endeavor to produce a theatrical experience and thereby create a
cultural presence for the neighborhood. Wright’s own enthusiasm for the
theater did not easily translate, however, to a venue of the kind and appeal
that was intended. Wright’s architecture could not impose the theater it
was designed for. More interesting are Angela C. Pao’s ‘‘Changing Faces:
Recasting National Identity in All-Asian-American Dramas’’ (53: 389–
409) and Mike Sell’s ‘‘[Ed] Bullins as Editorial Performer: Textual Power
and the Limits of Performance in the Black Arts Movement’’ (53: 411–28).
Pao focuses on the politics of casting and the heated debates involved in
contemporary productions of canonical American drama when Asians or
Asian Americans perform the ‘‘non-Asian’’ roles of Arthur Miller and
Eugene O’Neill. Her comparative analysis of the 1983 Beijing production
of Death of a Salesman and the National Asian American Company’s
production of Long Day’s Journey into Night and Ah! Wilderness in 1997
suggests why casting remains key to understanding the cultural work and
how the casting of Asian and Asian American actors incites antithetical
responses. Sell’s essay revisits the Black Arts movement and its eVorts to
invigorate the public discourse on race and reminds those for whom the
publication of Bullins’s Four Dynamite Plays in 1972 was powerful stuV
and required graduate school reading that the playwright was quick to
question the tactics of the Black Arts movement as well. Sell not only
moves through Bullins’s important work as a dramatist but examines his
rarely discussed editorial projects for both the Ž rst Black Theatre issue of
TDR in 1968 and the 1970 issue of Black Theater which showcased the
tension between text and performance. Another pair of contiguous arti-
cles is David Krasner’s ‘‘Migration, Fragmentation, and Identity: Zora
James J. Martine 425

Neale Hurston’s Color Struck and the Geography of the Harlem Renais-
sance’’ (TJ 53: 533–50) and Amy Koritz’s ‘‘Drama and the Rhythm
of Work in the 1920s’’ (TJ 53: 551–67). Krasner’s essay reminds us of
Hurston’s belated entry into the canon of drama, and his careful reading
of Color Struck points to an increased interest in the intersection of
theatrical performance with folk culture as well as with related arts prac-
tices such as dance. Krasner’s attention to the production history of Color
Struck also includes a recounting of the play’s critical reception, raises
fundamental questions about Hurston’s dramatic oeuvre, and notes the
importance of the play in providing a history of black women in the
South at a particular historical moment. The same historical moment —
the 1920s —frames Koritz’s essay. Through an examination of a range of
plays by O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Sophie Treadwell, and others, Koritz charts
how ideologies about work were dramatized and how the period’s in u-
ential critics responded. Koritz leads her discussion through a wide range
of critical texts from history to sociology, business studies, popular cul-
ture, and —most signiŽ cantly —cultural studies.
Back-to-back articles in TDR are devoted to unusual dramatic forms.
For the past 37 years a rodeo has taken place inside the gates of the
Louisiana State Penitentiary north of Baton Rouge, a facility where white
guards on horseback continue to watch over Ž elds worked mostly by
black men. Jessica Adams’s ‘‘ ‘The Wildest Show in the South’: Tourism
and Incarceration at Angola’’ (TDR 45, ii: 94–108) examines the signiŽ -
cance of this convergence of leisure and imprisonment, insisting that the
annual performance is a cruelly ingenious form of post-Emancipation
slavery consistent with the history of the plantation system. Political
theater in America has traditionally been a left-wing preserve. JeVrey D.
Mason’s ‘‘Performing the American Right: The BakersŽ eld Business
Conference’’ (TDR 45, ii: 109–28) suggests that the political right deploys
theater implicitly and discreetly, even covertly, through ‘‘mainstream’’
venues and paratheatrical events like the annual one-day convocation
held on the campus of California State University, BakersŽ eld, in a
program designed to appeal to political, social, and Ž scal conservatives.
Mason concludes that this event is political vaudeville, latter-day Chau-
tauqua, and theater on a grand scale. In response to Michele Wallace’s
article last year (see AmLS 2000, p. 420) which called for an increased
acknowledgment of black participation in minstrelsy and an apprecia-
tion of black performers’ accomplishment in this Ž eld, Barbara L. Webb’s
426 Drama

‘‘The Black Dandyism of George Walker: A Case Study in Genealogical

Method’’ (TDR 45, iv: 7–24) contributes an investigation of a perfor-
mance which constituted a refusal to echo minstrel caricatures. Shauna
Vey’s ‘‘Good Intentions and Fearsome Prejudice: New York’s 1876 Act to
Prevent and Punish Wrongs to Children’’ (ThS 42: 53–68) suggests that
class and ethnic prejudices pertained in the writing and enforcement of
child labor laws in New York theater a century ago and that protection of
child performers from exploitation extended more to lower-class enter-
tainments than to those catering to an elite clientele. Vey contends that
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s disproportionate
attention to Italian immigrant children re ected increasing middle-class
ethnic bias and fear. Incidentally, this issue opens a new chapter for this
journal as Cambridge University Press assumes production and distribu-
tion of ThS for the American Society for Theatre Research, which retains
editorial control.
Richard Hornby’s ‘‘Mathematical Proof ’’ (HudR 54: 110–16) provides a
good brief introduction to David Auburn’s Proof and an unceremonious
burial kaddish for Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed which Hornby thought
lived down to its lack of promise, ‘‘exactly the kind of piece you would
expect from a tony intellectual with no theatrical background —talky,
aVected, amorphous, and lifeless.’’ Instead of theater history, perhaps
Richard Hornby’s ‘‘Death in the Mall’’ (HudR 54: 305–12) should be
included under a new rubric of theater geography since it introduces the
Cornerstone Theatre Company of Los Angeles, an innovative troupe that
has given a series of productions in that most American of locations, the
shopping mall. Any history of drama in America should include examples
relating to the history of scholarship on American dramatic literature. To
mark the 10th anniversary of the journal, Norma Jenckes’s ‘‘Ten Years of
American Drama ’’ (AmDram 10, i: 1–10) describes its genesis and evolu-
tion from items of traditional scholarship to the recent interest in discus-
sions of dramatic texts written for radio, television, and Ž lm. In addition,
Jenckes provides a complete index for the journal (AmDram 10, ii: 107–
16). A reader pauses momentarily, however, when six items appear in an
issue and three —two interviews and a book review —are by the journal’s
editor. Chris Jones’s ‘‘Will a New Broom at Humana Sweep the Old Era
Away?’’ (New York Times 11 Mar.: sec. 2, pp. 6, 20) raises concerns about
the future of the prominent Humana Festival of New American Plays and
the regional theater that produces it, the Actors Theater of Louisville. A
James J. Martine 427

must is the annual peek at Gerald Weales’s ‘‘American Theater Watch,

2000–2001’’ (GaR 55: 620–30), which devotes its featured opening pages
this year to David Auburn’s Pulitzer and Tony award–winning Proof,
Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby, Richard Nelson’s Madame
Melville, Rob Ackerman’s Tabletop, Mac Wellman’s Cat’s-Paw, Horton
Foote’s The Last of the Thorntons, and Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days.
Weales next turns to a quick calendar of plays, many with real virtues, that
he does not have space to consider at length: Willy Holtzman’s Hearts: The
Forward Observer; Kia Corthron’s Force Continuum; John Henry Red-
wood’s No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs; JeVrey Hatcher’s Compleat Female
Stage Beauty; Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth; Seth Rozin’s Men of
Stone; Dennis Raymond Smeal’s Exit Wounds; and Kathleen Tolan’s The
Wax. Weales includes brief comments on musicals: Terrence McNally’s
book for The Full Monty; 3hree, the season opener at the Prince Music
Theater in Philadelphia, amiable one-act musicals developed in the work-
shop of Harold Prince; The Silver River with music by Bright Sheng and
book by David Henry Hwang; and Gary S. Fagin’s Charlotte: Life? Or
Theater? with book by Elise Thoron. Weales concludes with a  ying
overview of The Flying Karamazov Brothers; Velvetville, the new show by
Paul Zaloom, the paragon of junk puppetry; and various other perfor-
mance artists. Sometimes the Ž rst notice developing artists and writers
receive is that of Gerald Weales. Two well-known theater McHistorians
made contributions this year, varied in depth and scope. The thesis, not
altogether a new one, of Brooks McNamara’s ‘‘Broadway: A Theatre
Historian’s Perspective’’ (TD 45, iv: 125–28) is that like Hollywood and the
major television networks Broadway produces a commercial product, not
high art. This brief, interesting opinion piece by a respected senior scholar
might have been richer had it included speciŽ c illustrations to support its
generalizations. Quite another matter, Bruce McConachie’s ‘‘Doing
Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and
the Problem of Experience for Historians’’ (TJ 53: 569–94) is a heady and
lengthy theoretical journey into the Ž eld of cognitive psychology. The
essay brings to the fore some problems in the recording of theater history.
The attempts to understand the experiences of both the practitioners and
spectators of theatrical performances are interesting, but the article’s
enduring contribution may very well be that it calls serious attention to a
much neglected and underappreciated drama of merit, A Hatful of Rain,
for which Michael V. Gazzo is attributed authorship.
428 Drama

ii Criticism and Theory

African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, ed.
Harry J. Elam Jr. and David Krasner (Oxford), includes 16 articles. Elam
opens with ‘‘The Device of Race: An Introduction’’ (pp. 3–16), which is
followed by a roundtable discussion with the leading senior scholars in
the Ž eld of African American theater —James Hatch, Sandra Richards,
Margaret Wilkerson, and the editors —‘‘African American Theater: The
State of the Profession, Past, Present, and Future’’ (pp. 331–44), and
Krasner’s ‘‘Afterword: Change Is Coming’’ (pp. 345–50). The volume’s
coup is Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s ‘‘The Chitlin Circuit’’ (pp. 132–48),
which weighs in on the matter of colorblind casting and August Wilson’s
stand on the issue, which has found little acceptance among working
black actors. Gates then re ects on what he calls the Chitlin Circuit and
speculates on the possibilities of an elevated black theater for which Wil-
son seeks patronage. Judith Williams’s ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Women’’ (pp. 19–
39) proposes that, despite the fact that having white actresses play black
Ž gures in the 19th century both stereotyped and silenced real black
women, the original novel and subsequent stage adaptations have had a
profound eVect on African American culture and later representations of
blackness. Margaret B. Wilkerson’s ‘‘Political Radicalism and Artistic
Innovation in the Works of Lorraine Hansberry’’ (pp. 40–55) establishes
the dramatist as an advocate of radical change and underscores the im-
portance of African liberation in Hansberry’s dramaturgy. Mike Sell’s
‘‘The Black Arts Movement: Performance, Neo-orality, and the Destruc-
tion of the ‘White Thing’ ’’ (pp. 56–80) reevaluates the movement that
Sell maintains formulated an alternative structure of history, community,
and aesthetic whose impact continues to be felt. William Sonnega’s ‘‘Be-
yond a Liberal Audience’’ (pp. 81–98), focusing on contemporary perfor-
mances in Minneapolis of a black production of Death of a Salesman and
Robbie McCauley’s Sally’s Rape, notes how white liberal attendance can
reinforce rather than subvert ideas of white privilege and normative
whiteness. Joseph Roach’s ‘‘Deep Skin: Reconstructing Congo Square’’
(pp. 101–13) and Telia U. Anderson’s ‘‘ ‘Calling on the Spirit’: The Perfor-
mativity of Black Women’s Faith in the Baptist Church Spiritual Tradi-
tions and Its Radical Possibilities for Resistance’’ (pp. 114–31) deal with
African American performance practices in venues outside conventional
theater. Sandra G. Shannon’s ‘‘Audience and Africanisms in August
Wilson’s Dramaturgy: A Case Study’’ (pp. 149–67) challenges critics to
James J. Martine 429

eschew Western standards of criticism which fail to appreciate African

aesthetic practices. Annemarie Bean’s ‘‘Black Minstrelsy and Double In-
version, circa 1890’’ (pp. 171–91), Krasner’s ‘‘Black Salome: Exoticism,
Dance, and Racial Myths’’ (pp. 192–211), Kimberly D. Dixon’s ‘‘Uh Tiny
Land Mass Just Outside of My Vocabulary: Expression of Creative
Nomadism and Contemporary African American Playwrights’’ (pp. 212–
34), and Jay Plum’s ‘‘Attending Walt Whitman High: The Lessons of
Pomo Afro Homos’ Dark Fruit ’’ (pp. 235–48) all deal with the intersec-
tions of race and gender. Diana Paulin’s ‘‘Acting Out Miscegenation’’
(pp. 251–70) theorizes that theatrical representation of interracial desire
disrupts static deŽ nitions of race and that staged portrayals of interracial
unions destabilize deŽ nitions of both blackness and whiteness. On the
other hand, Tina Redd’s ‘‘Birmingham’s Federal Theater Project Negro
Unit: The Administration of Race’’ (pp. 271–87) chronicles how certain
social performances between 1935 and 1936 reinforced the static borders
of race on and oV stage. Elam’s ‘‘The Black Performer and the Perfor-
mance of Blackness: The Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom by William Wells
Brown and No Place to Be Somebody by Charles Gordone’’ (pp. 288–
305) analyzes the work of black performance artists. Finally, unlike the
other works in this volume, Christina E. Sharpe’s ‘‘The Costs of Re-
membering: What’s at Stake in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora ’’ (pp. 306–27)
examines the role that performance plays in a novel. Also of note, the
University of Michigan Press has issued a paper version of Harry J. Elam
Jr.’s Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and
Amiri Baraka (Michigan, 1997), which compares the performance meth-
odologies, theories, and practices of Valdez’s farmworkers’ theater El
Teatro Campesino and Baraka’s Black Revolutionary Theater as examples
of how disenfranchised peoples and political movements turned to the-
ater as a means of articulating social causes and galvanizing campaigns of
political resistance during the 1960s and 1970s. Of related interest is
Jonathan Mandell’s ‘‘Two Playwrights Who Listened to Their Elders’’
(New York Times 8 July: sec. 2, pp. 5, 26), which introduces Bridgette A.
Wimberly and Christopher Shinn, beginning playwrights who were part
of a mentoring project. Charles Fuller, best known for A Soldier’s Play,
became Shinn’s oYcial mentor for a year and Wendy Wasserstein served
the same role for Wimberly.
Jorge Huerta’s Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (Cam-
bridge, 2000) is devoted to Chicano/a drama during the last two decades
of the 20th century. The point of departure is 1979, the year that Luís
430 Drama

Valdez’s Zoot Suit was produced on Broadway, marking a turning point

for an entire generation of Latina/o artists. The volume focuses on plays
and playwrights, and all of the plays discussed are about families, the vast
majority of which would be termed dysfunctional. Each of the book’s
four chapters has a diVerent theme. The Ž rst (pp. 15–55) traces the roots
of Indo-Christian Chicano mythos through the plays of Estela Portillo-
Trambley and Valdez. Chapter 2 (pp. 56–99) analyzes how Chicana/o
playwrights dramatize ‘‘el misterio,’’ incidents or circumstances that have
no rational explanation. Chapter 3, ‘‘Redemption: Looking for Miracles
in a Man’s Church’’ (pp. 100–139), considers the in uence of the Catholic
Church and the playwrights’ responses to that institution and explains
how dramatists challenge the church while demonstrating an abiding
faith. The fourth and Ž nal chapter, ‘‘Rebelling Against Damnation: Out
of the Closet, Slowly’’ (pp. 140–82), addresses the dramatization of
homosexuality. Huerta is especially informative on playwrights Valdez,
Octavio Solis, Milcha Sanchez-Scott, Guillermo Reyes, Carlos Morton,
and Cherríe Moraga. He closes with an afterword (pp. 183–92) which
searches for a unique Chicana/o aesthetic and identiŽ es challenges to be
faced as Chicana/o artists enter the 21st century.
Philip Uko EYong’s In Search of a Model for African-American Drama:
A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and
Ntozake Shange (Univ. Press, 2000) purports to examine the African
American quest for a historically, culturally, and sociopolitically in u-
enced theatrical model. The author, born and raised in Nigeria, concedes
that a notion of black theater as a single, unfragmented entity would be
naive, but insists that blacks will ‘‘perhaps forever’’ comprise a separate
and distinct fragment within American socioartistic life. The text does
not deal with issues such as audience reception or the production history
of speciŽ c dramas and covers a limited period and only a selection from
the works of the three playwrights. There are vast amounts of informa-
tion and resources on the factors shaping African American theatrical
development that receive little attention in this book. Even if the atti-
tudes identifying the American avant-garde did not arrive in American
drama until a decade beyond the chronological limits of the volume, Bert
Cardullo’s ‘‘En Garde! The Theatrical Avant-Garde in Historical, Intel-
lectual, and Cultural Context,’’ pp. 1–39 in Theater of the Avant-Garde
1890–1950: A Critical Anthology, ed. Bert Cardullo and Robert Knopf
(Yale), provides an interesting background against which to see the work
of the Wooster Group, the Bread and Puppet Theatre, and others. Later
James J. Martine 431

performance groups such as Mabou Mines, which have become less

concerned with what they are saying —with context —than with form and
formal experiment, and performance artists from Karen Finley and Anna
Deavere Smith to Holly Hughes and Tim Miller may be diVerently
understood in the context of Franco-Russian symbolism, Italian futur-
ism, German expressionism, French surrealism, and other 20th-century
European developments to which this volume is largely devoted.
David Savran’s ‘‘The Haunted Houses of Modernity’’ (MD 43: 583–
94) proposes that the achievements of the so-called information age, the
emergence of new media and new industrial and social technologies, are
far less novel than they at Ž rst appear but represent instead the fulŽ llment
of a particular historical logic. Using Tony Kushner’s Angels in America,
Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, and Terrence McNally’s stage
version of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime as text, Savran argues that the canon
of modern drama represents not only the repetition of a distinctive
formal logic but the fulŽ llment of a certain globalizing imperative and
that postmodernism represents an attempt to divert attention away from
the increasingly uneven patterns of capital accumulation. Savran con-
cludes that in its continuing failure to recognize the exploitative intercon-
nections between the First and Third Worlds, the very category ‘‘modern
drama’’ is in fact a product of imperialism. Using methodologies drawn
from a phenomenological perspective, Stephen Di Benedetto’s ‘‘Stum-
bling in the Dark: Facets of Sensory Perception and Robert Wilson’s
‘H. G.’ Installation’’ (NTQ 67: 273–84) examines how Wilson’s installa-
tion, presented in 1995 at the Clink, near London Bridge, served as an
exemplar of the ways in which the full range of sensory resources can be
‘‘theatrically’’ deployed.

iii Eugene O’Neill

Two major additions this year will assist the O’Neill scholar. Madeline C.
Smith and Richard Eaton’s Eugene O’Neill: An Annotated International
Bibliography, 1973 Through 1999 (McFarland) was originally designed to
update the 1973 edition of Jordan Y. Miller’s Eugene O’Neill and the
American Critic (see AmLS 1974, pp. 379–80), but in the last three de-
cades scholarly interest in O’Neill and productions of his plays have
grown international. As a result, Smith and Eaton now range beyond the
English-speaking world in their survey of the O’Neill experience. Their
bibliography includes Periodical Publications (English), pp. 5–72; Books
432 Drama

and Parts of Books (English), pp. 73–131; Dissertations (English), pp. 131–
47; Scholarship and Criticism (Foreign Language), pp. 148–58; Produc-
tions (English), pp. 159–206; Productions (Foreign Language), pp. 207–
12; Primary Works Including Translations, pp. 213–21; and Miscella-
neous, pp. 222–25, which includes video, recordings, and adaptations. A
bibliography usually contains only primary and secondary material while
reviews are generally considered tertiary. This volume includes reviews
which point toward interpretation. The annotations are knowledgeable,
astute, yet concise. Cambridge University Press, along with Oxford Uni-
versity Press, extends its preeminence in the Ž eld. Brenda Murphy’s
O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey into Night (Cambridge) is Murphy’s second
contribution to the notable Plays in Production series under general
editor Michael Robinson. This volume is comparable to Murphy’s Mil-
ler: Death of a Salesman (see AmLS 1995, p. 418) or last year’s Philip Kolin’s
Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire (see AmLS 2000, p. 428). The ac-
count of the play’s composition from the earliest entry in O’Neill’s work
diary for 6 June 1939, to its remarkable and unorthodox pre-production
history, to its New York premiere in English on 7 November 1956 takes up
nearly a third of the volume. Murphy then turns to productions in
English, productions in translation, and media adaptations. The book is
conscientiously annotated and includes a production chronology which
lists nearly 100 signiŽ cant productions. Until now, the best if most over-
looked book devoted entirely to this play has been Michael Hinden’s
Long Day’s Journey into Night: Native Eloquence (see AmLS 1990, p. 398),
a succinct compendium of history and analysis which is a useful tool as an
introduction or for reference—and sadly is omitted from Murphy’s bibli-
ography. Once again, however, Murphy provides a solid contribution for
anyone planning to analyze or stage a production of a play. She continues
to research prodigiously and write clearly.
In the last few years, O’Neill studies have suVered loss by the deaths of
Jason Robards, José Quintero, and Adele Heller, as well as scholars
James A. Robinson, Travis Bogard, and most recently John Henry
Raleigh. Although EONR (24, i–ii) begins and ends with contributions
from longtime contributors to O’Neill scholarship, between these articles
editor Fred Wilkins with a sapient obstetrical maneuver delivers an intel-
ligent array of essays by knowledgeable newer O’Neillians. Madeline C.
Smith and Richard B. Eaton, the redoubtable bibliographical duo, open
the issue with ‘‘Will the Real John Francis Please Step Forward?’’ (pp. 5–
12), which engages in some especially narrow research whose subject
James J. Martine 433

is not a man of letters or artistic ability but O’Neill’s Provincetown

landlord-cum-friend. The volume concludes with a piece by a major
recorder of the history of O’Neill’s plays in performance, Sheila Hickey
Garvey’s ‘‘New Myths for Old: A Production History of the 2000 Broad-
way Revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten ’’ (pp. 121–33). The issue also
includes Daniel Larner’s ‘‘Dionysus in Diaspora: O’Neill’s Tragedy of
Muted Revelries’’ (pp. 13–19), which claims that O’Neill’s use of tragedy,
particularly in The Iceman Cometh, can be understood as a form of
Dionysian rite. Robert E. Byrd’s ‘‘Unseen, Unheard, Inescapable: Unseen
Characters in the Dramaturgy of Eugene O’Neill’’ (pp. 20–27) brie y
explores O’Neill’s use of the device of the unseen character before con-
cluding that the device itself was O’Neill’s transmutation of painful
biography. Diya M. Abdo’s ‘‘The Emperor Jones: A Struggle for Individu-
ality’’ (pp. 28–42), after a requisite survey of scholarly opinion on Brutus
Jones, conducts a close examination of the protagonist’s con ict with the
‘‘collectives’’ he is forced to join but ultimately denounces. Zander
Brietzke’s ‘‘Tragic Vision and the Happy Ending in ‘Anna Christie’ ’’
(pp. 43–60) proposes that the play’s juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy
is O’Neill’s earliest attempt to integrate his mature vision into a full-
length drama. James R. Fleming’s ‘‘Cross Cultural O’Neill: A Bengali
Desire Under the Elms ’’ (pp. 61–72) is an interview with Sudipto Chatter-
jee, whose adaptation, Basona Brikshamule, of O’Neill’s play premiered
in July 2001 in Calcutta and is performed in repertory across India.
Sharon O. Watkinson’s ‘‘Two Journeys to Wilderness’’ (pp. 73–80) oVers
an overview of two separate productions of Ah, Wilderness! by means of
interviews with the two directors. Two articles follow on Mourning Be-
comes Electra: Miriam M. Chirico’s ‘‘Moving Fate into the Family: Trag-
edy RedeŽ ned in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra ’’ (pp. 81–100) is an
especially interesting piece that follows O’Neill’s deliberate removal or
alteration of lines as he revised the trilogy in its entirety three times.
Chirico traces O’Neill’s process and intentions through signiŽ cant revi-
sions through galley proofs as the dramatist worked to reshape traditional
understandings of tragedy for the 20th century. Lisa Miller’s ‘‘Iphigenia:
An Overlooked In uence in Mourning Becomes Electra ’’ (pp. 101–12)
speaks to O’Neill’s incorporative skill as an artist in tracing the play’s
lineage to the in uences of Aeschylus and Sophocles with special atten-
tion to the often overlooked Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides. Julia White’s
‘‘The Iceman Cometh as Infertility Myth’’ (pp. 113–20), using Joseph
Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the pattern of the
434 Drama

archetypal fertility myth as touchstones, proposes that Hickey deems

himself the hero, a questing knight trying to Ž nd a way out of the
wasteland of illusion; yet the quest fails as the pipe dreams prove more
powerful, and by the play’s denouement each character is back where he
began. Michele Valerie Ronnick’s ‘‘O’Neill’s The Rope ’’ (Expl 60: 33–34)
points out O’Neill’s invention of two expressive phrases, a pair of neolo-
gisms unattested in modern lexicography.

iv Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller

While there has been a momentary lacuna in the publication of Williams
and Miller scholarship following an abundant decade, the ever-proliŽ c
Philip C. Kolin’s ‘‘ ‘A Play about Terrible Birds’: Tennessee Williams’s The
Gnädiges Fraulein and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds ’’ (SoAR 66, i: 1–22)
makes a case for the ways in which Hitchcock’s Ž lm inŽ ltrates Williams’s
‘‘Gracious Lady,’’ one of the dramatist’s least successful and least-known
plays, which contains surrealistic elements reminiscent of Eugene Io-
nesco and Samuel Beckett. Robert Siegel’s ‘‘The Metaphysics of Tennes-
see Williams’’ (AmDram 10, i: 11–37) sees in Williams’s works a running
dialogue and a deep ambivalence about whether the mind and body can
communicate or even coexist. Siegel sees the dramatist as a metaphysician
searching for a connection between seemingly diVerent entities and con-
cludes that for Williams the greatest crimes are committed by neither
body nor spirit, but by indiVerence. Rachel Van Duyvenbode’s ‘‘Dark-
ness Made Visible: Miscegenation, Masquerade and the SigniŽ ed Racial
Other in Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll and A Streetcar Named Desire ’’
( JAmS 35: 203–15) is an overly inventive and overheated piece which
proposes that Silva Vacarro and Stanley Kowalski, neither of whom is
African American or a person of color, are ‘‘conduits for Williams’ own
veiled fantasies of the dark Africanist other.’’ Moreover, the author claims
that the virtual absence of African American characters in Williams’s
plays disguises the signiŽ cance of an Africanist in uence on the play-
wright’s creative imagination. The basis of this is ‘‘the stiVening of black-
white sexual diVerence’’ and the white man’s insecurity vis-à-vis the black
man derived from a sexual origin. My own response to this reading is that
as sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, sometimes we have to allow that an
absence is merely an absence.
JeVrey Meyers’s ‘‘A Portrait of Arthur Miller’’ (VQR 76: 416–35), by the
author of biographies of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Poe, among others,
James J. Martine 435

is essentially about the one that got away. To date, Miller has declined to
give Meyers permission to write his biography. This essay characterizes
Meyers’s relationship with the dramatist, essentially consisting of nine
visits beginning in June 1981 and correspondence extending over the next
17 years. While the piece is gossipy and familiar, there is not much new
here; moreover, there is a little too much of Meyers’s presence and
opinions —too many ‘‘I,’’ ‘‘we,’’ ‘‘me,’’ ‘‘my,’’ or ‘‘our’’ —and Meyers does
not neglect to  og his own books. His questions for Miller about other
writers and celebrities have been asked and answered before. This is not a
bad essay for it is quite readable, but it is a portrait of Miller and Meyers.
One day scholars interested in Meyers as a subject will Ž nd this article
useful. Not any better is Jay L. Halio’s ‘‘Arthur Miller’s Broken Jews,’’
pp. 128–35 in American Literary Dimensions: Poems and Essays in Honor of
Melvin J. Friedman, ed. Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio (Delaware, 1999),
which provides book report synopses of Incident at Vichy, Playing for
Time, and The Price. Although Halio is interesting on Broken Glass, all
four plays deserve better. And a bit better is Qun Wang’s ‘‘Arthur Miller:
Creating the Timeless World of Drama’’ (Proteus 18: 24–28), which ob-
serves that the tragic appeal of Miller’s plays does not stop at their ability
to engage an audience emotionally. Wang concludes that Miller estab-
lishes a partnership between his characters and the audience that is
mediated by human decency, human interdependence, and the law of
causality. The article notes that the interaction between play and au-
dience, between new ideas and old, between emotion and concepts is
contingent on the writer and the audience identifying shared com-
monalities, what Miller calls shared social needs. Best of all, in Steven R.
Centola’s ‘‘The Search for an Unalienated Existence: Lifting the Veil of
Maya in Arthur Miller’s The Archbishop’s Ceiling ’’ ( JEP 21: 230–37), an
experienced Miller scholar provides a close-reading of Miller’s 1977
drama which shows how an oppressive totalitarian regime makes it diY-
cult for artists to survive spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

v David Mamet and August Wilson

As studies on Williams and Miller see a period of ebb tide, two dramatists
experience  ood tide. Gender and Genre: Essays on David Mamet, ed.
Christopher C. Hudgins and Leslie Kane (Palgrave), gathers a baker’s
dozen original pieces. The featured article is Thomas P. Adler’s ‘‘Mamet’s
Three Children’s Plays: Where the Wilder Things Are’’ (pp. 15–26), the
436 Drama

Ž rst serious consideration of Mamet’s largely neglected children’s plays

which illustrate his inventive ways with gender and genre. As she did two
years ago with The Cryptogram (see AmLS 1999, p. 433) Janet V. Haedicke
in ‘‘Plowing the BuValo, Fucking the Fruits: (M)others in American Buf-
falo and Speed-the-Plow ’’ (pp. 27–40), surely this year’s most attention-
getting title, characterizes both plays as Oedipal narratives, yet makes her
case that an implicitly feminist ethic is at work in many of Mamet’s plays.
Steven Price’s ‘‘Disguise in Love: Gender and Desire in House of Games
and Speed-the-Plow ’’ (pp. 41–59) argues that feminist critics are divided
between those who see Mamet’s women as misogynist misrepresentation
and those who read them as complex Ž gures before suggesting that such
closed readings misrepresent the strategies of the texts. Richard Brucher
and Imtiaz Habib examine Mamet’s controversial Edmond. Brucher’s
‘‘Prophecy and Parody in Edmond ’’ (pp. 61–75) concludes with a sugges-
tive reading of the play’s last scene, and Habib’s ‘‘Demotic Male Desire
and Female Subjectivity in David Mamet: The Split Space of the Women
of Edmond ’’ (pp. 77–94) criticizes the notion that Mamet is hostile
toward women as misreading the playwright’s dramatic discourse. Robert
Skloot’s ‘‘Oleanna, or, The Play of Pedagogy’’ (pp. 95–107) and Kellie
Bean’s ‘‘A Few Good Men: Collusion and Violence in Oleanna ’’ (pp. 109–
23) wrestle with Mamet’s much discussed two-character play. Skloot
contends that neither the male professor nor the woman student wins in
the educational arena, while Bean’s essay is representative of feminist
criticism that regards the work as misogynistic and holds that American
realism in general is a conservative paradigm which circumscribes trou-
blesome female characters within patriarchal borders. On the other hand,
Karen C. BlansŽ eld’s ‘‘Women on the Verge, Unite!’’ (pp. 125–42) argues
that many critics misread Mamet’s attitudes toward women and suggests
that the power of Mamet’s female characters is generated by men’s insecu-
rity and fear of women and their pathetic dependence on women for
identity. The editors, cofounders of the David Mamet Society, contribute
chapters of their own. Kane’s ‘‘ ‘It’s the way that you are with your
children’: The Matriarchal Figure in Mamet’s Late Work’’ (pp. 143–73)
reconsiders the matriarch and the place of home in Mamet’s recent plays,
while Hudgins’s ‘‘ ‘A small price to pay’: Superman, Metafamily, and
Hero in David Mamet’s Oedipal House of Games’’ (pp. 209–33) turns to
Mamet’s Ž lm noir. The late Linda DorV ’s ‘‘Reinscribing ‘the Fairy’: The
Knife and the MystiŽ cation of Male Mythology in The Cryptogram ’’
(pp. 175–90) attempts to cast light on the universe of the other, which is
James J. Martine 437

full of tricks, and maintains that the hypercoded stage props —a photo-
graph, a blanket, and a knife —impede, rather than enable, decoding of
their meaning by the characters and audience alike. Diane M. Borden’s
‘‘Man Without a Gun: Mamet, Masculinity, and MystiŽ cation’’ (pp. 235–
54) concludes that Mamet manipulates both gender and genre expecta-
tions through deliberate obfuscation. Ilkka Joki’s ‘‘Mamet’s Novelistic
Voice’’ (pp. 191–208) uses Mamet’s Ž rst novel, The Village (1994), to
discuss the generic distinctiveness of drama and novel in Bakhtinian
terms.
Kane also edits David Mamet in Conversation (Michigan). Despite the
editor’s insistence on Mamet’s resistance to interviews, the dramatist often
adopts the role of instructor or provocateur although he is most comfort-
able in interviews with John Lahr, Jeremy Isaacs, and two televised
conversations with Charlie Rose. Kane wisely arranges the interviews in
chronological order, which re ects the evolution of Mamet’s thinking
from Ross Wetzsteon’s 1976 Village Voice proŽ le-essay ‘‘David Mamet:
Remember That Name’’ to Renée Graham’s 1999 Boston Globe piece
‘‘Mamet with Manners.’’ Between are the male chorus of Mark Zweigler,
Ernest Leogrande, Steven Dzielak, Dan Yakir, Hank Nuwer, Henry I.
Schvey, David Savran, Ben Brantley, Jay Carr, Richard Stayton, Brian
Case, Michael Billington, Melvyn Bragg, and Robert Denerstein. The
best sections are Matthew C. Roudané’s ‘‘Something out of Nothing’’
(pp. 46–53); a surprisingly good Playboy magazine interview by GeoVrey
Norman and John Rezek, ‘‘Working the Con’’ (pp. 123–42); and, not sur-
prisingly, John Lahr’s ‘‘David Mamet: The Art of Theatre XI’’ (pp. 109–
22). A quarter of these collected conversations aired on radio or television
or before a live audience and have not previously been transcribed or
published: conversations with PBS’s Jim Lehrer (pp. 86–90) and NPR’s
Terry Gross (pp. 157–62); two excellent chats with Charlie Rose, ‘‘On
Theater, Politics, and Tragedy’’ from 1994 (pp. 163–81) and ‘‘A Great
Longing to Belong’’ from 1997 (pp. 182–91); other previously unpub-
lished pieces are Barbara Shulgasser’s ‘‘Montebanks and MisŽ ts’’ (pp. 192–
210) and Jeremy Isaacs’s BBC 2 broadcast ‘‘Face to Face’’ (pp. 211–25).
This collection complements Mamet’s body of work and oVers scholars a
view of how much may be learned about Mamet from Mamet. Kane also
includes a brief chronology (pp. ix–xiv) and necessary headnotes to
each piece.
Contiguous AmDram articles are devoted to Mamet: Robert I. Lublin’s
‘‘DiVering Dramatic Dynamics in the Stage and Screen Versions of
438 Drama

Glengarry Glen Ross ’’ (10, i: 38–55) contends that when the dramatist
adapted the play for the screen, he changed the work’s meaning. Lublin
argues that each deserves analysis as a separate work of art, and a com-
parison reveals that the works present fundamentally diVerent dramatic
worlds. The play depicts a far more complex societal order in which the
employees who are oppressed by an unfair society may ultimately be
responsible for their own oppression, whereas the introduction of the
new character named Blake and other changes in Mamet’s screenplay
show a more simplistic worldview in which society is bifurcated by an
economic system that allows those who have power to lord it over those
who do not. Steven Ryan’s ‘‘David Mamet’s A Wasted Weekend ’’ (10, i: 56–
65) comments on Mamet’s teleplay which aired as an episode of the long-
running series Hill Street Blues in January 1987. AŽ cionados may also
want to see David Mamet’s ‘‘A Beloved Friend Who Lived Life the
Chicago Way’’ (New York Times 14 Oct.: sec 2, p. 7), an encomium for the
late Shel Silverstein occasioned by the opening of An Adult Evening of Shel
Silverstein, 10 of his one-act plays.
Hersh Zeifman’s ‘‘Phallus in Wonderland: Machismo and Business in
David Mamet’s American BuValo and Glengarry Glen Ross, ’’ pp. 167–76
in Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American
Playwrights, ed. Kimball King (Routledge), explores the homosocial
world of American business so wickedly critiqued in Mamet’s two most
celebrated plays; Zeifman is especially interesting on the signiŽ cance of
the characters’ use of language. In the same collection, Trudier Harris’s
‘‘August Wilson’s Folk Traditions’’ (pp. 369–382) examines how Wilson’s
plays, particularly Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Ž t into African American
folkloric traditions which re ect patterns that include strategies for sur-
vival, ways of manipulating a hostile Anglo-American environment, and
a worldview that posits the potential for goodness in spite of American
racism. While including recognizable patterns of lore in his dramas,
Harris sees Wilson expanding what African American folklore means and
what it does. Perhaps his best piece since his comments on Arthur Miller
(see AmLS 1999, p. 431) or his essay on Tennessee Williams and Maria St.
Just (see AmLS 1994, p. 380), and this year’s most readable work, John
Lahr’s ‘‘Been Here and Gone: How August Wilson Brought a Century of
Black American Culture to the Stage’’ (NY 16 April: 50–65) is a lengthy
proŽ le that cuts through all the hype and controversy. Lahr has a remark-
able eye for detail. An introduction to Frederick August Kittel —August
Wilson —begins here. Harry J. Elam Jr.’s ‘‘August Wilson, Doubling,
James J. Martine 439

