American Literary Scholar (2001)
American Literary Scholar (2001)
American Literary Scholar (2001)
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 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-
ce their summer vacations to this project for no more reward than the
viii Foreword
Labor’s Text / Laura Hapke, Labor’s Novel History / Mark C. Carnes, ed.,
Text: The Worker in American Fic- Novel History: Historians and Nov-
tion (Rutgers) elists Confront America’s Past (and
Maritime Fiction / John Peck, Mar- Each Other) (Simon & Schuster)
itime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in ‘‘The Only EI cient Instrument’’ / Aleta
British and American Novels, 1719– Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves,
1917 (Palgrave) eds., ‘‘The Only EI cient Instru-
Metaphysical Club / Louis Menand, ment’’: American Women Writers
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of and the Periodical, 1837–1916 (Iowa)
Ideas in America (Farrar) Passing / María Carla Sánchez and
Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, Linda Schlossberg, eds., Passing:
and the Politics of Community / Identity and Interpretation in Sex-
Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, uality, Race, and Religion (NYU)
Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Patchwork Quilt / Suzanne V. Shep-
Community (Cambridge) hard, The Patchwork Quilt: Ideas of
Necro Citizenship / Russ Castronovo, Community in Nineteenth-Century
Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, American Women’s Fiction (Peter
and the Public Sphere in the Lang)
Nineteenth-Century United States Public Sentiments / Glenn Hendler,
(Duke) Public Sentiments: Structures of Feel-
Negative Liberties / Cyrus R. K. Patell, ing in Nineteenth-Century American
Negative Liberties: Morrison, Literature (No. Car.)
Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Publishing the Family / June Howard,
Ideology (Duke) Publishing the Family (Duke)
New Deal Modernism / Michael Reconstituting Authority / William E.
Szalay, New Deal Modernism: Moddelmog, Reconstituting Author-
American Literature and the Inven- ity: American Fiction in the Province
tion of the Welfare State (Duke) of the Law, 1880–1920 (Iowa)
Not in Sisterhood / Deborah Lindsay Regional Fictions / Stephanie Foote,
Williams, Not in Sisterhood: Edith Regional Fictions: Culture and Iden-
Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, tity in Nineteenth-Century Ameri-
and the Politics of Female Authorship can Literature (Wisconsin)
(Palgrave) Revolutionary Memory / Cary Nelson,
Nothing Abstract / Tom Quirk, Revolutionary Memory: Recovering
Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the Poetry of the American Left
the American Literary Imagination (Routledge)
(Missouri) Richard Wright’s Travel Writings / Vir-
Novel Art / Mark McGurl, The Novel ginia Whatley Smith, ed., Richard
Art: Elevations of American Fiction Wright’s Travel Writings: New Re-
after Henry James (Princeton) ections (Miss.)
xii Key to Abbreviations
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
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 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 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.
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.
(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 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 exempli ed in Mazzini,
David M. Robinson 23
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.
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 codi 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 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 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 ‘‘de 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
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
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.
Super 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
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 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.’’
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 Con 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
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 Con 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 de 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 Con 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. Speci 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 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
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) identi 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 identi 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
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
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 gure of Lima: 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 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 . . . 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 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
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, Sacri 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, sacri 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.’’
concept of love from Plato’s Symposium to argue that ‘‘what Melville was
conscious of nding in and through Hawthorne was the 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 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 quali es Freud’s theory of anxiety as
projection. Ngai connects two locations of Pierre’s anxiety, women and
writing, which are ‘‘consolidated in the 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 nancial com-
munity anent the social ills accompanying New York’s diverse and sud-
den population growth during the rst half of the nineteenth century —
the 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, 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 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 identi 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 de 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 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
Con 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
Con 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 nds that the
sections ‘‘The Dominican’’ and ‘‘In Con dence’’ show further evidence
of Melville’s engagement with Gnosticism.
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 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 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
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 diversi ed in a 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
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 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 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’’ exempli 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.’’
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 speci 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 sacri 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 personi 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 rei cation that the Romantics themselves had rejected. With this
nal step into the theoretical arena Maslan shows the full range and
signi 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 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
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
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 Pro 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)Identi 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 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 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 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 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 gures of authority (and to the
various audiences, 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 identi 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, 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
crusader for the Dickinson family honor’’ who remembered the old 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 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
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
A short story that Mark Twain set aside 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 signi 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 speci es the second printing of the 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 ve-page, handwritten preface that was tipped into a
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
ction author Jules Verne. The narrative is simultaneously pulled in the
directions of several literary genres, including detective 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
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 justi able move, the
editors choose to reintegrate the once-discarded but magni 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 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 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
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 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 identi 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
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
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 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.
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 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 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 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 super -
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, 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.
