bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Old Republic in the West
Authors: Hanyan Craig
Published: March 2011

Daniel Feller. The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. 264 + xvi pp. Dan L. Flores, ed. Jefferson and Southwestern Exploration: The Freeman and Custis Accounts of the Red River Expedition of 1806. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984.386 + xx pp. Thelma S. Guild and Harvey L. Carter. Kit Carson: A Pattern for Heroes. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.367 + xii pp. Polly Welts Kaufman, ed. Women Teachers on the Frontier. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984.270 + xxiii pp. James P. Ronda. Lewis and Clark among the Indians. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. 310 + xv pp. Two decades ago William H. Goetzmann, in Exploration and Empire, provided us with an examination of the reconnaissance of the American Far West. Early in that many-faced monograph, he briefly traced the rovings of Peter Skene Ogden through the distant mountain and basin regions of the United States. Ogden had been sent by the Hudson's Bay Company to create a "fur desert" that would seal out American traders. He failed to do that but, finding the Humboldt River and probing southward to the Gulf of California, he accomplished feats of trail blazing. Ogden had carried the frontier of British North America down to the region of the Gila River.
Thoreau's Psychology
Authors: Harvey Roderick W.
Published: March 2011

John Hildebilde. Thoreau: A Naturalist's Liberty. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. 174 + viii pp. Samuel Arthur Jones. Thoreau Amongst Friends and Philistines and Other Thoreauviana. Edited by George Hendrick. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982. 241 + xxvi pp. Richard Lebeaux. Thoreau's Seasons. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.410 + xviii pp. Jerome Loving. Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982. 220 + xii pp. Henry D. Thoreau. The Illustrated A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. With Photographs from the Gleason Collection. Edited by Carle F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.415 + xxxvi pp. In his chapter in Walden called "Reading," Thoreau comments: "To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem."1 Whether he would have been gratified by the plethora of critical studies of his own work, however, is another question. Since Thoreau is now a cultural as well as a literary figure, critics of recent years have not been reluctant to offer new interpretations of his life and thought in the light of changing critical fashions. A look at the evolution of fairly recent criticism on Thoreau will bring us to the books that are the subject of this review. Ten years ago much of this criticism either viewed Thoreau as a Transcendentalist or simply related his philosophy to the landscape he described so well. In Thoreau and Whitman: A Study of their Esthetics (1968), Charles R. Metzger explored links with both Whitman and Emerson, a technique used by many of the older Thoreau critics and recently found in Jerome Loving's Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse, a book I cannot recommend because of its confusing organization and lack of attention to any single figure. The romantic Thoreau, the writer who found unity between thought and landscape, is well presented in James Mcintosh's Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Shifting Stance Toward Nature (1974). Recent criticism of Thoreau tends to be psychologically oriented, though the more conventional biographers still prefer to view the Journals as representations of a fairly stable inner life.
America's War of National Unification— New Perspectives?
Authors: Shore Laurence
Published: March 2011

John Barnwell. Love of Order: South Carolina's First Secession Crisis. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982. 258 + x pp. Paul H. Bergeron. Antebellum Politics in Tennessee. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982. 208 + xii pp. Richard M. McMurray. John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982. 239 + xi pp. James M. McPherson. Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.694 + 1 pp. Phillip Shaw Paludan. Victims: A True Story of the Civil War. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981.144 + xvi pp. George C. Rable. But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984. 257 + xiii pp. Henry Adams worried about his ability to write "drama with what is essentially undramatic" when he set about the task of composing his autobiography. Readers of The Education know that he had little reason to worry. Adams' skills as a historian enabled to him to recreate vividly a nineteenth-century American consciousness struggling to come to terms with modernity. But modern historians of the central event of Adams' nineteenth-century world -the Civil War—have good reason to ponder the converse of Adams' con- cern: can they prevent themselves from making the dramatic undramatic?
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Modernization and Tradition, 1870-1920
Authors: Macleod David
Published: March 2011