Madness, and Modern African-American Drama’’ (MD 43: 611–32) cen-

ters on a form of character that becomes a repeated critical trope in
Wilson’s dramaturgy, Ž gures who appear mentally or physically handi-
capped and unable to grasp the reality of the world around them —such as
Gabriel Maxson in Fences, Hambone in Two Trains Running, Hedley in
Seven Guitars, and Stool Pigeon in King Hedley II —yet paradoxically
represent a connection to a powerful spirituality, to a lost African con-
sciousness, and to a legacy of black social activism.
Çigdem Üsekes’s ‘‘ ‘You always under attack’: Whiteness as Law and
Terror in August Wilson’s Twentieth-Century Cycle of Plays’’ (AmDram
10, ii: 48–68) focuses on Wilson’s association of whiteness with law and
observes that scholarship has neglected to pay attention to the few white
characters who appear and those, including the regularly evoked generic
white man, who remain oVstage but nevertheless play a role in the lives of
his black characters. The author reminds us that Wilson consistently
draws attention to the Ž ne but essential distinction between law and
justice, between legality and legitimacy, and her essay concludes by in-
vestigating what Robert Brustein has often questioned, the source of
Wilson’s critical and popular success among white audiences. Gaylord
Brewer’s ‘‘Holy and Unholy Ghosts: The Legacy of the Father in the Plays
of August Wilson,’’ pp. 120–39 in Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealo-
gies, and Explorations of Fatherhood in Modern and Contemporary Litera-
ture, ed. Eva Paulino Bueno, Terry Caesar, and William Hummel (Lex-
ington, 2000), observes that when the father is present, as in Fences and
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the plays portray the burden and frustrations
of that role, yet more often fathers are absent and sons wrestle with
unreconciled paternal relationships in hopes of adapting the father’s
‘‘song’’ as their own. Brewer concludes that Wilson’s plays are consistently
optimistic regarding the son’s chance for dignity and reaYrmation of
identity through cultural recognition and proud acceptance. AAR pub-
lishes a pair of items on Wilson. James R. Keller’s ‘‘The Shaman’s Appren-
tice: Ecstasy and Economy in Wilson’s Joe Turner ’’ (35: 471–79) proposes
that the events of the play dramatize the election and education of a
shaman as the power to heal and manipulate the spirit world is passed
from one generation to the next and concludes that the playwright
himself becomes the shaman, healing the wounds of 400 years of racial
oppression and cultural imperialism. Elisabeth J. Heard’s ‘‘August Wilson
on Playwriting: An Interview’’ (35: 93–102) centers largely on the 1996
version of Jitney, originally written in 1979; Heard questions the drama-
440 Drama

tist about his revision strategies. Readers interested in Wilson’s King

Hedley II will also want to see Don Shewey’s ‘‘Sharing the Stage with
August Wilson’’ (New York Times 29 Apr.: sec. 2, pp. 7, 22) and Margo
JeVerson’s ‘‘Broadway Choices: Old World EdiŽ ce or Sleek Machine
(New York Times 13 May: sec. 2, p. 10).

vi Closed Canons
Although some readers come to Glaspell through an interest in gender
studies and feminist criticism, J. Ellen Gainor’s Susan Glaspell in Context:
American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915–48 (Michigan) recognizes
that to do so is to do a disservice to her work. This book’s reader will Ž nd
no one theme traced through Glaspell’s work nor one critical form em-
ployed as an interpretive strategy. Gainor wisely and productively shows
how the writer was dedicated to a number of social issues and wrote from
a commitment to multiple strongly held political convictions, feminism
among them. Establishing Glaspell’s plays as the site for her strongest
political statements is central to this study, but its overarching agenda is
to convince an audience that the most compelling way to approach
Glaspell is as an American writer. After an introductory chapter, ‘‘The
One-Act Play in America,’’ Gainor moves straight through the writer’s
plays from Suppressed Desires and Tri es to Alison’s House and Springs
Eternal. In general, her modes of analysis fall into two categories: making
social, political, and historical connections with the plays; and discussing
the issues of literary form or subgenre and theater history that they
represent. If Glaspell keeps getting lost in the shadows in Barbara
Ozieblo’s Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography (see AmLS 2000, pp. 430–
31), the focus here remains sharply on Glaspell. While previously the
dramatist has been caught between dismissal of women playwrights and
recent performance theory that has narrowly deŽ ned what theater can be
called ‘‘feminist,’’ this volume’s original goal is to establish the historical
and critical contexts for Glaspell’s theatrical writing.
On the eve of the centennial of Richard Rodgers’s birth, Frank Rich’s
‘‘Oh, What a Miserable Mornin’ ’’ (New York Times Magazine 28 Oct.:
58–61) reveals that Rodgers’s private life was nothing to celebrate. In a
volume of essays devoted to persons struck down by AIDS, Randall
Kenan’s ‘‘Where R U, John Crussell? Or, Inventing Humanity, One Play
at a Time,’’ pp. 50–60, 296–97 in Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of
AIDS, ed. Edmund White (Wisconsin), is an eclectic, intensely personal
James J. Martine 441

reminiscence of playwright John C. Russell, author of a half dozen oV-

Broadway plays including In the Dark (1992) and Stupid Kids (1998),
which was performed four years after his death from complications due
to AIDS. If audiences do not know Russell’s name or works, it may be
because he was dead at age 31.

vii The Quick

The New York Times prints three articles of passing interest here: Leslie
Garis’s ‘‘Albee, Directing Albee, Is Impish About the Baby’’ (28 Jan.: sec.
2, pp. 5, 28–29) traces Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby from
rehearsals in Houston to its oV-Broadway premiere. Don Shewey’s ‘‘A
Playwright Who’s Unafraid to Admit She’s Political (4 Feb.: sec. 2, pp. 5,
18) was occasioned by the opening of Kia Corthron’s Force Continuum,
which examines the relationship between the black community and the
New York police department. Bernard Weinraub’s ‘‘Fleshing Out China-
town Stereotypes’’ (14 Oct.: sec. 2, pp. 7, 27) discusses David Henry
Hwang’s drastic overhaul and revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1958
musical Flower Drum Song. Kenneth Bernard’s ‘‘Bad Boy Foreman: Some
Observations on Richard Foreman’s Bad Boy Nietzsche! ’’ (AmDram 10, i:
87–90) is a critique of Foreman’s play and a criticism of his work generally
by a playwright who has worked for many years with New York City’s
Play-House of the Ridiculous. The vitality of this year’s American drama
was nowhere more apparent than in the same June week that saw the
New York openings of Corthron’s coming-of-age play Breath, Boom;
David Rabe’s dark comedy The Dog Problem ; and John Guare’s new play
Chaucer in Rome. Guare is the subject of Gene A. Plunka’s ‘‘Guare’s Four
Baboons Adoring the Sun’’ (Expl 58: 116–18), which uses a 1965 journal
entry by the dramatist to develop the observation that his plays often
demonstrate how dreams have been corrupted by a ubiquitous American
popular culture, even as Guare admires idealists, like himself, who try
to establish meaning in otherwise spiritually disconnected lives. The
Adrienne Kennedy Reader, intro. Werner Sollors (Minnesota), gathers
selections from Kennedy’s writings, including her Obie-winning Funny-
house of a Negro (1964), A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White
(1976), Ohio State Murders (1992), and June and Jean in Concert, which
won an Obie in 1996.
James Fisher’s The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope (Rout-
ledge) starts with the premise that the two Angels in America plays, Mil-
442 Drama

lennium Approaches and Perestroika, comprise a theatrical epic that com-

pares favorably to the greatest plays of the 20th century; seeks to examine
the tensions between popular mainstream theater and drama of high
purpose in Kushner’s dramatic work; and explores the blur of reality,
fantasy, and the playwright’s guardedly hopeful imagination. Comparing
him to George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht, the book demonstrates
how Kushner uses the stage as a platform for social, political, and re-
ligious argument and concludes that the dramatist is more successful
than any of his predecessors or contemporaries in melding an aesthetic
drawn from postnaturalistic European theater with American dramatic
realism. Fisher shows a comprehension of Kushner’s socialist politics
which is essential to understanding his drama and approaches him as a
political dramatist who happens to be gay rather than a gay dramatist,
although the book identiŽ es important connections between Kushner
and Tennessee Williams. Individual chapters are devoted to each of the
produced full-length dramas while other chapters examine the one-act
plays and numerous adaptations. Moreover, Fisher discusses Kushner’s
unpublished works, including an opera libretto, a screenplay, and works-
in-progress. For the uninitiated he also provides a short biography of the
playwright. This is the Ž rst study to examine the techniques and themes
of Kushner’s entire dramatic output thus far, and as such it is a signiŽ cant
contribution to an understanding of the dramatist’s oeuvre. Kushner
aŽ cionados will also want to see Amy Barrett’s questions for the play-
wright in ‘‘Foreign AVairs’’ (New York Times Magazine 7 Oct.: 23) and
Peter Marks’s ‘‘For Tony Kushner, an Eerily Prescient Return’’ (New York
Times 25 Nov.: sec. 2, pp. 1, 20), both occasioned by the New York
Theater Workshop presentation of Homebody/Kabul.
Kurt Bullock’s ‘‘Famous/Last Words: The Disruptive Rhetoric of
Historico-Narrative ‘Finality’ in Suzan-Lori Parks’ The American Play ’’
(AmDram 10, ii: 69–87) proposes that Parks uses the performative nature
of language to question history, subverts an audience’s comfort in histor-
ical myth, and disrupts their assurance in historical fact. Bullock believes
the play demonstrates that there can be no Ž nality in history. Jon D.
Rossini’s ‘‘Marisol, Angels, and Apocalyptic Migrations’’ (AmDram 10, ii:
1–20) begins with a comparison and contrast to Kushner’s Angels in
America, but the bulk of the article is devoted to a close-reading of José
Rivera’s play. This is followed immediately by Norma Jenckes’s ‘‘An Inter-
view with Jose Rivera’’ (AmDram 10, ii: 21–47). Robert M. Post’s ‘‘The-
ater as Persuasion: The Plays of Wallace Shawn’’ (AmDram 10, i: 66–86)
James J. Martine 443

relates Shawn’s works in several ways to the dramatic theory of Brecht.

Shawn’s writing is less overtly political and the subject matter of Shawn
and Brecht diVers, but their objectives are similar. Post insists that
Shawn’s plays show dysfunctional relationships to inform and persuade
audience members to rectify their own dysfunctional relationships. Neil
Simon’s ‘‘Chicken Soup for the Soul Inspires a Play’’ (New York Times
11 Nov.: sec. 2, pp. 7–8) is not about dysfunctional relationships but is a
witty teaser for his new comedy 45 Seconds from Broadway.
Anna Deavere Smith’s ‘‘Not So Special Vehicles,’’ pp. 3–16 in Perspec-
tives on Teaching Theatre, ed. Raynette Halvorsen Smith, Bruce A. Mc-
Conachie, and Rhonda Blair (Peter Lang), was the keynote address at the
Association for Theatre in Higher Education annual conference and lays
out a range of problems confronting theater workers, teachers, and cit-
izens. Aware that she is speaking to a predominantly white audience,
Smith suggests that theater in the last 20 years has been ethnocentric and
proposes ways to work within and still transcend ethnic, generational,
class, and gender diVerences. Lani Guinier and Smith’s ‘‘Rethinking
Power, Rethinking Theater’’ (Theater 31, iii: 31–45) transcribes a conver-
sation which took place at the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, a
project started by Smith, in which scholars from the Harvard commu-
nity, such as Guinier, also participated. Norma Jenckes’s ‘‘An Interview
with Caridad Svich’’ (AmDram 10, ii: 88–103), which was conducted by
email, covers matters of in uences, ethnicity, Ž rst productions, life as a
Latina in the theater, role models, and future plans. Especially interesting
are the comments on the mentorship of Irene Fornes, with whom Svich
studied at the Intar Hispanic American Arts Center Lab from 1988 to
1992. Mac Wellman’s Cellophane (Hopkins) publishes 11 plays written
between 1983 and 1998 that the avant-garde playwright considers his
most important: Albanian Softshoe; Mister Original Bugg; Cleveland; Bad
Penny; Three Americanisms; Fnu Lnu; Girl Gone; Hypatia; The Sandal-
wood Box; Cat’s Paw: A Meditation on the Don Juan Theme; and, of course,
Cellophane (pp. 151–84). Wellman also includes his essay on theater, ‘‘A
Chrestomathy’’ (pp. 1–16), brief headnotes to the text of each play, and a
foreword by Marjorie PerloV (pp. x–xvii).
St. Bonaventure University
19 Themes, Topics, Criticism
Gary Lee Stonum and Theodore O. Mason Jr.

In recent decades, as concern about ethnic and cultural identity has come
to occupy the center of American literary studies, class has received far
less attention than race or gender, its partners in slogan. The neglect has
often been lamented but rarely repaired. This year, however, a striking
number of studies focus usefully on class distinctions and on the eco-
nomic foundations that give rise to them. Some of them carry forward
the established tenets of dialectical materialism; some propose newer
ideas about class, labor, and the social position of art and the artist.
Collectively, they testify to the formidable challenges presented by the
topic and to several questions deserving renewed attention in the coming
years.
Whereas the experience of social class in the United States continues to
provide rich material for literary analysis, the concept of class seems more
elusive and obscure than ever in the scholarship of Robert Seguin, Cary
Nelson, Laura Hapke, and several others discussed below. Without quite
losing prestige or being displaced by rival notions, Marxist deŽ nitions of
class, labor, production, and surplus value have been regularly challenged
over the years, and their conceptual weaknesses are evident in some of
this year’s scholarship. Likewise, the frequent perplexity within Marxian
thinking about the nature and role of art continues to trouble critics,
especially those seeking to reconcile aesthetic values and progressive
politics.
Another theme that has begun to emerge from the era of identity
politics is cosmopolitanism. Within recent political theory cosmopoli-
tanism gets proposed as an alternative to the social fragmentation that
multiculturalism is believed to foster. It also stands as a rival to communi-
tarianism, the other major remedy that contemporary political theory
446 Themes, Topics, Criticism

oVers for fragmentation and anomie. Now, if the works by Cyrus R. K.

Patell, Jessica Berman, and Russ Castronovo discussed below should
prove harbingers, not only has the originally Kantian idea of cosmopoli-
tanism become newly of interest to literary study, but the larger discourse
of political philosophy from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls and MouVe
may be acquiring within literary studies the kind of intellectual in uence
previously wielded by poststructuralism.

i Identities
Two overviews of the state of African American literary studies insist on
the centrality of economic and class issues as against the poststructuralist
in uence of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker. As the reference
in the subtitle indicates, Bill V. Mullen’s ‘‘Breaking the Signifying Chain:
A New Blueprint for African-American Literary Studies’’ (MFS 47: 145–
63) seeks to update Richard Wright’s 1937 manifesto and to do so by
reinstating a Marxist, working-class perspective largely identical with
what Wright then championed. Mullen describes the familiar fault lines
in African American literary studies more thoroughly and elegantly than
he reveals how the Old Left might be invoked to repair them. He suc-
cinctly critiques an understanding of slavery that sees it as an institution
for the making of race, rather than class, and that correspondingly deŽ nes
it as a spiritual condition rather than an economic vocation, but he passes
over the vexed problem of how to conceptualize race and class together.
Likewise, despite his splendid metaphor of black nationalism as carrying
the letter of economic oppression inside the envelope of black essential-
ism and his witty call for a Birmingham, Alabama, School of Black
Cultural Studies, Mullen more impressively calls for including national-
ist, postcolonial, and feminist axes within the grid of a traditional Marx-
ism than addressing how this might happen or how it would work.
A similar but more conspicuous absence of any developed remedy for
the ills it diagnoses marks Robert Young’s otherwise rich ‘‘The Linguistic
Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an Aesthetics of Crisis’’ (Callaloo
24: 334–45). Like Mullen, Young endorses an economistic view of racial
issues, but he does so from an Althusserian level of abstraction and by
means of critiquing theories of race rather than histories of African
American writing. Young’s target is not Gates the editor of a middle-of-
the-road Norton anthology but an earlier, more Derridean Gates. Gates,
Gary Lee Stonum and Theodore O. Mason Jr. 447

Houston Baker, and Cornel West are all taken to task as postmodernists
who accept the bourgeois pleasures of disrupting dominant and oppres-
sive meaning in place of any more fundamental emancipation that would
provide equal access to economic resources.
Young oVers sensitive, sophisticated criticism of these theorists. About
Gates’s most textualist arguments, for example, he observes that ‘‘if black-
ness is diVerence and all texts are situated within networks of diVerence,
then all texts are in a sense ‘black.’ ’’ The argument leaves Gates unable to
explain why it is blackness that is persistently assigned such a role in
signiŽ cation. More tacitly Young distances himself from the in uential
view that blackness can be paradigmatic of American or even human
experience in general. Similarly, against West’s pragmaticism, Young
mounts a version of the complaint regularly made against Richard Rorty
and Stanley Fish, namely, that if their views are taken seriously there can
be no grounds for political advocacy other than the force of someone’s
rhetoric. Despite the widely publicized attacks that have subsequently
been made on West’s supposed radicalism, Young characterizes him as a
crisis manager for the status quo.
On the other hand, and also like Mullen, Young provides a strikingly
richer analysis of what is lacking in poststructuralist accounts of race than
any discussion of what materialism can oVer in their place. He merely
declares as self-evident the proposition that racial diVerence operates in
the interest of maintaining and legitimating the extraction of surplus
value. That proposition leaves open two questions that one hopes will
soon get the attention they deserve: Ž rst, whether race is (as Young
implies) not only endemic to capitalism but essential to it, and second,
how and whether Marx’s concept of surplus value stands up to the
criticism oVered by subsequent social and economic theory and hence
can provide the materialist basis for any future cultural theory.
To write as a black person, a lesbian, an evangelical, or any other
contested form of group identity is normally to make claims that one
legitimately represents that identity. Such claims regularly get disputed,
of course, and what better way to investigate the issues involved than to
examine the autobiographies of imposters and impersonators. If the
author’s extratextual identity proves fake (or even contestable), what
signiŽ cance does or should this have for the work’s textual eYcacy? Is it
the verbal performance that counts, or is it biographical authenticity?
Laura Browder’s Slippery Characters sets out to answer just such ques-
448 Themes, Topics, Criticism

tions, although the outcome is marred by a tendency to substitute plot

summary for analysis and by a more prevalent and damaging one of
digression from the book’s announced topic.
At her best Browder oVers thoughtful accounts of the two most noto-
rious recent impersonations, The Education of Little Tree by the former
klansman Forrest Carter and Famous All Over Town by Daniel James, an
aging blacklisted screenwriter writing as a young Chicano named Danny
Santiago. Yet Browder seems to regard minstrel shows, Helen Hunt
Jackson’s novel Ramona, and a 1923 sociological study of hobos published
by the University of Chicago Press as similar in intent, genre, eVect, and
signiŽ cance to the Carter and Santiago masquerades. She makes no real
distinction between fake memoirs and other ersatz life writings, in which
the author overtly simulates some alien racial, cultural, or ethnic identity,
and the wide array of works that otherwise variously depict such identi-
ties. In other words, she extends to nearly every form of ethnic representa-
tion the claim to Ž rst-person authenticity and factuality usually reserved
for autobiography. By such logic Tocqueville would be disqualiŽ ed from
making observations about democracy in America, as he was both French
and an aristocrat.
Despite the shortcomings Browder does oVer some important argu-
ments about the history of ethnic impersonation. She proposes that the
production and circulation of ethnic autobiographies, both genuine and
fake, cluster about the periods in American history when anxiety about
ethnic identity is at its highest. Three times are singled out: the ante-
bellum years with their abundance of slave narratives, the 1920s with its
anxieties about Americanism, and the years of the Civil Rights move-
ment and afterward when writers both black and white sought to unveil
the mystery of black experience in a racially divided society. From these
and other times Browder identiŽ es a number of particular autobiogra-
phies, novels, movies, and public entertainments that seem worthy of
subsequent, more sustained investigation. One awaits, for example, a
closer scrutiny of the similarities and diVerences among authorial imper-
sonation, the Ž ctional and nonŽ ctional literature of passing, works of
Ž ction and of nonŽ ction in which the authors speak on behalf of groups
to which they do not claim to belong, and cultural spectacles in which
specimens of some exotic identity —Native Americans, drag queens,
aging celebrities —are put on display for others.
In Saints, Sinners, Saviors Trudier Harris emphasizes the limitations of
a cultural stereotype running from Aunt Jemima and Butter y McQueen
Gary Lee Stonum and Theodore O. Mason Jr. 449

to Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs, the black woman as big, strong, and
asexual. The image originated as a white fantasy, she argues, but it has
often been welcomed and furthered by African American writers. It is, for
example, one symptom in the rivalry that has been visible in recent years
between some male writers —Ishmael Reed, most conspicuously —and
their currently more popular or in uential sisters.
Except for markers like the Stonewall riots or for Foucauldian claims
about the conceptual vicissitudes of same-sex desire, periodizing has thus
far been less important to queer studies than the recovery of forgotten or
erased historical moments. In Foundlings, however, Christopher Nealon
investigates what it might be to ‘‘feel historical’’ in the Ž rst part of the
20th century. Examining Hart Crane, Willa Cather, and an array of
modernist-age pulp literature for gays and lesbians, Nealon concludes
that the paradigmatic situation is that of the foundling and that the
literature is dominated by coming-of-age narratives in which queer char-
acters experience disaYliation from family, nation, and history. Joyce,
not Wilde, would thus stand as the key Irish exemplar, despite the
former’s inconvenient heterosexuality. Foundling writing stands between
an inversion model of queer identity, which Nealon acknowledges as
otherwise prominent during this same period, and a more recent model
in which sexual orientation founds a distinctive culture in the same way
that ethnicity is said to do.
Cyrus R. K. Patell’s Negative Liberties analyzes the liberal tradition of
political philosophy on the way toward arguing that the novels of Mor-
rison and Thomas Pynchon provide a corrective to its excessively nega-
tive, individualistic (and for literary studies, essentially Emersonian)
ways of deŽ ning freedom. The concrete particularities of Ž ction ward oV
philosophy’s compulsion to simplify or abstract and accordingly promote
a cosmopolitanism that is comfortable with both the ways in which we
are the same and the ways in which we are diVerent.
Patell celebrates a cosmopolitan ideal of a liberty that for the individual
is both negative (freedom from domination) and positive (freedom to
participate). Although some of the terms and sources are unusual for
literary studies, his argument stands well within the mainstream of Amer-
ican liberalism and thus is likely to seem distinctive less for originality
than for lucidity of presentation and for the tenacity with which, through
Morrison and Pynchon, he insists on facing the legacy of slavery. In Necro
Citizenship Russ Castronovo draws on some of the same sources as Patell
and addresses some of the same concerns about the relations between po-
450 Themes, Topics, Criticism

litical theory and literary representation, but neither lucidity nor main-
stream argumentation is part of his brief. Castronovo makes a number of
provocative, even sensational, but usually murky claims. One is that, ever
since Patrick Henry’s famous cry, death has seemed pivotal to citizenship
in the United States. In what sense, one wonders, and to whom, as
Castronovo’s discussions of 19th-century writers turn up few suspects.
Another and, alas, stylistically more typical claim is that in America ‘‘the
question ‘What does citizenship demand?’ incites a necrophilic desire to
put democratic unpredictability and spontaneity to death.’’

ii Genres
Stalwartly adhering to the goals and methods of the often maligned
myth/symbol/ image school of American studies, Susan M. Matarese’s
American Foreign Policy and the Utopian Imagination (Mass.) aims to
describe the self-image of the United States and to show its in uence on
foreign policy in recent years. The book’s interest for American literary
scholarship lies not in its aim, however, but in its archive, for Matarese
proceeds by means of a systematic survey of the more than 200 utopian
novels written in the United States between 1888 and 1900. Regardless of
the value of Matarese’s study to politicians and pundits and regardless of
the historiographical and theoretical suspicions raised by her conŽ dence
in a singular, persistent national image, she oVers a thorough description
of the genre’s common claims and assumptions. Three familiar motifs are
found to pervade a group of novels otherwise noisily contesting one
another: an intense preoccupation with American aVairs to the exclusion
of the rest of the world, a belief in the uniqueness of America, and a
conviction of its moral superiority to other nations, especially European
ones.
In Public Sentiments Glenn Hendler proposes that the 19th-century
American novel, including but not limited to sentimental Ž ction per se,
was conceived as a public instrument designed to play in a sentimental
key. By encouraging identiŽ cation with those who did not necessarily
share the reader’s interests, race, class, or gender, the genre’s logic of
sympathy helped to create a public and to shape its ideas and institutions.
Hendler takes care not to confuse the reading public with the public
sphere in Jürgen Habermas’s sense of the term, but he is also eager to
show how the one can in uence the other and to support the claim that
Gary Lee Stonum and Theodore O. Mason Jr. 451

sentimental Ž ction can accomplish signiŽ cant cultural work by providing

models of how to feel and act in society. Public Sentiments identiŽ es
several 19th-century examples of such action, countering the suspicion
that reading novels is a merely private or vicarious activity by showing
that a novelistic logic of sympathy can be discerned in such public forums
as a temperance meeting, a librarian’s congress, and a black nationalist
convention. The same patterns of discourse appear in novels as in the
social spaces that structure the novels’ production, distribution, and
reception.
Sympathy is not a panacea, however, and Hendler is skeptical of the
belief that aVect can ground a noncoercive politics. As a process more
driven by the identiŽ er’s projections than by the feelings of the person
identiŽ ed with, sympathetic identiŽ cation always risks disrespecting or
patronizing the person identiŽ ed with, collapsing bridges rather than
building them. Furthermore, the feelings that lead even to benign forms
of identiŽ cation must themselves be manufactured in the audience by the
novelist or orator. Habermas, the guiding light of Public Sentiments, thus
worries that the authentic communication in the public sphere has in-
creasingly been hijacked by publicity and by the media. Hendler shows
that American novelists from Louisa May Alcott to Henry James have
worried about the same threat.
Only in the dictionary does politics stand closer to poetry than prose
Ž ction. Cary Nelson and Rachel Blau DuPlessis oVer strikingly diVerent
perspectives on the same problem: how to reconcile an admiration for
modern American verse with politically progressive beliefs (and a convic-
tion that literary studies should further such beliefs). Pitting art versus
politics obviously threatens poetry more acutely than it does genres in
which attention to cultural work and social meaning can more easily
crowd out stylistic, rhetorical, and aesthetic concerns. In Revolutionary
Memory Nelson makes another important contribution to his long-
standing project of unburying political poems and poets of the 1930s and
earlier. He directly counters some of the objections that have been made
against such literature but does so more by asking us to share his enthusi-
asm for obscure or forgotten left-wing poets than to reject as reactionary
the modernism of Pound and Eliot. Recovering the former need not
require casting aside the latter, he suggests. By contrast, DuPlessis focuses
squarely on the con ict between progressive and modernist ideals. In
Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, a book
452 Themes, Topics, Criticism

that otherwise largely gathers previously published essays on well-known

poets, she seeks to undo the alliance between formalist aesthetics and
conservative or quietist political values.
The center of Nelson’s book is its archival and biographical material,
which particularly challenges Eliot’s dismissal of the decades leading up
to his own modernism as poetically a complete blank. In various asides
about other scholars, Nelson also exposes some of the tensions that arise
from valuing both poetry and progressive politics. From the political side,
he bashes the profession of English studies for not deŽ ning itself in
opposition to the dominant culture and thus for having failed to regard
the preservation of leftist poetry as part of its mission. Less predictably,
from the poetic side he laments the tendency of labor historians (appar-
ently the only other scholars to examine many of the same archives in
which he is at home) to regard poetry as local color rather than as
culturally or politically central. The complaints spring from Nelson’s
competing allegiances, it seems, ones not so easily reconciled by his
cultural studies commitment to ‘‘how meaning was materially realized in
actual practices.’’
DuPlessis pays more heed than Nelson to the continuing hegemony of
the New Criticism in deŽ ning how lyrics should be analyzed and in
promulgating a doctrine of the essentially transcendental nature of po-
etry. Whereas Nelson emphasizes the initially embattled status of New
Critical teachings and suggests that they emerged victorious only because
of the pressures of the Cold War, she wants to preserve their attention to
poetic detail without otherwise giving an inch to formalist aesthetics or
ideology. Accordingly, DuPlessis scrutinizes poems according to what she
calls ‘‘social philology,’’ that is to say, a kind of close-reading that is
equally attentive to the events of form, the agency of the poet, and the
sociopolitical resonances of the text. In practice, this means emphasizing
the social and historical contexts of modernist poetic diction.
Like Mullen and Young with reference to African American literature,
Robert Seguin in Around Quitting Time aims to reinstate socialist con-
cepts of class and labor as keys to understanding. Seguin’s topic is 20th-
century American culture as a whole, which he brings into view by a
method with long-established roots in Marxist criticism: seeing the his-
tory of the novel as re ecting and participating in a unitary, indeed
universal historical narrative. One immediate advantage of this approach
is that it is able to make visible the ways in which novelists from Dreiser to
DeLillo are engaged in a common enterprise. As against the discontinu-
Gary Lee Stonum and Theodore O. Mason Jr. 453

ities of modernist and postmodernist modes or of distinct ethnic, re-

gional, or gender allegiances, Seguin emphasizes a continuing obsession
with middle-class-ness and with the borders between work time and
leisure time as experienced by characters who almost unanimously would
regard themselves as members of a middle class.
Although Seguin has a Ž ne eye for literary particularities and many
useful things to say about speciŽ cally aesthetic considerations, and al-
though he by no means puts his novelists through a theoretical meat
grinder, he is at least as interested in the history of ideas as in that of the
novel. Like a good historicist of the old school, he reads novelists and
social theorists as engaging the same conditions and problems. Daniel
Bell’s The End of Ideology and John Barth’s The Floating Opera are thus
seen both as representing a cultural exhaustion typical of the 1950s and as
responding to it, among other ways, with an emphasis on the divorce of
intellect from emotion.
Like Seguin, Laura Hapke focuses on labor and class issues in her
Labor’s Text but she is untroubled by the conceptual and methodological
problems that interest him. A thematic survey of the old sort, Labor’s Text
summarizes an impressively large number of 19th- and 20th-century
novels that pay attention to working-class characters or the labor move-
ment. It is likely to be more valuable as a reference work or an introduc-
tory textbook than as a stimulus to other scholars of American Ž ction, the
history of labor organizing, or the vicissitudes of class in American cul-
ture. Hapke rarely oVers more than a superŽ cial reading of novels she
describes, and except for periodizing Ž ction about workers into texts
written before, during, and after the 1930s, she does not propose an
overview or a thesis. Instead she typically oVers in each chapter a potted
history of labor activity during the period in question, summaries of both
canonical and forgotten novels of the time that bear on this history, and
an evaluation of the Ž ction according to how accurately or progressively it
re ects that history.

iii Histories
The most original and suggestive book in American literary studies this
year is Michael Szalay’s New Deal Modernism. Examining several forms of
government intervention into culture during the Depression and comb-
ing the economic and political writings of the time, Szalay proposes that
the middle decades of the 20th century form a previously unrecognized
454 Themes, Topics, Criticism

but coherent literary period, one that takes its cues from the New Deal
and more speciŽ cally from several loosely linked developments in —of all
things —the insurance business. Along with private insurance, the social
insurance established by the Social Security Act redrew the lines between
public and private and between the individual and the group. It also
in uenced how writers understand their economic and political status,
Szalay argues, although this part of his thesis seems to have less to do with
the advent of Social Security than with other contemporary matters he
examines: the appeal of leftist notions of authorial responsibility and,
more important, the new promise of government sponsorship of the arts.
Insurance agents appear with some frequency in books and movies of
the 1930s, and insurance fraud is a moderately common plot device.
Calling attention to the topos and to the coincidence that James Cain,
Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, Benjamin Whorf, and Richard Wright all
worked for insurance companies, Szalay argues that such devices as life
insurance aVect our sense of personal responsibility and agency, loosen-
ing the tie between motives and consequences. This gives to the literature
a characteristic double perspective (Bigger Thomas as both active agent
and passive onlooker in the killing of Mary Dalton) that Szalay associates
with the gap between the individual and the actuarial. Events exist both
as particularly caused by or contingently happening to autonomous per-
sons and as they occupy a place within the impersonal, predictable
register of statistical patterns. A visual example of the diVerence can be
seen in Busby Berkeley’s musicals (especially Gold Diggers of 1937, whose
plot Szalay reads as allegorizing the relation between insurance and the
production of entertainment). Seen from above the dancers appear in
patterns invisible to them or from anywhere else on the ground. Yet as
Berkeley regularly also stages it, the lead characters often paradoxically
stand outside the frame watching themselves dance. Such characters are
both individuated and part of a faceless mass.
Berkeley meticulously choreographed these musicals, of course, so one
might link the organization of mass populations with the central plan-
ning then favored by both fascism and communism. Szalay argues, how-
ever, that Social Security, for him the key institution of the welfare state,
provides pattern without planning. Statistical and demographic reg-
ularities do the work of the choreographer. To the extent that is so, the
New Deal and the American version of the welfare state represent a
genuinely new ideal for government, one that redeŽ nes the individual’s
Gary Lee Stonum and Theodore O. Mason Jr. 455

relation to the social and supplants or supplements liberty and equality

with an ethos of security. Welfare state liberalism, rather than the vapid
compromise between left and right it has sometimes been deemed,
emerges as a distinctive alternative to fascism and socialism. (Szalay’s
historical focus is narrow, so it is unclear how or whether he under-
stands Roosevelt’s social security program to diVer from, say, Bismarck’s,
and hence whether he regards New Deal modernism as speciŽ cally
American.)
Szalay also examines how Depression-era debates about the literary
marketplace and about state support for writers and artists in uenced
writers’ ideas of class allegiance and complicated any simple division
between bourgeois and proletarian status. By contrast to Hapke, who
depicts the left-wing writers of the 1930s as endorsing a straightforward
labor theory of value (one that she also unquestioningly champions),
Szalay sees even the most committed Marxists as ambivalent about equat-
ing the value of the literary artifact with the amount of labor involved in
producing it. Particularly around the time of the First American Writers
Congress, questions about the production and consumption of art en-
gaged a number of authors on both the left and the right.
The Federal Writers Project and related eVorts of the Roosevelt admin-
istration alleviated these anxieties somewhat. So did the Hollywood
studio system, which also for the Ž rst time made signiŽ cant numbers of
writers into wage earners rather than owner-producers of a commodity or
courtiers dependent on patronage. More important, according to Szalay,
this new position of the writer in the market provided an early, impor-
tant, and hitherto little-noticed foundation for the aesthetics of perfor-
mance dominant in the second half of the century. New Deal arts policy
encouraged close links between producers and consumers and thus
helped to displace the earlier modernist emphasis on the independent
masterpiece with a conception of art as what the audience experiences or
even actualizes in the act of reception.
The movement from understanding art as an object to regarding it as
an experience is a common theme in scholarship on 20th-century culture.
Peter Bürger traces to Dada and other European avant-gardes the emer-
gence of a performative aesthetic from one focused on the artifact; Rich-
ard Poirier Ž nds an earlier, native origin in American pragmatism; and
Fredric Jameson identiŽ es it as coming into its own only with the 1960s
and postmodernism. Szalay’s contribution is to argue both that a post-
456 Themes, Topics, Criticism

modern emphasis on performance and experience more continues than

breaks with important aspects of modernism and also that it has roots in
the speciŽ c economic and political contexts of New Deal liberalism.
Discussions about globalization sometimes note that the early 21st
century repeats the free-trade economy of the early 20th century, so it is
perhaps not surprising that literary modernism can be seen as anticipat-
ing contemporary concerns about diversity, universalism, and nation-
ality. In Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Commu-
nity Jessica Berman champions a position not unlike Patell’s in his
discussion of recent authors. She does so by reexamining a question that
was once considerably more prominent in modernist studies, namely,
how writers sought to imagine community after what they perceived as
the collapse of 19th-century ideals. In Ž ction by James, Marcel Proust,
Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, she Ž nds very diVerent answers but a
similar concern to circumvent the drive toward centralized power and a
single, usually nationalist or racialist, common identity that is otherwise
a dominant feature of politics in the era between George Eliot and
George Orwell. Instead, the novelists in various ways adumbrate a cos-
mopolitan community that on one hand refuses the category of the
universal, and on the other eschews the boundary between ‘‘we’’ and
‘‘they’’ characteristic of tribal thinking or the ideology of the nation-state.
Berman draws importantly on modern political theory, an intellectual
resource that literary scholars do not often tap. Her standard is the
deconstructive politics of Jean-Luc Nancy and Chantal MouVe, par-
ticularly as set against recent communitarian theories of Charles Taylor
and others. As she also notes, however, a model of  uid, overlapping
inscriptions of identity and group membership can be discerned as well
in some American theorists more nearly contemporary with the novelists
she studies. George Herbert Mead and John Dewey both can be under-
stood to present what is otherwise usually characterized as a postmodern
condition, incomplete and relational selves seen in  uctuating political
association.
In ‘‘DeŽ nitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/
Modernism ’’ (MoMo 8: 493–513) Susan Stanford Friedman helpfully
maps the long-standing terminological and disciplinary disputes that
shape modernist studies. Noting that ‘‘modernity’’ is more often used in
the social sciences and linked to political and economic rationalization,
whereas ‘‘modernism’’ tends to be a category of cultural and stylistic
Gary Lee Stonum and Theodore O. Mason Jr. 457

periodization in the humanities, Friedman points out that this rough

disciplinary partition is itself crisscrossed by numerous other divisions
and disputes. Either side can as readily be associated with a rupture of
tradition (iconoclastic modernization, rebellious modern art) as with the
perpetuation of established values (a continued valorization of Enlight-
enment ideals, the conservative cultural politics of a Pound era). Fried-
man does not resolve the confusions and contradictions she maps, pro-
posing instead that the dialogical contradictions among these terms run
through the phenomena to which they refer. One consequence is that an
analysis of deŽ nition-making, such as she conducts in this article, should
itself point to substantive issues. Another, she suggests by reference to
Shoshona Felman’s psychoanalytic reading of disputes in literary inter-
pretation, would be that the terminological quagmire derives from a
transferential process in which scholars unconsciously repeat the re-
pressed contradictions of modernity itself.