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- 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 ( 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 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
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 testi 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 nds, ‘‘Twain reformed Southwestern
Alan Gribben 115
(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 de 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 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
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 nd in the Mark Twain
Papers. Now he terms it ‘‘a recently reexamined Twain manuscript’’ that
‘‘lay largely ignored.’’ But Mark Twain still gures prominently, and is the
sole subject of one of the 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, 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
‘‘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 con 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 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.’’
spontaneous virtue yet also reveal the greed caused by a lack of familial
aVection, while The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima con 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 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) 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 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 lm’s opening sequence, multiple voices challenge the 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.
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-
pli 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 gures, often in stories representing them as art objects. ‘‘The
Voice: Discourses of Silence’’ explains how women, subjected to highly
codi 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 signi 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 signi 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 sacri 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 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 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 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 ‘‘Meta 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 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 Meta ction’’ (pp. 105–16) the altar functions as an interpre-
128 Henry James
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 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 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
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 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
identi 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 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 signi 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-
li 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 con 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 identi 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 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
de 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
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 de ning conventions of Jew-
ett’s 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-
con 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
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, de 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 nd stimulating insights in Goldberg’s association of
Cather’s novels with the 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
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 unful lling
lives in romantic fantasies of heroism in war. But he 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.
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 de 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 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
de 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 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 de nes Cather as a ‘‘lesbian forebear’’ and ‘‘gender
inversion’’ as a dominant pattern in her 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 nd
their ‘‘true selves’’ in identi 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 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 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 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 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 proli 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 nally appeared as Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: ‘‘What Thou Lovest
Well . . .’’ (Yale). It is the 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
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 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
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 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; ‘‘speci cally, the structural
principle whereby a rhetorical premise calls into being the possibility of
its own negation.’’ She 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 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 con 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 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 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 nds it predictably ironic that Pound found postmodern tech-
niques to express it.
nism and a Dantescan conception of love,’’ which uni 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 nds that Pound’s choices are often guided
by his previous experience with troubadour poetry, especially in his
imagining the 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,
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
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 pro 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 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 ction will nevertheless nd much
of value. Seymour-Jones has done extensive research in the unpub-
lished papers of many people who knew the Eliots. Most signi 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 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.
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 quanti 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 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
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, 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 De nition of Culture (1948).’’ He 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 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), 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
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 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 identi 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
d. Poetry Possibly the most signi cant publication of the year is the 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 arti 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-
cial poetic.’’ This identi 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 nds no overt
expression of anti-Semitism in the poem but asserts, ‘‘Far from being
Eliot’s abandonment of anti-Semitism, . . . this absence of 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 signi 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
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 a 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 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 arti 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
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 clari 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) 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
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 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
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 ‘‘ 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.
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
exempli 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
identi 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 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.
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 ction’’ so that both ‘‘explode the conventions of such commer-
cially popular genres as the detective novel and 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 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 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
‘‘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 speci c passage in his novel but there is nothing
in Look Away that resembles the passage for which Faulkner expresses a
debt. Urgo 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 ction,
leading his interlocutor instead to a consideration of language, craft, and
articulation. Kodat rede 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 de nitional questions: If sentimental
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 rei 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
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 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 sacri 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.
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 Bull 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 bull ghter. He believes that Wright’s
book deserves a spot on ‘‘the required reading list of the English-speaking
a 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
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
Bahamas, 2000) they would all have been worth hearing; as published
‘‘articles’’ several could have bene ted from revision and elaboration.
While one appreciates the documentary nature of this special issue
(where else might nonattendees hope to 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.
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 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 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 ction,
Nowlin observes, ‘‘suggests that the guardians of ‘whiteness’ themselves
are self-betraying’’ and that ‘‘it is 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 speci 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-
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 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 ction that makes reference to
actual events must be rendered with historical accuracy. Isn’t this one
reason why we call it ‘‘ 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 super 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 ful 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 scienti 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.
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 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 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 speci 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 justi 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-
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 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 nd accessible. ‘‘ ‘Soft Filters’:
Some Sunshine on ‘Cat in the Rain’ (Narrative 9: 217–22) distinguishes
‘‘character’s point of view,’’ called ‘‘ lter,’’ from ‘‘narrator’s point of view,’’
called ‘‘slant,’’ observing that Hemingway’s ‘‘Cat in the Rain’’ exempli 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) identi 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
‘‘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- 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 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 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
tory and biography; he theorizes his critique but also resists oversimpli -
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
slavery. In ‘‘The Detective Gaze: Edgar A. Poe, the Flaneur, and the
Physiognomy of Crime’’ (ATQ 15: 5–22) James V. Werner 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 nally identi 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-
de 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
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 identi 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 rst-person narration, they often successfully con-
vey plot suspense. Naming Poe ‘‘the major single literary in uence’’ on
Hitchcock’s American 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 signi 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 speci cally Haitian in uences. Bergman con-
trasts Stowe’s determination to place ‘‘slavery and slaves outside the moral
con 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 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
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 speci 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 Sa 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
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, pre 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.