LeRoy Ashby. Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children, 1890-1917. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.313 + xiii pp. William J. Breen. Uncle Sam at Home: Civilian Mobilization, Wartime Federalism, and the Council of National Defense, 1917-1919. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. 279 + xvii pp. Sean Dennis Cashman. America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: New York University Press, 1984.370 + xiv pp. Donald J. Mrozek. Sport and American Mentality, 1880-1910. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983. 284 + xx pp. Michael Pearlman. To Make Democracy Safe for America: Patricians and Preparedness in the Progressive Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.297 + ix pp. John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983. 399 + xi pp. Edward Wagenknecht. American Profile, 1900-1909. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.365 + ix pp. When facing an examination in U.S. history, I was always relieved to read a nice, broad question such as this: "Were innovators, organizers, social critics and reformers of the period 1870-1920 primarily nostalgic or forward-looking?" Confronted with seven books as disparate as these, I have to imagine myself answering such a question.
American Poetics of Self and History
Authors: Reibetanz Julia M.
Published: March 2011

Charles Altieri. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 237 pp. Stephen Fredman. Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.173 pp. Joseph G. Kronick. American Poetics of History: From Emerson to the Moderns. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.302 pp. These three books present very distinctive accounts of an enduring problem for American writers: the necessity to relate the creative self to a culture as vast and contradictory as America itself, to develop forms "at once sufficiently expansive and fractured to contain their experience as Americans,"1 and to interpret the past and include a historical dimension in an art that lives in the present moment, remaining essentially unfinished. In his earlier study of the problem, Cary Nelson centers upon what he calls "open form poetry," studying the work of Roethke, Kinnell, Duncan, Rich and Merwin, and arguing a progressive deterioration in the ability of their open forms to survive the subverting pressure of the nation's history, language and culture. His conclusion is apprehensive: contemporary poets are doomed with Merwin to be poets of "irresolution," announcing the "dissolution of language" in a form "that ruthlessly deconstructs its own accomplishments."2
Melville's White-Jacket: Sovereignty in the American Polity of Displacement
Authors: de Paul Stephen
Published: March 2011

Herman Melville the man was a democrat given to patrician nostalgia for an American aristocracy. Melville the writer entered into a grammar of the American political culture which disclosed the structural origins of these mixed aspirations. White-Jacket (1850), his allegorical documentary fiction chronicling the abuses committed aboard ships of the U.S. Navy, uses the metaphor of the ship of state as a means to uncover the hidden structures of America's complex relationship to the Old World. The novel illustrates, better than any other fiction Melville wrote, how the America of 1850, though independent, was still ensnared in a historical process belonging to European culture. Melville's narrator-protagonist, White-Jacket, becomes the hybrid representative of a nation which was itself a liminalized political space caught between the historical traditions of the Old World and the typological destiny of the New. Beneath the surface of Melville's allegory lie the deep structures of an America expressing itself in discordant languages of self-realization.1 'Evert Duyckinck, among Mellville's early readers, struck closest to the underlying concern of White-Jacket in his review for The Literary World. He saw in the metaphorical thrust of the "world in a man-of-war" an underlying principle of fragmentation. Beyond the separation of the ship's all-male crew from women, Duyckinck perceived in Melville's new novel a "divorce" of greater implication: "The man-of-war is divorced from civilization,—and we will not repeat the stale phrase, from the progress of humanity,—but from humanity itself. How thus divorced, through all the windings and intricacies of the artificial system White-Jacket will show."2 Both Duyckinck's observation and Melville's metaphor of the ship of state are acutely American. For precisely what constitutes the divorce, the break-away from "civilization," and how it occurs in history are factors that inspired Melville to construct a version of the American polis. The Neversink is the political anatomy of a culture which in 1850 retained at its center the paradoxical tension between a historical society of severed ties and a typological destiny of restored human harmony.
Recreating the Social Contract: James Dickey's Deliverance
Authors: Redenius Charles M.
Published: March 2011