iv Critics and Methods

Two articles contribute to the continuing uneasiness about organizing
literary studies according to the political or geographic boundaries of the
nation-state. In ‘‘Reworlding America: The Globalization of American
Studies’’ (Cultural Critique 47: 91–119) John Muthyala surveys the main
attempts to challenge Eurocentric and monocultural notions of America
but oVers little in the way of a program that might synthesize or select
among them. In ‘‘Deep Time: American Literature and World History’’
(AmLH 13: 755–75) Wai-Chee Dimock also regrets that ‘‘Americanists are
nothing but that: Americanists’’ and tries to oVer some examples of how
scholars might no longer foreclose their work according to territorial and
chronological imperatives. She does this by noting the links that several
canonical American writers have with other lands and other times. I
wonder, however, if Emerson’s interest in German and Persian writing is
as obscure as Dimock seems to assume.
Underlying the lamentations of both Muthyala and Dimock, not to
mention those of countless others among us, is an unwavering commit-
ment to the representational function of literature and hence to the task
of discerning which are the true or useful representations. I note this not
to deny that literature pretty much always and eagerly takes on this
function or to worry that exclusive attention to such utility can crowd out
458 Themes, Topics, Criticism

other aspects, but to acknowledge the inherent diYculty of demonstrat-

ing, rather than merely advocating, that some representation of ‘‘Amer-
ica’’ is superior to another.
DeŽ ning America is traditionally more the task of American studies
than American literary studies, and there it is normally coextensive with
disciplinary self-examination. The venerable genre of re ection on the
Ž eld of American studies has in turn often been dominated by picking at
methodological and disciplinary scabs. Bleeding and bloodletting are the
norm. In From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park, however, Paul Lauter oVers
a refreshingly upbeat view, arguing that emergent understandings of
American culture as hybrid, postnationalist, or otherwise inconsistent
with the Cold War consensus mean that the discipline is likely to grow
and  ourish. In the section of this collection of essays entitled ‘‘Practicing
American Studies’’ he also particularly champions the educational and
scholarly work done outside the United States.
In addition to re ections on the discipline and a section on racial
issues, Lauter devotes several essays to the literary canon as it came to be
shaped at various points in the 20th century. He continues to maintain
that, rather than a parochial matter of concern only to teachers construct-
ing a syllabus or pundits looking to score points on a slow news day, the
literary canon has fundamentally to do with what will be heard in the
land and thus what will be taken seriously by the public. The claim
somewhat begs the question of how literature’s cultural capital varies with
time, but then unlike some scholars Lauter is notably unconcerned about
how or whether literary writing diVers from other cultural products. He
speaks instead from his central role in editing the Heath Anthology of
American Literature, noting for example that the anthologizers’ work of
deliberate canon reformation closely paralleled the activities that led to
the Melville revival after World War I. More than debates about the
varying import of political and aesthetic merit, eVective intervention in
what we read consists of locating books, putting out bibliographies,
publishing editions, and talking about one’s Ž nds, all of which collec-
tively then provide the foundation for serious criticism.
Phillip Barrish’s American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intel-
lectual Prestige is chie y devoted to matters of literary history and genre,
but its most provocative claim pertains to the rhetoric of literary criticism
and theory. His argument about the history of the American novel,
developed through readings of Howells, James, Cahan, and Wharton, is
that persuasive claims about being more in touch with or closer to reality
Gary Lee Stonum and Theodore O. Mason Jr. 459

operate as literary trump cards, both within particular novels (where

diVerent notions of the real dialogically compete) and between one writer
and his or her rivals. The deeper, better, and fuller the real, the greater the
distinction for the writer.
Moreover, and more surprising, the same persuasive strategy can be
seen in literary criticism of the last 50 years. Getting at the real and doing
so by means of a distinctive argumentative strategy operates as a meta-
critical criterion shared by a variety of otherwise diVerent critics. Barrish
contends that Paul de Man, John Guillory, Joan Copjec, and Judith
Butler all repeat a version of Lionel Trilling’s famous dismissal of Vernon
Parrington in ‘‘Reality in America.’’ In one way or another each bids for
prestige by claiming to have the authentic critical grasp of actuality. More
telling, each attacks rivals by arguing that, in the manner of Trilling on
Parrington’s supposed preference for Dreiser over Faulkner, the rival fails
either to appreciate the complexity of the reality or to appreciate its
plainest, simplest aspects; or both.
A corollary of this argument is Barrish’s appreciation for Judith Butler’s
notion that materialization is a process —necessarily discursive —that pro-
duces the objects —not necessarily or usually discursive at all —that count
as material and thus as real. Rather than something intrinsically outside
language, which can represent it or refer to it only from afar and from an
incommensurate order of being, the real has an inherent bond with
signiŽ cation. Even the increasingly in uential, inherently nonsymboliz-
able notion of the Real in Lacanian theory would thus exist in and as a
relation to discourse, not as part of it but not as utterly alien to it either.
Case Western Reserve University
Kenyon College
20 Scholarship in Languages Other Than
English

i French Contributions: Françoise Clary

Two book-length studies of note appeared this year, one on William
Faulkner, the other on Sherwood Anderson, but the prevailing interest of
French scholars has assuredly been in contemporary American literature.
The attraction to the distinctive aesthetic features in contemporary
American literature has increased the scope as well as the number of
contributions on individual novelists, among them Alexander Theroux,
Jayne Anne Phillips, Susan Daitch, Ann Pyne, Lynne Tillman, Richard
Powers, and Patricia Eakins. Contributions re ect the dual in uence of
linguistic and cultural studies. There is increasing interest in narrative
craftsmanship, with the exploration of semantic vistas drawing attention
to the act of reading. What attracted my attention was the general
tendency of French scholarship to look at contemporary American litera-
ture as characterized not only by its plurality and speciŽ city, but also by its
interactivity and synergy. The focus has been on a multicultural literature
inevitably hybrid in its process of construction and dialogic in its nature.

a. Faulkner The major oVering in Faulkner studies this year is François

Pitavy’s Le bruit et la fureur de William Faulkner (Paris: Gallimard), a rich
and brilliant book. Featuring a number of short essays devoted Ž rst to
introducing Faulkner’s historical, social, and economic background, then
to explicating the linguistic and stylistic innovations of the novelist,
Pitavy’s book also includes a section listing general biographical and
critical studies that both instructors and students will Ž nd helpful. The
volume’s primary strength is its commitment to various critical ap-
proaches and interpretations from traditional to poststructuralist. Pitavy
recapitulates the history of criticism of The Sound and the Fury while
462 Scholarship in Other Languages

consistently emphasizing pedagogical concerns. What strikes me as par-

ticularly interesting is that in his reading of The Sound and the Fury Pitavy
oVers both an excellent and instructive critical history of Faulkner’s novel
and a vast array of cultural choices. Pitavy’s book also oVers Ž ne textual
analysis of Faulkner’s sense of tragedy. Examining the novel’s meaning
and form of modern narrative in its treatment of loss, self-consciousness,
and the longing for order, he thoughtfully analyzes how Faulkner experi-
ments with a variety of methods of thought and representation. Pitavy
aptly shows how the text both invokes and denies perception rooted in
stable identities.
As the special issues on Faulkner attest, the French fascination with his
work persists. Marie Liénard’s inspiring article ‘‘Metaphor and Desire in
Faulkner’s Writing,’’ pp. 187–195 in William Faulkner in Venice (Venice:
Marsillo, 2000), focuses on the discursive inscription of sexual desire in
Faulkner as it encompasses cultural and racial issues. Examining how
metaphor, a double-edged weapon, displaces categories, Liénard un-
covers a subtext  owing beneath the surface and breaks new ground by
exploring how metaphor is a ‘‘trace,’’ in the Derridean sense, of the work
of desire in writing. Metaphorization in Faulkner, claims Liénard, oVers a
discursive representation of racial politics.

b. Women’s Studies Feminist writing and scholarship has set itself the
task of bearing witness to the silences, invisibilities, and gaps that mark
the fabric of history wherever women’s voices have been suppressed or
excluded. In Femmes et écriture au Canada (Dijon: Editions univérsitaires
de Dijon) Danièle Pitavy-Souques gathers 15 essays focusing on Canadian
women’s writing and insightfully analyzes Canadian polyvocalities of
race, class, and gender diVerences. Among particulars ethnicity and race
remain prominent. Several essays contributed to Femmes et écriture au
Canada reinforce this point. In ‘‘Bach Mai et Ying Chen: Identité et
nationalisme québeçois’’ (pp. 49–61) Jack A. Yeager studies the challenge
faced by linguistic and ethnocultural Asian minorities in Quebec. How
women come to speech in the political and cultural world of Quebec is
demonstrated by Ying Chen in Les lettres chinoises, argues Yeager. Lothar
Hönnighausen also makes good use of the theme of race and identity
quest in ‘‘The Metaphoric Interaction of Gender, Place and Race in Ann-
Marie MacDonald’s novel Fall on Your Knees (1996)’’ (pp. 143–61). As
Hönnighausen puts it, Fall on Your Knees is more than merely another
women’s novel; it oVers a sociocultural space where region manifests itself
Françoise Clary 463

as a cultural area with religion, ethnicity, and gender as the chief inspira-
tional forces. Similar concern with religion and gender is given special
focus by Roger Gaillard in ‘‘Corps religieux, corps mystérieux, corps
montrueux, à propos d’une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel de Marie-
Claire Blais’’ (pp. 15–37). Gaillard shows how Marie-Claire Blais’s narra-
tive derives its power from its sociocultural speciŽ city. Particularly upset-
ting is the subtext with a cultural demonization of women’s bodies and the
choice of sacrilege as a way of Ž ghting for life. Similar issues are explored
by Chantal Arlettaz in ‘‘Rêves, rêveries et fantasmes dans A Jest of God de
Margaret Laurence’’ (pp. 77–91), where the rejection of past inhibitions is
given a positive role. It is through a respect for past experiences and an
understanding of the need for the individual to Ž ght against deliberate
conŽ nement and loneliness, argues Arlettaz, that Margaret Laurence’s
female protagonist develops an ability to comprehend human nature.
Issues of loneliness, time, and space dominate Rosemary Sullivan’s ‘‘On
Writing Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEven ’’ (pp. 101–05),
which focuses on biography to explore how, for MacEwen, art becomes a
way to make sense of life. Biography is a form of memory, contends
Sullivan. Also deserving attention is Françoise Le Jeune’s ‘‘Ecriture et
émigrantes en Colombie Britannique, la période coloniale: 1849–1871’’
(pp. 63–75), a study meant to remind the reader of women’s colonial duty,
emphasizing the fact that as regards morals and manners, it is of little
importance what colonial fathers are in comparison with the mothers. In
a smart essay, using Les fous de Bassan to illustrate his point (pp. 39–48),
Jacques Poirier examines how a woman writer projects a masculinized
vision of vice and degenerate sexuality, whereas a challenging perspec-
tive on mother-daughter relationships is the focus of Conny Steeman-
Marcuse’s ‘‘Mother-Daughter Relationships in Isabel Huggan’s Work’’
(pp. 93–100). This essay is reminiscent of a book-length study by Kath-
leen Gyssels, Sages sorcières? Révisions de la mauvaise mère dans Beloved by
Toni Morrison, Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall et Moi,
Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem by Maryse Condé (Univ. Press, 2000). In
this study Gyssels redeŽ nes narrative as well as culture, deconstructing the
myth of the mother by introducing the image of the ultimate M/Other.
In a similar modernist perspective Steeman-Marcuse attempts to move
away from traditional feminist studies that investigate the representation
of gender toward a serious examination of the philosophical questioning
of a transformative experience undergone by mothers whose daughters
are in puberty, opposing the decline of the Mother to the growth of the
464 Scholarship in Other Languages

Daughter. Then in ‘‘Monique Mojica’s Transformational First Nations

Woman’s Dramaturgy’’ (pp. 111–16) Ric Knowles shows how, for Cana-
dian native playwright Monique Mojica, political facts are eVects of
language. In fact, Knowles argues that the political eYcacy of Mojica’s
plays rests in their pushing beyond critiques on the level of theme and
action toward a deep-structural dramaturgical hybridity. Representation
of native experience is also the main subject of Carmen Birkle’s ‘‘ ‘We Are
an Internally Colonized People’: Emancipatory Strategies in Dionne
Brand’s Short Stories’’ (pp. 117–30). Once ethnic stereotypes are over-
come —since for Birkle the word ‘‘ethnic’’ is shown to be linked to the
social positioning of the other —it is hard to separate issues of race and
gender. The short story, contends Birkle, enables Dionne Brand to select
decisive moments in a woman’s life —such as rape and sexist and racist
confrontations —in order to present the shortcomings or even failure of
politics. Canadian writing has apparently challenged, among other liter-
ary conventions, that of genre, argues Marta Dvorak in ‘‘Women Poets:
The New Legislators’’ (pp. 131–42), which emphasizes Bronwen Wallace’s
rhetoric of negation and Margaret Atwood’s commitment to the raising of
a feminist consciousness. Jagna Oltarzewska in ‘‘Making History: Mar-
garet Atwood’s Alias Grace ’’ (pp. 163–72) is mainly concerned with show-
ing how Atwood’s novel produces a re-vision of the past deŽ ned as the act
of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a
new critical direction. In a related article, ‘‘Miscellaneous Literary Rov-
ings in Good Bones by Margaret Atwood’’ (Annales du CRAA 26: 203–10),
Patricia Paillot examines how Atwood’s short stories, based mostly on
body language and metamorphosis, challenge and debunk codes and
genres. In ‘‘Maud et l’enfant: Entre ordre et chaos’’ (pp. 175–79) Pierre
Deplanche brings out the ambivalence of chaos in Jane Urquart’s The
Whirlpool, and Danièle Pitavy-Souques oVers an inspiring analysis of
Urquart’s writing in ‘‘Territories en miroir: Écriture et peinture chez
Jane Urquart’’ (pp. 181–92). Pitavy-Souques’s essay is especially valuable
in countering the picture of a relatively passive artist to enhance the
position of women and of Canadian literature. In this inspiring essay
Pitavy-Souques shows how Canadian cultural inheritance shaped Ur-
quart’s writing.
One of the many consequences of the modern feminist movement in
America has been a renewed interest in women’s traditional textile arts
(weaving, sewing, and quilting) as a gendered practice and a literary
trope. Joanna Megna-Wallace’s ‘‘(Re)covering an African Self and Piec-
Françoise Clary 465

ing an African American Identity: Writing the Quilt in the Works of

Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Lucille Clifton,’’ pp. 57–66 in Con-
structions of Memory in Contemporary American Literature (Montpellier:
CERCLA), shows how Walker, Morrison, and Clifton value the quilt
metaphor for its vital links to a rich African American tradition and the
dynamic possibilities and connections the image oVers. Opting for a
similar viewpoint, in ‘‘The Overworked, Inherited, and Personal Pattern:
Poetics of the Crazy Quilt in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples ’’ (Annales
du CRAA 26: 19–31) Elizabeth Lamothe examines Welty’s creative process
and the relationship between quilting and writing from the vantage point
of feminist criticism and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theorization
of homogeneous and heterogeneous spaces.

c. 19th-Century Literature This year two original readings of Herman

Melville appeared in QWERTY. In ‘‘SuVering from Simultaneity in ‘Be-
nito Cereno’ ’’ (11: 109–21) Tony McGowan studies how Melville’s narra-
tive design artfully imagines a dispersing, half-embraced, and Africanized
destiny for America in the years leading up to the Civil War. What is to be
noted is the way McGowan explores Melville’s plot as a meditation on the
temporal aspect of U.S. subjection to the slavery question. In ‘‘Republi-
can Gothic: Melville’s ‘The Bell-Tower’ Reconsidered’’ (11: 123–27) Corey
Evan Thompson shows how by describing the post-Bannadonna state
with the traditional terror-invoking gothic atmosphere Melville clearly
asserts his view of an America without democracy. The Ž nal blame,
argues Thompson, lies not in technology itself but in those who manipu-
late it to excessive ends, an end that would for Melville literally signal the
breakdown of American democracy.
In ‘‘La Ž n des temps? De l’ ‘Utopie’ des pères à la prophétie de la femme
adultère dans The Scarlet Letter, ’’ pp. 211–43 in Amérique Ž n de siècle
(Provence), Michèle Bonnet perceptively speculates on the way the past
invisibly invests itself in the present in Hawthorne’s writing, while in a
related article, ‘‘Pearl and ‘The Golden Truths’ in The Scarlet Letter ’’
(Annales du Monde Anglophone 13: 135–70), Bonnet highlights the fact that
the allegory developing around Pearl borrows its idiom from the tradition
of writers Hawthorne fervently admired, Bunyan, Spenser, and Dante.

d. 20th-Century Literature An important addition to Sherwood An-

derson scholarship this year is Claire Bruyère’s Sherwood Anderson: Le
Grotesque tendre (Paris: Belin). In her introduction to the volume (pp. 9–
466 Scholarship in Other Languages

13) Bruyère aptly deŽ nes Anderson as a major Ž ctionist and oVers chal-
lenging perspectives on his work. Then under Ž ve headings —‘‘Le mythe’’
(pp. 17–31), ‘‘Silence éloquents’’ (pp. 33–54), ‘‘Enfances’’ (pp. 55–72),
‘‘Résister’’ (pp. 73–96), and ‘‘L’impuissance créatrice’’ (pp. 97–114) —
Bruyère helpfully supplies biographical data, tells of Anderson’s love for
the city and its people, deals with his writing practices, and discusses
Anderson’s work, its modernist experimentation with expressionism, and
his focus on the concept of the oneness of disparate human experience.
RFEA includes an interesting ‘‘Interview with Don DeLillo’’ (87: 102–
11) by Marc Chénetier and François Happe bringing out DeLillo’s struc-
tural choices and use of backward chronology. Catherine Chauche’s
‘‘Pourquoi Aston ne veut-il pas changer de lit? Pronominalité et psych-
analyse dans The Caretaker d’Harold Pinter’’ (Imaginaires, pp. 127–38)
focuses on Pinter’s subtext while Christine Chollier in ‘‘La Respiration de
Jimmy Herf ou les cinq sens à l’épreuve de l’inertie de la matière dans
Manhattan Transfer ’’ (pp. 171–81) resorts to textual analysis and social
history to explore Dos Passos’s novel. With a focus on Memories of a
Catholic Girlhood Martine Aronzon examines the use of realistic descrip-
tions in ‘‘Le Fétichisme du détail chez Mary McCarthy’’ (pp. 195–203).
Daniel Thomières looks at the interplay of metaphors in Raymond
Carver’s Ž ction in ‘‘La Voiture sur la nappe ou la jouissance du Puritain
dans Will You Please Be Quiet, Please ’’ (pp. 205–11).
The recent volume (29) of Cahiers Charles V, ed. Marc Chénetier, is
devoted to thorough research on contemporary American Ž ction. Under
the heading ‘‘Etats-Unis: Formes récentes de l’imagination littéraire’’ it
features interesting articles on John Hawkes, Paul West, Fanny Howe,
David Markson, Jayne Anne Phillips, Ann Pyne, Lynne Tillman, and
Richard Powers as well as smart notes by Chénetier aptly introducing
Alexander Theroux, Joanna Scott, Nathaniel Mackey, Mary Caponegro,
Jaimy Gordon, and Patricia Eakins. Several essays address the question
of the rhetorical understanding of language. The narrative syntax of
Hawkes’s Second Skin is Arnaud Regnauld’s subject in ‘‘Poétique du désir:
Figuralité de la syntaxe dans Second Skin de John Hawkes’’ (pp. 15–40),
whereas in ‘‘ ‘Against Decorum’: L’Oeuvre scandaleuse de Paul West’’
(pp. 41–51) Anne Laure Tissut examines how Ž gures of the carnivalesque
work in West’s Ž ction. Howe, argues Philippe Jaworski in ‘‘Fanny Howe,
The Deep North ’’ (pp. 59–64), reproduces in her novel the Ž xed represen-
tation of metamorphosis to be found in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.
Trope is a Ž xed artistic representation whose authority Markson decon-
Françoise Clary 467

structs, argues Marie-Claude ProŽ t in ‘‘Vers une écriture du silence: Trois

romans de David Markson’’ (pp. 65–87). Language used in parasitic ways
or as machine dreams is explored by Jean-Louis Lampel in ‘‘L’Abri et le
monde: Shelter de Jayne Anne Phillips’’ (pp. 109–14). Fictional language
possesses many of the properties of the elocutionary act. Both Beatrice
Trotignon in ‘‘De Duchamp à Daitch: Collages, jeux d’identité et jeux de
mots in Storytown’’ (pp. 125–41) and Claude Grimal in ‘‘Ann Pyne: Une
poétique de l’indistinct’’ (pp. 159–69) deal with the main component
parts of linguistic utterances and their situational context. The issue of
the context that illuminates and stabilizes the meaning of Ž ctional lan-
guage is central to Chénetier’s thoughtful introductory notes ‘‘Nathaniel
Mackey’s ‘Vatic Scat’ ’’ (pp. 171–74) and ‘‘Mary Caponegro: L’Esprit de la
matière’’ (pp. 251–56). Tillman attracts the attention of several contribu-
tors, among them Emmanuelle Delanoë-Lebrun, who draws a parallel
between Tillman and Cormac McCarthy in ‘‘Lynne Tillman: Le Charme
discret de la modestie’’ (pp. 195–224), and Monica Manolescu Oancea,
who opts for a comparison with DeLillo in ‘‘L’Anti-toutisme comme
mode de vie: Motion Sickness de Lynne Tillman’’ (pp. 225–33). Jean-Yves
Pellegrin evokes Tillman’s textual links with Ann RadcliVe and Poe in
‘‘Lynne Tillman: Haunted Houses’’ (pp. 237–42). Reading Powers’s novels
as both an exhilarating and frustrating experience, Eric Athenot in ‘‘The
Reader as ‘A First-Class Goldberg Rube’ in The Gold Bug Variations ’’
(pp. 263–73) and Sandrine Dechaume in ‘‘Richard Powers’ Operation
Wandering Soul: A Narrative ‘On Open Circulation’ ’’ (pp. 275–88) ex-
plore Powers’s elusive linguistic strategy. Re ecting aptly on Eakins’s
linguistic imagination in his short note ‘‘Introducing Patricia Eakins’’
(pp. 301–03) Chénetier evokes the  uctuating new generic sphere of
Eakins’s Ž ction, while Françoise Palleau-Papin explores her building of
images in ‘‘La Dérive du récit dans The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre
Baptiste de Patricia Eakins’’ (pp. 311–27).
The essays gathered in L’Hétérogène et l’hétéroclite dans la littérature, les
arts et les sociétés d’Amérique du Nord (vol. 26 of Annales du CRAA ), ed.
Christian Lerat and Yves-Charles Grandjeat, point out that fragmenta-
tion thrives on the memory of unity. Most of the studies gathered in this
volume seek to shed light on the motivations behind the choice by North
American writers of an aesthetics of heterogeneity challenging any total-
izing compulsion while promoting liberty and diVerence as its guiding
values. Intergenerational and ideological con icts within the Jewish com-
munity are Suzanne Durruty’s subject in ‘‘Juxtaposition and Dissonance
468 Scholarship in Other Languages

in Allegra Goodman’s The Family Markowitz’’ (pp. 45–53), an essay that

highlights the drawbacks of assimilation and acculturation. In ‘‘Rick
Moody’s De-composed Bodies in Purple America ’’ (pp. 69–80) Pascale
Antonin strives to demonstrate that de-composition is a driving force in
Moody’s latest novel, serving the novelist’s satiric purpose. Françoise
Buisson on her part examines structure and form in ‘‘The Panorama of
Aesthetic Chaos in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama: The Heteroclite as a
Way of Eviscerating Being’’ (pp. 81–94), pointing out the baroque reality
conveyed by its linear and cumulative characteristics. Among the studies
dominating this section, the most comprehensive is Grandjeat’s ‘‘A World
Without Absolutes: From Heterogeneity to Contingency in William
Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own ’’ (pp. 139–54), an inspiring essay that looks
at the structure of Gaddis’s satirical novel. Arnaud Schmitt compares two
great narrative periods in Roth’s work in ‘‘Narrative Heterogeneity in
Philip Roth’s Work’’ (pp. 155–66). Two other essays are concerned with
the issue of time. In ‘‘Entre histoire et Ž ction, le bricolage de Daphne
Marlatt dans Ana Historic’’ (pp. 193–202) Marcienne Rocard addresses
the reading of history in a text that consistently subverts patriarchal
historical discourse and Patricia Paillot in ‘‘DiV-errances en tous genres
dans Good Bones de Margaret Atwood’’ (pp. 203–10) examines the shift
from conventional themes to modern ones. Anne-Laure Tissut explores
hybrid texts that include pictures or drawings in ‘‘From Words for a
Deaf Daughter to Gala: A Tentative Comprehension of Heterogeneity’’
(pp. 211–22) and Cecile Cormier strives to demonstrate that hetero-
geneousness —as allotopia —is at the core of Cummings’s aesthetic strat-
egy in ‘‘Heterogeneity in E. E. Cummings’s Arts: From Symptom to
Strategy’’ (pp. 235–46).

e. Ethnic Literature Volume 13 of PA is devoted to the ‘‘constructions of

memory in contemporary literature’’ and includes several essays of note
on ethnic literature. In ‘‘The Middle Passage and the Work of Memory in
the Novels of Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson’’ (pp. 15–23) John
Beckman examines the impetus behind Morrison’s Beloved, Johnson’s
The Middle Passage, and Stephen Spielberg’s blockbuster Ž lm Amistad to
work through the trauma of the middle passage. In the illuminating essay
‘‘America’s Hybrid Discourses on the Past: A Study of Four Poems’’
(pp. 35–47) Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin argue that the general
tendency in literary studies has been to consider American ethnic litera-
tures more or less according to the categories of the national census,
Françoise Clary 469

pointing out distinctive aesthetic features in the writings of Native Amer-

icans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Americans from His-
panic and other ethnic groups. In order to demonstrate the hybridity of
new American literature Harding and Martin brilliantly contrast writ-
ings of the dominated, exempliŽ ed by poems by Adrian C. Louis and
Marilyn Nelson, with the poems of ‘‘mainstream’’ writers May Swenson
and Robert Lowell. Appropriating the voice of an Indian woman and
adopting the Abenaki point of view, Julie Fay tells the story of Hannah
Duston, who was taken in 1693 by Abenaki Indians from her Haverhill
home. Miguel Mendez’s novel The Dream of Santa Maria de las Piedras,
according to Natividad Martinez Marin in ‘‘The Construction of Mem-
ory in The Dream of Santa Maria de las Piedras ’’ (pp. 49–56), turns out to
be both a magniŽ cent recovery of Chicano memory and a warning
against what can happen to a society that despises this memory in favor of
an Anglo moral code. A related article can be found in Annales du CRAA.
In ‘‘Heteros and Clitos in Chicano Poetry’’ (26: 167–80) Elyette Benjamin-
Labarthe explores Chicano poetry in an attempt at linking the underly-
ing philosophy of interlingual poetry to the contemporary syncretism in
languages. Similarly, Sue Standing in ‘‘Language as Mosaic: Memory and
Cultural Representation in the Writing of Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros,
Louise Erdrich, and Maria Infante’’ (26: 141–52) examines the way con-
temporary American Ž ction writers and poets embed cultural memory
through their employment of languages other than English, including
Spanish and Ojibwa in the cases of the writers under discussion.
With a focus on Beloved, Serigne Ndiaye in ‘‘ ‘Unspeakable Things
Unspoken’: Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Representation as Necessity and
Impossibility’’ (PA 26: 67–80) highlights the tension that results from the
moral imperative to remember the ‘‘disremembered’’ when memory re-
sists representation. Jan Pildich’s ‘‘Miracles and Wonders: Spirituality
and Physicality in the Novels of Toni Morrison’’ (26: 81–92) explores how
Beloved shares with its literary predecessors, slave narratives, an insistence
on providential, miraculous, or magical occurrences, whether Christian
or pagan. Similar issues are examined by Deirdre Reddington in ‘‘Written
on the Body: Memory and Female Identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior ’’ (26: 115–24), with its
exploration of ‘‘subjugated knowledges’’ which lie beyond the traditional
narratives of American national identity. Ann Wallace’s ‘‘ ‘How come you
to see all this?’ Envisioning the Lost Stories of Rebellious Slave Women’’
(26: 153–62) pays attention to silences in the novels of Sherley Anne
470 Scholarship in Other Languages

Williams, Morrison, and Michelle CliV. Reconstructed history is the

subject of Nancy Laine Price’s ‘‘The Healing Power of ‘Blood’s Memory’
in August Wilson’s Fences and The Piano Lesson’’ (26: 93–102). Exam-
ining Ellison’s posthumous novel, Patrice D. Rankine argues in ‘‘Epic,
the Oral Community, and the Memory of Emancipation in Ralph Elli-
son’s Juneteenth ’’ (26: 103–14) that the speeches in the text are epic
narratives that memorialize crucial periods in American history such as
emancipation.
Adopting a historical perspective, John Beckman’s ‘‘ ‘Stomping the
Savoy’: Langston Hughes et la démocratisation hédoniste de l’ art oli-
garchique,’’ pp. 181–92 in L’Hétérogène et l’hétéroclite dans la littérature, les
arts et les sociétés d’Amérique du Nord (Annales du CRAA), describes an
alternative aesthetic tradition within African American culture that fol-
lowed a gradual evolution from the middle passage, throughout the ante-
and postbellum periods in U.S. history, to its ultimate perfection and
articulation during the Harlem Renaissance. It is not for me to assess the
value of my own work, but in that same issue of Annales du CRAA I
attempt in ‘‘Heterogeneity and the Production of Meaning in Paule Mar-
shall’s Fictional Work’’ (26: 33–44) to explore how Paule Marshall’s aes-
thetical view of sociological knowledge, including the tangle of forces
surrounding West Indian immigrants, is expressed through a system of
metaphoric signiŽ cance that favors baroque iconography, images of alien-
ation spiraling toward nonbeing, and speech disorder. My contention is
that as disjointedness builds on disjointedness, Marshall’s aesthetical use
of the heterogeneous can contribute greatly in conveying the contradic-
tions visible in immigrants torn between their interest in and alienation
from the Barbadian community. In ‘‘Race, Gender and Space: Louise
Merriwether’s Harlem in Daddy Was a Number Runner ’’ (CLAJ 45, i: 26–
40) Corinne Duboin examines the way Merriwether reconstructs the
geography of Harlem and re-creates the black experience during the
Depression. Sources also includes Duboin’s interview with Dawn Turner
Trice, ‘‘A New Voice in African American Literature’’ (11: 115–27).
Université de Rouen

ii German Contributions: Frank Kearful

a. The Lay of the Land Neither the German nor the American econ-
omy is, as of this writing, particularly  ourishing and concern has been
voiced in America about long-term eVects on ‘‘shareholder culture’’ of
Frank Kearful 471

recent corporate skullduggery. Fortunately for those who need it, Amer-
ica already has a ‘‘culture of pain,’’ not to mention, as GeoVrey Hartman
notes in The Fateful Question of Culture (1997), a ‘‘gun culture,’’ ‘‘a culture
of amnesia,’’ and a plethora of other minicultures to choose among. All
well and good in these trying times.
But when it comes to culture, nobody beats the Germans. When a
leading sports commentator was lamenting before the World Cup the de-
cline of the German national soccer team, he bewailed the current team’s
lack of Spielkultur (play culture). Coming out of the subway on the way to
work, I used to pass every day an ad promoting reading and libraries and
the national Lesekultur (reading culture). Buy a magazine and you can
learn how to do wonders for your Wohnkultur (dwelling culture) by
redecorating your home. Or buy the culinary magazine next to it and Ž nd
out how to improve your Esskultur (eating culture). When the education
ministry of North Rhine-Westphalia recently criticized my incorrigibly
conservative university it found us woefully wanting in Reformkultur (re-
form culture); similarly, a newspaper editorial has argued that the perilous
state of German schools can be remedied only through a radically new
Unterrichtskultur (teaching culture). A crucial component of that new
Unterrichtskultur must be, in the wake of an American-style bloodbath at
a German school, a new Anerkennungskultur (recognition culture), which
I gather will prevent adolescent loners from turning into killers.
Kultur compounds such as these random samples, which might be
endlessly multiplied, are regularly supplemented by the sudden ap-
pearance of temporarily fashionable neologisms such as Leitkultur (lead
culture), a coinage intended to stress the necessity of maintaining Ger-
man culture in the face of rampant multiculturalism (i.e., the Turks
should be more like the rest of us if they want to live here). Another
pressing problem in Cologne, where I live, is the huge number of tickets
given for double parking, which will never be reduced, so I read, unless
and until a new Parkkultur (parking culture) is instilled in all of us. To a
non-German like myself, such Kultur compounds often sound high-
falutin and, literally translated, funny. To sensitized American ears,
Kultur compounding can also sound politically incorrect, as when I heard
someone making use in conversation of the anthropological distinction
between a Kulturvolk (culture people) and a Naturvolk (nature people). I
later learned that a distinction between Kultur and Natur was fundamen-
tal to older German Kulturwissenschaft (culture scholarship), which also
distinguished between Geist (a polyvalent word associated with notions
472 Scholarship in Other Languages

of spirit or mind) and Natur. As a discursively challenged American

earnestly trying to prove his credentials as a member of a Kulturvolk,
whenever I go to a conference on Amerikastudien I never fail to pack my
Kulturtasche (culture bag, i.e., toilet kit).
That Amerikanistik is not a Philologie (a philological discipline) but a
Kulturwissenschaft, one of whose attendants is Literaturwissenschaft, goes
without saying. Accordingly, many who teach American literature prefer
to designate themselves a Kulturwissenschaftler (culture scholar, male) or a
Kulturwissenschaftlerin (culture scholar, female) rather than a mere Liter-
aturwissenschaftler or Literaturwissenschaftlerin. As Amerikanistik often
enjoys a separate or quasi-separate departmental existence, enabling in-
terdisciplinary cultural studies to grow like Topsy, English departments
have not yet undergone the battles to the death between literature die-
hards and cultural studies zealots that have sent some American univer-
sity departments into receivership. British studies, not to be outdone, is at
some German universities already a separate department or in the process
of becoming one. In short, cultural studies is where the action is.
To take stock of what the expansion of Kulturwissenschaft promises for
North American studies in Germany, a conference was held in 1999 at the
Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, an interdisciplinary research
center funded by the aforementioned education ministry. The con-
ference has now given birth to Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven in der
Nordamerika-Forschung, ed. Friedrich Jaeger (StauVenburg), who con-
cedes in his introductory ‘‘Einführung: Kulturwissenschaften, Cultural
Studies und die deutsche Nordamerikaforschung’’ (pp. 9–23) that skep-
tics may still be heard defaming cultural studies as an academic band-
wagon loaded with dilettantes which threatens the integrity and survival
of traditional disciplines in a time of widespread budget cuts. Keeping his
cool, Jaeger argues for dynamic intercourse between Anglo-American-
style cultural studies and German Kulturwissenschaft, with its own intel-
lectual roots and traditions long antedating the annus mirabilis 1964
when Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall said let there be cultural studies,
and at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, lo, there was. Jaeger
argues that by sustaining the tensions between Anglo-American and
German cultural studies the German Amerikanist can forge a creative
synthesis: both traditions have something to learn from the other. In this
spirit, Jaeger, a historian and Kulturwissenschaftler, traces in ‘‘Traditionen
der Kulturwissenschaft im deutsch-amerikanischen Vergleich’’ (pp. 209–
Frank Kearful 473