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 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 ctionalized con-
versations, said to mirror a public sphere shaped by conversational clubs,
organizations, and institutions. This study ranges across the physician-
poet’s diversi 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 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.
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 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.’’
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 ‘‘trans 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 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 identi 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 de ant speech —which challenges emerg-
ing race theory as well as conventional notions of blackness and white-
J. Gerald Kennedy 275
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
quali 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 de 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: 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 de 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 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
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 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 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 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 speci 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 identi ed as late-19th-
century 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
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 reuni 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
de 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 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 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/scienti 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 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 ction.
ction (her earliest and later 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 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 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 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 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 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 de nitions of con dentiality that work against
women’s health. Her use of real doctors and real treatments enhances the
authenticity of her 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 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
noted, but they are seen as representative of her age and her experience as
a 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.
time, readers may be drawn more deeply to the poetry for its psychologi-
cal depth and intricacy and may 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
over the uses and de 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 de 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 de ne herself as white against the dominant de 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-Speci 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 de 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 speci city but is given only generic or theatrical consid-
eration. Posey, Womack argues, oVers an example of writing from an
awareness of speci city, which is a strength rather than a hindrance.
cause they adversely aVected the unity he found in nature. She sees Muir’s
attempt to project a uni 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 bene t for Jessamy Harte Steele, Harte’s daughter who was by
then in dire 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 scienti 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 de 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
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 ‘‘recon gured science as writing and performed scien-
ti 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
ii Jack London
Issues of race, class, and gender continue to predominate in this year’s
work on London, directly through studies of his 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 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 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 satis 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
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
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 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 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
‘‘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 con 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,’’ 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 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 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 identi 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 de 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’’ 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
gure of the mother, while Tim Edwards in ‘‘Magni 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,’’ 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
‘‘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 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
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 re 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 identi 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
‘‘The Caucasian Problem’’ (1944), one of his ‘‘ 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), 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 signi 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 re guring
would highlight the signi 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 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 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 signi 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 identi 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
Sars eld’s No Crystal Stair and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing ’’
(ECW 74: 136–66) contrasts the xed ‘‘bipolar’’ de nitions of race cri-
tiqued in Larsen’s novels with the more uid and complex versions
available to the multiracial Canadian heroine of Mairuth Sars eld’s re-
cent novel No Crystal Stair (1997); unlike Larsen, Sars 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 de nes herself by individuality, not by arbitrary racial classi-
cations. Mary Jane Schenck reads Fauset’s 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
Ful llment vs. the Lost Generation’’ (SoAR 66, i: 102–25). For Schenck,
Fauset’s novel exhibits a ‘‘politics of ful llment,’’ sometimes misread as
sentimentality, that opposes conventional de 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.
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 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.
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 identi 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 signi 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 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 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 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 speci 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 ction and
344 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s
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 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.
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
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 identi es such additional Warren themes as time, self-
knowledge, identity, greed, pride, the past, and alienation. Two chapters
are devoted to Warren’s 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 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
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.
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 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 rst signi 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
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.
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 signi cant, they argue, are Robin
Vote and Dr. Matthew O’Connor, characters who while ‘‘enacting the
identity of the âneur, a distinctive modernist 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 ction and poetry,
noting that Barnes’s works incorporate gothic images from art as well as
from vampire ction, Romantic and Victorian writers, and expressionist
cinema and prophesy the horri 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 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 ‘‘cruci 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 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 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 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 nd the female 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 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 Non 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 non 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 ction is the topic of one essay collection. In The Magic
362 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s
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 Caul 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 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, 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
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 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 bene 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 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
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 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.
Once upon a time, scholars assumed there was one American ction.
Then other voices asserted themselves, from those of multiculturalist
authors to critics with speci 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 ction from
the 1960s to the present a complex 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
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 ction, an art form Madden and
many others 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 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 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 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,’’
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
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 rede 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 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 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
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, meta 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 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 arti ces, can never again be ac-
Jerome Klinkowitz 371
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 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
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.
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 de ne his unconventional 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
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
de 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 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
pro 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.
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 ction), and how his novels have fared when adapted to lm.
New in uences are Jon Woodson’s domain in A Study of Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22 (Peter Lang). Although the novel bene 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
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
ctive action can proceed largely by its own momentum.