As with most good novels, Deliverance can be read at several different levels -as a harrowing adventure story, as a gripping account of the violent encounter between citified individuals and primitive, rural folk, as a searing look at group dynamics in a stressful situation, and several more that come readily to mind. Such a work can be enjoyed by audiences with widely differing interests. The multiple layers of Dickey's novel have, consequently, been the subject of numerous articles by scholars and critics.
"History's Heavy Attrition": Literature, Historical Consciousness and the Impact of Vietnam1
Authors: Wright Robert A.
Published: March 2011

In America's bicentennial year, Friendly Fire author C.D.B. Bryan lamented that "there just haven't been many books written by Vietnam vets about their experiences over there. I suspect this might have less to do with their inability to achieve the objectivity necessary to come to grips with experiences in that war than it does with the fact that the Norman Mailers and Thomas Heggers who were capable of writing the Vietnam era's equivalent to a Naked and the Dead or a Mister Rogers were also capable of avoiding the draft."2 Apart from Bryan's exaggeration of the mediocrity of Vietnam literature a decade ago, for which he was rebuked by more than one indignant vet-turned-author, both the quantity and the quality of published novels, poetry, personal narratives and oral histories have lately elevated fictional and quasi-fictional writing on the American war in Vietnam to the level of a genre.3 The literature inspired by a generation of involvement in Indochina has spawned a significant, though not overwhelming, number of academic specialists and university courses; moreover, scholarly attention to this body of writing has begun to transcend the confines of literary criticism, branching off into the sophisticated realm of cultural, political and historical analysis. With more than 300 novels now in print, a steadily widening audience for this kind of writing, and the major American publishing houses reporting expanded printing schedules for Vietnam-related paperbacks, this awakening interest shows no sign of abating.
Carnival and Jeremiad: Mailer's The Armies of the Night
Authors: Mierau Maurice A.
Published: March 2011

"I'm not so sure I want a revolution," said Norman Mailer less than four months after the completion of The Armies of the Night, "some of those kids are awfully dumb."1 Mailer's ambivalences, evasions and self-deceptions about his role as a political prophet have rarely been as cogently expressed. These ambivalences, however, exist as much in Mailer's "nonfiction novel" as they do in his casual remarks, and they are evidence of a consistent failure in Armies of the political in favor of the mythic and the esthetic. Andrew Gordon, commenting on the book, proposes that "form is, among other things, a system of defense," and he goes on to cite Mas'ud Zavarzadeh's belief that the form Mailer's "defense" takes is a kind of literary "schizophrenia."2 If, as Robert Merrill claims, Armies is indeed a "powerful synthesis of Mailer's artistic and prophetic ambitions,"3 formal "schizophrenia" should not be any part of it. Yet it is apparent that any "nonfiction novel" is at odds with itself in ways that contradict grandiose ambitions on the part of its author; thus Gordon perceptively entitles his chapter on Armies "Mailer vs. Mailer" (p. 186).
Early U.S. History Firsthand
Authors: Schultz G.A.
Published: March 2011

Robert H. Elias and Eugene D, Finch, eds. Letters of Thomas Atwood Digges, 1742-1821. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1982.666 + Ixxxiv pp. Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, eds. Lydia Maria Child Selected Letters, 1817-1880. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. 383 + xviii pp. Lillian B. Miller, ed. The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family. Volume I.- Charles Willson Peale: Artist in Revolutionary America, 1735-1791. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.673 + liii pp. Robert Seager, II, ed. The Papers of Henry Clay. Volume 7: Secretary of State, January 1, 1828 -March 4, 1829. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982. Ill + xi pp. A common lament of historians is that outsiders too often define their craft for them. In the popular mind their job is seen as "stating the facts," implying that facts somehow speak for themselves. The wounds are largely self-inflicted. Too many historians are satisfied to record vital statistics or survey often- repeated generalizations. The briefer the survey, the easier to assume splendid detachment. In broad sweeps they chart the rise and fall of civilizations, the clash of classes and the achievements of the great. These then are set in stone as the facts of history.
Whitman's Life and Art: The Precarious Boundary
Authors: Babington Douglas
Published: March 2011