38) the historical signiŽ cance of Jakob Burckhardt, Max Weber, and John
Dewey in the inception of the German and American traditions.
In the same volume, Janice Radway’s 1998 presidential address to the
American Studies Association urging the abolition of the term ‘‘American
Studies’’ (which insidiously implies the existence of American culture as
‘‘a uniŽ ed whole’’) provides a point of departure for Jeanne Cortiel and
Walter Grünzweig’s discussion of ‘‘Das Erzählen in der Kultur: Narrativ,
Religion und Kulturanalyse’’ (pp. 27–40). Cortiel and Grünzweig dis-
count the alleged danger bruited about in the aftermath of Radway’s and
similar onslaughts that American Studies might be gobbled up by a
border-trampling behemoth dubbed simply Cultural Studies. Appar-
ently all that we have in store as a successor to politically malodorous
‘‘American Studies’’ is what Betsy Erkkila has christened ‘‘comparative
American cultural studies.’’ Ruth Mayer’s ‘‘Science Studies —Global
Studies? Kulturwissenschaften im Wandel’’ (pp. 63–80) also takes up
Radway’s call for a reconstitution of American Studies, one in which
postcolonial theory and transnational perspectives would transform the
discipline. While not fundamentally averse to such goals, Mayer accords
free airtime to prophets of doom who warn of what will transpire if the
Radways of this world have their way, and Mayer herself in recounting
post-Sokel controversies engulŽ ng science studies is not mesmerized by
wilder-eyed cultural studies enthusiasts such as Donna Haraway. Her
case for concentrating on deŽ ning local networks instead of hailing an
imminent realization of global studies sounds suspiciously sensible.
When tracing local networks and the spread of multiculturalism and
hybridization, practitioners of American cultural studies might proŽ ta-
bly turn their attention to the impact of American popular culture on
ethnic minorities who, although born in Germany, are stubbornly imper-
vious to the Leitkultur. Christoph Ribbat’s ‘‘ ‘Ja, ja, deine Mutter!’ Ameri-
can Studies und deutsche Populärkultur’’ (pp. 145–60), which explores
Turkish assimilation and the hybridization of American rap and hip-hop,
oVers a model for such research. Ecocriticism, a growth industry now
beginning to establish itself in Germany, is well represented in the Kultur-
wissenschaftliche Perspektiven volume by Neil Browne’s ‘‘Northern Imagi-
nation, Political Reality, and Arctic Dreams: Ecological NonŽ ction and
the Arctic,’’ a study of Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Richard K.
Nelson’s Make Prayers to the Raven (pp. 81–94). My own ‘‘Meter Matters
and Cultural Poetics: Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’ ’’ (pp. 177–
474 Scholarship in Other Languages

205) argues for an admittedly scarce variant of interdisciplinary American

cultural studies, a joining forces of metrical analysis and cultural poetics.
That dyed-in-the-wool Literaturwissenschaftler do not necessarily have
to change their spots, or their professional ID cards, is reassuringly
proved by Heinz Ickstadt, one of Germany’s most distinguished Ameri-
canists and a longtime holder of the literature chair at the John F. Ken-
nedy American Studies Institute in Berlin. Ickstadt’s Faces of Fiction:
Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Period to
Postmodernity, ed. Susanne Rohr and Sabine Sielke (Winter), brings
together essays from more than two decades. ‘‘In Place of an Introduc-
tion: America as Literary and Cultural Model in Postwar Germany’’
draws on Ickstadt’s experience growing up after World War II as it
recounts the impact of American culture and American literature from
the ‘‘pro-American’’ ’50s through the ‘‘anti-American’’ ’60s and early ’70s.
Although the younger generation embraced America and all things
American wholeheartedly, even the pro-American ’50s were not entirely
pro-American. As Ickstadt recounts, ‘‘[d]espite Germany’s military defeat
and total moral collapse, the sense of German cultural superiority —the
sense of being somehow better than the barbarous East or the crude
material West (not to mention the sunny but superŽ cial South) —had
managed to survive the war; and I remember how my heart sank, when
my father—not in any way a cultured man —never wavered in his con-
viction that America was a country without culture, repeating all the
worn-out anti-American clichés that had long been part of the cultural
chauvinism of the German bourgeoisie.’’ As a cultural image ‘‘America’’
became the focus of a debate, often conducted between generations, on
the state and direction of postwar German culture. Theodor Adorno’s
attack on American jazz, the liberating in uence of the poetry of William
Carlos Williams and Frank O’Hara, the fascination with but also distrust
of American culture on the part of German intellectuals of the postwar
period are some of the elements in the dialectical story Ickstadt relates.
Bernd Ostendorf ’s ‘‘Why Is American Culture So Popular? A View
from Europe’’ tells a complementary story, extending it to the present.
Although he does not close his eyes to anti-American clichés, Ostendorf
is principally interested in recounting the impact of democratic values in
and through the transmission of American popular culture. Ostendorf ’s
labor of love appears in a splendid special issue of Amst (46: 339–66) on
popular culture, along with Sherry Linkon and John Russo’s ‘‘Class
Confusions: American Media Discourse about Class’’ (46: 367–78) on
Frank Kearful 475

current interests in and anxieties about class as re ected in class discourse
in the media; Winfried Fluck’s ‘‘Crime, Guilt, and Subjectivity in Film
Noir ’’ (46: 379–408) on, among other things, the continuing fascination
with Ž lm noir as a stylized, theatrical transformation of self-dissolution
into a ‘‘cool,’’ pleasurable experience; Peter Schneck’s ‘‘Image Fictions:
Literature, Television, and the End(s) of Irony’’ (46: 409–28) on the
ironic, self-re exive modes of TV in the 1980s and their impact on David
Wallace and other writers; Hanjo Berressem’s ‘‘ ‘Think Globally, but
Better to Act Elvisly’: Elvis and El Vez’’ (42: 429–42) on the music of
Robert López, a.k.a. El Vez, the ‘‘Mexican Elvis,’’ and his transformation
of traumatic experience through impersonation; and Reinhold Wagn-
leitner’s ‘‘ ‘No Commodity Is Quite So Strange as This Thing Called
Cultural Exchange’: The Foreign Politics of American Pop Cultural He-
gemony’’ (42: 443–70), which argues that such hegemony as occurred did
so as much through invitation as subjugation and notes the irony that
several of the artists who created the ‘‘Sound of Freedom’’ were deemed
un-American or were otherwise marginalized at home.

b. Poetry Lives What some might call the hegemony of cultural

studies —often with a focus on American popular culture —has not put an
end to the close study of poetry. Occasionally it might even be said to
have enriched it, as in Therese SteVen’s Crossing Color: Transcultural Space
and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama (Oxford), whose back
cover features prominently an endorsement of it by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
as ‘‘a magniŽ cent contribution to students of American Literature, Afri-
can American Studies, and Women’s Studies . . . a model of literary
criticism at its most useful, and readable.’’ Published in the distinguished
series of volumes of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, of which
Gates is an editor, SteVen’s thoughtful study portrays Dove as an invete-
rate boundary crosser, be it a geographical, racial, religious, class, gender,
or genre boundary. SteVen, a Swiss scholar at the University of Basel and a
former fellow of the Du Bois Institute, reveals how Dove’s shaping of
transcultural spaces provides her with ‘‘a home in art.’’ Crossing Color is
essential reading for all those interested in Dove’s poetry, Ž ction, and
drama.
Dove’s ‘‘A Dialectical Romance’’ also Ž nds its way into Franz Link’s
‘‘Religiöse Thematik in der amerikanischen Lyrik der Gegenwart,’’
pp. 91–122 in Spiritualität und Transzendenz in der modernen englisch-
sprachigen Literatur, ed. Susanne Bach (Paderborn: Schöningh). Long an
476 Scholarship in Other Languages

eminent Ž gure in American literary studies in Germany and long retired

from his post at Freiburg, Link remained highly productive until his
death in 2002. His survey of religious themes in contemporary American
poetry takes into consideration poems, quoted extensively or in full,
by Ann Astell, Joseph Awad, David Berman, Thomas Carper, William
Dickey, Thomas Disch, Rita Dove, Frank X. Gaspar, Dana Gioia, An-
drew Hudgins, Herbert A. Kenny, Denise Levertov, Lisa Lewis, David
Morrison, R. H. Morrison, Howard Nemerov, Lynn Powell, Richard
Tillinghast, Frederick Turner, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and John Wood. Link,
whose own religious faith informed much of his writing, never hid his
decided literary tastes and distastes; he was not given to delivering tepid
critical judgments. All this is evident in this typically independent-
minded essay, and in its exclusions as much as its inclusions.
Frank O’Hara, not a likely candidate for anyone’s list of poets with a
yen for the religious, is the focus of Christa Buschendorf ’s ‘‘Ekphrasis
und die Abkehr vom Mimesis-Prinzip —Bildgedichte Frank O’Haras auf
Werke des Abstrakten Expressionismus,’’ pp. 249–70 in Behext von
Bildern? Ursachen, Funktionen und Perspektiven der textuellen Faszination
durch Bilder, ed. Heinz J. Drügh and Maria Moog-Grünewald (Winter).
Buschendorf ’s essay, my nominee for best essay of the year on American
poetry, oVers devoted, subtle close-readings of O’Hara’s ‘‘Digression on
Number 1, 1948’’ and ‘‘Blue Territory’’ —which as ekphrastic poems en-
gage themselves with Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1948 and Helen Frank-
enthaler’s Blue Territory. Twentieth-century poets, including contempo-
rary poets like Dove, with her special interest in Albrecht Dürer, are
generally more drawn in their ekphrastic poems to Ž gurative paintings,
which obviously are easier to ‘‘portray’’ in words. How can one write an
ekphrastic poem ‘‘on’’ an abstract expressionist painting? Read O’Hara,
read Buschendorf.
Dickinson scholars the world over will warmly welcome the boundary-
crossing publication by a German publisher of an important collection of
essays, Emily Dickinson at Home, ed. Gudrun M. Grabher and Martina
Antretter (Wissenschaftlicher), who teach at Innsbruck University. The
18 essays, based on papers given at the Third International Conference of
the Dickinson International Society at Mt. Holyoke College in 1999,
include interesting contributions by Swiss, Austrian, Thai, American,
Canadian, Danish, Australian, and Japanese scholars. Among the topics
discussed are Dickinson as a feminist poet, her diverse in uences on
contemporary American writers, Dickinson and slavery, Dickinson and
Frank Kearful 477

the Hebrew Bible, Dickinson’s popularity in the Far East, her poetic
language, her handwriting, and her implicitly erotic language.
Anyone on the lookout for a detailed account of the fortunes of the
sonnet in 20th-century American poetry and its important place in the
literary movements of the century cannot do better than to read Paul
Neubauer’s Zwischen Tradition und Innovation: Das Sonett in der amer-
ikanischen Dichtung des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Winter). Not  ying
under the banner of cultural studies or trailing theoretical clouds of glory,
Neubauer’s 451-page study will perhaps be most relevant to those par-
ticularly interested in the continued vitality of the sonnet in contempo-
rary American poetry, to which roughly one-third of the book is devoted.

c. Prose, Drama, Film, and Photography The volume on spirituality

and transcendence in modern English language literature to which Link
contributed his piece on poetry includes thoughtful essays by Vera Nün-
ning and Ansgar Nünning on John Irving, ‘‘ ‘Faith and Prayer —They
Work, They Really Do’: Formen und Funktionen der literarischen Ins-
zenierung von Spiritualität in John Irvings A Prayer for Owen Meany ’’
(pp. 123–43); Daniel Göske on John Updike, ‘‘ ‘An Essay about Kinds of
Belief ’: Updikes theologische Erzählkunst in Roger’s Version ’’ (pp. 145–
66); Gerd Hurm on Richard Ford, ‘‘Die Lüge der Literatur und die
Wahrheit des Lebens: Paradoxien moderner Sinnsuche und Sinnstiftung
in Richard Fords The Sportswriter ’’ (pp. 167–81); Bruno Friedrich Arich-
Gerz on Thomas Pynchon, ‘‘Betriebsgeheimnis des Glaubens: Thomas
Pynchons Gravity’s Rainbow ’’ (pp. 183–91); Astrid Swift on Louise Erd-
rich, ‘‘Indianische Religiosität im identitätspolitischen Kontext in Lou-
ise Erdrichs Romanen Tracks und Love Medicine ’’ (pp. 193–207); and
Kurt Müller on Cynthia Ozick, ‘‘Liturgie und Idolatrie in der zeitgenös-
sischen jüdisch-amerikanischen Literatur: Das religiöse Kunstkonzept
Cynthia Ozicks’’ (pp. 209–25). Several of the same authors —Irving,
Updike, Pynchon, and Erdrich —make an appearance, in diVerent roles,
in Günter Leypoldt’s Casual Silences: The Poetics of Minimal Realism from
Raymond Carver and the New Yorker School to Bret Easton Ellis (Wis-
senschaftlicher). Leypoldt recounts the short, happy life of ‘‘literary mini-
malism,’’ notably as represented in Carver’s short Ž ction and Ann Beat-
tie’s and Bobbie Ann Mason’s short Ž ction and early novels, from its
burgeoning in the ’70s to its decline in popularity in the ’90s; minimal
realism proves, however, to be alive and well in the ‘‘brat pack’’ novels of
Ellis and Jay McInerney. Leypoldt, who is also intent on discriminating
478 Scholarship in Other Languages

contemporary minimalist poetics from neo- and experimental realism,

metaŽ ction, and fabulism, has written a cogent book graced by some
perceptive close-reading.
On a broader historical scale, Ulfried Reichardt’s Alterität und Ge-
schichte: Funktionen der Sklavereidarstellung im amerikanischen Roman
(Winter) is an impressive study of alterity (the other is alive and well in
Germany, too) and history as related to the representation of slavery from
the pre-Civil War period to the present; particular attention is given to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘‘Benito Cereno,’’ Huckleberry Finn, Absalom, Ab-
salom!, Go Down, Moses, and The Confessions of Nat Turner. Reichardt, an
adept in the fabrication of theory who is by no means averse to close-
reading, demonstrates how varying representations of slavery have served
as ways of writing about contemporary cultural and social phenomena,
including segregation and the repression of history in the South. Wider
perspectives on the functions of the representation of slavery in American
historical and national consciousness and attendant emergent contradic-
tions in the modern temper form part of the backdrop of Reichardt’s
panoramic focus.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, no longer a
neglected text, is the subject of Jürgen C. Wolter’s ‘‘From History to
Narrative: The Merging of Cultural Paradigms in Their Eyes Were Watch-
ing God ’’ (Amst 46: 233–48). Wolter argues that the novel, which synthe-
sizes the linearity of the literate tradition and the circularity of orality,
ultimately privileges the African mode of constructing histories over the
Western. The dualism of the two cultural paradigms is found to be at
work in narrative technique, imagery and metaphor, the treatment of
time, and plot construction. Along with Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and
Langston Hughes’s story ‘‘Cora Unashamed’’ from The Ways of White
Folks, another Hurston novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, provides the focus for
Klaus Ensslen’s diVerent approach to ‘‘Silencing the ‘Exotic,’ Voicing the
‘Demotic’: Culture and Experience in the Fiction of Nella Larsen, Zora
Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes,’’ pp. 35–49 in Transatlantic Mod-
ernism, ed. Martin Klepper and Joseph C. Schöpp (Winter). Ensslen,
who acknowledges the in uence of George Hutchinson’s placing of the
Harlem Renaissance in the context of an American cultural nationalism
engendering a broader modernist movement, argues that the three texts
he discusses represent three strikingly diVerent handlings of the vernacu-
lar norm as a distinct basis for an African American national modernism.
On more recent Ž ction, Heike Paul’s ‘‘Old, New and ‘Neo’ Immigrant
Frank Kearful 479

Fictions in American Literature: The Immigrant Presence in David

Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars and T. C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain ’’
(Amst 46: 249–65) notes that the current boom in ethnic and immigrant
Ž ction has included several novels by white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class
writers previously not concerned with issues of ethnicity and immigra-
tion. In Guterson and Boyle’s ‘‘neo-immigrant’’ Ž ction, which Paul re-
lates to theoretical discussions of the construction of whiteness, the
immigrant experience is employed to unfold a culturally resonant re-
demption plot.
A wide-ranging special issue of Amst (46, i) on queering America
includes interesting pieces on prose, drama, Ž lm, and photography.
Christoph Ribbat’s ‘‘Queer and Straight Photography’’ (pp. 27–39) con-
trasts the representation of cross-dressers by ‘‘straight artists’’ Lisette
Model and Diane Arbus with their representation by two leading expo-
nents of queer photography, Nan Goldin and Mark Morrisoe, and com-
ments on queer and straight in the work of two younger photographers,
Nikki S. Lee and Collier Schorr. Torsten GraV ’s ‘‘Gay Drama/Queer
Performance’’ (pp. 11–25), on the status of dramatic texts within queer
theory, notes that while work by gay playwrights has  ourished on the
stage for more than a decade, queer theory has neglected drama; he
advances a queer strategy of metatheatricality linked to Tony Kushner’s
ideas on a theater of the fabulous. Catrin Gersdorf ’s ‘‘The Gender of
Nature’s Nation: A Queer Perspective’’ (pp. 41–54) dissects the ‘‘hetero-
sexual imperative’’ in America’s national mythology as it is revealed in The
Passion of New Eve (1995) by the British novelist Angela Carter. Dorothea
Löbbermann’s ‘‘Looking for Harlem: (Re)konstruktionen Harlems als
‘queer mecca,’ 1925–1995’’ (pp. 55–69) discusses Samuel R. Delany’s 1995
novella Atlantis: Model 1924 as a recent instance of Harlem’s (re)con-
struction in Ž ction, nonŽ ction, and Ž lm in American queer cultural
memory. Ralph J. Poole’s ‘‘Cannibal Cruising, or, ‘To the Careful Student
of the Unnatural History of Civilization’ ’’ (pp. 71–85) unearths Charles
Warren Stoddard’s page-turner travelogue South Sea Idyls (1873), which
like Melville’s Typee oVers ‘‘a peep at Polynesian life,’’ albeit one which
aVords a heterotropic space of queerness within the discursive Ž eld of
‘‘Orientalism.’’ Sabine Hark’s ‘‘Disputed Territory: Feminist Studies in
Germany and Its Queer Discontents’’ (pp. 71–85) is required reading for
anyone interested in tracing the impact hereabouts, and afterlife in suc-
ceeding debates, of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which a year after its
publication in America appeared in German translation as Das Un-
480 Scholarship in Other Languages

behagen der Geschlechter (1991). Claudia Berger’s ‘‘Queens und Kings, oder
Performing Power ’’ (pp. 105–21), which includes in its purview the 1933
Greta Garbo Ž lm Queen Christina, argues that while the kingdom of the
queer star is a kingdom of theatrical femininity the recent emergence of
the ‘‘drag king’’ challenges the association of femininity and masquerade.
Brian Currid’s ‘‘Judy Garland’s American Drag’’ (pp. 123–33) focuses on
the 1954 Ž lm A Star Is Born and its revelation of Americanness as a
structure of impersonation. Nadine Milde’s ‘‘Pop Goes the Queerness, or
(Homo)sexuality and Its Metaphors: On the Importance of Gay Sen-
sibilities in Postmodern Culture and Theory’’ (pp. 135–50) examines how
and why ‘‘queerness’’ has been promoted as a new media trend during the
past decade, while at the same time there has been a turning away from
‘‘gay and lesbian studies’’ toward ‘‘queer studies’’ and a new concept of
queerness harboring, Milde argues, strategic dangers as well as positive
hermeneutic and political potential.
Jochen Baier’s ‘‘The Long-Delayed but Always Expected Something’’: Der
American Dream in den Dramen von Tennessee Williams (Wissenschaft-
licher) is less concerned with the sorts of issues of gayness and queerness,
writers and theorists, the theater and the groves of academe, which are of
central importance to Torsten GraV and Nadine Milde. Williams ob-
served of his own success story, in a remark Baier quotes, ‘‘My experience
was not unique. Success has often come that abruptly into the lives of
Americans.’’ In the course of pursuing his thesis, Baier provides sensitive
readings of the plays and perceptive comments on Williams’s literary and
dramatic art. Baier’s explication and his dramaturgy make his book
worth reading. A younger Southern dramatist is the subject of Susanne
Au itsch’s ‘‘Beth Henley’s Early Family Plays: Dysfunctional Parenting,
the South, and Feminism’’ (Amst 46: 267–80), which explores Henley’s
redeŽ nition of ‘‘family’’ as a nonhierarchical union of caring women.
Despite the deŽ ciencies of such families, Henley’s brand of ‘‘family’’
optimism is seen as according her virtually a unique place in Southern
(family) drama.

d. The Long Goodbye Along with death and taxes, postmodernism

threatens to be always with us, and books about it are not in short supply.
German scholars have put their shoulders to the wheel to help keep post-
modernism a going concern and one of the most notable books this year
is, in fact, Postmodernism and the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gerhard HoVmann and
Frank Kearful 481

Alfred Hornung (Winter). Designed to take stock of postmodernism —

heart still beating? turn oV the scholarly life support system? —at the end
of one century and the beginning of another, this collection of essays
turns out to be eminently worth reading, even by those of us who may
doubt that what the world needs most is another book on pomo. Hans
Bertens’s ‘‘In Defense of the Bourgeois Postmodern’’ (pp. 1–11) notes that
‘‘[p]ostmodernism has been under attack from the very beginning’’ and
concedes that postcolonial theory, a growth stock in the 1990s, now
threatens an unfriendly takeover. Bertens deplores the highjacking of
postmodernism by ‘‘radical relativists’’ who have given it a bad name and
whose absolutist relativism has been a godsend to postmodernism’s de-
tractors. He is not ill-disposed toward the postmodern fun and games of
so much American literature of the ’60s and ’70s —i.e., Pynchon and Co.;
what really matters to Bertrens is an emancipatory ‘‘postmodernism of
diVerence’’ which ‘‘allows those whose voices were repressed Ž nally to
speak for themselves.’’ Thanks to postmodernism, we now have lesbian,
black, and feminist female sleuths in our crime Ž ction and even at the
Nobel Prize end of the scale a Eurocentric bias has been undermined.
Somehow during all this George W. Bush managed to get elected. An-
dreas Höfele in ‘‘Ut Architectura Poesis ? Or, the Limits of Interdisci-
plinarity’’ (pp. 13–25) observes that the ‘‘goalposts of the ever-popular
deŽ nitions game are not where they used to be. What used to be regarded
as most conspicuously and typically postmodern in 1975 would now Ž nd
itself pushed back across the great divide and labeled late modern.’’
Höfele questions the validity of ‘‘postmodern’’ sister-arts analogies à la
Charles Jencks between architecture and literature and talks a lot of com-
mon sense. Johann N. Schmidt’s lively, closely argued ‘‘The Sameness of
Variety: Urbanism and ‘a Sense of the City’ ’’ (pp. 27–38) winds up by
observing that the 54 cities in Thomas More’s Utopia all were designed the
same, but while Utopia became synonymous with the monotony of the
modern world ‘‘there is also a sense of sameness in programmed diver-
sity.’’ Lothar Bredella’s ‘‘Pluralism and Cosmopolitanism: Two Answers to
a Multicultural Society at the End of the Century’’ (pp. 39–55) distin-
guishes a ‘‘pluralism’’ which stresses the collective of a given ethnic group
in its diVerence from others and a ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’ which gives priority
to individual notions of self-realization. In ‘‘Feminism and the Legacy of
Postmodernism’’ Chris Weedon recounts the impact of a postmodern
culture of diVerence as seen in feminist thought and urges —speaking of
482 Scholarship in Other Languages

diVerences —that individual diVerences of Third World women’s condi-

tions be taken more into account by universalizing First World feminists.
Kathleen Woodward’s ‘‘Statistical Panic’’ (pp. 69–92) associates the post-
modern ‘‘society of the statistic’’ with a pervasive statistical stress and
indeed panic, particularly as induced with respect to aging and disease.
Two exceptionally thoughtful pieces on the fate and function of the
humanities in the postmodern American university, where cultural stud-
ies rules the roost, are among the best essays in the collection, Steven
Marcus’s sweetly reasonable ‘‘The Humanities at the End of Centuries:
From the Classics to Cultural Studies’’ (pp. 93–107) and Winfried Fluck’s
well-considered ‘‘The Humanities, the Individual and the ‘System’ ’’
(pp. 109–23). In ‘‘History and Subject: Caught in Modernity’s Game
(pp. 125–39) Herbert Grabes also weighs in with a substantial piece
which manages to look on the bright side: postmodern art may yet liber-
ate postmodern theory from its dead ends by encouraging ‘‘more re-
workings of older theories or combinations of well-known styles of
thought that would help to preserve the memory of valuable cultural
work without having to buy into any kind of untenable ontologizing.’’
More directly concerned with literature, Jochen Achilles’s ‘‘Fin de
Siècle —Fin des Grandes Villes? The Reprimitivization of Urban Culture
in Premodern and Postmodern American Fiction’’ (pp. 141–61) inter-
estingly juxtaposes premodern representations of cities in British Ž ction
at the end of the 19th century (e.g., Richard JeVries, H. G. Wells, and
London) with their representations in postmodern American Ž ction at
the end of the 20th century (e.g., Paul Auster, Tama Janowitz, and New
York), which turn out to express a similar skepticism regarding the prog-
ress of civilization. In ‘‘The Gospel According to Norman Mailer: Fic-
tional Evangelists in Postmodern Times’’ (pp. 163–73) Alfred Hornung
Ž nds in Mailer’s 1997 novel The Gospel According to the Son a template for
an intriguing analysis of a Ž n-de-siècle wave of literary interest in re-
ligious ideas and practices of all sorts, seen as associated with a ‘‘pre-
modern postmodernism which reintroduces pre-rational thinking for
a re-enchantment of the world.’’ Rüdiger Kunow’s ‘‘At the Border-
line: Placing and Displacing Communities in Postcolonial Narratives’’
(pp. 175–202) shows how novels by Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and
Salman Rushdie fashion communities out of borderline existences. In
‘‘The Aesthetics of the Mysterious and the Grotesque in the American
Novel of the Nineties’’ (pp. 203–40) Gerhard HoVmann Ž nds the post-
modern legacy of uncertainty transformed into an aesthetics of the mys-
Frank Kearful 483

terious and grotesque in ‘‘summation novels’’ by Coover, Roth, DeLillo,

and Morrison. Refashionings of hard-boiled detective conventions and
Ž lm noir atmosphere in ethnic detective Ž ction are illuminated in
Theo D’haen’s ‘‘Postmodern Noir: ‘Fin d’America?’ ’’ (pp. 241–48) while
Hanjo Berressem in ‘‘DeNarration: Literature at the End of the Millen-
nium’’ (pp. 249–65) takes on postmodern Canadian cyberŽ ction in
which the futuristic deconstruction of narrative structures—denarra-
tion —becomes the basis for a renewed desire for narration. Moving away
from literature, by way of coda Herbert Blau’s ‘‘The Millennial Look and
the Perpetual Blush’’ (pp. 267–78) focuses on fashions in fashion while
Edith Wyschogrod’s ‘‘From the Death of the Word to the Rise of the
Image in the Choreography of Merce Cunningham’’ (pp. 279–91) ex-
plores the evolution of Cunningham’s art in postmodern contexts as
simulacra dancing. Postmodernism and the Fin de Siècle is a wide-ranging,
lively collection of essays deserving more than a ticker-tape summary.
Not that we have, I suspect, heard the last of postmodernism. Watch this
space.
Universität Bonn

iii Italian Contributions: Maria Anita Stefanelli

The woman is the protagonist of four important volumes published last
year, whether in her interaction with clothing (speciŽ cally, accessories),
in her relationship with art works, as private/public persona, or —as is the
case with the diVerent portraits of the Lady created by Henry James —in
the cultural representation of femininity. Several scholars contributed to
the three collections of essays: Abito e identità: Ricerche di storia letteraria e
culturale (Palermo: Ila Palma), the fourth in a successful series edited by
Cristina Giorcelli focusing on the literary and cultural history of fashion;
Before Peggy Guggenheim: American Women Art Collectors, ed. Rosella
Mamoli Zorzi (Venice: Marsilio), resulting from a conference celebrating
the centennial anniversary of the famous American woman collector’s
birth; and a special issue of Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica,
presented by Giorcelli and Giuseppe Monsagrati, ‘‘Margaret Fuller tra
Europa e Stati Uniti d’America,’’ containing the papers of the interna-
tional symposium commemorating the 150th anniversary of Fuller’s
death (Rome: Carocci). Donatella Izzo is the single author of Portraying
the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James (Ne-
braska), a prominent contribution to James studies. Three volumes deal
484 Scholarship in Other Languages

with the critical and theoretical issues that emerged in the last century.
Among them, The Idea and The Thing in Modernist American Poetry, ed.
Giorcelli (Palermo: Ila Palma), concerns the experimental poetic move-
ment that, thanks to the Objectivist poets who wished ‘‘to replace ‘ideas’
with ‘things,’ concepts with objects, abstractions with facts, principles
with action,’’ promoted ‘‘the peculiar, dense, concreteness of the word.’’ A
second collection of essays, Presenza di T. S. Eliot, ed. Agostino Lombardo
(Rome: Bulzoni), revisits the intellectual production and artistic achieve-
ment of a 20th-century poet who has been the frequent object of attack.
A special issue of Acoma contains the papers presented at the 2000
convention on ‘‘Pubblico e privato nella cultura statunitense del Nove-
cento,’’ whose emphasis rests on the private emotional, existential, and
intellectual dimension of the writer and/or the function of the works
produced within the public context. Critical approaches in all volumes
are Ž rmly grounded in recent research in gender, ethnic, and cultural
studies.

a. General Works, Literature As Sergio Perosa observes in his conclud-

ing remarks to the 1999 conference ‘‘Before Peggy Guggenheim,’’ the
collections of those American women art collectors, as much as the
contributions oVered by the scholars who have studied them, are a ‘‘mon-
ument to far-sightedness, the good use of money, generosity, chance, a
sense of the future, and sheer good luck.’’ If on the one hand, as Perosa
observes, Henry James testiŽ es to the inŽ nite potential implications of
collecting art, Guggenheim on the other fulŽ lled James’s wish by achiev-
ing the splendid collection she left in Venice. Among the essays, Rosella
Mamoli Zorzi’s ‘‘Introduction: Collectors, Collecting, and American Lit-
erature’’ (Before Peggy Guggenheim, pp. 15–29), Gregory Dowling’s ‘‘ ‘Pay-
ing Court’: The Chivalrous Language of Art and Money in the Letters of
Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner’’ (pp. 85–97), and Alide
Cagidemetrio’s ‘‘A New Wo-man in the Art Place: Pictures from the Lives
of the Berensons’’ (pp. 65–83) all take as their starting point, and then
concentrate on, Stewart Gardner as a model for John Singer Sargent’s
1888 portrait, the recipient of a 1907 letter by Berenson intended to have
her buy three important Italian masters’ paintings, and, quite unexpect-
edly, a selŽ sh, whimsical, and pathetic old lady on her way to the other
world, as portrayed by Mary Berenson in 1920. Having brilliantly elected
the portrait set against a Venetian pattern as an appropriate icon for the
conference, Zorzi goes on to illustrate the function of art collecting in
Maria Anita Stefanelli 485

American literature in order to evaluate critically its symbolic, cultural,

and prophetic impact on American society. Washington Irving’s Western
prairies as seen through Salvator Rosa’s paintings, Edgar Allan Poe’s and
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s portraits, and even Herman Melville’s descrip-
tion of the painting in the Spouter Inn are examples of the presence of art
in American literature before the golden age of collecting; later authors
such as James and Wharton, Zorzi continues, not only deal with aspects
of arts and artists in their works, they also have art collectors and collec-
tions in their Ž ction. Wharton’s art collections in particular, the author
concludes, are an act of faith, as well as re ecting the faith of the United
States, in the invisible future. Starting from the fascinating correspon-
dence between Berenson and Stewart Gardner, Dowling stresses the
range of linguistic and stylistic registers they adopted in their dealings
with art, literature, business, and each other. He observes how, for in-
stance, in one letter Berenson’s tone shifts from enthusiastic to personal to
businesslike to conspiratorial, while elsewhere it sounds condescending
or even apologetic, as when an instruction to herself has been sent
(undoubtedly by mistake) by cable. By concentrating on Berenson’s pri-
vate self as it emerges from her letters and diary, Cagidemetrio subtly
points out the undercurrent of sincerity and simulation, connoisseurship
and pretended naïveté, honesty and shrewdness that underlay the society
woman, not overlooking her lifelong ambiguous attitude toward the
object of her aVectionate though selŽ sh husband’s ‘‘chivalrous devotion.’’
Through her voice one reaches an awareness of the ‘‘tricky sides of the
business as the smuggling of pictures, the corruption of oYcers, the
evasion of State duties, the systems used by forgers, in short, of all
the simulations to be learned in order to triumph in a chaotic yet ex-
tremely proŽ table market.’’ Alberta Fabris Grube’s ‘‘Mrs. Fenollosa: Pas-
sage to Japan’’ (pp. 197–211) presents another intellectually committed
lady who contributed to carve the new wood cut by her husband in the
Ž eld of Japanese culture. By drawing the reader’s attention to the state of
Far Eastern art scholarship in the West, the critic points out that it was
Mary MacNeil Fenollosa who published her husband’s scientiŽ c work on
the subject and intuitively chose to give his unpublished material to Ezra
Pound. Fabris Grube aVectionately accompanies this Oriental muse’s
pursuit —in her devotion to her husband’s scholarship —of ‘‘her labor
of love.’’ In ‘‘Collecting Paintings, Collecting Words: Gertrude Stein’’
(pp. 139–50), by cleverly drawing on Stein’s inclination for playing with
verbal and painterly suggestions, Francesca Bisutti De Riz deconstructs
486 Scholarship in Other Languages

her own experience of reading and interpreting, not without resistance,

the literary creations of the brightest of the Stein children. Entering the
body of Stein’s writings with a careful consideration of the idea of repeti-
tion as perseverance and also as a special tool ‘‘to collect words and
things,’’ Bisutti de Riz casts light on Stein’s collection of art works as a
narrative whose characters (i.e., objects) are assembled to provide ever
new stories and ultimately to lead to the conceptualization of the inex-
pressible. In ‘‘Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney: A Poor Little Rich Artist
and the Museum She Made’’ (pp. 171–84) Marina Coslovi throws light
on Gertrude Vanderbilt’s founding of the Whitney Museum of American
Art (1931) as recaptured from Vanderbilt’s own journal. The document
reveals her commitment to art as a way toward the expression of her real
self. The setting up and development of a department of daily decorative
arts within the MoMA as a consequence of the philosophy of art detected
in Aline Meyer Liebman’s correspondence and notebook is clariŽ ed by
Cristina Ossato in ‘‘Collecting and Creating Art: Aline Meyer Liebman’’
(pp. 213–22). Finally, in ‘‘Art and SuVrage: Louisine W. Havemeyer’’
(pp. 99–106) Pia Masiero Marcolin by looking at Havemeyer’s Memoirs
recaptures this woman collector’s artistic commitment as interlinked
with her role as campaigner for women’s vote.
Andrea Mariani highlights synergies between writing and music
within a discussion concerning the experience, rather than the theory, of
genre (‘‘Un caso di ibridismo estremo: L’opera lirica nella scrittura let-
teraria,’’ Generi Letterari: Ibridismo e contaminazione, ed. Annamaria
Sportelli [Bari: Laterza], pp. 200–215). Walt Whitman’s ‘‘new brood’’ of
artists—original and unique individuals, unable to procreate—are seen as
representatives of hybridism; Whitman’s idea of ‘‘grafting,’’ the anxiety of
in uence, the space of in-betweenness, and the ‘‘bridge’’ imagery all meet
in the concept of hybridism. The opera aVecting literature is an extreme
case: suggestions from Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, among
others, are detected by Mariani in several works by James, Eliot, Pound,
George Santayana, James Merrill, and John Barth. In the encounter
between Wagner and Merrill, for example, the point of intersection of the
everyday with the sublime is reached. In Grotta Byron: Luoghi e libri
(Udine: Campanotto) Massimo Bacigalupo discusses —as far as Ameri-
can writers are concerned —places with literary associations: from Haw-
thorne’s Boston and Dickinson’s Amherst to Melville’s Manhattan and
Henry Roth’s Harlem; on the other side of the ocean new glimpses are
oVered of Pound’s and Hemingway’s Rapallo on the Italian Riviera.
Maria Anita Stefanelli 487

b. Early-19th-Century Prose A contemplative essay by Giuseppe Nori

entitled ‘‘Gli usi e gli abusi dei grandi uomini: Emerson e la dottrina della
rappresentatività’’ appeared in Trame di letteratura comparata (2: 185–
212). Not indiVerent to the possibility open before him to gain a place
among the most venerable minds of his century, young Emerson elab-
orated —through a much-suVered, self-centered research —on the doc-
trine of being both representative and self-reliant. Nori concludes that
the Emersonian individual does not belong to the hero worship typology
but is instead inclined toward democracy, progress, and the universal
education of the human race. By the same author is ‘‘Ai piedi della Torre:
Emerson e il reportage transcendentalista,’’ an essay devoted to Emerson’s
‘‘easting’’ and ‘‘eastering,’’ namely the Transcendentalist’s journey across
the ocean that entailed his awakening to his real vocation (Camminare
scrivendo: Il reportage narrativo e dintorni, ed. Nicola Bottiglieri [Cassino:
Edizioni dell’Università degli Studi di Cassino], pp. 79–105). Solidly
documented, Nori’s paper concentrates on Emerson’s English Traits, giv-
ing careful consideration to the wide typology of its narrative and meta-
narrative registers, and showing in the conclusion how this American
pilgrim reached the full transcendental awareness of the interdependence
between the individual and the universe. Such relation can be interpreted
as a hermeneutic meeting between the individual and an element of
nature as a re ection of the whole.
The identity theme, though dealt with from diVerent perspectives,
underlies most Italian contributions to the Fuller collection in Dimen-
sione e problemi della ricerca storica: ‘‘Margaret Fuller mazziniana e la
Repubblica romana del 1848’’ by Giuliana Limiti (pp. 49–66); ‘‘A Hum-
bug, a Bounder and a Dabbler: Margaret Fuller and/as Cristina di
Belgioioso and/as Christina Casamassima’’ by Cristina Giorcelli (pp. 93–
112); ‘‘Margaret Fuller: Maps and Patterns of a Transgressive Journey’’ by
Liana Borghi (pp. 259–68); ‘‘Margaret Fuller e la ricerca del materno’’ by
Anna Scacchi (pp. 269–92); and my own ‘‘Margaret Fuller on the Stage’’
(pp. 151–64). A Giuseppe Mazzini enthusiast, Limiti recounts the dif-
ferent phases of the encounter in London between the Italian patriot and
the American journalist. The emancipation of the poor, blacks, and
women as well as the liberation of Italy were discussed during their Ž rst
meeting; later, Fuller gradually became involved in the Italian patriot’s
initiatives: from the foundation of the Italian free school and the Giovine
Italia in London to the intellectual appraisal of Mazzini’s work in her
talks and writings to the hospital assistantship she undertook in Rome.
488 Scholarship in Other Languages

