bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Freud, Erikson, and the Historian: A Bibliographical Survey
Authors: CRUNDEN ROBERT M.
Published: March 2011

Nothing seems to make the average historian more nervous than a new methodology that he does not readily understand. Over the past two decades we have seen vogues for the use of statistics, computers, socio- logical concepts, economic determinism, anthropological studies of cul- ture - the list is long. Some historians always seem ready to adopt the newest craze, whatever it is; most have numerous reasons ready that protect their own comfortable methodology, and consign the brash new- comer to the wastebasket. Often, whether they will admit it or not, how- ever, the nay-sayers feel a certain guilt about what they are doing; they seem to feel that they ought to be more up-to-date, but their ability to learn is limited by institutional and financial constrictions, and they greatly fear the adverse criticism that any use of the new methodologies in their work might receive.
Ideology and the Political Economy of Revolution
Authors: ERNST JOSEPH
Published: March 2011

Studies in the political economy of the American Revolution are not popular just now. Those "Progressive" historians who took up the theme and suggested a broad pattern of political explanation against the back- ground of economic history have few followers today. If there is a pre- vailing interpretation at present, it is that of the so-called "Neo-Whigs". According to this view, abstract ideas rather than political and economic conflict, and fear rather than rational self-interest, lay at the heart of the revolutionary movement.
Struggling Upward: The Minister's Charge and A Cool Million
Authors: GRAHAM JOHN
Published: March 2011

The informing purpose of Nathanael West's A Cool Million; Or, The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934) is to destroy the "rags to riches" story popularized by Horatio Alger. A Cool Million would describe, West wrote, "The break-down of the American dream." "I'm re-writing the Horatio Alger myth - from barge boy to president or from shirt-sleeves to shirtsleeves in one generation."1 Not only did West read Alger in preparation for his novel, but he also extensively investigated American success literature.2 A succession of internal parallels indicates that West read and was strongly influenced by William Dean Howells' The Ministers Charge; Or, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker (1887). Unlike Alger, both Howells and West emphasize the human costs implicit in the illusion that ambition, hard work, and thrift will automatically bring success.
"We Have Had Conversation in the World": The Abolitionists and Spontaneity
Authors: PERRY LEWIS
Published: March 2011

Social control, a favorite theme in American sociology in the 1920s, has more recently attracted the notice of historians. This is particularly true of writings on antebellum reform. In his influential article on "Religious Benevolence as Social Control" Clifford S. Griffin observed that "between 1815 and the Civil War the United States was in a ferment of great and fundamental social, economic, and political change"; reform movements, he argued, were often instituted by Protestant evangelicals who wished to resist change and keep the nation "under control."1 Subsequent books and articles have indicated that some reformers were disgruntled Fed- eralists and ministers of newly disestablished churches - men who pre- sumably had sufficient reason to lament the decline of moral leadership in the republic. The creation of reform societies, we have also learned, enabled middle-class Americans to signify their own virtues as upright, disciplined citizens in a land thought to be losing sight of proper stan- dards. Abolitionism, plainly more controversial than most reform causes, has not been excepted from generalizations about control. Abolitionists apparently came from the same conservative backgrounds, shared the theocratic design to check the sins of people unlike themselves, and emu- lated the propaganda techniques of benevolent societies.2 One recent essay links antislavery to attitudes toward sexuality: "abolitionists were driven as much by a generalized desire to control the 'animal nature' standing between man and civilization as they were by a specific quarrel with the South."3 Their fascination with eroticism on Southern plantations and their uneasy discussions of marriage suggest that many abolitionists mis- trusted signs of impulsive, uncontrolled behavior in themselves; there- fore, they sought to identify themselves with self-discipline.
Colonial Puritan Rhetoric and the Discovery of American Identity
Authors: BERCOVITCH SACVAN
Published: March 2011

According to Sancho Panza, who ought to have known, the best way to measure the flights of human fantasy is through the perspective of common sense. I should therefore like to begin this discussion by recalling Roger Williams's polemic against the New England theocracy - specifically, against its claim to the title of New Israel. The emigrants had based their claim on a social covenant. They had a right to it, Williams agreed, and by that right they might expect God to reward their obedience with large harvests. But they spoke of spiritual bles- sings as well, of a figural Israel in a new promised land. Quoting countless authorities from the Church Fathers to the Reformation, Williams outlined the crucial distinction. Figurally understood, Israel constituted the elect of God, whereas all worldly designations - geographical, political, personal - pertained to the city of man. The saints in New England, like all saints, belonged to the figural Israel. But as New Englanders they could no more arrogate that title to themselves than could the Indians. "America," Williams pointed out, "(as Europe and all nations) lyes dead in sin." What, then, was all this talk of a "new found land of Canaan," divinely granted to a New Israel for their "everlasting posses- sion"? To declare that prophecies were unfolding through the agency of "a people, naturally considered" - that a portion of this fallen earth was designated from eternity as sacred space - "if this be not to pull God and Christ and Spirit out of Heaven, and subject them unto naturall, sinful, inconstant men,... let Heaven and Earth judge."1
The Politics of Ambition: A New Look at Benjamin Franklin's Career
Authors: EGNAL MARC
Published: March 2011