Dennis Berthold and Kenneth M. Price, eds. Dear Brother Walt: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1984. 202 + xxxvii pp. C. Carroll Hollis. Language and Style in "Leaves of Grass. "Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. 277 + xiii pp. Paul Zweig. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984.372 + xi pp. In the first chapter of Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway offers crucial advice to himself and to all other conscientious witnesses of life and death: "If they sense the meaning and end of the whole thing even when they know nothing about it; feel that this thing they do not understand is going on, the business of the horses is nothing more than an incident."1 The context of this statement is a defense of bullfighting, which—as ritual—must not, he believes, be viewed fragmentarily ; rather, the goring of picadors' horses must be subordinated to the deadly confrontation between man and bull. Heming- way's statement aligns strikingly with David Lodge's definition of metonymy: "representing the whole by parts, parts which are contiguous (because they belong to a larger complex of phenomena taking place at the same time) rather than similar."2 The metonymic stylist—inductive, syntagmatic, denotative, prosaic—is finely represented by both Hemingway and his self-acknowledged mentor, Mark Twain, either of whom discovers meaning through the artful accumulation—or conjunction—of vivid images and incidents.
The Changing Fictional Images of Women on the North American Landscape
Authors: Hlus Carolyn
Published: March 2011

Carol Fairbanks and Sara Brooks Sundberg. Farm Women on the Prairie Frontier: A Sourcebook for Canada and the United States. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1983. 251 + xiii pp. Mary Kelley. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.409 +xx pp. Annette Kolodny. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.293 + xix pp. The dearth in the traditional literary canon of literature by women and, subsequently, of feminist criticism and analysis is slowly being rectified. These three books fill gaps in specific areas of feminist literary criticism. By entertaining specific aspects of clearly-defined types of fiction by women, they prove that feminist analysis is transcending its earlier tendency to make general statements about women's fiction. Farm Women on the Prairie Frontier is concerned with the relationship between women's fictional and real approaches and adaptations to the North American grasslands. It circumscribes a particular geographical area of the United States and Canada, and analyzes the literature by women generated in that area. Private Woman, Public Stage explores the fiction of twelve women writers labeled by Mary Kelley as "literary domestics," who, beginning in the 1820s and, in some cases, lasting into the twentieth century, became best selling American authors. Kelley explores the paradoxical roles of women writers who were publicly working in a realm dominated by men while privately struggling like all women for independence, self-esteem and power. In Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her the area of investigation is again limited and particular. Exploring various literary materials—fiction, letters and diaries written by women between 1630 and 1860—Kolodny searches for a common denominator in female responses to the landscape, in particular to the developing frontier.
La Synarchie impériale : les Etats-Unis depuis la Grande Guerre
Authors: Ricard Serge
Published: March 2011

Georges-Albert Astre et Pierre Lépinasse. La Démocratie contrariée: les lobbies et le jeu des pouvoirs aux Etats-Unis. Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1985.251 pp. Fred V. Carstensen. American Enterprise in Foreign Markets: Studies of Singer and International Harvester in Imperial Russia. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. 289 + vii pp. Frank Costigliola. Awkward Dominion : American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-1933. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984.379 pp. Barry D. Karl. The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945. Chicago and London : The University of Chicago Press, 1983. 257 + x pp. Une tragique répétition de l'histoire aura permis aux Etats-Unis d'affirmer, en l'espace d'une génération, une suprématie aujourd'hui planétaire. De la révolution à l'empire...On ne peut que s'interroger sur l'étonnant parcours des héritiers de 1776, sur le destin de ce Nouveau Monde qui s'est voulu héraut et artisan d'un monde nouveau. Quatre publications récentes remettent l'Amérique en perspective et nous aident à mieux comprendre son chemine- ment de l'incertitude à l'insolence.
Books on Pound from University Microfilms International
Authors: Adams Stephen J.
Published: March 2011