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 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
scienti c open-mindedness.’’ In The Bridge Hart Crane drew distinctions
between diVerent applications of scienti 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
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 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 rede ne his place in literary
history is a distinguishing feature of all the studies of his work published
in 2001.
The 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 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-de 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 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 uni 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 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 speci 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 rst ap-
peared in NLH in 1999 in which the author attests that the experience of
actually scything a 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 Versi 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
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 identi 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 identi ed with Keats as a ‘‘lover
of women,’’ she also defended and identi 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 signi 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 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
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 de 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 bene 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 signi 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
‘‘signi 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 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
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 speci cs.’’
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
sacri ce’’ that nds its expression in Jarrell’s war poetry as well as Owen’s.
The poems Bishop wrote during the war ended up in her 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 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 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 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.
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 con 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
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 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 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
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 lm and video,
classic Hollywood. SUNY Press advances books on gender in 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 super 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 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
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 signi 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 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 signi -
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 Bakers 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, Bakers eld, in a
program designed to appeal to political, social, and 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 eld, Barbara L. Webb’s
426 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 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 signi 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 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 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.
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 Mysti 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 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 pro 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 Mis 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. A 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 signi 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, 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
pro 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
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 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 de 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
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 de 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
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 de 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
signi 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: 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
signi 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
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 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 de ning freedom. The concrete particularities of 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 con 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 ction per se,
was conceived as a public instrument designed to play in a sentimental
key. By encouraging identi 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
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 speci 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 rede nes the individual’s
Gary Lee Stonum and Theodore O. Mason Jr. 455
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 speci city. Particularly upset-
ting is the subtext with a cultural demonization of women’s bodies and the
choice of sacrilege as a way of 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 ght against deliberate
con 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 rede 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
13) Bruyère aptly de nes Anderson as a major ctionist and oVers chal-
lenging perspectives on his work. Then under 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 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 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 gures of the carnivalesque
work in West’s ction. Howe, argues Philippe Jaworski in ‘‘Fanny Howe,
The Deep North ’’ (pp. 59–64), reproduces in her novel the xed represen-
tation of metamorphosis to be found in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.
Trope is a xed artistic representation whose authority Markson decon-
Françoise Clary 467
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 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
38) the historical signi 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 uni 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 engul ng science studies is not mesmerized by
wilder-eyed cultural studies enthusiasts such as Donna Haraway. Her
case for concentrating on de 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 pro 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 Non 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
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 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.
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.
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 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 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
rede nition of ‘‘family’’ as a nonhierarchical union of caring women.
Despite the de ciencies of such families, Henley’s brand of ‘‘family’’
optimism is seen as according her virtually a unique place in Southern
(family) drama.
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 rmly grounded in recent research in gender, ethnic, and cultural
studies.
full signi cance, for ‘‘the woman in the nineteenth-century’’ as for its
author, of motherhood by bringing to light its nightmarish quality. My
own essay, 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 gures in Rosella Mamoli Zorzi’s essay
dealing speci 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
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
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 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 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 ‘‘ 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
who adds four passages omitted from the rst edition as well as endnotes
on sources and recondite allusions. The full text is now available in Italian
for the 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-
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 loso , ed. Giovanni Cianci, Elio Branzini, and Antonello
Negri [Milan: Bocca Editori], pp. 199–211) Mario MaY 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 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
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 gures.’’ Through a reading of passages from
Douglass’s writing, Dimock uncovers how this 19th-century literary and
public 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 lters’’ in Leigh’s published journal and con-
cludes that the entire polyphonic text testi 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 signi er and signi ed, Juncker nds that the African
Bo G. Ekelund, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Henrik Lassen 507
escapes include Suckow’s The Odyssey of a Young Girl, in which the ‘‘revolt
from the village’’ is quali 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 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 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 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, sacri 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 classi 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 ction that does not 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 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 speci c and have global importance. She does this
through a reading of the historical signi cance of the geographical area
that is depicted in Ceremony (the uranium mine in the Southwest con-
nected to the production of the 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
An original mystery play from the York Cycle of Mystery Plays, The
Cruci 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.
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
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 ction in Vonnegut’s
ction as a metacritical trope of the diVerence of this ction from a
vaguely de ned (‘realist’ and occasionally modernist) poetics of ction’’
with the primary focus on Breakfast of Champions (HJEAS 6, i [2000]:
29–54; rpt. JFA 2: 432–53).
Zo 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 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 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 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 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).
(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,
justi 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 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
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 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
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. Buttery, 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 de 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 de ni-
tions of concepts such as duendes [goblins], pintos [prisoners], la llorona
[the weeping woman], la migra [immigration oYcials], Cinco de Mayo
[the 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 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 signi 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 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
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, 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
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 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 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 ‘‘identi 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 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
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 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 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 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
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