Most writing on the personality and career of Benjamin Franklin has rested on the assumption that his Autobiography and other public tracts present a reasonably accurate portrayal of the man. Critics have found in the memoirs the hallmarks of a complex personality, and have enumerated a now familiar set of traits. One set of qualities Franklin underscored in the Autobiography, the almanacs, and else- where is hard work and frugality. "I mention this industry the more particularly and the more freely," he notes in the memoirs, "though it seems to be talking in my own praise, that those of my posterity who shall read it, may know the use of that virtue when they see its effects in my favour throughout this relation."1 Equally notable is the printer's dedication to civic virtue. After discussing the city and provincial offices to which he was chosen, he observes: "They were still more pleasing as being so many spontaneous testimonies of the public's good opinion and by me entirely unsolicited."2 In addition, Franklin's self-portrait makes clear his wiliness, inventiveness, humor, and human frailty. Disputes among scholars over the printer's nature all too often have turned on the question of weighting these components.3
Art and Advertising in A Connecticut Yankee: The "Robber Baron" Revisited
Authors: DOUGLAS ANN
Published: March 2011

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which Henry Nash Smith rightly sees as representing "the crucial problem in Mark Twain's career as a writer,"1 is Twain's major attempt to understand the spirit of capitalism which conspicu- ously dominated his society and inevitably affected his craft. Hank Morgan, the hero, is many things. He is an American abroad, a reformer, a mechanic, but Hank is also a businessman, in a special sense a "Robber Baron," and Twain has explored in this story the role of the entrepreneur and his complex significance for industry and for art.2
Alice Munro and the American South
Authors: Struthers J. R. Tim
Published: March 2011

Abstract:

As a girl, Alice Munro lived in Huron County in rural Southwestern Ontario. In an interview with Graeme Gibson, Munro remarked, "... the writers who first excited me were the writers of the American South, because I felt there a country being depicted that was like my own. I can think of several writers now who are working out of Southwestern Ontario. It is rich in possibilities in this way. I mean the part of the country I come from is absolutely Gothic. You can't get it all down." Munro has discussed the relationship between the American South and her own country in greater detail with Mari Stainsby: If I'm a regional writer, the region I'm writing about has many things in common with the American South. Your area is south Ontario.
Stephen Leacock: an Early Influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald
Authors: CURRY RALPH , LEWIS JANET
Published: March 2011

Early in March, 1917, Stephen Leacock received a letter from a young American admirer: My Dear Mr. Leacock: As imitation is the sincerest flattery I thought you might be interested in something you inspired. The Nassau Literary Magazine here at Princeton of which I'm an editor got out a "Chaopolitan number," as a burlesque of "America's greatest magazine." The two stories I wrote "Jemina, a story of the Blue Ridge mountains, by John Phlox Jr" and "The Usual Thing" by "Robert W. Shamless [sic]" are of the "Leacock school" of humour - in fact Jemina is rather a steal in places from "Hannah of the Highlands." I'm taking the liberty of sending you a copy - needless to say it increased our circulation & standing in undergraduate eyes. Hope you'll get one smile out of it for every dozen laughs I got from the Snoopopaths. Very appreciatively yours, F. Scott Fitzgerald1 On March 16,1917, Leacock responded: Dear Mr. Fitzgerald Your stories are fine. As Daniel Webster said, or didn't say, to the citizens of Rochester, "Go on." Very Sincerely, Stephen Leacock2
Faulkner's Caddy
Authors: HILL, JR. DOUGLAS B.
Published: March 2011

There are no extraneous characters in fiction. As far as the structure of a novel is concerned, every character depends upon every other. If a novelist accepts this condition as a challenge to his ingenuity, his work can take any number of directions. Dickens's method in a book like Bleak House - the arranging of dozens of characters into a structure so contrived that the least movement of the least significant of them causes it to topple into a new equilibrium - is one remarkable elaboration of the principle. What William Faulkner does with the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury, though accomplished with fewer actors, is no less remarkable. Readers of that work quickly become aware of the centrality of Caddy Compson to the complex structure that Faulkner has built. The novel revolves about her, focuses itself upon her. She never appears in the flesh, in the actual present time of any part of the book (unless Benjy's consciousness can be said to operate always in present time); yet in the way she is made to control the substance of each brother's narrative life, she gives each one, as a character and as a narrator, his reason for existence. It is as if Faulkner had determined to make Caddy the sole source of both human and structural energy in The Sound and the Fury, and proceeded to build his novel upon that plan.
Political Economy and Reality: Problems in the Interpretation of the American Revolution
Authors: ERNST JOSEPH
Published: March 2011