Jo Brantley Berryman. Circe's Craft: Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. " Ann Arbor: UMI, 1983. Guy Davenport. Cities on Hills: 4 Study of I-XXX of Ezra Pound's Cantos. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1983 Peter D'Epiro. A Touch of Rhetoric: Ezra Pound's Malatesta Cantos. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1983. Ron Thomas. The Latin Masks of Ezra Pound. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1983. The UMI series has rapidly become familiar to students of modern literature. We can be grateful for a publishing venture that will release doctoral dissertations to public view in book form. We may grumble about the price tags, but we are grateful. These books represent, presumably, the best work on Pound by younger academics. In this case, however, the buyer is warned to be selective, for these four books, presented with the blessings of series editor A. Walton Litz and Pound consultant George Bornstein, are an uneven lot.
Constitutional Biorhythms
Authors: Gibson Dale
Published: March 2011

Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek. Equal Justice Under Law: Constitutional Development 1835-1875. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. 571 + xv pp. William R. McKercher, ed. The U.S. Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Toronto: Ontario Economic Council, 1983. 270 pp. Arthur Selwyn Miller. Toward Increased Judicial Activism: The Political Role of the Supreme Court. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. 355 + xii pp. Speaking about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to an audience of lawyers in Edmonton early in 1985, Chief Justice Brian Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada commented on the usefulness of American judicial decisions to courts faced with the task of interpreting the Canadian Charter. Counsel should not hesitate to refer to American material, he said, but courts must use the material cautiously and selectively. "[W]e can learn," he pointed out, "not only the positive points, but also from the errors which have been made....[W]e must be alert, in selecting from that jurisprudence, to the many fundamental differences between the American Constitution and American values, and our own Constitution and our values."1
The Body Eclectic: Recent Science-Fiction Studies
Authors: Petty Christopher
Published: March 2011

Thomas D. Clareson, comp. Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.305 + xiv pp. Richard D. Erlich and Thomas P. Dunn, eds. Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in Science Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. 369 + xiii pp. Richard D. Erlich and Thomas P. Dunn, eds. The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. 284 + xiv pp. David Ketterer, ed. The Science Fiction of Mark Twain. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984.385 + xxxiii pp. Seth McEvoy. Samuel R. Delany. New York: Ungar, 1984.142 + x pp. Only an academic Rip Van Winkle could be surprised by the degree to which, in the past twenty-five years, science fiction has shoehorned its way into the offerings of most English departments and, simultaneously, into a position of academic respectability. If there are dissenting voices, they are quieter than they used to be, and one may hope that in this more relaxed atmosphere teachers and scholars will continue to ignore the supposed utility of science fiction and to assert its artistic strengths— in other words, to treat it more like "mainstream" fiction. Certainly the flood of bibliographies, indexes, reader's guides and even concordances in recent years suggests that this transformative process is well under way. The five books under review represent something of the range of scholarship and criticism which has changed science fiction from one of the cottage industries of the academic world into a major literary corporation. One of these books is a guide to materials in one section of the field, two are thematically-arranged collections of critical essays, one is a compendium of primary material, and one is a critique.
Art, Myth and Ritual in Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness
Authors: Valdine Clemens Anna
Published: March 2011