Fuller’s last expression of aVection toward Mazzini (‘‘Mazzini is immor-

tally dear to me, —a thousand times dearer for all the trial I saw made of
him in Rome; —dearer for all he has suVered’’) is recorded in a letter to
Costanza Arconati Visconti quoted at the end of the essay. Based on an
intelligent reading of Fuller’s multifaceted personality through the char-
acters of two female homonyms —one historical (a noblewoman who
became a good friend of Fuller) and one Ž ctional (born of Henry James’s
genius) —Giorcelli unveils the common traits of all women involved,
most of them so far unnoticed by the critics. Similarities (such as com-
mon physical traits and intellectual qualities besides their faith in the
Risorgimento and their role as opinion makers) and diVerences (of
beauty and money) characterize Fuller and Belgioioso; similar ‘‘theatri-
cal’’ and ‘‘masculine’’ traits are subtly detected by Henry James in both
Fuller and Belgioioso (the former ones also associated with Italian actress
Adelaide Ristori) as they appear in William Wetmore Story and His
Friends. A James specialist, Giorcelli also shows how ‘‘a dangerous para-
digm of womanhood’’ such as Christina Light in Roderick Hudson and
The Princess Casamassima carries Fuller’s and Belgioioso’s imprints, thus
reaching the conclusion that ‘‘Fuller, to be sure, haunted him. ’’ Taking
stock of her own academic research, Borghi sympathetically distills her
own intellectual journey through literature from the wide geographical
space that nurtured Fuller’s engaged, romantic, and mysterious person-
ality. Well equipped with her feminist methodologies, Borghi maps the
interaction of space and subjectivity in the process of deemphasizing the
feminine and romantic side of Fuller’s life and highlighting the metanar-
rative traits of her writings. Among the many plots ‘‘that surface with and
through her rhetorical strategies’’ Borghi sees the Jamesian plot ‘‘of spin-
sterhood and seduction,’’ the plot ‘‘involving social strictures and con-
trol,’’ the Zenobia plot of the traveler looking for completion, the dis-
placement plot as ‘‘engrained in immigrant experience,’’ the multiple
identity plot, the discovery of a new self plot, and the Ž nal plot of the
double nostos: the reluctant return to her homeland when she would have
liked to return to her ideal homeland, namely the ‘‘city on seven hills.’’
Scacchi, on her part, picks up many of the inŽ nite suggestions supplied
by Fuller’s life and through a collation of the critical (often feminist) texts
shows how, in its unique and enigmatic quality, it oVers itself to several
narrative traits that are possible only through Fuller’s mediation. After
outlining many of the American journalist’s identities (Mariana, Mi-
randa, and Minerva among her numerous masks) Scacchi digs into the
Maria Anita Stefanelli 489

full signiŽ cance, for ‘‘the woman in the nineteenth-century’’ as for its
author, of motherhood by bringing to light its nightmarish quality. My
own essay, Ž nally, discusses how stage behavior applies to real life and
focuses on the importance of duplicity, rage, and disease. It deals with
Fuller as constructed by Susan Sontag in her play Alice in Bed, where a
‘‘mad tea-party’’ taking place in Alice James’s mind is nothing but a stage
where each actress (Fuller among them) plays her nonsensical role. Son-
tag takes up suggestions from Alice in Wonderland, The Diary of Alice
James, and Pirandello’s construction of the woman’s identity in As You
Desire Me to elaborate on Fuller’s masks, allowing me to study their
interaction with the ‘‘new’’ Margaret who emerges from the last edition of
her letters. One can read of Fuller’s social and intellectual involvement
with prominent contemporary Ž gures in Rosella Mamoli Zorzi’s essay
dealing speciŽ cally with ‘‘Margaret Fuller and the Brownings’’ (pp. 135–
50), where Fuller’s enthusiastic response to their work and later their
friendship is described in detail. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was initially
unsympathetic toward Fuller’s work and expressed irritation (according
to Zorzi) at her too advanced feminism and excessively radical views
before meeting her. Her new ideas on the role of women in the political
debate and the question of slavery put forward in Aurora Leigh, Zorzi
concludes, were not distant from Fuller’s; yet Fuller’s views were ahead of
hers if one thinks only of her involvement with Italian politics, her
supposed familiarity with Marx, and her criticism of Roman Catholi-
cism. Robert Browning’s attitude toward Fuller, on the other hand, was
indeed appreciative, and he felt ‘‘a deep sense of loss and aVection’’ when
she drowned. Fuller’s political and enduring links with the city of Rome
are a matter of analysis in Francesco Guida’s ‘‘La città, la democrazia,
l’amore: Le passioni romane di Margaret Fuller’’ (pp. 67–82).
‘‘Edgar Allan Poe e la caduta del genere gotico’’ by Roberto Cagliero
(Letterature d’America 21: 5–29) considers Poe as both author and critic.
Through an analysis of ‘‘The Fall of the House of Usher’’ Cagliero
demonstrates how —in keeping with Poe’s duplicity —the popular gothic
short story deals with such issues as literary nationalism, imitation, and
the rejection of didactic and allegorical forms in literature. Through
Ž ction rather than criticism Poe ended up modifying the gothic genre. A
close-reading of an American Renaissance classic is supplied by Valerio
Massimo De Angelis in ‘‘La prima lettera: Miti dell’origine in The Scarlet
Letter di Nathaniel Hawthorne, ’’ the third issue of Lezioni Americane, a
series ed. Biancamaria Pisapia and Ugo Rubeo (Rome: Lozzi and Rossi).
490 Scholarship in Other Languages

Over approximately 100 pages, De Angelis —well aware of the debate in

progress among theoreticians on the interrelationships between Ž ction
and history, out of which the discourse on the origin and destiny of the
American national identity emerges —investigates the function of ‘‘The
Custom-House’’ as a declaration of poetics in which is shown how ro-
mance creates a ‘‘neutral territory’’ whose world can become a grotesque
province of the writer’s imagination. De Angelis goes on to read the birth
of the nation through the imagery, events, and language of the narrative.
Finally, he analyzes the Ž gures of speech, symbols, and myths that are
contained, clusterlike, within the letter ‘‘A,’’ sealed upon Hester Prynne’s
breast as a site for the con icting tensions born out of an ideology of
dissent and resistance to the dominant culture. From Hester’s scarlet
letter to Reverend Hooper’s black veil, the visual quality of Hawthorne’s
art is scrutinized by Francesca Di Blasio in ‘‘ ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’:
La mise en abime dello sguardo,’’ a step in her research into the literary use
of ‘‘gaze’’ (Teoria e pratiche dello sguardo: Percorsi nella letteratura inglese e
americana [Bergamo: Edizioni Sestante], pp. 85–104). Enlightened by
the fathers of semiotic theory ( Jurij Lotman) and contemporary psycho-
analysis ( Jacques Lacan) Di Blasio’s discussion revolves around the repre-
sentation of subjectivity in its interaction with the narratological device
of focalization, as suggested by the permeability of vision and cognition.

c. Late-19th-Century Prose A monographic issue of Igitur (vol. 2) con-

tains papers by scholars from Ž ve diVerent countries and an exhaustive
bibliography about ‘‘Melville and/as Myth’’ (pp. 3–6). Melville’s prose is
also perceptively and concisely surveyed by Annalisa Goldoni in her
introduction to the Italian edition of Billy Budd, Foretopman (Billy Budd,
gabbiere di parrocchetto, trans. Enzo Giachino [Turin: Einaudi], pp. v–
xxii). A reexamination of Melville’s works disclosing the emergence of the
writer from the sailor as well as the writer’s discovery of the structural
principle of ‘‘careful disorderliness’’ precedes the account of Melville’s last
labor, the short yet dense novel written in the years 1888–91 and centered
on the ideological and methodological encounter of order and disorder,
out of which springs the original sense of inŽ niteness conveyed by the
narrative. Goldoni’s critique of Billy Budd revolves around two centers of
interest: Beauty and the Revolution (the Handsome Sailor and the Great
Mutiny), each full of massively incongruous and contradictory informa-
tion. Billy’s ‘‘body,’’ standing out in an environment skillfully arrayed
with a rich mythic and biblical imagery is, like the white whale, the
Maria Anita Stefanelli 491

hieroglyph of knowledge and, via a comparison with the sculptured bull

of the Assyrian priests, of art.
‘‘Visibilità e sguardo femminile nelle strade vittoriane’’ by Anna Scac-
chi explains why it was impossible for the Victorian woman to become a
aneuse (Passaggi: Letterature comparate al femminile, ed. Liana Borghi
[Urbino: Quattroventi], pp. 135–51). The woman’s exclusion from the
urban experience is associated with domesticity as well as with the impos-
sibility for the woman to be the subject —instead of the object —of ‘‘gaze.’’
Scacchi, however, shows how in Maria Susanna Cummins’s novel The
Lamplighter the structure of ‘‘gaze’’ is reversed, so that in the new urban
scene everyone is simultaneously a spectator and an actor. Donatella Izzo
in Portraying the Lady questions representation as the crucial node of
textuality and metatextuality in Henry James’s short stories spanning
1873–1909. The author relies on the ‘‘productivity’’ of the texts, in their
multiple and dialogical nature, as well as on the complexity of their
negotiations with dominant patriarchal ideology that reveal the con-
tinuity between the cultural practices embodied in them and gendered
readings of them. Centered on beauty (perceived in the visual sphere) as
the common denominator of women and artifacts (art objects), the
stories allow confrontations (e.g., the opposition between the woman
and the Madonna in ‘‘The Madonna of the Future’’ or the equivalence of
the woman and the statue/gem in ‘‘The Last of the Valerii’’) and sub-
stitutions (e.g., the woman as object in ‘‘Rose-Agathe’’). Izzo’s textual
analysis —derived from semiotics and a poststructural narratology —
shows that James’s tales, by enacting strategies of resistance against the
aesthetic evaluation of woman, art objects, and short stories as artistic
products, reveal ‘‘a constant exhibition of representation’’ that is staged
from an unstable position within the text shared by the text’s producer
and the reader. After exploring the function of the ‘‘gaze’’ in James, Izzo
devotes her eVorts to the ‘‘voice’’ by pointing out its interaction with
‘‘silence’’ as a gender-connoted element. The issue of sexuality as ‘‘obliga-
tion to speak’’ informs the analysis of a number of short stories, among
them ‘‘A London Life,’’ in which the threat to the symbolic order makes
the experience of shame and horror set in motion by adultery ‘‘unspeak-
able.’’ Izzo’s provocative approach leads one to read in the (presumably)
last short story of the Jamesian corpus, ‘‘Mora Montravers,’’ the ultimate
representation of the feminine. There an explicit project —that of being
free —is simply and directly put forward by the heroine in her own voice.
A thoroughly researched array of endnotes reveals the critical framework
492 Scholarship in Other Languages

within which the book has taken shape. A survey of James’s ‘‘Prefaces’’ as a
revision of his narrative works and implicitly an admission of imperfec-
tion is undertaken by Francesco Marroni in ‘‘ ‘A Great Grey Void’: Henry
James, le ‘Prefaces’ e i sentieri della critica’’ (Letterature d’America 21: 31–
58). James’s critical apparatus as displayed in the ‘‘Prefaces’’ is also ex-
plored in Carlo Martinez’s L’arte della critica: Ideologia estetica e forma
narrativa nelle Prefazioni di Henry James (Roma: Bulzoni). It opens with a
summary of their reception and the proposal to read them on the basis of
a ‘‘rhetoric of intimacy’’ that structures the critical text as a whole and
reaches out toward the emerging mass culture. Starting from an inter-
pretation of the ‘‘Prefaces’’ as an ‘‘act of the imagination,’’ Martinez Ž rst
draws the reader’s attention to literary criticism as partaking of art and the
market, and then sees the writer of the ‘‘Prefaces’’ as a (professional)
painter engaged in ‘‘making a portrait’’ of his own work. From ‘‘private’’
to ‘‘intimate,’’ the critical discourse set in motion by the ‘‘Prefaces’’
revolves around, and digs into, the ‘‘harem’’ of memory treasured in the
huge New York Edition until a new dynamic writer emerges who realizes
that criticism needs to enter the mechanism of the market in order to play
a social and cultural role. Martinez also studies a James story to comment
on the censorship of one’s and one’s descendants’ personal past (‘‘ ‘Paste’:
Storie, censure e volontà di sapere in Henry James,’’ Le lettere rubate:
Forme, funzioni e ragioni della censura, ed. Annalisa Goldoni and Carlo
Martinez [Napoli: Liguori], pp. 183–97). Through the play of Ž ction and
reality (suggested by the actress and the theater), falseness and truth
(evoked by the string of pearls), transgression and morality (as embodied
in the vicar’s wife and the vicar, respectively) James in Martinez’s opinion
rejects the Victorian system of values, unveils its groundlessness, and
condemns its hegemonic nature. Martinez argues that the mechanism of
censorship, while recognizing and simultaneously negating the ideologi-
cal character of repressed truth, earns the male character an economic
advantage; moreover, it has an added power: that of destroying the female
protagonist’s faith in the ‘‘Ž ction’’ she herself has constructed. In Tatiana
Petrovich Njegosh’s ‘‘T. S. Eliot e Henry James’’ (Presenza di T. S. Eliot,
pp. 305–32) James’s career is perceived as vital to the American literary
tradition. Using James’s ‘‘point of view’’ Eliot unveils, according to
Njegosh, his own literary descent from the great novelist with regard to
locality, universality, and the language of ‘‘reality.’’ By rejecting the
Jamesian component before his later phase, Eliot accomplishes the neces-
sary ‘‘turn of the screw’’ to exorcise James’s presence in favor of ideas of
Maria Anita Stefanelli 493

impersonality and order, and even of a belief —diVerent from James’s

negative attitude toward the ‘‘blankness’’ of the American literary tradi-
tion —in predecessors such as Poe, Twain, and Whitman. I end this James
section by mentioning the afterword to an 1881 anonymous translation of
Portrait of a Lady, chapters 1–4 (‘‘Postfazione,’’ Henry James, The Portrait
of a Lady: Il ritratto d’una Signora, ed. Sergio Perosa [Venice: Supernova],
pp. 89–98). Thanks to the  uent elegance of the text where the ‘‘tone of
time’’ is captured, and in spite of its several  aws —both negative and
positive qualities accurately accounted for by Perosa —this translation
surely demands the attention of James scholars.
A number of 19th-century novels by American writers (Edward Bel-
lamy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Kate Chopin) are scrutinized by
Gianfranca Balestra in ‘‘A spasso con l’ombrello’’ (Abito e identità, pp. 63–
89) with the intention of discovering the function of a fashion accessory:
the umbrella. By submitting speciŽ c textual loci to analysis, and allowing
herself excursions into history and the cinema as well as other literatures
and cultures, Balestra identiŽ es the meanings of this accessory in the
complex interplay of realistic, symbolic, social, psychological, structural,
and semiotic elements. She Ž nally evokes René Magritte’s famous paint-
ing, Hegel’s Holiday (representing an umbrella with a glass full of water
standing on it) as a hybrid that simultaneously rejects and contains water,
thus suggesting unforeseen relationships between things and opening up
new perspectives of knowledge.
Before concluding this section I will just mention a brief introduction
by Daniela Daniele to the translation of a short story from Louisa May
Alcott’s Hospital Sketches based on her experience as a nurse during the
Civil War (‘‘Terza, quarta, quinta persona: Louisa May Alcott: Le donne,
un’altra resistenza,’’ Storie, Idee, Idiozie, Idiomi 41: 79–89).

d. 19th- and 20th-Century Poetry, Theater Marisa Bulgheroni pub-

lishes a suggestive biography of Emily Dickinson —her dreams, masks,
intelligence, rebellion, emotions, and, not last, her demonic gift—in Nei
Sobborghi di un segreto: Vita di Emily Dickinson (Milan: Mondadori). By
ingeniously reading the Amherst poet’s poems, letters, and manuscripts,
as well as relying on relevant historical documentation, the author in
confronting the nearly impossible challenge of loosening the knot of
Dickinson’s real and poetic experience strategically lays out a semiotic
map indispensable to penetrating the mysterious abyss out of which
sprang her extraordinary poetry.
494 Scholarship in Other Languages

Reading through Carolyn Burke’s rich biography of Loy, Antonella

Francini in ‘‘Mina Loy’s Florentine Days: The Birth of a Poet Against the
Backdrop of Futurism’’ (vol. 7 of Italian History and Culture) follows the
poet’s steps to Florence in the winter of 1907 and her awakening to
futurism. Among the traits of her poetry and prose in that period Fran-
cini lists ‘‘typographical eccentricities, verbal dynamism, and satirical
responses to the futurists’ aggressive and sexist attitudes.’’ A fruit of the
expatriate colony’s changed attitude toward Italy, Loy’s voice in those
writings, taking stock of F. T. Marinetti’s and the futurists’ political
engagement, proclaims the need for a radical revision of the feminist
program.
T. S. Eliot’s inquiry into the crisis aVecting culture and society and its
representation in his metaphor is the subject of Agostino Lombardo’s
‘‘Introduzione a The Waste Land ’’ (Presenza di T. S. Eliot, pp. 13–25).
From fragmentation and dissociation to inclusiveness, the form of The
Waste Land re ects the great challenge of modern art. Controlled by a
musical, dramatic, visual, and mythic organization, Eliot’s poem reveals,
as Lombardo suggestively puts it, his eVort to compose a set of disŽ gured
features into a recognizable face. Eliot’s relationship with Ž ne arts is the
subject of Stefania Tondo’s ‘‘L’artista e la tradizione: La simultaneità
dell’arte’’ (pp. 149–59), which deŽ nes Eliot’s role in the appreciation
of tradition within modernity as that of the artist-critic whose ‘‘self-
sacriŽ ce’’ in the process of self-surrendering substantiates the modern
paradox of the ‘‘impersonal presence’’ in time. A close-reading of Eliot’s
‘‘fragments’’ as protectors of Eliot’s ‘‘ruins’’ is supplied by Edward G.
Lynch in ‘‘T. S. Eliot’s Exclusions’’ (pp. 101–08). Several contributors to
the same collection engage in the debate over Eliot’s religious and philo-
sophical views. The ‘‘idea’’ of poetry, in its etymological connection with
‘‘seeing,’’ is the subject of Heather Gardner’s ‘‘L’idea della poesia: Eliot e
Bradley’’ (pp. 27–46). Through a diligent survey of Eliot’s philosophical
and existential views interlinked with the demands of poetics, Gardner
shows where Eliot’s conception of the creative process coincides with and
departs from F. H. Bradley’s conception of ‘‘feeling’’ and ‘‘thinking.’’ In
‘‘The Idea of a Christian Society’’ (pp. 255–69) Leo Marchetti stresses the
importance of an Eliot lecture in the development of two fundamental
concepts, ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘orthodoxy,’’ the latter of which includes the
need of a communal perspective to distinguish good from evil. Marchetti
concludes that through his redeŽ nition of ‘‘Christian’’ as linked with
‘‘civilization,’’ Eliot opened the way to a series of utopian experiments in
Maria Anita Stefanelli 495

the Ž elds of literature and society. A provocative stance is taken by Paolo

Prezzavento in his ‘‘Eliot e il neostoricismo’’ (pp. 367–76) with the
intention of pointing out an unsuspected correlation between the leader
of the New Criticism and the spokesmen for such contemporary antifor-
malist critical schools as structuralism, poststructuralism, and New His-
toricism. In Prezzavento’s view, those who, through a dogmatic belief in
the continuity and dialectics of history, refuse to appreciate Eliot’s idea of
redemption should adopt a less naive approach. On a diVerent yet very
‘‘serious’’ level, Eliot’s handling of cats in poetry is interpreted by Elis-
abetta Tarantino as Ž gure for the ineVable (‘‘ ‘The Naming of Cats’ e il
pragmatismo eliotiano,’’ pp. 193–216). Albeit not denying the function of
the cat poems as divertissement, Tarantino shows that they reveal an
adherence to a special kind of pragmatism that also implies relativism and
a methodological skepticism. In conclusion, cats are ambiguously used in
poetry to represent both the order of beatitude (‘‘innocence’’) and the
chaos of evil (‘‘experience’’). The in uence of Hinduism and Buddhism
on Eliot is evaluated in three papers: Mario Faraone’s ‘‘ ‘Burning, Burn-
ing, Burning’: Induismo e Buddismo in Eliot’’ (pp. 47–69), Floriana
Perna’s ‘‘Between Orient and Occident: T. S. Eliot’s Encounter with
Alterity’’ (pp. 71–82), and Mario Martino’s ‘‘T. S. Eliot e Rudyard Kip-
ling’’ (pp. 333–47). In the Ž rst, Faraone surveys Eliot’s borrowings from
the Bhagavad Gita and examines divergent philosophical conceptions
from his Anglo-Catholic faith. Perna analyzes Eliot’s position in regard to
Edward Said’s later conception of Orientalism by making use of postcolo-
nial theories of alterity, diVerence, and identity. Martino reconsiders the
ideological and literary aYnity between Eliot and Kipling, whose work —
in spite of later occasional contradictory judgment —may have been
decisive for Eliot’s early interest in Indian language and literature.
A number of essays are devoted to Eliot and music. Giuseppe Cos-
tigliola compares Eliot’s poetics with Arnold Schoenberg’s and Igor
Stravinsky’s technical and formal experimentation with tonality (‘‘T. S.
Eliot e le avanguardie musicali del primo Novecento,’’ pp. 109–36), while
Elena Calogero discusses musical allusions in Eliot’s verse (‘‘Immagini di
musica nella poesia di T. S. Eliot,’’ pp. 137–48). The ultimate signiŽ cance
of Four Quartets, which partakes of the ineVable quality of musical
compositions, is under scrutiny in Umberto Rossi’s ‘‘Quartetti per la Ž ne
dei tempi’’ (pp. 177–92), where Eliot’s philosophical and religious con-
ception of time is related to Paul Ricoeur’s theoretical approach to time.
The epiphany at the conclusion of ‘‘Little Gidding’’ may be interpreted as
496 Scholarship in Other Languages

a possible messianic explosion and aligns Eliot’s ideological position —in

spite of recent accusations of anti-Semitism —with that of the great Jew-
ish intellectual Walter Benjamin. Several essays from Presenza di T. S.
Eliot compare Eliot with such 19th- and 20th-century poets as Words-
worth, Tennyson, and the ‘‘war poets.’’ According to Elena Spandri, Eliot
appropriated and contradicted Wordsworth’s idea of tradition by replac-
ing the Romantic notion of ‘‘genius’’ with that of ‘‘individual talent’’
(‘‘Wordsworth in Eliot,’’ pp. 271–88). Paola Partenza compares two char-
acters in Tennyson’s and Eliot’s verse in her essay ‘‘Ulysses di A. Tennyson e
Gerontion di T. S. Eliot’’ (pp. 289–304), where the emotional tension
between the longing for spirituality and the love of knowledge produces
for Tennyson the thirst of rationalism, while for Eliot it translates into a
weak hope of purgation. The lurid and nightmarish presence of corpses
in Eliot’s postwar poetry is noted by Mariangela Pisani in ‘‘Eliot e i ‘war-
poets’ ’’ (pp. 161–75).
Eliot’s modernism is compared with that of two novelists in Luca
Briasco’s ‘‘Hemingway e T. S. Eliot’’ (pp. 413–33) and Antonella Sarti’s
‘‘T. S. Eliot e Janet Frame’’ (pp. 385–411). Though he disliked Eliot’s
academic intellectualism, Hemingway was attracted by the treatment of
the theme of sterility in The Waste Land but worried about Eliot’s possi-
ble identiŽ cation with his subject. By adhering, in the reconstruction of a
lost manuscript, to the open form that re ects the operations of memory,
Hemingway —an ‘‘advanced’’ modernist who nevertheless was in favor of
a ‘‘literary democracy’’ that would include the reader—walked not only in
the footprints of Pound but also of Eliot. According to Sarti, Eliot and
Frame adopted similar rhythms. In Frame’s postmodern novel Scented
Gardens for the Blind, Sarti observes, the perception of truth is frozen
within a dimension that precedes language. Frame also derived from
Eliot such themes as vision and blindness, living and drowning, aware-
ness and madness. Salvatore Proietti evaluates Eliot’s Americanness —as
traceable, as far as his aesthetic and poetic engagement is concerned, in
the rhetoric of the frontier and the jeremiad —in terms of Northrop Frye’s
notions of ascesis, self-denial, and identiŽ cation with the community
(‘‘Eliot e Frye,’’ pp. 349–65). The poet’s complex relationship with his
native land is analyzed in Sara Antonelli’s ‘‘T. S. Eliot e la tradizione
Americana’’ (pp. 447–69). Drawing from F. O. Matthiessen’s critical
appreciation of the American Renaissance as well as from Eliot’s own
theoretical handling of the metaphysical poets and profound respect and
admiration for Henry James’s intelligence and art, Antonelli explores
Maria Anita Stefanelli 497

Eliot’s poetical project and elaborates on its continual revision of tradi-

tion. Anna Scannavini in ‘‘Lingua ordinaria e lingua conversazionale in
Eliot’’ (pp. 435–46) thoughtfully comments on Eliot’s modernist use of
language in poetry.
Through a meticulous look at Gertrude Stein’s ‘‘Vacation in Brittany’’
(‘‘ ‘By the Sea Inland’: Gertrude Stein’s ‘Vacation in Brittany’ or Descrip-
tion Without Place,’’ The Idea and the Thing in Modernist American
Poetry, pp. 179–207) Salvatore Marano searches for a link between the
Elizabethan stage (Shakespeare, mostly) and the Victorian world (Ed-
ward Lear’s nonsensical literature, culture, and behavior). Marano shows
how Stein confounds the logic of binary oppositions (‘‘self and other,
body and soul, story and history,’’ but also ‘‘the idea and the thing’’).
In ‘‘A Stony Language: Zukofsky’s Zadkine’’ (pp. 109–39) Cristina
Giorcelli, after pointing out the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual links
between the two Jewish exiles, explores Louis Zukofsky’s poem ‘‘25’’ from
the collection Anew. There ‘‘the clear physical eye’’ is set against ‘‘the
erring brain’’ in such a preposterous way as to cancel a clearly marked
opposition between ‘‘idea’’ and ‘‘thing.’’ By studying all the recondite
meanings of the words (that in Hebrew are indeed ‘‘things’’) Giorcelli
deconstructs Zukofsky’s idea of Zadkine’s sculpture La Prisonnière and
shows how the poem is given body. Giorcelli, moreover, draws the
reader’s attention through the concrete references in the poem to a num-
ber of Zadkine’s sculptures, showing how they become intertwined with
history, art, personal memory, and the reader, so that in the end the
‘‘word’’ gains a place in the physical world as a real thing, much like a
sculpture.
My own essay, ‘‘Objects Lost and Found: Kenneth Patchen’s Poetics of
the Letter’’ (pp. 323–44), places Patchen’s earlier collections of poems in
the context of dadaism, surrealism, and objectivism. The poetic poten-
tialities inherent in words led the American rebel poet to experiment with
chance operations, the dissection of discourse into fragments, and the
rearrangement of discourse units as diVerent headings or titles. The result
is a series of poems that are monuments to the American past, each
functioning as ‘‘idea’’ captured in the ‘‘thing.’’ One last ‘‘Poem,’’ as the
title goes, ‘‘in the Form of a Letter: to Lauro de Bosis’’ is built on the letter
form as a chain of discourse sequences, the found object (de Bosis’s letter
published as document in the press), and the surreal letters of the lea ets
falling from above onto the people of Rome to incite them to free
themselves from fascism. The poem is indeed an ‘‘object.’’
498 Scholarship in Other Languages

A survey of the U.S. sonnet was published by Antonella Francini in

2000 (‘‘In forma di sonetto: Ovvero i 14 versi statunitensi,’’ vol. 23
of Semicerchio: Rivista di poesia comparata). It is to be noticed that
this form was often adopted by contemporary poets, including Robert
Lowell, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Rita Dove, in a long sequence. A discus-
sion of Wallace Stevens’s correspondence with Renato Poggioli, his Ital-
ian translator, prompts Massimo Bacigalupo to tell the story of the
publication of Stevens’s Ž rst translation in book form of ‘‘Sunday Morn-
ing’’ (‘‘A New Girl in a New Season: Stevens, Poggioli, and the Making of
Mattino domenicale, ’’ WSJour 25: 254–70). Daniela Fidanza tracks down
some existential and philosophical elements of Eliotian derivation in the
novel Il Gattopardo (‘‘Tomasi di Lampedusa e T. S. Eliot,’’ Presenza di
T. S. Eliot, pp. 377–84). Published in a volume devoted to translation,
Annalisa Goldoni’s ‘‘Poesia postmoderna: L’inŽ nita traduzione’’ concen-
trates Ž rst on the incipit of Pound’s ‘‘Canto I’’ as a rewriting of Homer’s
text scanned on the rhythms of the Anglo-Saxon, then on George Bower-
ing’s appropriation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duiniser Elegien for his Ker-
risdale Elegies, and Ž nally on Robert Duncan’s Several Poems: In Prose and
Dante Études, where the author plays with the self-re exiveness of lan-
guage (Teoria: Didattica e prassi della traduzione, ed. Giovanna Calabrò
[Naples: Liguori], pp. 243–57). Riccardo Duranti in ‘‘Tradurre Raymond
Carver’’ (pp. 259–68) reports on his friendship with Carver, the experi-
ence of discovering what is ‘‘new’’ in Carver’s writing, and how he felt to
lose a friend.
Two of the several translations of 20th-century poetry are mentioned
here. A selected edition of William Carlos Williams’s poems exquisitely
translated in 1958 by Cristina Campo is reissued alongside an exchange of
letters between Williams and Campo and Vanni Scheiwiller in Il Žore è il
nostro segno: Carteggio e poesie, ed. Margherita Pieracci Harwell (Milan:
Scheiwiller). Pieracci Harwell suggests in her introduction that a surpris-
ingly intimate relationship between the poet and his sensitive Italian
translator gradually develops in the correspondence. The letters ad-
dressed to as well as those written by Scheiwiller, on the other hand,
reveal an interest in poetry and an engagement on his part that go beyond
market reasons. This precious little book is a homage to its Ž ne publisher
who recently died. Charles Wright’s initiation to poetry on visiting Sir-
mione on Lake Garda in 1959 is examined by Antonella Francini in
‘‘Trilogia triplice: Ri essioni sulla poesia di Charles Wright’’ (Crepuscolo
americano e altre poesie [1980–2000] [Milan: Jaca], pp. 261–81. Francini
Maria Anita Stefanelli 499

foreshadowed this piece in ‘‘Charles Wright, crepuscolo americano’’

(Poesia 14: 18–35). Upon his knowledge of Italian literature (Dante and
Eugenio Montale, mostly) and his admiration for Ezra Pound’s verse, as
Francini demonstrates, rest Wright’s education to poetics and ultimately
his poetry. Finally, Il senso del desiderio: Poesia gay dell’età moderna, ed.
Nicola Gardini (Milano: Crocetti), anthologizes such American poets as
Whitman, Melville, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Robert Dun-
can, Frank O’Hara, James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg.
The preface asserts that the poems represent gay love within the frame-
work of the dream of a peaceful, democratic, and nonconformist desire.
As in the past, little attention has been given to theater. The only two
essays devoted to American drama this year are from the Eliot collection:
‘‘Le scene della tentazione in Murder in the Cathedral ’’ by Franco Minetti
(pp. 217–35) and ‘‘Tra tigri e formicai: Il falso movimento in The Cocktail
Party ’’ by Demetrio Yocum (pp. 237–53). Minetti is interested in showing
how Murder conveys sin and its expiation by the ineVable qualities of its
musical design; he also shows how Eliot’s subtle handling of lyricism
wraps the audience in a mimetic involvement in the religious drama and
succeeds in ‘‘shock[ing] the audience out of their complacency.’’ From the
stage itself comes an appeal to the audience to become instruments of
martyrdom. The building of dramatic tension in The Cocktail Party
culminates, according to Yocum, in an encounter of verse and theatrical
action at a ‘‘deep’’ level. As far as the genre is concerned, the tragic motif
(Celia’s death and her cruciŽ xion) looms behind the apparent comedy.