There are two theories on the subject of "Political Economy"1 and the ideological origins of the American Revolution, both put forward by members of the "Ideological School," and both false. The first holds that economic considera- tions have little place in any ideological interpretation of the colonial rebellion against the mother country. The second, and adverse, theory holds that economic developments are central to any explanation of revolutionary rhetoric and be- havior.
Walt Whitman's Vernacular Poetics
Authors: KUMMINGS DONALD D.
Published: March 2011

Athletic, complex, elusive, Whitman's theories on poetry have inspired many efforts at interpretation.1 Nevertheless, his central theory of the character and function of poetry in a democratic society, that set of propositions which he loosely but persistently outlines in his prose writings, has not been adequately explored in terms of the perspective from which it emanates. By investigating this theory at length, we get, of course, a better understanding of Whitman's aesthetic. But we also find that the poet's egalitarian view of the traits and tendencies of a democratic poetry differs radically from the aristocratic view of Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French observer whose literary opinions (as set forth in Democracy in America) continue to be celebrated for their perceptiveness and prescience.2 Indeed, we see that the egalitarian and aristocra- tic views of poetry amount to two different ways of perceiving reality. Whereas de Tocqueville believes that ideal or poetic values are found only in the realm of things-as-they-ought-to-be, Whitman is convinced that such values are disco- vered in the realm of things-as-they-are - that is, within the sphere of com- monplace reality, within the vulgate of human existence. This conviction in Whitman underlies his effort to establish an altogether new view of experience, best described as a vernacular perspective.
The Gap in Henry Adams' Education
Authors: WATERSTON ELIZABETH
Published: March 2011

Henry Adams tried to erase a twenty-year period, 1871-1891, not only from the book he titled The Education of Henry Adams, but also from his diaries, notes, and correspondence.1 The gap in the Education is worth filling in, for it represents a crucial period in the development of a unique artist and historian. The events of the twenty-year period can be presented in four ways: Adams himself said, "One must either treat history as a catalogue, a record, a romance, or as an evolution."2 First, an itemized list of dates, events, publications, and travels can constitute the approach to history via catalogues, and we can note the items deleted when he moved from life to autobiography. Second, a fuller record of Adams' story can be compiled from letters, journals, reminiscences of his friends, letters of his wife, and from the two novels which he produced during that blacked-out period. Phrase after phrase in this record will tempt the historian to speculate about the tensions implied in comments on Adams' mother, his sister, his wife, the heroines he created in Democracy, and Esther, and the friend he memorialized in Marau Taaroa, Last Queen of Tahiti. So we slip from history as record to history as romance. The romance reads at first like the simple story of a broken heart, but no follower of Adams' ironies will be satisfied to settle for anything simple. Fur- thermore, Adams himself as historian rejected the romantic view. He also re- jected a simple evolutionary view of history and finally believed that the universe is moving inevitably to randomness and chaos. This descent he felt to be con- nected with changes in the feminine principle: once again this crucial aspect of his vision evolved between 1871 and 1891.
Consensus Revisited
Authors: SMITH ALLAN
Published: March 2011

Major L. Wilson, Space, Time and Freedom: The Quest for Nationality and the Irrepressible Conflict, 1815-1861. Westport, Conri.: Greenwood Press, 1974. 309 pp. Ruch Welter, The Mind of America 1820-1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. 603 pp. Consensus historians have faced two sets of particularly burdensome difficulties in the course of their efforts to unify the elements of the American experience. In the face of much - sectional differences, ethnic identification, even class con- sciousness - that might have been expected to mitigate the sense of a common participation in a shared national experience, they have had to argue the proposi- tion that Americans inhabited the same universe of belief and value. Secondly, they have had to decide whether this universe, once identified, was an historical product which assumed form and definition over time, or whether it was in possession of its essential characteristics throughout the course of American history.1
"Ifs Eternally:" Melville, Hawthorne, and American Literature
Authors: KETTERER DAVID
Published: March 2011

Edwin Haviland Miller. Melville. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1975. 382 pp. Richard H. Brodhead. Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976. 216 pp. Warrick Wadlington. The Confidence Game in American Literature. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1975. 331pp. Towards the conclusion of Moby-Dick, Ishmael observes, "There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: - through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally." At summational points in their very different discussions of Melville the authors of the three books under review each quote this passage (Brodhead, p. 150; Miller, pp. 192-93; Wadlington, pp. 78-79). In each case the quotation is shown to be particularly apposite to the author's developing argument. Clearly Melville's statement is as applicable to the knowledge provided by literary criticism as to any other kind. And, of course, in treating material gone over repeatedly by previous investigators, Brodhead, Miller and Wadlington might be said to "trace the round again." At the same time, taken together in the following order, Miller's psychological portrait of Melville, Brodhead's formalis- tic study of Hawthorne and Melville, and Wadlington's largely rhetorical analysis of Melville, Twain and Nathanael West appear to trace the cycle from a more or less closed certainty to a creative sense of "Ifs eternally."
Women's Studies Comes of Age
Authors: VIPOND MARY
Published: March 2011