Critical discussions of Ursula K. Le Guin's novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, fall generally into three main areas of emphasis: political, feminist/political and anthropological. Although these are all certainly legitimate approaches, unfortunately little attention has been paid to the important issue of the work's implications in terms of archetypal, psychological and literary theory. Politically-oriented critics generally confine themselves to a historical framework and so miss the contrast Le Guin draws between historic and pre-historic cultures in her argument against totalitarianism; they also tend to neglect her affirmation of the subversive potential of ritual and art.1 Feminist critics either minimize, denigrate or wholly ignore the implications of the archetypal content of LED for the women's movement that was gaining momentum when the book was first published in 1969; they also too frequently assume that science fiction should be overtly prescriptive, and consequently fail to recognize Le Guin's ironic intent in her presentation of a protagonist with an excessively masculine point of view.2 Critics who do focus on myth and ritual usually limit their argument by using either a sociological/anthro- pological frame of reference or paradigms from Eastern religious practices, which exclude consideration of the significance of matriarchal culture in LHD and of the idea that art itself can be seen as a form of ritual with therapeutic potential3—both issues which I hope to demonstrate are central concerns in Le Guin's work.
The Will to Transcendence in Contemporary American Poet, Ai
Authors: Wilson Rob
Published: March 2011

I came not to astonish But to destroy you. Your Jug of cool water? Your Hanker after wings? Your Lech for transcendence? — Galway Kinnell, "The Supper After the Last" There is a famous dialectical analysis of the American "lech for transcendence" by Kenneth Burke called "I, Eye, Ay—Concerning Emerson's Early Essay on 'Nature' and the Machinery of Transcendence." Burke's impacted pun of a title suggests the way sublime-hungry Emerson's ego, his first-person /, is changed through the self-transcending vision of the imaginative eyeball, his eye, into a sustained cry of cosmic affirmation, an ay.1
Use and Misuse of the Slave Community Paradigm
Authors: Lachance Paul
Published: March 2011

John Boles. Black Southerners, 1619-1869. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983.244 + xii pp. Walter J. Fraser, Jr., and Winfred B. Moore, Jr., eds. The Southern Enigma: Essays on Race, Class, and Folk Culture. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. 240 + vi pp. Philip Foner. History of Black Americans. Volume II: From the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. 656 + viii pp. Philip Foner. History of Black Americans. Volume III: From the Compromise of 1850 to the End of the Civil War. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. 539 + viii pp. Michael Wayne. The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860-1880. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1983. 226 + xii pp. The concept of the slave community underlies a fundamental reorientation of the history of slavery in the United States South. Attention has shifted from the impact of slavery on blacks to their response to enslavement, and from the master-slave relation to the relationships among slaves themselves. However many blacks may have played the role of Sambo in the presence of whites, American slaves are now often said to have led an autonomous cultural and family life among their own kind.1
The Search for a Modus Vivendi between Amerindians and Euro-North Americans
Authors: Dickason Olive Patricia
Published: March 2011

R. David Edmunds. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.260 + xii pp. R. David Edmunds. Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Boston: Little Brown, 1984. 246 + viii pp. Isabel Thompson Kelsay. Joseph Brant 1743-1807, Man of Two Worlds. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984.775 + xii pp. L.G. Moses. The Indian Man. A Biography of James Mooney. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984, 293 + xvii pp. Raymond Wilson. Ohiyesa: Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. 219 + xii pp. The underlying "reality" of the confrontation between the civilization of the Americas and that of Western Europe is not easy to identify. The confrontation itself was diffused through time and space, occurring during the course of at least a millennium between countless individuals and myriads of places scattered throughout the Western Hemisphere. Each incident was as individual as the geography, circumstances and persons involved combined to make it. Yet considered together and in context, these separate incidents coalesce to form larger interlocking patterns, which in turn recombine into still larger patterns, until the characters of the civilizations themselves appear. In the final analysis, while each encounter was between individuals, it was the two civilizations they represented which largely determined the course of events. This phenomenon is illustrated, in encapsulated form, in the biographies being considered here. All five subjects, four from Amerindian stock and one the son of Irish immigrants, are well known to ethnohistorians, and came from regions which today are included in the United States. They lived out their days within a two-hundred-year span, from the 1740s until the 1940s, a period which saw the submergence of Amerindian societies, sometimes begun by conquest, but always completed by the flood of European immigration. Each of the five men was concerned, albeit in a different way, with the consequences of the European takeover of the Americas. For them, identifying common ground between their different societies proved to be difficult enough; strategies utilizing those commonalities to arrive at a reasonably satisfactory modus vivendi were positively elusive.
Writing Female
Authors: McLay Catherine
Published: March 2011