e. 20th-Century Prose I open this section with Roberto Birindelli’s

‘‘Quel che resta del sogno,’’ an afterword to the translation of Ž ve short
stories by Theodore Dreiser (‘‘Townsend,’’ ‘‘Solution,’’ ‘‘Tabloid Trag-
edy,’’ ‘‘A Start in Life,’’ ‘‘The Tithe of the Lord’’) published last year (Un
caso di coscienza [Palermo: Sellerio], pp. 133–48). The awakening follow-
ing the sense of loss and defeat is the common theme; and the consequent
acceptance of some sort of compromise on Dreiser’s part is interpreted by
Birindelli as evidence of the writer’s modernity.
In his introduction to the translation of William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes
(Zanzare [Turin: Einaudi], pp. vii–xxii) Massimo Bacigalupo explicates
Faulkner’s method of leaving gaps in the narrative for the reader to Ž ll, his
way of provoking laughter in a somewhat perversely indirect way, and his
ability to present the complexity of experience. The standard translation
of the novel by Giulio De Angelis is thoroughly revised by Bacigalupo,
500 Scholarship in Other Languages

who adds four passages omitted from the Ž rst edition as well as endnotes
on sources and recondite allusions. The full text is now available in Italian
for the Ž rst time. ‘‘Da Fitzgerald a James: Le perle di Nicole e delle altre’’
(Abito e identità, pp. 129–55) Caterina Ricciardi evokes the Pearl ‘‘of great
price’’ that is Hawthorne’s ambiguous creation, Zenobia, or the ‘‘Black
Pearl,’’ and Miriam, who in The Marble Faun sees the statue of a young
pearl diver lying dead at the bottom of the sea among the oysters. Nicole
Warren Diver and Rosemary Hoyt from Tender is the Night are then
brought into the picture; both are associated with a string of pearls, a
symbol of suVering. The analogy is with the pearl demanding the sacri-
Ž ce of the oyster that has made its formation possible. In her conclusion
Ricciardi recalls D. H. Lawrence, who supplied an oblique, ‘‘theological’’
reading of The Scarlet Letter by suggesting that Pearl’s name, as in ‘‘Pearl
without a blemish’’ or immaculate conception, is ironic.
In ‘‘Cézanne e il ‘segreto’ di Hemingway’’ (Il Cézanne degli scrittori dei
poeti e dei Ž losoŽ , ed. Giovanni Cianci, Elio Branzini, and Antonello
Negri [Milan: Bocca Editori], pp. 199–211) Mario MaY Ž nds traces of
Paul Cézanne’s in uence on Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. The act of
seeing linked with the act of writing, the organization of experience
within space (in ‘‘Big Two-Hearted River’’ and The Sun Also Rises ), and
the use of whiteness (in ‘‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’’) reveal how close to
Cézanne’s painting Hemingway felt during his Parisian years.
Forty years after the Ž rst Italian translation of On the Road, the elegant
hardback series called ‘‘I Meridiani’’ issues a complete edition of Jack
Kerouac’s novels with a thoughtful introductory essay by Mario Corona
(‘‘Jack Kerouac, o della contraddizione: Storie degli anni cinquanta’’ and
‘‘Cronologia,’’ Romanzi [Milan: Mondadori], pp. x–cxxxix). From the
perspective of cultural studies Corona introduces the reader to the story
of Kerouac’s reception in Italy. Kerouac’s forefathers are Twain and
Hemingway, the promoters of a native, as opposed to a Jamesian and
anglophile, literary tradition. Kerouac develops, with the sense of free-
dom and alterity, a poetics of distance that involves alien kingdoms or
even the universe of insanity. The language of his novels reproduces the
oral dimension and approaches the condition of music; so much so that
the hipster’s speech sounds as energetic and spasmodic as that of a black
jazz musician. Kerouac’s rapid and incessant typing on a single contin-
uous roll of paper has —Corona observes —a surrealistic and dada matrix
but is also a product of jazz and action painting (Jackson Pollock, Willem
De Kooning). It is an operation that aims at recovering the romantic
Maria Anita Stefanelli 501

over ow of emotions in opposition to Eliot’s impersonal principles. Ker-

ouac’s radicalism, expressed through a self-referential prose as well as the
often excessive experiments of the Beats, is Ž nally resolved, unlike the
intellectual choice of a Whitmanesque rebellion, in a conventional
homecoming. In the second part of the essay Corona analyzes each novel
translated in the edition: On the Road, centered on male bonding that
develops through a series of tensions; Visions of Cody, a jazz poem that
Corona considers Kerouac’s masterpiece; The Subterraneans, a dark and
intense narrative; The Dharma Bum, a journey through the spaces of the
soul and toward the highest spheres; Big Sur, a single journey toward the
horrid, wild, and foggy environment of the PaciŽ c coast; and, Ž nally,
Desolation Angels, which sets Oriental philosophies against a totalizing
world.
Clara Bartocci’s Le mille e una lettera: Saggi sulla narrativa di John Barth
(Perugia: Edizioni ScientiŽ che Italiane) contains 11 essays, a number of
them previously published. Bartocci anchors her insights into Barth’s
labyrinthine prose on the complex methodology of his ‘‘ oating opera,’’
where the most sophisticated concepts of contemporary technology
(from the cinematographic process to the experience of Web browsing)
come to the surface to be used as critical tools. Among the most recent
essays: an analysis of the three short stories in Chimera, where Barth
revisits mythic archetypes from The Arabian Nights and Greek mythology
to show the open-endedness of tradition; a study of the ‘‘algebra and Ž re’’
of Barth’s Letters; a re ection on the methods of writing revealed in
Sabbatical and The Tidewater Tales; an account of the inŽ niteness of the
word as a deferment of silence in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor;
and an analysis of On with the Story as a dramatization of 20th-century
scientiŽ c theories, the relationships between art and science, and Barth’s
engagement with metaŽ ction.
In ‘‘ ‘Longing on a Large Scale Is What Makes History’: Don DeLillo’s
Underworld ’’ (Letterature d’America 21: 149–58) Itala Vivan describes the
novel as ‘‘postcontemporary’’ in that it relates time processing to repre-
sentation and links desire with memory and culture. Through a close
analysis of its structure Vivan shows how DeLillo deconstructs the mod-
els developed by early American and American Renaissance writers that
have lost their power as signiŽ ers, and how he replaced them, in the end,
with a new American model.
Stefano Rosso discusses a cluster of gender-related questions in Viet-
nam War narratives (‘‘Pubblico/ privato, misoginia e ‘male bonding’ nelle
502 Scholarship in Other Languages

narrazioni della Guerra del Vietnam,’’ Acoma, pp. 22–34). Categories

such as race, class, culture, ethnicity, space, and time are often dis-
regarded in order to foreground the debate over gender. After an exhaus-
tive survey of the misogynist and aggressive qualities of verbal and ges-
tural language, Rosso concludes that ‘‘male bonding’’ developed during
the war years, not heterosexual or even homosexual relations, works
toward a renegotiation and redeŽ nition of one’s private and public
spheres. In Stephen King’s Hearts in Atlantis, for example, the veteran
bonds with his buddies while urging them to ‘‘action.’’ In the Ž eld of
science Ž ction Salvatore Proietti draws examples from William Gibson’s
cyberpunk novels to discuss the cyborg in its ideological and critical
functions, thus contributing to the debate over technology in the post-
modern world (‘‘Bodies, Ghosts, and Global Virtualities: On Gibson and
English-Canadian Cyberculture,’’ Il Canada e le culture della globaliz-
zazione, ed. Alfredo Rizzardi [Fasano: Schena], pp. 479–94).

f. Cultural Studies Gaetano Prampolini’s ‘‘Bianciardi traduttore di nar-

rativa Americana: Alla catena di Harvey Swados e Il re della pioggia di Saul
Bellow’’ was published in 2000 but not reviewed last year (Carte su carte
di ribaltatura: Luciano Biaciardi traduttore, ed. Luciana Bianciardi [Flor-
ence: Giunti], pp. 60–84). Bianciardi especially deserves to be mentioned
because he has played a signiŽ cant role in introducing American litera-
ture and culture to Italy, even though they were often unfavorably re-
ceived during the Cold War by left-wing intellectuals. Bianciardi is a
skilled translator who aims for philological accuracy, as Prampolini dem-
onstrates with several examples from his translations of Swados’s On the
Line and Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.
Alessandro Portelli analyzes the family crisis in John Steinbeck’s The
Grapes of Wrath through a close-reading of the novel whereby keywords
and images are accurately deconstructed (‘‘ ‘DiVerent Kinda Fences’:
Spazio familiare e spazio sociale in The Grapes of Wrath,’’ Acoma, pp. 47–
58). Through the evolution from huddle to family, the social group
gradually acquires a speciŽ c meaning; as a matter of fact, the family
functions as both an extension of the individual ego and as a unit in-
volved with society. Portelli focuses on The Grapes of Wrath to clarify how
the space of the farm, and speciŽ cally the function of its fences, leads
Steinbeck to an aYrmation of family. This perspective —not necessarily
shared by Portelli —views the family as a mediator between nature and
culture, private and social world, and ultimately selŽ shness and solidarity.
Maria Anita Stefanelli 503

The script of Gilda, a Hollywood production directed by Charles

Vidor, is carefully and suggestively analyzed by Alessandro Clericuzio in
his ‘‘ ‘Put the Blame on the Critic’: Guanto, bastone e cravatta: Accessori
per una triplice lettura di Gilda’’ (Abito e identità, pp. 181–227). Cler-
icuzio discusses voyeurism in the Ž lm as a form of public, private, and
existential control. The spectator is led, within the melodramatic plot, to
expect Gilda’s strip-tease; but as it is repeatedly delayed, the dialogue
unveils the complex perversions of the characters. In the end the specta-
tor is treated to the image of a single long black glove, a fashion accessory
on which the author focuses to discuss the role of transvestitism in the
cinema.
In Dai Sixties a Bush Jr.: La cultura USA contemporanea (Rome: Ca-
rocci) Sara Antonelli examines the changes undergone by U.S. society
and culture in the last four decades: the new hopes, dissent, and utopias
of the ’60s; the legacy of Vietnam and postmodernism in the ’70s; the
search for a new identity in the ’80s; and, after the transformation of the
melting-pot into a ‘‘quilt,’’ the virtual reality and new frontier in the ’90s.
The political tensions, social con icts, and national crises are not only
examined through a historical lens, they are also seen as re ected in the
Ž elds of literature, cinema, and performance. Mario MaY in ‘‘Il salotto e
la strada (per non dir della gallina): Spazi pubblici e spazi privati nell’es-
perienza del Lower East Side di New York’’ (Acoma, pp. 87–101) cele-
brates the dynamic multicultural experience of the Lower East Side.
Strongly opposed to the melting-pot theory, MaY insists that the al-
chemy of past and present, old and new, has favored the development of
complex sociocultural laboratories within the metropolis. Drawing on
the ethnic literature of the Lower East Side, MaY proposes to draw
surprising new maps of private and public loci, street furniture, and
linguistic areas. He seeks to follow a metaphorical Ariadne’s thread that
lets the city be read —a city that, in fact, lasst sich lesen.

g. Ethnic Studies Simone Cinotto’s Una famiglia che mangia insieme:

Cibo ed etnicità nella communità italo-americana di New York, 1920–1940
(Torino: Otto editore) is a study of the role of food, cooking, and cuisine
in Italian American society. Using an ethnic-based approach Cinotto
outlines the habits, manners, rituals, and memories connected with food;
he then expands his survey to include questions of food production and
consumption, its import, export, and marketing.
Cristina Giorcelli’s ‘‘Intertextuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing ’’ (Lettera-
504 Scholarship in Other Languages

ture d’America 21: 127–47) is centered on race. Constructed on the prac-

tice of ‘‘passing’’ (that is, crossing the color line), the novel appeared in
1929 during the Harlem Renaissance and alludes to miscegenation. Spec-
ulating on the possibility that Larsen detected the practice of passing in
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Giorcelli convincingly argues that, much as
Fitzgerald borrowed from black stereotyping to portray his socially mar-
ginalized protagonist, Larsen invested her black characters with bour-
geois qualities. ConŽ dent in her rigorous close-reading practice, Giorcelli
scans the two texts thoroughly, discovering many similarities in them.
In ‘‘L’emergere della dimensione privata nella poesia di Alma Vil-
lanueva’’ (Acoma, pp. 70–86) Erminio Corti describes Chicano culture as
a form of resistance to Anglo-American society and aYrms the impor-
tance of artistic expressions such as the murales, the Teatro Campesino,
and the poetry readings that emerged during the Renacimiento Chicano
in the riveting of a common identity. The opposite direction (usually
overlooked by scholars of Chicano literature) was often taken by Chicano
artists in the second half on the ’70s, as Alma Villanueva’s Mother, May I
(1978) suggests. The narrative voice there, scarcely interested in the con-
struction of an ethnic collective memory, utters individual herstory.
In ‘‘Un io ‘indiscutibilmente, inconfondibilmente nero’: Gli scritti di
Toni Morrison’’ (Vita e Pensiero, Jan.–Feb.: 79–97) Clara Ranghetti sur-
veys Morrison’s prose —The Bluest Eye, Paradise, Tar Baby, Sula, Song of
Solomon, Beloved, and Jazz —to reveal how assimilation may lead to false
identity and how understanding African American folklore can help to
overcome hatred and intolerance. As Ranghetti shows, Morrison suc-
ceeds in exposing the hypocrisy of the American myth of innocence and
warns against the dichotomy of good and evil that might ultimately lead
to isolation. Self-discovery and the reappropriation of the past are seen by
Morrison as indispensable tools for the next generations’ work toward an
‘‘undivided’’ future.
A selection of Puerto Rican poet-performer Pedro Pietri’s poetry is
published in the bilingual anthology Out of Order: Fuori Servizio, ed.
Mario MaY (Cagliari: CUEC). In the introductory essay, ‘‘The Poet
Dresses in Black’’ (pp. 17–31), MaY portrays this bard-fool poetic per-
sona against the background of Nuyorican (sic) poetry, pointing out the
oral, nonsensical, and visionary quality of his verse, his political engage-
ment, and his adoption of the ‘‘strategy of signifyin(g)’’ as derived from
the African American tradition.
Università ‘‘Roma Tre,’’ Roma
Bo G. Ekelund, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Henrik Lassen 505

iv Scandinavian Contributions: Bo G. Ekelund, Sandra Lee

Kleppe, Henrik Lassen
This year’s scholarship from Scandinavia re ects a turn-of-the-century
urge to take inventory of past and present notions of immigrant, multi-
ethnic, and multilingual literatures of the United States. Two volumes of
essays, Not English Only: RedeŽ ning ‘‘American’’ in American Studies, ed.
Orm Øverland (VU), and American Studies at the Millennium: Ethnicity,
Culture and Literature, ed. Lena M. Koski (Turku), set the tone for a year
of critical re ection that scrutinizes and problematizes received ideas of
what American literature is.
For obvious reasons, Scandinavian scholars have always had an inter-
est in the literature of the Midwest; articles on writers such as Ole E.
Rölvaag, Jane Smiley, Sherwood Anderson, and Willa Cather testify to
the continuing interest and relevance of the region’s literature in the
context of the American experience. Contemporary Asian American,
Native American, African American, and Caribbean American works by
Karen Yamashita, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, and Jamaica
Kincaid are examined for the ways in which they challenge conven-
tional categories of literariness and Americanness. The selection of 20th-
century literature also includes critical scrutiny of works by Reynolds
Price, Richard Ford, and William Gaddis. Of the 19th-century canonical
writers Melville receives the most attention, and the Scandinavian inter-
est in literature portraying the consequences of slavery and the Civil War
continues unabated with articles on Frances Butler Leigh, Elizabeth
Stoddard, and Frederick Douglass.

a. 19th-Century Poetry and Prose The relationship between science

and technology has generally been understood to be one of contrasting
realms which occasionally intersect, but when Herman Melville wrote
Moby-Dick there was a strong drive on the part of scientiŽ c communities
in America to make common cause with technology in order to serve
industrial interests. In ‘‘ ‘The Leyden Jar’ and the ‘Iron Way’ Conjoined?
Moby-Dick, the Classical and the Modern Schism of Science and Tech-
nology,’’ pp. 243–53 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations’’ (Kent State), Inger
Hunnerup Dalsgaard makes a case for interpreting Ahab as Melville’s
comment on the dehumanizing eVects of this situation. Dalsgaard’s anal-
ysis of the cluster of images and metaphors drawn from industrial society
that Melville employed in describing Ahab’s purpose unveils a modern
506 Scholarship in Other Languages

American Prometheus who did not so much oVend God or upset the
natural order as sin against other human beings and the Protestant ethos
of productivity. Similarly, in ‘‘The Tartarus of Myths: Constructing a
Dark Satanic Mill in Melville’s New England’’ (Igitur 2 [2001]: 91–110)
Dalsgaard also examines Melville’s more direct portrayal of the (social)
eVects of industrialization in America in ‘‘The Paradise of Bachelors and
the Tartarus of Maids.’’ Melville ‘‘oVers up a mythopoeic version of the
conditions of the American mill-girl’’ which is at odds with the much-
vaunted image of, for instance, the model mill city Lowell, Massa-
chusetts. Dalsgaard argues that in building a set of mythic constructions
resembling those found in contemporary writing and reporting on fac-
tory life only to subtly undermine the rosy popular view of life in an
industrialized community, Melville’s text achieves a form of mythological
revisionism which subverts the normal prescriptive and stabilizing func-
tions of myth. This new, cautionary mythology is partly a result of
Melville’s relocation of what Dalsgaard calls ‘‘the myth of the mill girl’’ to
the classical, mythical space of Tartarus and thus defying narrative expec-
tations. Melville leaves ‘‘the reader/consumer’’ both helpless and guilty, as
well as vulnerable to this ‘‘literary prophecy about industry.’’
Three articles treat literature concerned with the eVects of slavery and
the Civil War. In Wai-Chee Dimock’s ‘‘What Frederick Douglass Says to
Kant with Help from Einstein,’’ pp. 87–100 in American Studies at the
Millennium, these three unlikely bedfellows are discussed as ‘‘interlock-
ing and mutually clarifying Ž gures.’’ Through a reading of passages from
Douglass’s writing, Dimock uncovers how this 19th-century literary and
public Ž gure challenged Western thought by putting slavery into a con-
text in which ethics and epistemology overlap. What Douglass, and by
extension the African American literary tradition, contributed to West-
ern philosophy is the notion that such boundaries as master and slave,
guilt and innocence, as well as science and humanities are by no means
clear-cut, but are bound up with particular institutional practices.
In ‘‘Island Queen: Frances Butler Leigh’s Ten Years on a Georgia Planta-
tion since the War ’’ (AmStScan 33, ii: 14–23) Clara Juncker focuses on the
voices of plantation owners and former slaves as they reach us ‘‘through
Frances’ representational Ž lters’’ in Leigh’s published journal and con-
cludes that the entire polyphonic text testiŽ es to a ‘‘racial struggle con-
cerning the function and meaning of language.’’ While both Leigh and
her husband, Reverend James Wentworth Leigh, assume a mimetic rela-
tionship between signiŽ er and signiŽ ed, Juncker Ž nds that the African
Bo G. Ekelund, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Henrik Lassen 507

Americans on the plantation ‘‘engage in more  uid, downright poststruc-

turalist operations.’’ Although clashes between planters and laborers arise
from con icts of interest, they ‘‘peak in moments of linguistic diVer-
ence.’’ The suggested linguistic battles which ensue are not so much
resolved as they are, at the end of the journal, overruled by Reverend
Leigh’s comments, which ‘‘take over’’ Frances’s account. This authorita-
tive white, male, and English voice sought, as Juncker puts it, ‘‘with his
own language and culture to prevent the chaos that nature and Recon-
struction politics threatened to bring about.’’
Maria Holmgren-Troy turns to Elizabeth Stoddard in ‘‘ ‘A House Di-
vided’: The Civil War in Elizabeth Stoddard’s Two Men, ’’ pp. 115–23 in
American Studies at the Millennium. The war of the title is fought not at
Shiloh or Gettysburg but in the everyday lives of a family in a small New
England town. Exploring Stoddard’s novel as a ‘‘domestic allegory of the
Civil War,’’ Holmgren-Troy focuses on the Parke household, which is
‘‘divided by an anticipated dual ownership, gendered concerns, and a
Northern woman’s dislike of Southern ways.’’ The analysis carefully iden-
tiŽ es various textual elements which connect with the national narrative
at points of political, racial, sexual, and cultural tension. Particular atten-
tion is paid to the function of narrative breaks and the displacement of
sexuality by means of what Holmgren-Troy argues is a deliberate use of
the mulatto stereotype.

b. 20th-Century Poetry and Prose Although Martyn Bone concludes

that ‘‘ultimately, it is impossible to excavate some positive, absent pres-
ence of ‘the South’ and its ‘sense of place’ from Independence Day ’’ in
‘‘New Jersey Real Estate and the Postsouthern ‘Sense of Place’: Richard
Ford’s Independence Day ’’ (AmStScan 33, ii: 105–19) Bone nevertheless
oVers a convincing reading of the novel as a ‘‘postsouthern parody.’’ In
this 1995 sequel to The Sportswriter (1986) Ford continues his Ž ctional
interrogation of the South and Southern literary shibboleths such as the
‘‘sense of place’’ and ‘‘sense of community.’’ The novel gradually reveals a
complex relationship between ‘‘community,’’ ‘‘place,’’ and the bland ano-
nymity of capitalist real estate in postmodern geographies. Independence
Day may even be seen as ‘‘the culmination of the postsouthern project’’
initiated by Ford in his Ž rst novel, a portrayal of ‘‘postsouthern America’’
where both the Agrarians’ nostalgic proprietary ideals and the romantic,
Weltyan ‘‘sense of place’’ have been ‘‘superseded by the capitalist fetishiza-
tion of ‘place’ as a commodity.’’ Thus place no longer has special meaning
508 Scholarship in Other Languages

and therefore, in practice, means nothing. Like ‘‘place,’’ ‘‘community’’

has become utterly controlled by the market economy and accordingly
both ‘‘sense of place’’ and ‘‘sense of community’’ have been ‘‘rendered
redundant, or at least highly contingent, by capitalism.’’
As Bo G. Ekelund points out in ‘‘Recognizing the Law: Value and
Identities in William Gaddis’ A Frolic of His Own, ’’ pp. 113–38 in
Folkways and Law Ways—Law in American Studies, ed. Helle Porsdam
(Odense), spectacle and law play such an important part in American
culture that ‘‘they must be understood as social forces with the power to
constitute values and identities.’’ Reading A Frolic of One’s Own as a work
which maps a social reality in the tradition of great realist novels, Ekelund
treats it as a detailed ‘‘literary analysis of the division of symbolic labor in
modern American society, with special reference to law and culture.’’
From this perspective, Gaddis’s satirical novel may be accepted as a
plotting out, in literary form, of the complex interplay between law and
literature in a society dominated by spectacle. This ongoing process
results in constant transformations and deformations of both individual
and collective values and identities. Ekelund’s detailed analysis of the
novel shows that the powerful social force of commodiŽ cation, in the
form of money and spectacle, tends to invade the Ž elds of art and law
with the result that their autonomy is reduced and their ‘‘elaborate princi-
ples of recognition’’ are replaced by instantly consumable images. The
degree of autonomy in art and law may thus be seen as vital in avoiding
the travestying forces of, at one end of the scale, marketplace spec-
tacle and, at the other, formal dominance, and Ekelund concludes that
Gaddis’s satirical novel helps describe this basic dilemma of modernity in
a form that ‘‘travesties its materials so that we can more accurately recog-
nize them.’’
In ‘‘The Ambiguities of the Escape Theme in Midwestern Literature
1918–1934’’ (AmStScan 33, i: 36–44) Mats Västå explores how Sherwood
Anderson, Willa Cather, Floyd Dell, Sinclair Lewis, Ruth Suckow, and
Glenway Wescott treat the theme of escape. What the characters escape is
a highly diverse set of experiences and relationships which Västå chooses
to treat individually, in largely descriptive terms. The comparative anal-
ysis involves the ambiguity created by an urge to leave which is matched
by the persistence of attachments to the past. However, Västå’s main
interest is to distinguish between diVerent escape patterns in terms of
their conclusiveness or lack thereof. The most deŽ nitive escape is the one
that ends in death, as in Cather’s One of Ours, while more inconclusive
Bo G. Ekelund, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Henrik Lassen 509

escapes include Suckow’s The Odyssey of a Young Girl, in which the ‘‘revolt
from the village’’ is qualiŽ ed by the strong bonds the protagonist feels for
her Midwestern place of origin. This is a loosely argued comparison of a
broad thematic category, unburdened by theory and by concerns about
the particular social context of the thematic patterns.
Øyvind T. Gulliksen’s ‘‘Beret’s Terrible Test: Giants in the Earth in
Contemporary American Scholarship,’’ pp. 177–87 in American Studies
at the Millennium, provides an overview of the critical reception of the
work of another Midwesterner, Ole E. Rölvaag. Documenting how the
status of Rölvaag has changed through the decades, Gulliksen simulta-
neously oVers insights into the relevance this Norwegian American writer
has for the current literary and cultural situation in America. Rölvaag
scholarship has variously placed him as a Norwegian, a Norwegian Amer-
ican, a regional, and an American writer. In pointing out that ‘‘the pure
emigration history reading of his works has reached its saturation point,’’
Gulliksen does not refute this tradition but illustrates how each genera-
tion of critics is able to Ž nd new relevance in Rölvaag. Gulliksen’s critical
essay focuses on the ways in which the character Beret is currently em-
braced not as a Norwegian immigrant but as a prophetic Ž gure whose
plight questions central American myths of freedom, materialism, and
the open frontier. Gulliksen points to an irony that underscores his point
about the changing critical interest in Rölvaag, namely that the Nor-
wegian translator of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, when confronted
with an intertextual reference to Rölvaag in Smiley’s book, had no knowl-
edge of the Norwegian title of Giants in the Earth.
The values represented by Beret and her inherent critique of the laying
of the land in Giants in the Earth also have prime importance in A
Thousand Acres. In the same volume, Tore Høgås aptly demonstrates in
‘‘ ‘A Destiny We Never Asked For’: Gender and Gifts, Property and Power
in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres ’’ (pp. 201–09) how Smiley depicts a
Midwestern farming community in which capitalism and patriarchy join
forces to exploit both the land and the female body. From the perspective
of Derrida’s three phases of deconstruction and his theory of the gift as
part of a chain of demand and repayment, Høgås sheds light on how the
farm that Larry bequeaths to his daughters in A Thousand Acres is a
poisoned gift which reinforces Larry’s status in Zebulon County as a
godlike patriarch.
Moving farther west, Roy Goldblatt compares and contrasts Myron
Brinig’s 1929 novel Singermann with the work of contemporary American
510 Scholarship in Other Languages

Jewish writers and Ž nds that ‘‘it can easily be placed inside the tradition of
the acculturation novel’’ (‘‘Singermann —Not Your Usual Jewish Ameri-
can Novel,’’ pp. 167–75 in American Studies at the Millennium ). Although
the novel is set in Montana and may also be read as an immigrant
resettlement narrative, Goldblatt demonstrates that most of its characters
end up accepting assimilation, sacriŽ cing the spiritual for the material as
they are ‘‘driven by the American ethic of acquisition and consumption.’’
He concludes that Brinig may therefore, thematically speaking, be said to
have written ‘‘the ghetto novel out West.’’
Dorothy Kim’s ‘‘Karen Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange: Postcolonial Dis-
course and (Re)visions of America at the Century’s Edge,’’ pp. 211–30 in
American Studies at the Millennium, is a close examination of how this
novel, which challenges genre classiŽ cation, ‘‘informs and simultane-
ously complicates current debates about postcolonialism in a ‘transi-
tional’ world.’’ Kim poses the question of whether postcolonial theory is
adequate to address a work of Asian American Ž ction that does not Ž t
prescribed categories, and by extension she analyzes whether ‘‘postcolo-
nial’’ is an adequate term to deal with the particular historical and geo-
graphical particularities of North and South America that Yamashita so
unconventionally invents and remaps in her novel. Through a close-
reading of the character ArcAngel, Kim arrives at the conclusion that
‘‘transnationalism’’ is a term that can supplement ‘‘postcolonialism’’ in
the eVort to Ž nd an adequate theoretical approach to such works.
In ‘‘Reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: Apocalyptic Vision or
Ecological Re-vision?’’ (Representing Gender, Ethnicity and Nation in
Word and Image, ed. Karin Granqvist and Ulrike Spring [Tromsø: Center
for Women’s Studies], pp. 57–67) Laura Castor argues that ‘‘Silko’s text
suggests that she provides a model for resisting and transforming the
tyranny of the apocalyptic narrative into a narrative about ecological
balance.’’ Castor illuminates how the issues raised in Ceremony transcend
the local and culturally speciŽ c and have global importance. She does this
through a reading of the historical signiŽ cance of the geographical area
that is depicted in Ceremony (the uranium mine in the Southwest con-
nected to the production of the Ž rst atomic bomb) as well as through a
reading of the diVerent characters’ stories. By showing how stories in
Ceremony are alternately caught up in and transcend destructive patterns
of dualistic thinking, Castor explains how Silko’s novel provides some,
but not all, of the solutions to apocalyptic destruction.
Two articles from Scandinavia analyze the role of sensory perception in
Bo G. Ekelund, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Henrik Lassen 511

literary works. Danuta Fjellestad’s ‘‘Towards an Aesthetics of Smell, or

the Foul and the Fragrant in Contemporary Literature’’ (CAUCE, Revista
de Filología y su Didáctica, pp. 637–51) examines the ‘‘olfactory universes’’
of Toni Morrison’s Sula, Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My
Mother, and Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. Arguing that a
critical interest in the sense of smell is timely both in view of the recent
turn to the physicality of bodies and for its subversive power within an
aesthetic tradition still marked by a 19th-century hierarchy of the senses,
Fjellestad demonstrates how odor is written into her three chosen texts in
ways that strongly shape their overall structure. Working with and
against the conventional meanings of diVerent smells, Morrison, Kin-
caid, and Winterson are able to recode other conventions —of gender,
ethnicity, and epistemology. Fjellestad’s aim to usher in an ‘‘olfactory
turn’’ in criticism is well supported by these undeodorized readings.
Karl-Heinz Westarp’s ‘‘Reynolds Price ‘Makes Sense’: Pleasure and
Pain in Kate Vaiden and Roxanna Slade ’’ (AmStScan 33, ii: 83–96) takes its
point of departure from the idea that sensory impressions form the basis
of all mental activity. Westarp points to Price’s predilection for striking
sensory images of a corporeal nature in his two ‘‘diary’’ novels and dem-
onstrates that especially the physical and mental aspects of pleasure and
pain are important and deeply meaningful thematic features of his work.
As a Southern writer, his ‘‘infatuation with the experience of the pain of
defeat’’ is hardly surprising, but Westarp shows that Price’s precise and
detailed descriptions of bodily experiences leading to pleasure and pain
go well beyond standard sense imagery. Both novels portray characters
who late in life reach what Westarp calls ‘‘a point of self-critical serenity’’
after having exculpated themselves through their narratives in a process
where ‘‘pain becomes pleasure in the telling.’’
Two articles in American Studies at the Millennium are concerned with
contemporary drama. Nicholas F. Radel examines Harvey Fierstein’s
Torch Song Trilogy and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in the light of
recent developments in queer theory in ‘‘Perestroika? (Dis)articulating
Gay Identity in American Film and Drama at the Millennium’’ (pp. 61–
74). Radel Ž nds that these plays validate or valorize their ‘‘queer, non-
normative visions’’ through an ‘‘appeal to fundamental American values
over and against distorted ones’’ and thereby dramatize a ‘‘struggle
around deŽ nition: who gets to decide what or who will be a citizen of the
United States.’’ Ilka Saal in ‘‘The New York Mystery Play: Adrienne
Kennedy’s Motherhood 2000 ’’ (pp. 75–85) analyzes Kennedy’s 1994 play.
512 Scholarship in Other Languages

An original mystery play from the York Cycle of Mystery Plays, The
CruciŽ xion of Christ is treated in depth as an important subtext in Moth-
erhood 2000, where the original tale of Christian love and forgiveness
becomes a part of a revenge plot. Saal concludes that since Kennedy’s play
not only questions the hegemonic function of religion within the pa-
triarchal state but also confronts both gender and racial biases, it makes
sense to read this apocalyptic drama in the tradition of female resistance
to male historiography.

c. General Studies, Theory, and Criticism The anthology Not English

Only: RedeŽ ning ‘‘American’’ in American Studies addresses a paradox in
the study of American texts, namely ‘‘the strange anomaly of combining
multicultural theory with monolingual practice.’’ The volume attempts
to counter this phenomenon by taking seriously the notion that what is
written in the United States in languages other than English is also
American literature. Many of the essays gathered here focus on individual
American writers or literary texts in languages as diverse as Swedish,
Norwegian, German, Polish, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Hawaiian.
Editor Orm Øverland points out that a serious obstacle to ‘‘the multi-
lingual enterprise is the library tradition of classifying books according to
language’’ rather than Americanness. Taken as a whole, Not English Only
represents a paradigm shift in the study of American literature and is a
noteworthy contribution to a Ž eld of study that will grow in importance
in years to come, as monolinguism inevitably limits our understanding of
what has been, is, and will be American literature. The study of the
multilingual literature of the United States has special challenges, the
most obvious being the limited language skills of the individual scholar,
and Øverland brings together the best of the joint eVorts over the past few
years to produce solid scholarship in the Ž eld.
In ‘‘ ‘Through Confusion to Unshakable Knowledge’: A Dialogic
Perspective Through Emerson on Contemporary Literary Change,’’
pp. 231–40 in American Studies at the Millennium, David Dickson re ects
on the achievement of Susan Howe in The Birth-Mark and traces a
linkage between Howe and Emerson consisting of a kind of visionary
cognition that is not so much transcendental and unitary as richly em-
pirical and dispersed. Dickson’s interest lies in the sources of innovation
in literature and scholarship and he draws on Stanley Cavell to argue for a
dialogic Emerson from whom we can learn about this visionary mode of
knowledge. Dickson argues that ‘‘the aYnity between Howe’s moments
Bo G. Ekelund, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Henrik Lassen 513

of ‘singularity’ and Emerson’s ‘transparent eye-ball’ experiences’’ lies in

this species of visionary cognition, which he insists should be understood
as social as well as spiritual. This diversity of vision is what enables Howe
to bring together ‘‘subjective dispersal’’ and ‘‘individual conviction,’’ an
achievement that Dickson holds up as a model for producing new
knowledge.
In ‘‘Intellectual Self-Fashioning: The Case of Frank Lentricchia and
Ihab Hassan’’ (European Legacy 5, vi [2000]: 863–74) Danuta Fjellestad
compares the ways that two well-established U.S. academics project their
self-image in the genre of autobiography. Situating Hassan’s Out of Egypt
and Lentricchia’s The Edge of Night, Fjellestad re ects more generally on
the phenomenon of an autobiographical turn among academic intellec-
tuals and raises issues regarding the Ž gure of the intellectual in the United
States today. The main burden of the essay, however, is to look closely at
the performance of an intellectual (and in the case of Lentricchia, anti-
intellectual) self in these autobiographical books. The choice of Hassan
and Lentricchia allows Fjellestad to map out two apparent opposites:
Hassan is transcendence where Lentricchia is all immanence; one is
aristocratic where the other revels in working-class origins; one belongs to
a romantic tradition, the other to a populist order; one represents
the aloofness of Henry Adams while the other writes the Benjamin
Franklin-style success story. Not least, Fjellestad draws up a political
contrast in a pair of questions that perform some intellectual self-
fashioning of their own: ‘‘One may wonder: is there something par-
ticularly self-alienating in the kind of Marxist theory that Lentricchia has
produced? Is there something liberating in the type of pragmatic plural-
ism that Hassan has produced?’’ Fjellestad’s recourse to Pierre Bourdieu’s
distinction between epistemic and empirical individuals seems misplaced
in such a context, where the self-fashioning of the individuals is inter-
preted and recognized from their symbolic production without con-
structing the social space which deŽ nes the epistemic individual, but the
questions raised by the analysis are crucial and are posed here with great
force.
In ‘‘American Literature in the Arab World: The Challenges and
Changes,’’ pp. 147–55 in American Studies at the Millennium, Marwan M.
Obeidat notes that ‘‘no treatment whatsoever’’ appears to exist of the
reception of American literature in the Arab world. However, Obeidat’s
overview of the gradual acceptance of American literature as an estab-
lished Ž eld of study within the larger discipline of English goes some way
514 Scholarship in Other Languages

toward amending the situation. From the Ž rst undergraduate courses

oVered at the American University in Cairo in the mid-1950s to the
eYcient and systematic programs found in many elite Arab universities
today, it is clear that American literary studies has gained ‘‘a relatively
strong foothold’’ in the Arab academic world after having been relegated
to the margins of the curriculum throughout most of the 20th century.
But as Obeidat points out, it is the world supremacy of the United States
as a political power that has played the greatest role in establishing the
Ž eld in a part of the world where the West has typically been perceived as
an alien, confrontational power and a general cultural threat and where
even some proponents of the study of English have long considered
American literature inferior due to a peculiar ‘‘narrowness or thinness.’’
Per Winther’s ‘‘Anglo-Amerikansk Novelleteori,’’ pp. 204–25 in Norsk
litterœr årbok (Oslo: Det norske samlaget), is an overview essay on Anglo-
American and especially American short story theories of the 19th and
20th centuries. Winther treats brie y the history of the short story form
in America and more thoroughly the tradition of theorizing about the
genre from Poe to the present. Pinpointing the 1970s as the beginning of
eVorts to systematize short story theories, Winther guides the reader
through a synopsis of the most important developments in the study of
this genre during the 1980s and 1990s, including Susan Lohafer and Jo
Ellyn Clarey’s Short Story Theory at a Crossroad (1989), John Gerlach’s
Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story (1985),
and Charles E. May’s The New Short Story Theories (1994). The problem
of essentialist versus nonessentialist genre deŽ nitions is treated at some
length, and Winther discusses the central question among theorists of
whether the short story diVers from other prose forms in degree or kind.
While Winther leans toward the solution of deŽ ning according to typical
rather than obligatory traits, his critical essay nevertheless illustrates how
generic elements of the short story such as brevity and narrative conden-
sation have endured since the 19th century.
In ‘‘A City upon a Hill: American Literature and the Ideology of
Exceptionalism,’’ pp. 45–68 in Marks of Distinction, ed. Dale Carter
(Aarhus), Thomas B. Byers oVers an overview of the relationship between
American literature and the ideology of exceptionalism with a special
focus on the in uence of exceptionalist thinking on both the production
and the reception of America’s literary texts. Byers sees what he calls ‘‘the
traditional canon of our literature’’ as a partial function of exceptionalist
ideology and maintains that ‘‘exceptionalism has historically been one of
Bo G. Ekelund, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Henrik Lassen 515

the conditioning and gate-keeping principles of canonization in Amer-

ica.’’ According to this ‘‘traditional way of looking at American literature’’
any text must bear the marks of the exceptionalist ideology if it is to be
accepted as both literature (as opposed to mere writing) and American (as
opposed to just literature). With exceptionalism as a constitutive element
for American literature, the canon may be seen as being prescribed
thematically and ideologically rather than determined by formal or aes-
thetic considerations. Although Byers Ž nds the recent contestation of
both the canon of American literature and exceptionalist thinking in
general to be ‘‘extremely healthy, both from a literary and a cultural point
of view,’’ he is unwilling to give up the canonical works altogether or to
‘‘discard the notion of aesthetic judgement as one criterion for deciding
what to read and teach.’’ Drawing on a number of central examples from
the canon, Byers points out that many of the greatest of these texts owe
much of their forceful impact to the exceptionalist notion that ‘‘what is at
stake is not just individual stories, not just a class or gender or race
analysis and critique, but a failure of America: a failure to live up to our
exceptionalist destiny.’’ Particularly in canonized American novels, indi-
vidual and social failures or tragedies are, as Byers points out, ‘‘rather
consistently framed, by authors or readers both, as failures or tragedies of
the nation.’’
Uppsala University
University of Tromsø
Odense University

v Central European Contributions: Zoltán Abádi-Nagy and

>
Elzbieta H. Oleksy
This section covers scholarship published in the Czech Republic, Es-
tonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia from 1998 through 2001. The
material with English summaries of studies in Czech and Slovakian was
procured through the generous cooperation of Jaroslav Kus̀nír of the
University of Pres̀ov, Slovakia.