Peter Gabriel Filene. Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. 351 pp. Annette Kolodny. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Ex- perience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.185 pp. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Volume I, Number 1 (Au- tumn, 1975). 275 pp. "Women's Studies" seems to be one of those flawed terms which are, ultimately, irreplaceable. What does it mean? That women are the objects of inquiry? That new models and theories are necessary to explain the experience of women? That research is to be coupled with action? The first type of women's studies is almost as old as the various disciplines under which it has always been subsumed, and consists more of intellectual hodgepodge than sustained analysis. It is in the simultaneous accomplishing of the second and third that the "new" women's studies is engaged; modern feminist scholars are attempting to create new models to "explain women in society" and at the same time are striving to "improve their condition."1 Three consequences follow, all of them well illus- trated by the volumes here under review.
Emily Dickinson as Poet and Mystic
Authors: HERBERT, JR. T. WALTER
Published: March 2011

Robert B. Sew all. The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. 821 pp. Inder Nath Kher. The Landscape of Absence: Emily Dickin- son's Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. 354 pp. Professor Sewall's biography of Dickinson succeeds beautifully in the basic task it sets for itself, which is to occupy the great central ground where established facts of the poet's life are laid before us in the light of common sense. Writing about Dickinson has suffered from various kinds of aberration that have tended to make a tricky subject even trickier, though our understanding of Dickinson would be greatly poorer if scholars as well as mythmakers had not run their theoretical risks in order to express what they have glimpsed of the strange and marvelous personality that produced the strange and marvelous poems.
Intellectualism, Educational Achievement, and American Catholicism: A Reconsideration of a Controversy, 1955-1975
Authors: Schnell R. L. , Rooke Patricia T.
Published: March 2011

There is, however, the further fact that men frequently orient themsleves to groups other than their own in shaping their behaviour and evaluations, and it is the problem centered about this fact of orientation to non-membership groups that constitutes the distinctive concern of reference group theory. Robert K. Merton and Alice S. Rossie (1957) The controversy over the intellectual life of Catholic America was brought into the public arena by John Tracy Ellis's 1955 article in Thought. He asked why a rich and powerful national church with an extensive network of educational institutions had contributed so little to American intellectual life.1 Subsequently, this public self-criticism was further elaborated by such prominent Catholic scholars as Thomas O'Dea, Gustave Weigel and Walter J. Ong.2 The controversy was fired by studies that indicated that Catholics were not sharing in the general upward mobility or attending post-secondary institutions to the same degree as their fellow Americans, that Catholic schools and colleges were not comparing favorably as measured by awards and fellowships, and that few Catholics were to be found among American leaders in any field.3
Ishmael Reed's Canada
Authors: Henning Uphaus Suzanne
Published: March 2011

Ishmael Reed. Flight to Canada. New York: Random House, 1976. 179 pp. In 1972, just after his best known novel, Mumbo Jumbo, was published, Ishmael Reed talked about the contemporary black American author in an interview: "I'm getting more and more interested in slavery as a metaphor for how blacks are treated in this civilization.... So I say to myself and the rest of us that we are going to get to our aesthetic Canada, no matter how many dogs they send after us. We'll get there."' Four years later Ishmael Reed published Flight to Canada.
Inaudible Man: The Indian in the Theory and Practice of White Fiction
Authors: Rans Geoffrey
Published: March 2011

"Indians is remarkably silent, in general, I believe, Sir." J. F. Cooper, The Redskins. "The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they even succeed in wholly depriving it of its rights; but the Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold pur- pose with singular felicity; tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, with- out shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality, in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity." de Tocqueville It is hardly news1 that, in the fifty years following the Revolution, American intellectuals were asking themselves, and dictating to their audiences, what shape the national literature would take, and, more urgently, what its proper subject-matter should be. Received opinion established itself upon William Tudor's Phi Beta Kappa address, published in the North American Review in 1815, which argued eloquently the need for a national literature, affirmed that America had a usable past for literature, and delineated three major areas of interest for those who would write the poetry and romances of America: the pioneers, the Revolutionary war (perhaps not remote enough in time for romance), and, above all, the Indians. While Tudor would find many objectors to his hopes in the two decades following, especially in the face of most of the poetry and fiction written according to the prescrip- tion, and despite the fact that Irving, Hawthorne, and Cooper — even after The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Prairie — would continue to express doubts of the possibility of framing a romance at home, Tudor's views of 1815 with minor qualifications had a remarkably long life, and remain almost intact in William Gilmore Simms' influential essays of the 1840's.
Sociological Treatise, Detective Story, Love Affair: The Film Versions of An American tragedy
Authors: Hayne Barrie
Published: March 2011

The turn of the twentieth century saw the heyday of a new kind of novel, written by the school of so-called naturalists: in Europe, most notably Zola; and, in the United States, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser.1 The maturity of naturalistic fiction and the infancy of film thus coincide: the emphasis placed by the naturalists on documentary detail, on representative characters with the quality of single-dimensional cartoons, and the appeal of these writers to a wide, proletarian audience, link the school of naturalistic novelists more than fortuitously to the emergent new art of cinema. The early filmmakers drew not only upon such proven stage successes as East Lynne and Uncle Tom's Cabin, or upon such immensely popular novels of the preceding age as those of Dickens. They turned as well for material to the contemporary novel; in particular to the naturalistic novel, with its larger than life characters, and its concern with maintaining an element of romance even in the midst of documentary realism (a colloca- tion which the chief American explicator of the genre, Norris, had insisted upon). In addition, to mention only the major directors, Griffith used Norris himself in A Corner in Wheat, DeMille used David Graham Phillips in Old Wives for New, and Stroheim used Norris again in Greed.
The Subjective Intensities of Faulkner's Flags in the Dust
Authors: McSweeney Kerry
Published: March 2011

William Faulkner's third novel was published under the title of Sartoris early in 1929. The novel that Faulkner had actually written — it was finished in the autumn of 1927 — was entitled Flags in the Dust; at the insistence of its first publisher, eleven other firms having turned it down, his agent cut Faulkner's manuscript by almost a fourth, an operation in which the author could not bring himself to participate. The uncut version was finally published in 1973, eleven years after Faulkner's death, and no matter what reservations one may have about the definitiveness of its text, Flags in the Dust must come to take the place of Sartoris in Faulkner's canon not only because it more closely approximates the novel he wrote and wanted to have published, but also because, as Douglas Day says in his introduction to Flags in the Dust, "it is a more complete fictional document of a time and place in history [and] a better introduction to the grand and complex southern world that William Faulkner was to write about until he died."1
Double Jeopardy: Canadians in the American Revolution
Authors: Upton L. F. S.
Published: March 2011

Allan Seymour Everest. Moses Hazen and the Canadian Refugees in the American Revolution. "Published for the New York State American Revolution Bicentennial Commission." Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1976. 217 + xi pp. This book provides more than enough information about Moses Hazen and much less than could be desired about the Canadian refugees in the American Revolution.
The American West: Publishing Minutiae
Authors: Gilliland Marshall
Published: March 2011

Richard Astro. Edward F. Ricketts. 48 pp. (No. 21) David B. Kesterson. Bill Nye: The Western Writings. 48 pp. (No. 22) Charlotte S. McClure. Gertrude Atherton. 47 pp. (No. 23) Robert Gish. Hamlin Garland: The Far West 48 pp. (No. 24) Lucille F. Aly. John G. Neihardt. 48 pp. (No. 25) "Boise State University Western Writers Series." Boise, Idaho: Department of English, 1976. If proof were needed to support the charge that the publishing aspirations of writers and academic institutions in Western America are sometimes concerned with the minutiae of literary culture and confused about that culture these five pamphlets go a long way toward providing it. It is past the time when intelligent judgment should have prevailed in this matter of literary history, and I wonder how long it will be before such judgment is exercised. I am not holding my breath while I wait, and you should not hold yours either, because it will be a long time if the advertised intentions of this sponsoring English Department are fulfilled. The pamphlets published now number twenty-five (or more by the time this essay is printed), thirteen are "in preparation," and at least an additional fifty-three are "forthcoming."
Poe and American Society
Authors: Levine Stuart
Published: March 2011

His works bear no conceivable relation, either external or internal, to the life of any people, and it is impossible to account for them on the basis of any social or intellectual tendencies or as the expression of the spirit of any age. —Joseph Wood Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genious We have for so long taken Edgar Allan Poe as a prime example of the alienated genius or the sensitive artist suffering in a materialistic environment, or-a favorite French literary fantasy—as a writer who should have lived in France, that I feel the need for a very general statement which points out a number of important ways in which the man and his work are unmistakably, unam- biguously of his time and place, which is to say, American, of the 1830's and '40's. Poe is the American author of greatest influence on world literature; his stories are immensely popular, and his poetry, whether or not we feel that it is important (Poe did not—he said that this poems were experiments, and that he had never had the leisure to make himself a better poet), has served several generations of youngsters well as introduction to the possibilities of sound and rhythm. He is, in short, in every way a big figure, and we should learn to be more comfortable with him by understanding his connections to his American environment.
Nineteenth-Century Sexuality and the "Sexual Revolution" of the Progressive Era
Authors: Kushner Howard I.
Published: March 2011