a. General: Bibliography, Literary History, Autobiography, Interviews

Central Europe can boast two outstanding bibliographical contributions
in recent years: Lehel Vadon’s overwhelmingly huge Az amerikai irodalom
és irodalomtudomány bibliogrᎠája a magyar ideoszaki kiadványokban 1990-
ig (Eger, 1997) and Marcel Arbeit’s three-volume Bibliography of American
516 Scholarship in Other Languages

Literature in Czech Translation (Olomouc: Votobia, 2000). The former,

done with philological care and precision, is a register of American
literature and literary scholarship in 395 relevant Hungarian periodical
publications from the beginnings through 1990. The latter, easily the
most important work of its kind of the last 100 years in the Czecho-
Slovak world, includes translations in book form, journals and news-
papers, nonperiodicals with up to 12 issues a year, samizdat, exile periodi-
cals, and fanzines. As for interviews, in the somewhat carelessly edited
Happy Returns: Essays for Professor István PálVy (Debrecen, 1999) Feder-
man discusses his Double or Nothing with Zoltán Abádi-Nagy in a pre-
viously unpublished section of their talk (‘‘Conversations with Raymond
Federman: Double or Nothing, ’’ pp. 270–78).

b. General: Theory, Criticism, Culture While the bigger part of this

section is taken up by Central European writing devoted to culture, there
is a book-size, very signiŽ cant contribution to theory in general and genre
theory in particular: Hungarian Tamás Bényei’s Rejtélyes rend: A krimi, a
metaŽ zikai és a posztmodern (Budapest: Akadémiai, 2000). Bényei is
especially fascinated by mid- and late-20th century rewrites of classical
detective Ž ction by major writers in world literature. Some of the Ameri-
cans he includes are Nabokov, Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Sukenick,
Morrison, and Auster. The main theoretical thrust of the book is that the
rewritten product —the ‘‘antidetective story,’’ an often parodistic de-
construction of the classical/metaphysical detective story —is one of the
most characteristic if not paradigmatic genres of postmodern Ž ction.
Postmodernity and deconstruction provide the link between this book
and another Hungarian contribution: Péter Csató addresses what he calls
the postmodern-Ž ction/poststructuralist-theory ‘‘tangled hierarchy,’’ in
which two allegedly similar discourses ‘‘place each other’s language under
erasure.’’ He goes on to show how, paradoxically, ‘‘linking postmodern
texts up with deconstruction is another mode of constructing a grand
meta-narrative’’ (‘‘Tangled Hierarchies: Postmodernist Fiction vs. De-
construction?’’ HJEAS 6, ii [2000]: 91–110).
As for schools of criticism, in ‘‘An Investigation into T. S. Eliot’s
‘Impossibly Fertile Paternity’: Northrop Frye’’ János Kenyeres discourses
on an underdeŽ ned area of Frye criticism: Eliot’s paradox-ridden parent-
hood in shaping Frye’s ideas about culture, literature, criticism, modern-
ism —even if Frye formulated some of these ideas in deŽ ance of Eliot
(HJEAS 6, ii [2000]: 35–45).
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy and El>zbieta H. Oleksy 517

In ‘‘Mixed Blessings of Freedom: American Literature in Poland under

and after Communism’’ (AmerSt 40, ii [Summer 1999]: 137–50) Jerzy
Durczak takes note of the change in the reception of American literature
in Poland in recent years. Evidently not sharing Jean Baudrillard’s enthu-
siasm for mass culture, Durczak laments the tastes of his students of
American literature and the general readers who turned from Barth and
Pynchon to a ‘‘much lighter literature.’’
Durczak is right, for interest in popular culture is noticeable also along
Polish academics. In Estonia and Poland, various narratives compete for a
recognized position within American Studies. Central to Cultural Policy,
or the Politics of Culture, ed. Agata Preis-Smith and Piotr Skurowski
(Warsaw: Warsaw University, 1999), is a discussion about the relationship
between politics and culture. Essays in the Ž rst part of the volume, which
opens with Winfried Fluck’s ‘‘Americanization of Modern Culture’’ and
concludes with Michael Zuckerman’s ‘‘Endless End of American Excep-
tionalism,’’ address issues in cultural policy, education, ideology, mass
culture, and transformations of American democratic institutions. The
second part focuses on various conŽ gurations of the political and the
aesthetic in literary texts. Grzegorz Kość in ‘‘The Idea of the High Canon:
An Enlightenment Critique of Relativism’’ (pp. 273–86) joins a chorus of
those who question the loss of tradition and the politicization of literary
criticism. Arguing that it is ‘‘only through a single canon’’ which ‘‘in its
entirety and complexity is hoped to approximate the unique truth’’ that
we can engage in a ‘‘passionate struggle with the Other,’’ he misses the
point that it is precisely the ‘‘we’’ of this argument, a shared perception,
that may be troubling to his readers. Most of the essays in this section im-
plicitly disagree with Kość’s statement. Cheryl Malcolm’s ‘‘The Politics of
Passing in the Short Story Fiction of Langston Hughes and Bernard Mala-
mud’’ (pp. 321–26) suggests a handful of literary strategies for the explora-
tion of the problem of otherness in literature. Cynthia Dominik’s ‘‘Asian
American Identity, Fiction, and Autobiography: E Pluribus Unum Not’’
(pp. 327–38) examines the intricacies of Asian American cultural and
literary otherness. Roy Goldblatt in ‘‘Othered by the Other’’ (pp. 339–46)
illustrates his discussion of the ‘‘othering’’ of African Americans with Saul
Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, though, as he self-consciously admits,
much could be also said (though it is not in Goldblatt’s paper) of Bellow’s
‘‘othering’’ of female characters in the novel, speciŽ cally ‘‘his reduction of
their intellectual competence.’’
Even more eclectic is a volume of essays ed. Krista Vogelberg and Raili
518 Scholarship in Other Languages

Põldsaar, Negotiating Spaces on the Common Ground: Selected Papers of the

3rd and 4th International Tartu Conferences on North-American Studies
(Tartu: Tartu University, 2000). Contributions include texts on globaliza-
tion and American transnationalism (Susan Armitage, Jarmo Oikarinen,
Eric J. Sandeen, Jerry Pubantz, Raili Põldsaar, and Krista Vogelberg), new
religious movements in the United States ( JeVrey Kaplan), American
migration patterns (Luca Codignola), and pedagogy (Elvira Osipova,
Berk Vaher, et al.). Among the essays of more immediate relevance to
American literary scholarship is Susan Mace’s analysis of Gerald Vizenor’s
Ishi and the Wood Ducks (pp. 97–103) —a play that deŽ es the conventions
of Native American theater and ethnic codes. Alexander MacLeod maps
out a ‘‘speciŽ cally spatialized and historicized position against the grid of
‘typically American’ society’’ in Toni Morrison’s Jazz (pp. 104–11). David
Cowart reinterprets the constitutive myths of male-centered Western
culture, illustrating his analysis with Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (pp. 41–
45). In a concise but sound analysis of Southern history, biography, and
Ž ction Jan Nordby Gretlund pronounces established literary categories
defunct because ‘‘history is now Ž ction, (auto)biography is Ž ction, and
Ž ction is autobiography’’ (pp. 46–52). The only paper in this section
written by an Estonian is Leena Kurvet-Käosaar’s ‘‘From MetaŽ ction to
Hyper-Ž ction: A Radical Turning Point or a Smooth Takeover?’’ (pp. 70–
80). In her thoughtful paper Kurvet-Käosaar quarrels with a view that
hypertext literature oVers a radically new artistic experience to its readers
and, illustrating her analysis with Robert Coover’s short story ‘‘The Magic
Poker’’ and Stuart Moulthrop’s cyber-story ‘‘Hegirascope,’’ she argues that
certain features of hypertext are already inscribed in metaŽ ction.
Telling It Slant: Polish Insights into American Culture and Literature, ed.
Marek Wilczyński and Magdalena Zapredowska (Pozna ń: Adam Mickie-
wicz University, 2000), is a collection of essays published in honor of
Andrzej Kopcewicz. Topics raised in the volume range from the discus-
sion of the moral philosophy of friendship and the ethics of contrariness
in William Blake and Thoreau (Tadeusz S™ awek) to the application of
Fredric Jameson’s ‘‘political unconscious’’ to an interpretation of Rebecca
Harding Davis’s ‘‘Life in the Iron-Mills’’ (Agata Preis-Smith) to a reading
of Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer against Jean Bau-
drillard’s America (Tadeusz Rachwa™ ) and feminist readings of Willa
Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (El¬zbieta H. Oleksy) and Susan
Sontag’s The Volcano Lover: A Romance (Agnieszka Rzepa). Three papers
in the collection merit special note. Agnieszka Salska’s elegantly written
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy and El>zbieta H. Oleksy 519

‘‘Dickinson in the Elegiac Mode’’ (pp. 37–52) draws on Jahan Ramazani’s

characterization of Thomas Hardy as the transitional Ž gure and makes a
similarly compelling case for Emily Dickinson. Like Hardy’s, Dickinson’s
conservatism stands in sharp contrast to various radical departures in
‘‘matters of form.’’ Dickinson’s ‘‘roughing up’’ of accepted syntax and
meter makes it diYcult —Salska contends —for literary historians to place
her. In ‘‘Joking about the Navel, or Intertextuality as Cyborg’’ (pp. 135–
50) Tomasz Basiuk demonstrates that there is much fun in Ž ction. In his
intelligent reading of Melville’s Moby-Dick, Norman Mailer’s ‘‘The Man
Who Studied Yoga,’’ and Thomas Pynchon’s V., Basiuk searches for an
intertextual element and Ž nds it in the idea of a cyborg. He says that the
intertextual approach to reading produces new, albeit provisional, units
of meaning which ‘‘oppose the outdated unities grounded in existing
political and cognitive structures.’’ If these units express tensions inherent
in their elements, they also hold a ‘‘promise of successful uniŽ cation’’
(e.g., in Queequeg’s tattooed body). Both are contained, he further notes,
in our reactions to a joke (here the joke of the navel) when the tension
between mutually incompatible meanings is Ž rst built and subsequently
alleviated by laughter. In this way, he concludes, ‘‘word gives way to
expression of the body.’’ Kopcewicz’s festschift also includes (pp. 229–48)
Magdalena Zapredowska’s straightforward piece ‘‘Mickiewicz’s Circles: ‘A
Vision’ in the Light of Emerson’s Early Essays.’’ Taking as a starting point
19th-century Polish critic Maurycy Mochnacki’s lament that Poland
lacked ‘‘mystics, transcendentalists, idealists, etc.,’’ Zapredowska argues
that there existed intercultural aYnities between Polish and American
Romantics as evidenced by the writings of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s
most revered Romantic poet, and Emerson. Analyzing just one element
of this kinship, i.e., Mickiewicz’s ‘‘grain of the soul’’ and Emerson’s ‘‘eye-
ball,’’ Zapredowska concludes on a hopeful note that there may exist
other ‘‘more general correspondences’’ between Polish and American
Romantics.
Hungarian perceptions of American multiculturalism are carried in
the proceedings volume of Multicultural Challenge in American Culture,
ed. Lehel Vadon (Eger, 1999). The collection is launched by Zsolt Virá-
gos’s and Tibor Frank’s papers. Virágos doubts ‘‘whether cannibalizing
respective cultural heritages on the basis of a blanket rejection along ra-
cial and gender lines is a promising future alternative.’’ He argues that
‘‘[c]ultural peace connotes reciprocity and it cannot be achieved within
the conŽ nes of a one-way street’’ (‘‘From Melting Pot to Boiling Pot:
520 Scholarship in Other Languages

Observations on the American Multicultural Scene,’’ pp. 5–19). Frank’s

informative survey of a century of American travelogues by Hungarian
authors concludes with the need to introduce social psychology as a
theoretical frame of reference when studying the way one nation looks at
the other, since the picture presented in a travelogue is often a clearer
re ection of the ‘‘photographer’’ (in this case the Hungarian viewer) than
of its subject (America). Some of the essays in the multicultural section of
the sloppily edited book revolve around commonplace notions and are
therefore less revelatory for an American than for a Hungarian audience,
and others may not have much to do with literary scholarship (e.g., Péter
Csató’s penetrating essay on Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish symphony) or
are more or less simply descriptive. However, there are contributions that
merit praise, such as Enik<o Bollobás on ‘‘Greek antagonisms resurfacing
in today’s canon war’’ and ‘‘on the beneŽ cial eVects of liberal pluralism’’
(‘‘Canonicity in Literature and Culture, or How Liberal Is Our Liberal
Arts Education?’’ pp. 37–53); and András Tarnóc’s provocative recogni-
tions of some convergences of parallel cultures in general and ‘‘the Euro-
American inner core’’ in relation to its African American and Mexican
American satellites’’ in particular —even if the paper is overly ambitious
and deploys its categories in a reductive and mechanical fashion (‘‘The
Paradox of the Multicultural Paradigm, or the Convergence of Parallel
Cultures,’’ pp. 146–55).
Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Polish Association
for American Studies, organized at the end of the 20th century and aptly
titled Apocalypse Now: Prophecy and FulŽ llment, ed. Agnieszka Salska and
Zbigniew Maszewski ( ódź:  ódź University, 2001), brings together es-
says on recurrent motifs of discontent and promise in American culture.
The volume is organized in two sections, one on cultural and the other on
literary perspectives. Meriting special note in the latter is Ewa  uczak’s
‘‘From Utopia to a Racial Armageddon: John Edgar Wideman’s Phila-
delphia and Toni Morrison’s Paradise ’’ (pp. 203–13).  uczak demonstrates
that the apocalyptic mode, which dominated African American culture
from its beginning through the 1960s, lost its attractiveness in the ’70s
and ’80s and was rekindled in the ’90s. In her Ž ne essay  uczak uses
Wideman’s and Morrison’s novels to show that they take up a ‘‘dialogue
with the apocalyptic tradition nearly at the moment of its abandonment’’
and explores the interdependence of the apocalyptic and the utopian in
their Ž ction.
Aleida Assman and Martin Procházka’s collection of essays in Litteraria
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy and El>zbieta H. Oleksy 521

Pragensia (8, xv [1998]), organized around the theme of ruins, harkens

back to a seminar jointly organized by the English departments of
Charles University and the University of Konstanz. It is ‘‘a fascinating
matrix for interdisciplinarity and transmedia discussions with a historical
range from Egyptian and Roman antiquity to postmodern culture.’’ In
‘‘Ruins in the New World: Roanoke thru Los Angeles’’ (pp. 44–57),
moving from John White’s reports on the Ž rst and second Roanoke
colonies through Hawthorne’s sketches (‘‘Old Ticonderoga’’) and tales
(‘‘New Adam and Eve’’) as well as Melville’s Moby-Dick to the ‘‘virtual
structure’’ of ‘‘not locatable’’ Los Angeles, Procházka uncovers a ruins-to-
specters-to–ghost towns progression which marks ‘‘the failure of the
culture to come to terms with the past and the otherness of America.’’
Rivers and the American Experience, ed. Jerzy Durczak (Lubin: Maria
Curie-Sk™ odowska University, 2000), is a collection of essays loosely
connected by their analyses of waterways in American literature and
culture. Articles included are by Teresa Ferreira de Almeida Alves on a
comparison of the book and Ž lm versions of Norman Maclean’s A River
Runs Through It, Walter H. Conser Jr. on the Cape Fear River in North
Carolina as a physical entity and a construct of imagination, Claus
Daufenbach on the importance of space and tourism in art and literature
as forging American national identity, and two essays on 19th- and 20th-
century poetry. Roy Goldblatt investigates the works of ethnic prose writ-
ers, Joseph C. Schöpp and Magdalena Zapredowska show the plethora of
meanings the term ‘‘river’’ carries for Henry David Thoreau, and Yuri V.
Stulov studies Trouble the Water by Melvin Dixon. The volume also
contains JeVrey Walsh’s account of Robert Fulton’s career as an engineer
and designer of the steamboat. The product of a panel of the 2000
European Association for American Studies biennial conference in Graz,
this volume makes a solid contribution to its subject.

c. 19th-Century Prose Miros™ awa Ziaja-Buchholtz’s The Rise of the

Young American Lady: Mark Twain’s and Henry James’s Search for the Real
and Right Character (Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Wy¬zszej Szko™ y Pedagog-
icznej, 1998) looks for similarities between the two writers. Mostly draw-
ing on old dichotomies, Ziaja-Buchholtz claims that Twain’s and James’s
investment in childhood and American innocence Ž nds its alternative in
adulthood and European experience, here referred to as ‘‘monstrosity.’’
She sees the young American lady as the ‘‘perfect alternative to adulthood
and childhood [and] to . . . men and women’’ and argues that Twain’s and
522 Scholarship in Other Languages

James’s partiality for female characters re ects the advent of the eman-
cipation movement. Curiously silent on the issue of gender and power,
Ziaja-Buchholtz concludes that ‘‘as opposed to the male-dominated busi-
ness world, writing was a feminine pursuit and a basis for the cross-
gender communication,’’ though she ignores James’s own reservations
about ‘‘scribbling women.’’
Nina Vietorová oVers a short monograph on Hawthorne’s and James’s
short stories: Short Story Nathaniela Hawthorna a Henryho Jamesa (Bra-
tislava: Slovak Academy, 1998). Half of the book is devoted to general
introductions of various sorts. The main topic is addressed in the fourth
and last chapter, in which Vietorová discusses Hawthorne and James
as psychological analysts of situations, emphasizing the unity of en-
vironment and character, ‘‘central intelligence,’’ ‘‘point of view’’ tech-
nique, ‘‘depth of comprehension and sensitive re ection of intensive
experience.’’
Ladislav Nagy’s ‘‘The Moving Pattern of Images: The Discourse
on History in Hawthorne’s ‘Main-Street’ ’’ (Litteraria Pragensia 10, xix
[2000]: 23–34) persuasively demonstrates that Hawthorne in this short
story is concerned with themes that anticipate the postmodern discourse
of our day: ‘‘the discontinuity of history, the problem of historical inter-
pretation and . . . the literariness of historical record.’’ Czech attention to
Hawthorne also generates another contribution by Martin Procházka:
‘‘Mechanic? —Organic? The Machines of Art in ‘The Artist of the Beauti-
ful’ ’’ (Litteraria Pragensia 10, xix [2000]: 3–15). In a penetrating post-
hermeneutic, intertextual reading, Procházka argues that ‘‘the three types
of Deleuzian machines are inscribed on Hawthorne’s text,’’ but Haw-
thorne’s ironic strategies relativize romantic aesthetic categories, and the
way his ‘‘machines of art’’ (‘‘functioning assemblages of fragmentary
parts’’) stage the problem of the interpretation of signs ‘‘does not allow a
metaphysical assertion of the truth’s Essence.’’ Procházka also devotes two
essays to Melville. ‘‘Nature in Moby-Dick and Emersonian Transcenden-
talism’’ (The Tongue Is an Eye: Studies Presented to Libuse > Dusková
> [Prague:
Charles University, 2000], pp. 67–83) concentrates on how Melville’s
early distrust of Emersonian ideology becomes more evident in Moby-
Dick; Ishmael may be interpreted as an ironic counterpart of the Emerso-
nian self-reliant man. He is also the mediator for alternative experience
and knowledge (‘‘the whaling matter’’), which has a decisive in uence on
the composition of the whole book. ‘‘Proster mor̀e, svoboda a subjektivita
závèru Byronovy Childe Haroldovy pouti a v Melvillovè Bílé velrybe> ’’
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy and El>zbieta H. Oleksy 523

addresses chapter 35 of Moby-Dick as a parody of Byron’s apostrophe of

the ocean in Childe Harold and discusses how Melville’s symbols of the
sublime and narratorial authority ironize authoritative and religious dis-
courses. His narrator turns to the ocean as to the authority of the other
whose symbol is ‘‘the ungraspable phantom of life’’ (Kultura a místo, ed.
Vladimir Svatoǹ and Anna Housková [Prague: Charles University],
pp. 209–20). Aladár Sarbu’s ‘‘ ‘No New World to Mankind Remains!’
Dream and Doubt in Melville’s Clarel ’’ lucidly demonstrates that Clarel
is a Moby-Dick-like contemplation ‘‘of the problems preoccupying Mel-
ville in the period after the Civil War.’’ Five years after Whitman’s Demo-
cratic Vistas, Melville opposes a ‘‘bleak,’’ ‘‘futureless,’’ world to Whitman’s
vision. Yet the distance that separates Clarel from Ahab, Pierre, Benito
Cereno —who did not accept the lessons of the same experience and were
destroyed by it, whereas Clarel does accept those lessons ‘‘and will live’’ —
is ‘‘the distance between the Romantic Ethos and the Modern’’ (The
American Dream: Festschrift for Peter Freese, ed. Carin Freywald and
Michael Porsche [Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1999], pp. 444–63). Katalin G.
Kállay’s impressive close-reading of Melville’s ‘‘Bartleby the Scrivener’’
enters ‘‘the magnetic Ž eld around the enigma’’ or void at the ‘‘heart’’ of
the story so as to follow ‘‘the narrator’s ‘circles’ around the case and the
Ž gure of Bartleby.’’ Kállay Ž nds that ‘‘the ‘void’ has escaped from the
middle of the [interpretive] sphere’’ and we have to accept ‘‘ambiguities as
ambiguities’’ (‘‘ ‘Homeward Bound on a Circular Path to Nowhere’: A
Reading of Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’ ’’ AnaChronist
[1999]: 70–100).

d. 20th-Century Fiction to World War II Multicultural Challenge in

American Culture has a Hemingway section, apropos of the Hemingway
centennial, with Donald E. Morse’s lucid and witty discussion of The
Hemingway Hoax (‘‘Ernest Hemingway as Character and Presence in
Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax, ’’ pp. 159–68), Gabriella Varró’s
‘‘Exercises in Re-reading: Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden’’
(pp. 189–205), and Ádám Molnár’s (re)readings of Carver/Hemingway
intertextuality (‘‘All of Them on the Same Train: Four Stories by Ernest
Hemingway and Raymond Carver,’’ pp. 171–86). An especially valuable
feature of the book is Lehel Vadon’s 118-page comprehensive ‘‘Ernest
Hemingway: A Hungarian Bibliography’’ of translations and criticism
(pp. 209–337).
John Dos Passos generates notable interest among Czech scholars.
524 Scholarship in Other Languages

Josef Grmela examines ‘‘The Czech Reputation of John Dos Passos’’ in

>
Rocenka Kruhu Modernich Filologgu (21 [1998]: 123–38). Tomás̀ Pospís̀il
looks at Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel and what he considers to be its
companion piece, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, in The Progressive Era in
American Historical Fiction (Brno: Masarykova Universita v Brnè, 1998).
Pospís̀il traces ‘‘signiŽ cant divergences in the artistic treatment of Ameri-
can historical reality as exempliŽ ed by the two novels’’ in a somewhat
sketchy yet often revelatory comparative analysis of the ways Dos Passos
and Doctorow handle the issues of body, Mexico, Ž lm, music, and race.

e. Contemporary Fiction Márta Pellérdi’s careful analysis of Lolita con-

cludes that the novel is ‘‘an exploration into the diVerence between
immorality in life and immortality in art’’ (‘‘Aestheticism and Decadence
in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita,’’ AnaChronist [1999]: 201–12). In ‘‘Flan-
nery O’Connor and the Politics of Realism: Reading ‘The ArtiŽ cial
Nigger’ ’’ Roland Végs<o uses the tropes of specularity and reversal ‘‘to
show how the rhetorical complexities of . . . ‘The ArtiŽ cial Nigger’ act out
some of the political anxieties of the age. . . . [H]ow the move towards
[Lionel] Trilling’s moral realism is dramatized and thematized in the
story’’ (HJEAS 6, ii [2000]: 59–75).
Several years’ study of Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme, and
postmodernity reaches fruition in Jaroslav Kus̀nír’s book Poetika amer-
ickej postmodernej prózy (Richard Brautigan a Donald Barthelme) (Pres̀ov:
Impreso, 2001). Although Kus̀nír could have easily let his subject orga-
nize itself across the Brautigan-Barthelme oeuvres into chapters (the best
parts are those where he lets this happen), for some reason he decided on
a novel-to-novel progression inside the framework of history, popular
culture media, and fantasy. Bringing Barthelme’s short Ž ction into play
might have made the work a little less lopsided (several Brautigan novels
against one Barthelme in each case). Nevertheless, Poetika is an impor-
tant contribution. Its theoretical launching pad is Brian McHale, Linda
Hutcheon, and Patricia Waugh’s point about how postmodern Ž ction
problematizes the relationship between Ž ction and reality and is obsessed
by its Ž ctive status. Watchful of the diVerences and similarities of the two
postmodern poetics, in a series of comparative analyses Kus̀nír examines
the problematizing-relativizing strategies of parody that Brautigan and
Barthelme use in their treatment of history (Brautigan’s A Confederate
General from Big Sur and Barthelme’s The King ), popular culture media
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy and El>zbieta H. Oleksy 525

(Barthelme’s Snow White and Brautigan’s The Abortion, The Hawkline

Monster, Willard and His Bowling Trophies, Dreaming of Babylon ), and
fantasy (Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar,
Sombrero Fallout, The Tokyo-Montana Express and Barthelme’s The Dead
Father ). His ‘‘Paródia z̀ánrov populárnej literatúry v americkej postmod-
ernej literatúre’’ is a slightly modiŽ ed version of the monograph subchap-
ter on Brautigan’s Willard and His Bowling Trophies as a postmodern
vision and critique of consumerist society (Svetová literatúra po roku 1945
[Pres̀ov: Metodické centrum], pp. 28–50). A somewhat diVerent version
of this essay is available in New Cultural Perspectives in the New Millen-
nium (Izmir: Ege University, pp. 103–12). More English versions of the
work leading up to the monograph (some of them diVerent from the
relevant chapter in the monograph) can be found in ‘‘Textual Strategies
in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White and The King or Myth Reconsidered’’
(Tracing Literary Postmodernism [Nitra: University of Constantine, 1998],
pp. 119–28); ‘‘Brautigan’s Parody in The Abortion: An Historical Romance
1966 ’’ (European British and American Studies at the Turn of Millennium
[Ostrava: Ostravská University, 1999], pp. 49–55); ‘‘Richard Brautigan’s
and Donald Barthelme’s Depiction of the Crisis of Representation and
Popular Culture’’ (Postmodern Productions: Text—Culture—Society [Lit-
verlag, 2000], pp. 111–22); ‘‘Richard Brautigan’s Exiled Worlds’’ (Stu-
dia Philologica 7 [2000]: 69–78); and ‘‘Brautigan’s Parody of Popular
Genres: Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel, 1942 ’’ (ZENAF Con-
ference Proceedings 1 [2000]: 125–33). Kus̀nír also contributes two es-
says on novels by Robert Coover. ‘‘Vnútropriestorové aspekty románu
Roberta Coovera Pinocchio v Benátkach ’’ analyzes Coover’s Pinocchio in
Venice as a parody of many works, genres, and styles, as well as of two
cultures (European and American), pp. 252–61 in Zborník materiálov z
vedeckej konferencia Vnútropriestorové priestory textu v literatúre pre deti a
mládez> (Pres̀ov: Náuka). Coover’s Briar Rose is considered a parody of a
famous story in ‘‘Paródia v románe Roberta Coovera S̀ípková Ruz̀enka?
(poznámky k z̀ánrovej a poetickej charakteristike jedného prozaického
textu),’’ pp. 259–67 in Literatúra pre deti a mládez> v processe I. Rozpráv-
>
kovỳ záner (Nitra: University of Constantine, 1998).
As a Vonnegut expert, Donald E. Morse rightly proposes in ‘‘Apoc-
alypse Now, or Ice Would SuYce: Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle ’’ that this
novel ‘‘has worn well over the decades since its publication,’’ ‘‘the best of
the Ž ve early novels.’’ The secret: it melds Vonnegut’s ‘‘comic, satiric
526 Scholarship in Other Languages

vision of modern society, its vacuity and lack of purpose, with a terrifying
vision of human irresponsibility’’ (Happy Returns, pp. 216–27). In ‘‘Sen-
sational Implications: Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952)’’ Morse main-
tains that the novel is ‘‘a plea for bringing into being an American society
composed of individuals who have discovered shared purposes and feel-
ings, who distinguish clearly between means and ends, who aYrm the
truth that American culture is neither true nor utopian, but partial and
imperfect. Above all, this society must be run not by corporations or by
machines but by and for free citizens’’ (AnaChronist [2000], 303–14). In
his penetrating ‘‘Leakings: Reappropriating Science Fiction —The Case
of Kurt Vonnegut’’ Tamás Bényei reads ‘‘science Ž ction in Vonnegut’s
Ž ction as a metacritical trope of the diVerence of this Ž ction from a
vaguely deŽ ned (‘realist’ and occasionally modernist) poetics of Ž ction’’
with the primary focus on Breakfast of Champions (HJEAS 6, i [2000]:
29–54; rpt. JFA 2: 432–53).
ZoŽ a Kolbuszewska’s lucid and well-researched The Poetics of Chro-
notope in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Lublin: Learned Society of the
Catholic University of Lublin, 2000) examines the intricacies of time and
space in Pynchon’s V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland,
and Mason & Dixon. Though numerous works have centered on issues of
space in Pynchon’s works, Kolbuszewska’s book brings new insight by
drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope and pointing to the
evolution of chronotopes throughout Pynchon’s oeuvre. Of special inter-
est, particularly after 11 September 2001, is her discussion of the
representations of apocalypse in Pynchon’s novels. Pynchon con ates
the Rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow, frozen in mid- ight over the Orpheus
Theater, which constitutes ‘‘a permanent threat to America,’’ with the
description of 1945 Berlin with its images of ruin. She reminds us that,
as Walter Benjamin had it, ruins are ‘‘sites in which history is accu-
mulated, spatialized and, thus, brought to a halt.’’ Kolbuszewska con-
tends that Pynchon situates history in the ‘‘eternal now and points to
the constant presence of apocalypse in history.’’ In ‘‘In the Wake of the
Lost Grail: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as Anti-Parsifal ?’’
Péter Csató is fascinated by another relationship: Pynchon’s novella and
Richard Wagner’s opera as variations of the theme of quest. This highly
intelligent analysis Ž rst compares the questing knights Parsifal and Oe-
dipa Maas and the nature of the worlds they inhabit, then explores
‘‘the extra-musical (especially ethical) implications’’ of this quest (HJEAS
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy and El>zbieta H. Oleksy 527

4, i–ii [1998]: 307–31). In the same HJEAS issue, Roland Végs<o’s in-
sightful ‘‘ ‘Each Other’s Authors’: Identity and Negation in Philip
Roth’s The Counterlife and The Facts ’’ (pp. 235–51) examines the in-
tertextual relation between the two texts as each other’s ‘‘horizons’’ and
‘‘countertexts.’’
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy discourses on narratorial strategies that are man-
ifestations of essential features of the minimalist narrative in contempo-
rary American Ž ction in ‘‘The Narratorial Function in Minimalist Fic-
tion.’’ His point is that minimalism reduces text-level agency through
narratorial functional disorders (devices that block functions) and limits
them further, even eVaces them completely, in Ž gural narratives whose
focalizer is an inarticulate character (Neohelicon 27 [2000]: 238–48).
Abádi-Nagy’s ‘‘Minimalism vs. Postmodernism in Contemporary Ameri-
can Fiction’’ constructs minimalism as both an extension of postmodern-
ism and a revolt against it. It means that the minimalist Ž ction of Carver,
Ann Beattie, and many others is a response to the postmodernist view of
the world, but the same philosophical conclusions regarding the post-
modern nature of the world result in a radically diVerent ars poetica
(Neohelicon 28: 129–43).

f. Poetry Two monograph studies (one on Eliot’s The Waste Land,

another on William Carlos Williams’s late poetry) and two essays on
Emily Dickinson represent Hungary. András Kappanyos’s main concern
in Kétséges egység: Az Átokföldje, és amit tehetünk vele (Budapest: Janus/
Osiris) is with ‘‘ambivalent unity’’ and ‘‘what we can do with it.’’ After
addressing the issues of Eliot criticism, the Eliot cult, and some relevant
hermeneutic issues by way of introduction, he moves to the questions of
genesis, an Eliot/Pound comparison vis-à-vis modernism, a possible
immanent structure of The Waste Land, and the possibility and self-
elimination of unity. It is a work which is occasionally chatty, self-
admittedly Eliotesque in its fragmented nature, but deŽ nitely a valuable
contribution. ZsóŽ a Bán’s Desire and Description: Words and Images of
Postmodernism in the Late Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1999) starts from the assumption that ‘‘the Ž eld of ‘word and
image studies’ intersects with the study of the transition to what is known
as ‘postmodernism’ in the arts.’’ What justiŽ es Bán’s choice of Williams
are his ‘‘strong links with the visual arts’’ and the period’s intense concern
with language in literature and the arts. If this is acceptable but vague
528 Scholarship in Other Languages

(because too generic), the main argument is both daring, original, and
cleverly argued: not denying Williams’s modernism, Bán also claims him,
based on the evidence of the ‘‘striking new concerns and new perspec-
tives’’ of his late poetry, for postmodernism. A spin-oV of her major
project is Bán’s ‘‘Words, Index Fingers, Gaps: The Critique of Language
in the Late Poetry of William Carlos Williams and the Conceptual Art of
Joseph Kosuth’’ (sic) in W&I (15, ii [1999]: 141–54). She also contributes
Amerikáner (Budapest: Magvet<o, 2000), a collection of witty essays on
Williams, Gertrude Stein, Laurie Anderson, Robert Pirsig, Bret Easton
Ellis, and Georgia O’KeeVe, among others.
Ildikó Limpár’s essay ‘‘Reading Emily Dickinson’s ‘Now I lay thee
down to sleep’ as a Variant’’ demonstrates ‘‘how various interpretations,
justiŽ ed by numerous other poems in the oeuvre, oVer an understanding
of the poem by reading them as nonexclusive variants of the same idea’’
( AnaChronist: 68–78). Donald E. Morse takes the Ariadne’s thread of
‘‘Sylvia Plath’s Trope of Vulnerability’’ in search of the voice that one
might hear in the dark labyrinth of a Thanatos-propelled poetry. Morse
challenges the conventional view by pointing to poetic values like imme-
diacy and intensity as he listens for ‘‘the poet speaking’’ rather than
focusing on her self-hatred and suicide (HJEAS 6, ii [2000]: 77–90).

g. Drama Zsuzsa Fülöp investigates how the dramatic and the epic/
lyric interrelate in some Chekhovian and 20th-century American plays
and reaches the predictable conclusion that ‘‘the presentation of the
negative world of alienation pulls drama in the direction of Ž ction,
whereas the expression of the positive counter-world pushes it in the
direction of the lyric’’ (Happy Returns, pp. 152–61). Lenke Németh’s title
is self-explanatory: ‘‘Critical Response to David Mamet’s Plays in Hun-
gary: A Re ection on Hungarian Sentiments.’’ The essay looks at how the
Hungarian reception of American BuValo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and
Oleanna ‘‘was largely shaped by a distinctive East-European historical
experience’’ (Happy Returns, pp. 310–16). Maria Kurdi is not sure whether
Irish dramatist Brian Friel’s 1963 stay in Minneapolis and his observation
of Tyrone Guthrie at work (an experience that gave Friel in his own words
‘‘a sense of liberation’’) proves he was in uenced by American drama, but
she does devote a chapter of her book (pp. 147–60) to some theme-,
motif-, and technique-based parallels, stressing similarities as well as
dissimilarities (Codes and Masks: Aspects of Identity in Contemporary Irish
Plays in an Intercultural Context [Peter Lang, 2000]).
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy and El>zbieta H. Oleksy 529

h. Gender and Culture Michael Peprník’s ‘‘The Death of Ladies in J. F.