This essay is an attempt to investigate the present state of our historical understanding of sexuality in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the pages that follow, I make no claim to present new evidence about sexuality during this period; rather, my essay does argue that if some of our present assumptions are probed, many of our conclusions about the history of sexual attitudes and practice will be called into question. I propose to suggest that our view of nineteenth-century sexuality has been at least partly distorted. One reason for this is that the vocal demands of physicians and moral reformers for a more rigid sexual ideology have often been used as descriptions of the actual sexual habits and practices of the general population. The assumption that most nineteenth-century Americans were puritanical about sex has led, in turn, to a second confusion: that the increased public discussion of sexual matters in the early twentieth century signalled a "sexual revolution."
Europeans in Hollywood: Success, Failure and Frustration
Authors: Petrie Graham
Published: March 2011

Don Whittemore and Philip Alan Cecchettini. Passport to Hollywood. New York: McGraw Hill, 1976, 558 pp. John Baxter. The Hollywood Exiles. London: Macdonald and Jane's, 1976. 242 pp. Almost from its beginnings, American cinema has been able to lure some of the finest foreign talent—writers, directors, actors and cameramen—to work for it, sometimes (most notably with actors and cameramen) putting their abilities to good use, and just as frequently (especially where writers and directors are concerned) wasting, distorting, frustrating or neglecting the very qualities that brought these figures to the forefront in the first place. For every Lubitsch, Curtiz, Wilder or Hitchcock who adapted quickly to the demands of Hollywood and, in many cases, went on to produce work of high quality, there are two or three Sjostroms, Christensens, Eisensteins or Renoirs who were rarely allowed to work on films that suited their particular creative abilities and who often ended by retiring from Hollywood, baffled, angry and frustrated—in some cases to direct few films, or even none at all, for the remainder of their careers.
Les bases matérielles du discours politique
Authors: Igartua José E.
Published: March 2011

Yves Roby. Les Québécois et les investissements américains (1918-1929). Les cahiers d'histoire de l'Université Laval, no. 20. Québec: les Presses de l'Université Laval, 1976. 252 + vii pp. Lorsque I.D. Andrews, en 1854, voulut convaincre les hommes politiques américains d'accepter un projet de réciprocité commerciale avec les provinces britanniques, il se servit de deux arguments contradictoires. Aux sudistes qui craignaient que l'intégration économique n'amène l'intégration politique et par conséquent ne renforce les positions nordistes au sein de l'Union, il prétendit que l'intégration économique rendrait l'annexion politique super- flue. Quant aux nordistes, il leur laissa entendre que l'intégration économique attirerait tôt ou tard les provinces britanniques dans l'Union.1
Frank Capra: The Art of the Moralist
Authors: Toles George E.
Published: March 2011

Leland A. Poague. The Cinema of Frank Capra: An Approach to Film Comedy. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes and Co., Inc., 1975. 252 pp. Frank Capra: The Man and His Films. Edited by Richard Glatzer and John Raeburn. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1974. 190 + xiv pp. Donald C. Willis. The Films of Frank Capra. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1974. 214 pp. Frank Capra. The Name Above the Title. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971. 513 + xii pp. One of the necessary conditions for the survival of a "classic," and in Frank Kermode's view the most important, is that "we have to want it to survive" and, therefore, "take a great deal of trouble over it," perhaps "out of a kind of instinct for self-preservation."1 When the critic pays homage to a given work, in other words, he may be consciously or unconsciously expressing the hope that the area in himself which the artist has penetrated and entered into secret fellowship with, will be joined somehow to the ongoing life of the "classic." Any classic's life-span, even that of a work as well-established as King Lear, is indeterminate, Kermode goes on to say, and the critic must come to terms with the knowledge that our wanting a treasured thing to endure will not, perhaps in the majority of circumstances, be enough.
Department of Knowledge: The Construction of Sociology
Authors: Ostrander Gilman M.
Published: March 2011

Fred H. Matthews. Quest for an American Sociology: Robert Park and the Chicago School. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1977. 278 + ix pp. In the academic world of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America, the revolt against formalism was accompanied by the entrenchment into disciplines. In an open-ended, relativistic, evolutionary intellectual world, academic scholars sought a measure of order and security in the eompart- mentalization of knowledge, the delimitation of subject matters and the codification of appropriate methodologies. Autonomous departments were not created overnight however. Certain of the early rebels against formalism, such as Sumner, James, Veblen and Dewey, ranged at will beyond the con- fines of a particular department. Furthermore, in the early years, when fledgling university departments were composed of but a few scholars each, interdepartmental collaboration and interchange appear to have happened almost naturally without requiring pressure from deans or negotiations through interdepartmental committees. The long-range tendency was never- theless toward departmental hegemonies over segments of subject matter and toward distinctive methodological approaches to knowledge which served to isolate scholars within their disciplines, even while increasing the sophistica- tion with which they approached their particular areas of study.
The Age Demanded an Image: The Gangster as American
Authors: Golden Daniel
Published: March 2011

Jack Shadoian. Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/ Crime Film. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977. 366 pp. Popular arts have a way of taking the pulse of a nation — witness the bawdy, participatory English music-hall tradition, the anguished recitative of the isolated French chanteuse, the dizzying alterations of lyricism and violence in the Kabuki, the decadent eroticism of the German cabaret. And, in America, the genre movie has, for over fifty years, documented a national obsession in the celebration of fierce individualism. The dogged persistence of a self-made man, who defeats or goes down fighting against social constraint, the "system," is seen almost everywhere—in war films, westerns, gangster movies, even musicals. Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt in From Here to Eternity insists at the cost of his own life that "if a man don't go his own way, he's nothing"; John Wayne as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach is compelled to avenge blood murder and is then permitted to escape across the border, "safe from the blessings of civilization," according to Doc Boone; and in Little Caesar, the narrative unfolds only when Caesar Enrico Bandello seizes the day, boldly heading "back East, where things break big."
Intellectual History and The Bicentennial Americanist
Authors: Martin John Stephen
Published: March 2011

Everett Emerson, ed. American Literature, 1764-1789. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. 301 + xvi pp. Taylor Littleton, ed. A Time to Hear and Answer: Essays for the Bicentennial Season. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1977. 218 + xii pp. Robin W. Winks, ed. Other Voices, Other Views: An International Collection of Essays from the Bicentennial. Westport, Connecticut, and London, England: Greenwood Press, 1978. Contribution in American Studies, No. 34. 428 + vi pp. One of the questions of the Bicentennial Americanist is, how academically rigorous are the investigations of American "roots?" In establishing the Bicen- tennial Commission to oversee a world-wide celebration, Congress wanted a popular approach to American history, one that would re-assure Americans and the world, despite the present funk of spirit, that the United States was on "the right road." And yet there must have been in Congress a number of historians, political scientists and students of literature who might have cautioned the Commission that the nature of recovered ideas was doubtful or that they might contradict what the populace supposed about its daily life. These knowing individuals might have seen that there was perhaps little for the modern American to claim in the past as his roots and that the Bicenten- nial Americanist would have a hard time to read the ideas of the past. Only the approach of the history of ideas could assure a relatively successful season of celebration. This involves a belief that ideas which are articulated correspond to the actualities or at least are reasonable representations of the actualities or documents that the historian examines. Such a view of ideas assumes that they are entities with lives of their own; they stand apart, waiting to be recognized by men and to be invited to take part in their affairs, somewhat as Platonic ideas await the discerning mind. Thus, to go back to the ideas of the founding fathers presumes that those ideas are universally recognized despite language difficulties and that they are valid appraisals of the Revolutionary Era. The purpose of this approach, in sum, is to express what the historian believes is the spirit of the times or a reflection of what was supposedly on people's minds, and there is no doubt permitted that the expression or reflection is valid or useful.
Selected Borrowings: The American Impact upon the Prairie Co-operative Movement, 1920-39
Authors: MacPherson Ian
Published: March 2011

Prairie protest has been a prominent part of Canadian life since Confedera- tion. Over the years it has gone through several stages,1 but beneath the changes has rested a remarkably consistent set of grievances. Indeed, listing the complaints has become something of a refrain for politicians, editorial writers, novelists and academics. High freight rates, excessive bank charges, railway discrimination, indifference in Ottawa, unfavorable tariffs, manipula- tion of natural resources—the list is well known to all students of Prairie regionalism. So too are the movements sparked by some or all of these grievances — the rebellions of 1870 and 1885, the agitation for provincial status, the radical labor movements, the agrarian unrest, the Progressive party, and the new parties of the 1930's.
Reinstating the Old Pieties in Frost Criticism
Authors: Tefs Wayne
Published: March 2011

Richard Poirier. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 322 + xvii pp. "Beloved" is a term that must always be mistrusted when applied to artists, and particularly to poets. Poets are likely to be beloved for only a few of the right reasons, and for almost all the wrong ones: for saying things we want to hear, for furnishing us with an image of ourselves that we enjoy believing in, even for living for a long time in the public eye and pronouncing sagely on current affairs. Robert Frost has been long admired for all these things, and is con- sequently one of the most misread writers in the whole of American literature.
L'Éducation Européenne de Nick Adams
Authors: Asselineau Roger
Published: March 2011

Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin. Ernest Hemingway: l'Éducation Européenne de Nick Adams. Paris: Didier, 1978, 182 pp. Le titre de cette étude critique sur Hemingway résulte, bien entendu, du téléscopage de deux titres connus: L'Éducation européenne de Romain Gary et The Education of Henry Adams. Par une heureuse coïncidence Hemingway a, en effet, donné le nom de Nick Adams, dans ses premiers contes, au jeune héros en qui il s'est projeté, et, puisque l'ensemble de son oeuvre peut être considéré comme un interminable Bildungsroman dont le héros vieillit en même temps que l'auteur, on peut, en jouant sur les mots, et en faisant de tous ses protagonistes des avatars du jeune Nick, estimer que Hemingway a essentiellement écrit à la troisième personne, comme Henry Adams, le récit de son "éducation," dont chaque roman constitue un chapitre.
Youth, the Family and Society
Authors: Vipond Mary
Published: March 2011

Steven L. Schlossman. Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of "Progressive" Juvenile Justice 1825-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. 303 pp. Beatrice Gross and Ronald Gross, eds. The Children's Rights Movement: Overcoming the Oppression of Young People. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977. 390 pp. Paula S. Fass. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 497 pp. In the spring of 1978 many North American newspaper readers probably noticed a brief report emanating from Boulder, Colorado, that a young man, Tom Hansen, aged twenty-five, had just filed suit against his parents for $350,000 damages for what one lawyer called "malpractice in parenting." Although the details were scanty, it seemed that Hansen blamed his continu- ing psychiatric problems on the fact that his parents "reared him improper- ly," "neglecting his needs for clothes, food, shelter and psychiatric support at critical periods in his life."1 The brief item probably gave pause to many of those who read it, not so much because they anticipated similar suits from their own children, but because the very existence of such a case raises some of the questions fundamental to human social organization. What is the mutual responsibility of children and parents within a family? What is the relationship between child, the family and society as represented by the state's legal system? What are the functions of the family? To what extent is the state empowered or obligated to step in when the family is not perform- ing its duties properly? These are by no means easy questions, and different societies have answered them in their own fashions at different times. Indeed, as Steven Schlossman points out in one of the works here being reviewed, a systematic study of the responses of any group to these issues in fact con- stitutes a partial intellectual history of that group, for they are keys not only to the fundamental assumptions of a society, but also to the actual lives of all of its members.
Myth, Melville, and Modernity
Authors: Ketterer David
Published: March 2011

Robert D. Richardson, Jr. Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. 309 + ix pp. Edward H. Rosenberry. Melville. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. 170 + xii pp. Thomas J. Scorza. In the Time Before Steamships: "Billy Budd," the Limits of Politics, and Modernity. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1979. 210 + xli pp. It is peculiarly appropriate that Herman Melville, perhaps the exemplary figure in American literature, should concern himself with the nature of the exemplary (or phenomenal) character in his final work of fiction, Billy Budd. Hence, it may be assumed, the parallel titles of Warner Bertofff's 1960 article, " 'Certain Phenomenal Men': The Example of Billy Budd," and of the fine book which subsequently included that article, The Example of Melville (1962).
The Development of Black Historical Studies in American Higher Education
Authors: Van Deburg William L.
Published: March 2011

There is so much to write about To sing about, to shout about In the Negro race! On each page of history America sees my face— On each page of history We leave a shining trace- On each page of history My race! My race! My race! From Langston Hughes' "A Ballad of Negro History (So Much to Write About)" The origins of Black Historical Studies cannot be defined in terms of exact date and place of founding. The character of early explorations into the black past have much more to do with the spirit and intellectual needs of the Afro-American community than with specific names and affiliations of a formal organizing leadership or an individual "prime mover." Common to all peoples, the deep-seated need to define oneself and one's situation in terms of a "useable past" has moved black Americans to seek out and to assemble the various components of an historical tradition.
The Red Badge and Social Violence: Crane's Myth of His America
Authors: Shulman Robert
Published: March 2011

The Red Badge of Courage is Crane's response to the underlying violence, turmoil and savagery of post-Civil War America. Crane, however, has still not received enough credit for conveying through the war world of his novel the inner meaning of the social, political, racial and economic realities he transformed into the myth of war in The Red Badge. By "the myth of war" I mean the timeless, larger-than-life, suggestive quality that emerges from Crane's dominant imagery of war and fog, from his disorienting irony and failure to provide clear connectives, from his sense of anarchic break- down and uncertainty, and from the savage violence, shifting shapes, and diminished, groping protagonist that together give The Red Badge its dis- tinguishing energy. This configuration constitutes a "myth" in the sense that it embodies a dominant imagery and set of emotionally charged attitudes that express the meaning of life not only for the author but also for a significant number of others in his culture.1