Cooper’s Literary Forests’’ applies Jane Tompkins’s idea of Cooper’s char-
acters as cultural types to his women to show that his forests serve as an
‘‘ideal site’’ where ‘‘the heritage of the English colonial past on the Ameri-
can continent and the American concept of Europe’’ are displaced in
order to sublimate them and get rid of them (6th Conference of British,
American, and Canadian Studies. Proceedings [Pres̀ov: Pres̀ovská Uni-
verzita, 2000], pp. 23–29). Nóra Séllei devotes a whole book (Tükröm,
tükröm . . . [Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetemi Kladó] to how early-20th-
century women’s autobiographies use and problematize the conventions
of the autobiographical ‘‘self.’’ Bringing feminist literary criticism, Bakh-
tin, Foucault, and Paul de Man to bear on the discussion, Séllei’s gender-
oriented and culturally embedded, sophisticated analytical work demon-
strates how the elimination of narrative hierarchy and the relativization
of authority and autobiographical truth result in the disruption of the
conventions of the genre in Ada, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (pp. 151–252).
Jadwiga Maszewska’s Between Center and Margin: Contemporary Na-
tive American Women Novelists—Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich
( ódź:  ódź University, 2000) deserves attention because it is the Ž rst
book-length critical assessment of the Native American novel published
in Poland. Although the book proposes little in terms of new theoretical
approaches for those who are familiar with international scholarship on
Native American Ž ction, it oVers a great deal when it comes to applying
recent theory to interpretive practice and providing new descriptive de-
tail. Having situated the Native American novel in the Western main-
stream canon (providing, for instance, an interesting comparison of
Silko’s Ceremony with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea ) and having sketched out
the history of Native American Ž ction, Maszewska moves on to discuss
the process of forging what she calls ‘‘new Native American identity.’’
Drawing on N. Scott Momaday’s statement that an Indian is the idea a
man has of himself, Maszewska proves how Native American women
writers forged their identity out of images of writing, mothering, and
bonding.
Women’s bonding is also the subject of El¬zbieta H. Oleksy’s Kobieta w
krainie Dixie: Literatura i Ž lm ( ódź:  ódź University, 1998). In the Ž rst
book on Southern women’s culture published in Poland, Oleksy traverses
racial as well as disciplinary boundaries, studying literary and visual
representations of women’s friendships in the South. The overarching
530 Scholarship in Other Languages

concern with literature and Ž lm, as indicated in the book’s subtitle, is

coupled with analyses of representations of Southern women’s history
from the antebellum period to contemporary times through the study of
personal narratives of black and white women.
Éva Federmayer and Edina Szalay examine female worlds in contem-
porary American writing. Federmayer’s ‘‘Octavia Butler’s Maternal Cy-
borgs: The Black Female World of the Xenogenesis Trilogy’’ argues that
‘‘Butler’s trilogy oVers a powerful feminist revision of the science Ž ction
that is inspired by communication technology and biotechnology. Dawn
(1987), Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989) are Butler’s Ž ctional
response to militant Reaganite politics and are a black female fantasy of
cyborg alternatives’’ (HJEAS 6, i [2000]: 103–18). Szalay’s ‘‘Gothic Fantasy
and Female Bildung in Four North-American Women Novels’’ —novels
by Gail Godwin, Joy Williams, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood —
takes its theoretical cue from the quadruple coordinates of male vs. female
Gothic and Gothic romance vs. feminist Gothic. Szalay chooses to discuss
a late-20th-century North American meta(Ž ctional)gothic transforma-
tion: female artist-protagonists who are fascinated by Gothic romances
and ‘‘come to conduct their lives more or less unconsciously along the
parameters of the Gothic formula’’ —a fascination that eventually shapes
their female individuation and Bildung (HJEAS 6, ii [2000]: 183–96). In
her earlier HJEAS essay, ‘‘Breaking into the House of Death and Love:
The Gothic as Subtext in a Minimalist Novel ( Joy Williams’s Breaking
and Entering )’’ Szalay convincingly detects the presence of the Gothic in
Williams’s minimalist Ž ction (4, i–ii [1998]: 285–306).
Csaba Csapó engages the theme of homosexuality in Baldwin’s Ž rst
novel in ‘‘DeŽ ance Against God: A Gay Reading of Go Tell It on the
Mountain by James Baldwin,’’ suggesting ‘‘an analogy between blackness
and gayness’’ (AnaChronist [2000]: 315–26).
Interest in American visual culture and gender politics among Polish
academics is on the rise to judge from a vast number of essays, disserta-
tions, and collections of papers. One such volume, Gender in Film and the
Media. East-West Dialogues, ed. El¬zbieta H. Oleksy, El¬zbieta Ostrowska,
and Michael Stevenson (Peter Lang, 2000), contains discussions by
James I. Deutsch on gender roles in science Ž ction Ž lms of the 1990s,
John R. Leo on representations of gay men in television melodrama of the
1980s, Wies™ aw Godzic on feminist perspectives in advertising, Iwona
Kolasińska on transsexuality, Agnieszka Ćwikiel on the female cyborg,
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy and El>zbieta H. Oleksy 531

and Piotr Sitarski on gender in multi-user dungeons. Meriting special

attention, though veering away from the immediate concern of this
section, is the discussion of East-Central European Ž lm through the lens
of Western, for the most part American, theory. The articles on Polish
and Soviet Ž lms of the 1940s through the 1980s demonstrate the limita-
tions of psychoanalytically based feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s
for East-Central European Ž lm critics —the same shortcomings that have
already been addressed in Western criticism by, for instance, black
women and lesbian women. These essays propose to take a leap in critical
work combining Western critical processes with those traditional to local
cultures in an attempt to assume new critical positions.

i. Ethnic Studies Stanislav Kolár̀ explores the European—especially

Eastern and Central European —roots of Jewish American Ž ction in
>
Evropské koreny >
americké zidovské literatury (Ostrva: Ostravske Univer-
sity, 1998). The Ž rst part deals with the depiction of the shtetl as the
typical Jewish European setting in the works of such Jewish American
authors as Anzia Yezierska, I. B. Singer, and Bernard Malamud. One
chapter analyzes the change caused by the move of the Jewish community
from the shtetl to the European city: the penetration of Western culture
into the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, the tension between faith and skepti-
cism, and the contrast between the shtetl life of faith and emotion on the
one hand and the intellectualism and rationalism on the city ghetto on
the other. A special chapter is set aside for the function and forms of
recollections in books by immigrant writers, in Holocaust literature as
well as in the works of contemporary authors. The second part focuses on
Ž ction set in America in which the impact of the Old World is still
undeniable. Though no close analysis of literary works is given, only
some thematic categories introduced and interpreted, the book is unique
in the Czech and Slovak American Studies context. Kolár̀ also publishes
‘‘Macbeth in the Jewish Ghetto: Creativity Against Destruction in Leslie
Epstein’s King of the Jews ’’ in praise of Epstein’s courage ‘‘to write about
one of the most controversial aspects of Jewish history at the time of the
Holocaust,’’ the ambiguous role of the Judenrat (pp. 39–48 in European
British and American Studies at the Turn of Millennium ). In a wide-
ranging essay Ágnes Heller (‘‘Pikareszk Auschwitz árnyékában: I. B.
Singer elbeszél<o m<uvészetér<ol’’) looks at Singer in general, discussing him
as a writer of postmodern picaresque (using Milan Kundera’s theory) and
532 Scholarship in Other Languages

at his trilogy The Estate, The Manor, and The Family Moskat—books
whose ‘‘patina’’ emanates from ‘‘the gesture of preservation’’ and whose
realism lies in the art of creating and re-creating the totality of the last 100
years of Polish Jewry in order to preserve that world (Nagyvilág 43, vii–
viii [1998]: 586–605).
University of Debrecen
University of ©ódź
21 General Reference Works
Gary Scharnhorst

When I predicted a few years ago that the market for reference books
would soon contract like a  accid balloon, I was dead wrong. Despite the
soft economy, reference books appear in ever-increasing numbers to
exploit a ‘‘market niche.’’ Unfortunately, these volumes are often issued
by trade publishers looking to score a fast buck and as a result their
quality varies wildly. The plight of many respected university presses
these days may be attributed, I am afraid, at least in part to the burgeon-
ing number of mediocre reference tools designed exclusively for sale to
libraries. Like foul air in a balloon, they expand to Ž ll the available space.
But to begin with the good news: A Companion to Twentieth-Century
Poetry features 48 essays on a wide range of theoretical and textual
matters, with excellent chapters on ‘‘Modernism and the Transatlantic
Connection’’ by Hugh Witemeyer (pp. 7–20), ‘‘Poetry and Politics’’ by
Reed Way Dasenbrock (pp. 52–63), ‘‘Poetry and Literary Theory’’ by
Joanne Feit Diehl (pp. 89–100), ‘‘The New Negro Renaissance’’ by Wil-
liam W. Cook (pp. 138–52), ‘‘Robert Frost: North of Boston’’ by Alex
Calder (pp. 369–80), ‘‘Robert Lowell: Life Studies’’ by Stephen Matterson
(pp. 481–90), and ‘‘Contemporary American Poetry’’ by Roger Gilbert
(pp. 559–70). Similarly, the monumental Encyclopedia of American Poetry:
The Twentieth Century, ed. Eric L. Haralson (Fitzroy Dearborn), contains
more than 800 dense, double-columned pages, with entries on individual
poets with a critical overview of their work, explications of individual
poems, and topics (e.g., ‘‘free verse,’’ ‘‘Black Mountain School,’’ ‘‘Harlem
Renaissance,’’ ‘‘Little Magazines and Small Presses’’). All entries feature a
bibliography and a list of works for further reading.
An admirable addition to the reference shelf, The Oxford Companion to
United States History, ed. Paul S. Boyer et al., focuses on historical rather
than literary subjects. It contains no reference to Hawthorne’s campaign
534 General Reference Works

biography under ‘‘Pierce, Franklin,’’ for example, or to Howells’s biogra-

phy under ‘‘Hayes, Rutherford.’’ It does include thumbnail deŽ nitions of
several literary movements (e.g., Romanticism, the Harlem Renaissance,
modernism, postmodernism). It mentions the Scopes trial, but not In-
herit the Wind, the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee based on
it. It contains biographical sketches of every individual author mentioned
in part 1 of AmLS except T. S. Eliot (because he does not quality as an
American author?), as well as such writers as Poe, Updike, Increase
Mather, Dreiser, Ellison, Gilman, and Langston Hughes. It sketches
most of the American writers who have received the Nobel Prize for
literature (O’Neill, Lewis, Morrison, Bellow) but not Steinbeck, Isaac B.
Singer (because he wrote in Yiddish?), or Pearl Buck (because she is so
easily ignored?). It also contains individual entries on such social novels as
The Jungle, Looking Backward, and The Grapes of Wrath. Similarly, A
Companion to 19th-Century America, ed. William L. Barney (Blackwell),
includes historical analyses of American politics, economics, foreign pol-
icy, and culture. Of the 24 essays, the ones most germane to this chapter:
on African Americans (pp. 195–208) by Donald R. Wright, on Native
Americans (pp. 209–22) by Michael D. Green and Theda Perdue, on
women and gender (pp. 223–37) by Laura F. Edwards, on immigrants
and ethnicity (pp. 238–54) by Nora Faires, and on ‘‘the communications
revolution and popular culture’’ (pp. 303–16) by David Hochfelder. On
the other hand, Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury, ed. Paul Finkelman (Scribner’s), is profusely illustrated with dozens
of sidebars, a hallmark of Scribner’s reference books. The section on
literature (pp. 202–23) is satisfactory but superŽ cial.
Many of the best new reference tools, continuing the trend of recent
years, center on race, ethnicity, and gender. The Concise Oxford Compan-
ion to African American Literature, ed. William L. Andrews and Frances
Smith Foster (Oxford), is an abbreviated version of The Oxford Compan-
ion to African American Literature half the length of the original. It
contains 242 sketches of writers as well as entries on major titles (e.g.,
Dunbar’s Lyrics of Low Life ), sports Ž gures (e.g., Joe Louis), activists
(Malcolm X), and others. The editors describe this volume as ‘‘an eVort to
update the original Companion ’’ while ‘‘at the same time distilling the
former volume’s contents to its biographical and textual essentials.’’ This
abridged volume contains no articles on writers or works not in the
unabridged version. Similarly, the four-volume African-American Culture
and History: A Student’s Guide, ed. Jack Salzman (Macmillan), is an
Gary Scharnhorst 535

abridged version of the Ž ve-volume Encyclopedia of African-American

Culture and History rewritten for younger readers. Two-thirds of the 852
entries are biographical sketches, and the balance of them are devoted to
‘‘events, era, genres, or colleges, states, or cities.’’
African American Writers, 2nd ed., ed. Valerie Smith (Gale), is a two-
volume critical anthology containing 55 entries, mostly biographies but
two are topical (‘‘Black Arts Movement’’ and ‘‘The Slave Narrative in
American Literature’’). Of special note among the roster of distinguished
contributors: William J. Harris on Amiri Baraka, William Andrews on
Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances Smith Foster on Frances E. W. Harper,
Arnold Rampersad on Langston Hughes, Eric Haralson on Gloria Nay-
lor, Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Ishmael Reed, Herman Beavers on John A.
Williams, and Joyce Ann Joyce on Richard Wright. The African American
Experience: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide, ed. Arvarh E.
Strickland and Robert E. Weems (Greenwood), contains 17 valuable
bibliographical essays by a variety of senior historians, political scientists,
and literary and cultural critics, including ‘‘The African American Liter-
ary Tradition’’ (pp. 116–43) by Clenora Hudson Weems and ‘‘The African
American Press’’ (pp. 216–30) by Julius E. Thompson. Each essay is
accompanied by an extensive bibliography. Edward J. Mullen edits the
text of Melvin B. Tolson’s 1940 Columbia University M.A. thesis, The
Harlem Group of Negro Writers (Greenwood), originally directed by
Arthur Christy. With individual chapters on Countee Cullen, Langston
Hughes, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon
Johnson, and others, the thesis is a veritable time capsule of critical
comment on the major Ž gures of the Harlem Renaissance. Contemporary
Black Men’s Fiction and Drama, ed. Keith Clark (Illinois), begins to repair
the critical neglect of recent writing by African American men with 10
essays, the most important on John Edgar Wideman’s ‘‘folk imagination’’
by Raymond E. Janifer (pp. 54–70), Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada by
A. T. Spaulding (pp. 71–88), Clarence Major’s All-Night Visitors by
James W. Coleman (pp. 89–107), and Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before
Dying by Herman Beavers (pp. 135–54). On the other hand, Slave Narra-
tives, ed. James Tackach (Greenhaven), merely excerpts 20 previously
published books and articles on various aspects of the genre for high
school students and undergraduates to consult. It breaks no new ground.
Here’s hoping all of the scholars whose work has been reprinted have
shared in the proceeds from the sales of this volume.
Among the new reference works on ethnic American literatures: A Re-
536 General Reference Works

source Guide to Asian American Literature, ed. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and
Stephen H. Sumida (MLA), features 25 essays devoted mostly to contem-
porary book-length prose narratives and drama. Each essay, on such texts
as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan,
Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, David Henry
Hwang’s M. Buttery, and Frank Chin’s The Year of the Dragon, includes
publication and/or production information, a reception history, a bio-
graphical sketch of the author, discussions of critical issues and themes
developed by the text, handy suggestions for teaching it, and a second-
ary bibliography. Similarly, Asian American Autobiographers: A Bio-
bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Guiyou Huang (Greenwood),
contains individual chapters on 59 autobiographers, among them King-
ston, Kogawa, Mukherjee, Carlos Bulosan, Sui Sin Far, her sister Onoto
Watanna, and Jeanne Houston. Each chapter is compiled according to
the familiar Greenwood formula: a brief biography, a discussion of major
works and themes, a summary of critical reception, and a bibliography.
The bane of such books, however, is the relative inexperience of its
contributors: recent Ph.D.s and doctoral candidates tend to be overrepre-
sented in their pages. Also, Deborah H. Madsen’s Chinese American
Writers (Gale) is a valuable introduction to the topic, with individual
chapters devoted to the history of Chinese American literature, represen-
tative authors, ‘‘hallmark works,’’ and a selection of critical responses.
In Beginning Ethnic American Literatures, ed. Maria Lauret (Manches-
ter), Martin Padget’s chapter on ‘‘Native American Literature’’ (pp. 10–
63) consists of a very general literary history dummied down for readers
new to the subject, though he does oVer detailed analyses of Scott Moma-
day’s House Made of Dawn, Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, and Sherman Alexie’s
Reservation Blues. Candida Hepworth’s chapter on ‘‘Chicano/a Fiction’’
(pp. 189–243) begins by posing the vexing question of how to deŽ ne a
Chicano/a literary heritage, though it again includes detailed analyses of
Rolando Hinojosa’s The Valley, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, and
Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. As editor Rafaela G. Castro
explains, Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals and
Religious Practices of Mexican Americans (Oxford) ‘‘provides basic deŽ ni-
tions of concepts such as duendes [goblins], pintos [prisoners], la llorona
[the weeping woman], la migra [immigration oYcials], Cinco de Mayo
[the Ž fth of May, the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla in 1862], pachucos
[urban adolescents], low-riders, zoot suits, las posadas [Christmas pag-
eants], and other cultural phenomena.’’ Like few other reference books,
Gary Scharnhorst 537

this dictionary with its hundreds of entries may also be read at leisure and
for pleasure.
One of the more esoteric reference volumes published this year, The
Native American in Short Fiction in the Saturday Evening Post: An Anno-
tated Bibliography, ed. Peter G. Beidler, Harry J. Brown, and Marion F.
Egge (Scarecrow), summarizes the plots of 265 short works of Ž ction in
chronological order published in the Post between 1897 and 1968, among
them tales by Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Rebecca Harding Davis,
Owen Wister, Oliver La Farge, Ernest Haycox, William Faulkner, and
Charles Portis. Fewer than 5 percent of these stories ‘‘treat Indians favora-
bly,’’ and none of them was written by an Indian. Rather, these tales as a
whole register the racial tenor of the period. The editors conclude that in
general these stories ‘‘suggest that there is no habitable middle ground
between being Indian and being white.’’
A pair of reference tools appears this year to support research on the
English-speaking writers of the Caribbean. The West Indian Americans,
ed. Holger Henke (Greenwood), devotes several pages to the literary
legacies of such Caribbean natives as Claude McKay, Derek Walcott, and
Jamaica Kincaid. Similarly, West Indian Americans: A Research Guide, ed.
Guy T. Westmoreland (Greenwood), cites signiŽ cant published studies
on West Indian American writers—but lacking an ‘‘Art’’ or ‘‘Literature’’
category lists them under ‘‘Cultural Activities’’ and ‘‘Politics.’’
As for reference tools on gender-related issues: American Women
Writers: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Carol Kort (Checkmark), is a
helpful compilation of 150 biographical sketches of Ž gures from the 17th
century to the present designed for high school readers. Catholic Women
Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. Mary R. Reichardt (Green-
wood), contains biographical sketches and sections on ‘‘major themes,’’ a
‘‘survey of criticism,’’ and working bibliographies of 64 writers, many of
them not often considered through the lens of their religious aYliation
(or their ‘‘Catholic view of the world’’), including such Americans as
Louise Imogen Guiney, Caroline Gordon, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop,
Clare Boothe Luce, Annie Dillard, Denise Levertov, Katharine Anne
Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Louise Erdrich, Willa Cather, and Sandra
Cisneros. Curiously, the entry on Mary McCarthy fails even to men-
tion her attacks on Stalinists in the CPUSA and her feud with Lillian
Hellman. Though repeatedly decrying the ‘‘suspect model of ‘separate
spheres,’ ’’ The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American
Women’s Writing, ed. Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould (Cambridge),
538 General Reference Works

reinscribes that very model. Coedited by a man, nevertheless all of the

contributors to this volume are women (among them, to be sure, such
distinguished scholars as Shirley Samuels, Dana D. Nelson, Lisa A. Long,
Susan GriYn, and Sandra A. Zagarell). Moreover, some of the writers I
would have expected to be central to a volume with this title are virtually
missing from it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Sarah Orne Jewett are
each mentioned only twice and in passing and Kate Chopin and Mary
Wilkins Freeman are each mentioned only once, whereas the very ob-
scure writer Margaret Bayard Smith rates an entire chapter or ‘‘case
study.’’ Overall, I wonder exactly whom this ‘‘companion’’ is designed to
accompany. It seems more determined to be trendy than particularly
informative or useful to teachers. Another esoteric reference book, Mys-
tery Women: An Encyclopedia of Leading Women Characters in Mystery
Fiction, ed. Colleen A. Barnet (Poisoned Pen), lists women detectives and
other major women characters in Anglo-American mystery Ž ction pub-
lished between 1860 and 1979. Most of these names, categorized into such
groups as ‘‘seeds of discontent —women sleuths of 1900–1919,’’ will be
meaningless to all but the most devoted fans of mysteries. Aggressively
promoted, this book should sell in the dozens.
A trio of reference books speciŽ c to region also appear this year.
Thomas L. McHaney’s The Southern Renaissance, a new release in the
Gale Study Guides to Great Literature series, is an excellent literary-
historical introduction to the topic pitched to advanced undergraduates
and graduate students. Profusely illustrated, the volume surveys the
achievements of representative writers and such groups as the Fugitives,
considers the ‘‘relevance of the Southern Renaissance,’’ sketches ‘‘hall-
mark works’’ of the Renaissance published between 1919 and 1941, and
even reprints H. L. Mencken’s scabrous essay ‘‘The Sahara of the Bozart.’’
The Ž rst in a projected series of three volumes, Dictionary of Midwestern
Literature: The Authors, ed. Philip A. Greasley (Indiana), casts a wide net.
For example, it includes entries on Bharati Mukherjee, who was born in
India and now lives in California, as well as T. S. Eliot, Mark Twain, and
W. D. Howells, none of whom spent much time in the region after he was
old enough to leave it. Eliot is sometimes not even considered an Ameri-
can (e.g., by the compilers of the MLA Bibliography ), much less a Mid-
westerner. The volume also trumpets ad nauseum the recipients of the
MidAmerica Award presented annually by the Society for the Study of
Midwestern Literature. Still, this is an attractive and potentially useful
volume, with nearly 400 biographical sketches of writers who have lived
Gary Scharnhorst 539

in the heart of the country since the mid-19th century. The Mythical West:
An Encyclopedia of Legend, Lore, and Popular Culture, ed. Richard W.
Slatta (ABC-CLIO), includes 154 entries (e.g., ‘‘Zane Grey and the Code
of the West,’’ Joe Hill, Elmer Kelton, ‘‘Owen Wister and the Virginian’’)
pitched to secondary (if not elementary) school readers. Many of these
entries were written by the editor’s graduate students at North Carolina
State University; the editor is apparently the only full-time academic
listed among the contributors.
Nearly a dozen reference books or study guides on individual au-
thors —most of them valuable —are also published this year. Edgar Allan
Poe, A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work, ed. Dawn B. Sova
(Facts on File), catalogs more than 3,400 entries on Poe’s career and
writings. This volume contains nothing of great moment, though it may
serve as a quick reference to Poe’s titles, characters, plots, and acquain-
tances. Similarly, Student Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Tony Mag-
istrale (Greenwood), is an elementary, even formulaic, introduction to
Poe’s life, legacy, and major works, with individual chapters on his poetry,
‘‘vampiric love stories,’’ ‘‘tales of psychological terror, homicide, and
revenge,’’ and his detective stories. Strangely, ‘‘The Pit and the Pen-
dulum’’ is listed as a detective story —but surely it is no more one than,
say, ‘‘Descent into the Maelström’’ or ‘‘The Gold-Bug.’’ Student Compan-
ion to Mark Twain, ed. David E. E. Sloane (Greenwood), is also a helpful
guide, pitched to high school and undergraduate students, to Mark
Twain’s life and career, with individual chapters (including plot synopses,
historical background, thematic issues, and ‘‘alternative readings’’ of each
major text) devoted to his travel books, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, The
Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and his
late short writings. The indefatigable Robert L. Gale publishes An Am-
brose Bierce Companion (Greenwood), a valuable compendium of entries
on 92 short stories, 161 essays, 19 short dramas, Ž ve reviews, three sets of
fables, a novel, and 57 family members and associates. This companion is
Gale’s seventh book in the Greenwood series; he has previously contrib-
uted volumes on Fitzgerald, Hammett, Henry James, Jewett, Melville,
and Hawthorne. W. E. B. Du Bois: An Encyclopedia, ed. Gerald Horne
and Mary Young (Greenwood), provides accurate, impartial, and thor-
ough coverage of many of the major issues in the life of Du Bois, the black
intellectual, activist, sociologist, novelist, and pioneering editor of The
Crisis. The volume includes nearly 150 entries on such topics as pan-
Africanism, Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, and the peace movement. An
540 General Reference Works

H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Green-

wood), contains everything anyone could possibly want to know about
the early-20th-century writer of ‘‘weird’’ and fantastic tales. The hun-
dreds of entries in this volume prove, if nothing else, how far outside
mainstream literary circles Lovecraft lived and moved and had his being.
Student Companion to Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Josie P. Campbell (Green-
wood), is a basic or undergraduate-level introduction to Hurston’s life
and career, with individual chapters on Hurston’s short Ž ction; her novels
Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moses, Man of the
Mountain, and Seraph on the Sewanee; and her autobiography Dust Tracks
on a Road. Surprisingly, it ignores Hurston’s collection of folk tales Mules
and Men. The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, ed. Nancy Lewis Tuten and John
Zubizarreta (Greenwood), contains several hundred entries —on individ-
ual poems, topics, in uences, themes —by more than 100 contributors.
Of particular interest are the entries on Frost’s ‘‘uncollected poetry’’
as well as the in uences of Emerson and Thoreau on his verse. The fasci-
nating life of the Hollywood screenwriter and author of What Makes
Sammy Run? deserves to be treated more fully than in the bare-bones
volume Budd Schulberg: A Bio-bibliography (Scarecrow) by Nicholas
Beck, though it does include a transcript of Schulberg’s cooperative
testimony before HUAC in 1951 and features a working bibliography of
works by and about him. Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion,
ed. E. D. Huntley (Greenwood), is a serviceable handbook, pitched at the
advanced high school and undergraduate level, with a biographical
sketch, proŽ le of Kingston’s critical reception, a piece on her relationship
with ‘‘the Asian American literary tradition,’’ and individual interpretive
chapters on The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey. A
Companion to V., ed. J. Kerry Grant (Georgia), contains more than 200
pages of annotations to Thomas Pynchon’s complex, highly allusive novel
without going to the trouble and expense of reprinting the novel itself.
This ‘‘companion’’ is keyed to three diVerent editions of the novel, with
chapter summaries to ‘‘help the reader keep a map of the main incidents
in mind.’’ Charles Kinbote would have approved.
This year, as usual, Greenwood Press issues a number of distinctive and
even unique reference titles. One of the most provocative reference works
of the year, Joseph W. Slade’s Pornography and Sexual Representation: A
Reference Guide, is an encyclopedic history of the genre, with sections on
‘‘theoretical works on erotica,’’ ‘‘the landscape of the body,’’ electronic
media, pornography and law, and the economics of pornography. The
Gary Scharnhorst 541

index alone is nearly 200 pages long. The three volumes are published
without illustrations lest they distract from the scholarly integrity of the
work as a whole. Biographical Dictionary of Literary In uences: The Nine-
teenth Century, 1800–1914, ed. John Powell and Derek W. Blakeley, is an
idiosyncratic reference tool containing 271 biographical sketches of liter-
ary and other Ž gures, including Hawthorne, Lincoln, Emerson, Du Bois,
London, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Whitman, Poe, Melville, Lydia Maria
Child, Irving, Dickinson, Muir, Roosevelt, Stowe, Dreiser, Douglass,
and JeVerson. In all, it is a handy reference guide to major in uences and
intertextualities of the period. The Supernatural in Short Fiction of the
Americas: The Other World in the New World, ed. Dana Del George, at
least touches on stories by Hawthorne, Irving, Wharton, Mark Twain,
James, Poe, Jewett, Fitzgerald, Donald Barthelme, Joyce Carol Oates,
Paul Bowles, Mary Wilkins Freeman, John Cheever, Louise Erdrich,
H. P. Lovecraft, Anne Sexton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe within the
context of the ‘‘larger’’ American literature. Encyclopedia of American War
Literature, ed. Philip K. Jason and Mark A. Graves, rounds up ‘‘the usual
suspects’’ (e.g., Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians,
Drum-Taps, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, The Red Badge of Courage,
Men at War, The Naked and the Dead, Slaughterhouse Five ) and a few
surprises (e.g., ‘‘Indian Captivity Narratives,’’ ‘‘vigilantes’’) but neglects
juvenile or pulp literature about American wars (e.g., Charlie Codman’s
Cruise, Frank’s Campaign). A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in
English, ed. Erin Fallon, despite its broad title covers only short Ž ction
published since 1960. More than half of the 22 American writers included
(e.g., Gish Jen, John Barth, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Leslie
Marmon Silko, Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Robert Coover, Louise
Erdrich, Ernest Gaines, Maxine Hong Kingston, Malamud, Sandra
Cisneros, Bobbie Ann Mason, Grace Paley, Amy Tan) are ‘‘identiŽ ed as
belonging to historically marginalized groups.’’ Each chapter is compiled
according to the familiar Greenwood formula noted above.
A pair of books, surprisingly, are devoted to American maritime litera-
ture. Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes, ed.
Jill B. Gidmark (Greenwood), contains 459 entries with some omissions.
While it includes entries on Cooper, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Richard
Henry Dana, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Hemingway, Steinbeck,
O’Neill, and Oliver Optic (author of the juvenile novel The Boat Club,
1855), for example, it overlooks such popular poems as Horatio Alger’s
‘‘John Maynard’’ (1868). Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British
542 General Reference Works

and American Novels, 1719–1917, ed. John Peck (Palgrave), focuses more
narrowly on sea Ž ction by British and American writers such as Cooper,
Poe, Dana, Melville, and London.
Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms,
ed. Margaretta Jolly (Fitzroy Dearborn), purports to be ‘‘a map of the
Ž eld’’ across discipline, region, and period with hundreds of entries on
more than 1,000 double-columned pages touching on both topics and
individuals. Where else might a reader Ž nd an entry on ‘‘Emerson, Ralph
Waldo’’ adjacent to one on ‘‘Epistolary Fiction’’? The latest volumes in a
valuable set of teaching tools, American Writers, supplements 6–8, ed. Jay
Parini (Gale), contains extended treatments of contemporary American
writers and selected bibliographies. The series also attracts leading schol-
ars (e.g., Sanford Pinsker on Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, Karen
Kilcup on Annie Dillard and Muriel Rukeyser, Laurie Champion on
Anne Rice and Harper Lee) and traces its scholarly lineage to the es-
teemed Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers library.
The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, ed. Victor Watson,
compiles 800-plus pages on Anglo-American children’s books, with en-
tries on such Ž gures as Jacob Abbott and such titles as The Cat in the Hat.
Solid and comprehensive, this reference book will not soon be super-
seded. In contrast, Literature Lover’s Companion: The Essential Reference to
the World’s Greatest Writers—Past and Present, Popular and Classical (Pren-
tice Hall) contains concise sketches of more than 1,000 writers from
around the world over the past 3,000 years. According to the authors of
these unsigned and simple-minded entries, Emerson ‘‘was an important
19th-century American poet and essayist. His ideas had a strong in uence
on the development of American culture.’’ Mark Twain was ‘‘one of
America’s great humorous writers. He created two famous characters—
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.’’ Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘‘mas-
terpiece’’ was Herland. Ugh. These entries are sometimes factually incor-
rect or simply wrong (a neglected critical term nowadays), as when The
Innocents Abroad is described as a ‘‘novel.’’ I have no idea what niche in
the book market this book is designed to Ž ll. Here’s hoping there isn’t
one.
Both Lee Horsley’s The Noir Thriller (Palgrave) and Hans Bertens and
Theo D’haen’s Contemporary American Crime Fiction (Palgrave) are fairly
straightforward taxonomies of 20th-century British and American crime
Ž ction. The latter volume, for example, contains chapters on ‘‘the old
guard’’ (e.g., Sue Grafton and Robert B. Parker), Los Angeles police
Gary Scharnhorst 543

procedurals, the ‘‘English tradition’’ in contemporary American crime

Ž ction, and ethnic crime writing (e.g., Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins
series). Missing from its pages, however, are the crime novels of Tony
Hillerman and Rudolfo Anaya.
Like most volumes in the DLB, American Short-Story Writers since
World War II, Third Series, ed. Patrick Meanor and Richard E. Lee (DLB
234), and American Short-Story Writers since World War II, Fourth Series,
ed. Meanor and Joseph McNicholas (DLB 244), blend the familiar (e.g.,
Alice Adams, Charles Jackson, Bruce Jay Friedman, Vladimir Nabokov)
with the obscure. Too often, as in these two volumes, books in the series
are redundant boondoggles or anthologies of informational footnotes.
Indeed, American Sportswriters and Writers on Sport, ed. Richard Oroden-
ker (DLB 241), epitomizes in my opinion the problems that plague the
DLB. Most of the sportswriters who merit coverage (e.g., A. J. Liebling,
Shirley Povich, Red Smith) were sketched in an earlier DLB volume.
While some of the Ž gures sketched here (e.g., Jim Murray, Blackie Sher-
rod, David Halberstam, Dan Jenkins, George Plimpton, Al Stump) en-
joy respectable reputations, most of the others are mediocrities or utter
nonentities (e.g., Bob Considine, best known for his 1948 hagiography of
Babe Ruth). Moreover, a fair number of the other Ž gures are, I daresay,
utterly unknown even to the most rabid sports fans. This is merely
another DLB volume commissioned, it seems, to exploit the reference
book market. I imagine with diYculty who would actually consult this
book —or who would recommend its purchase.
At its best, however, the DLB performs a scholarly service by recover-
ing neglected writers. Editor Kent P. Ljungquist has recruited many of the
most respected 19th-century Americanists to contribute to Antebellum
Writers in New York, Second Series (DLB 250), including Benjamin Fisher
on Lewis Gaylor Clark, Stephen Railton on James Fenimore Cooper,
Donald Yannella on Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck and Cornelius
Mathews, Ezra Greenspan on George Palmer Putnam, and Ed Folsom
and Kenneth M. Price on Walt Whitman. The careers of the authors
sketched in this volume, Ljungquist fairly concludes, ‘‘underscore the
centrality of New York to antebellum literary activity, its in uence and
attraction for both major and minor Ž gures, and its role in enhancing
the profession of authorship and the business of publishing.’’ Similarly,
Antebellum Writers in the South, Second Series, ed. Ljungquist (DLB
248), features Robert D. Habich on George Washington Harris, G. R.
Thompson on Edgar Allan Poe, and David B. Kesterson on Johnson
544 General Reference Works

Jones Hooper. These two volumes neatly complement Antebellum Writ-

ers in New York and the South (DLB 3), ed. nearly a quarter century ago by
Joel Myerson (see AmLS 1979, p. 534). The American Renaissance in New
England, Third Series and Fourth Series, ed. Wesley T. Mott (DLB 235 and
243), are also among the most valuable recent releases in the series.
Lavishly illustrated, often with items in Joel Myerson’s private collection,
the contributors include many of the most respected scholars in the Ž eld,
among them William Rossi on Francis Bowen, David M. Robinson on
William Ellery Channing and Jones Very, Len Gougeon on William
Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, Christine Brooks Macdonald on
Richard Hildreth, Thomas Wortham on James Russell Lowell, Robert D.
Habich on Andrews Norton, Ronald A. Bosco on William Wetmore
Story, John W. Crowley on John B. Gough, Patricia Okker on Sarah
Josepha Hale, Susan Belasco on Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Cameron C.
Nickels on Seba Smith, Robert N. Hudspeth on John Weiss, and Al-
bert J. Von Frank on John Greenleaf Whittier.
Whatever my quibbles about the DLB in general, I harbor no com-
plaints about the documentary volumes in the series, which have proved
to be valuable teaching tools. Thomas Wolfe: A Documentary Volume, ed.
Ted Mitchell (DLB 229), for example, reproduces hundreds of original
sources, photographs, and articles related to the life and career of the
prodigious novelist and playwright. Similarly, The Beats: A Documentary
Volume, ed. Matt Theado (DLB 237), is a valuable compilation of pri-
mary material: interviews, manuscript facsimiles, letters, reviews, car-
toons, advertisements, book jackets, newspaper articles, trial transcripts,
and photographs, including publicity stills from movies about the Beats
or movies based on their writings. The volume also contains individual
biographical essays on Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, William Bur-
roughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, and Gary
Snyder.
Finally, a cautionary note to collection development librarians: Please
do not squander any of your limited acquisitions budget on the DLB
Yearbook. It epitomizes all that is wrong with academic publishing: triv-
ial, arcane, and overpriced books that few readers will ever consult. The
sooner the publication of the Yearbook is suspended, the better for stu-
dents, teachers, and librarians everywhere. Funds now earmarked for it
will better be spent more selectively.
University of New Mexico