Willa Cather. The Troll Garden: A Definitive Edition. Edited by James Woodress. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.173 pp. Joan Crane. Willa Cather: A Bibliography. Foreword by Frederick B. Adams. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.412 pp. Linda Huf. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature. New York: Ungar, 1983.192 pp. Helen Winter Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowski, eds. Women and Western American Literature. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1982. 331 pp. The past two decades have been significant in the development of Women's Studies in North America. Scholars have been re-examining our past, retelling history to recognize the valuable and unique contributions of our foremothers to our present society. Others have been looking at patterns in literature and the roles that women play as both protagonists and supporting characters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Still others are turning back to the best female writers, and reassessing their work in the light of contemporary findings. Of the four books reviewed here, three are dedicated to Virginia Faulkner and Bernice Slote for their pioneering work on the West and women's literature. As the editors of Women and Western American Literature remark: "[their] work reminds us of the excellence we strive towards."
Dionysus in Dixie: Studies in Southern Modernism
Authors: Royden Winchell Mark
Published: March 2011

Ashley Brown and Frances Neel Cheney, eds. The Poetry Reviews of Allen Tate, 1924-1944. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. 214 + xii pp. Robert S. Dupree. Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. 247 + xv pp. Walter B. Edgar, ed. A Southern Renascence Man: Views of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. 116 + xiv pp. Rose Ann C. Fraistat. Caroline Gordon as Novelist and Woman of Letters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. 181 pp. James A. Grimshaw, Jr., ed. Robert Penn Warren's "Brother to Dragons": A Discussion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. 309 pp. Katherine Snipes. Robert Penn Warren. New York: Ungar, 1984. 195 + xi pp. Sally Wood, ed. Foreword by Andrew Lytle. The Southern Mandarins: Letters of Caroline Gordon to Sally Wood, 1924-1937. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. 218 + xx pp. According to Virginia Woolf, "in or about December, 1910, human character changed."1 Whether or not Woolf is correct, there can be little doubt that in the early years of this century many intellectuals felt the historical and metaphysical discontinuity to be greater than at any time since the rise of Christianity. With the sort of generational arrogance that comes with such an attitude, the artists of this era spoke of an esthetic "modernism." (As one might expect, this movement has been supplanted by "post-modernism," which will no doubt give way to even more revolutionary innovations—say, new wave or punk lit.) As dated as the term may seem, we are stuck with modernism to refer to the literary angst of the World War I era. When this angst afflicted such a traditional society as the American South, the melancholy was predictably greater and the response more desperate than in the more cosmopolitan outposts of the waste land.
Advances on Chaos: The Poetry and Esthetics of Stevens, Williams and Winters
Authors: Whalen Terry
Published: March 2011

Dick Davis. Wisdom and Wilderness: The Achievement of Yvor Winters. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1983. 244 + xi pp. David M. La Guardia. Advance on Chaos: The Sanctifying Imagination of Wallace Stevens. Hanover: University Press of New England. 1983,192 + xiii pp. Grosvenor Powell. Yvor Winters: An Annotated Bibliography 1919-I982. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1983. 202 + vii pp. Henry M. Sayre. The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.152 pp. Leonora Woodman. Stanza My Stone: Wallace Stevens and the Hermetic Tradition. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1983. 195 + x pp. "[W]e are new men...not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark."1 These words of Ralph Waldo Emerson's are more confident than the words of twentieth- century writers, but they at least capture the hope and the aim of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Yvor Winters—as that aim is understood by the studies listed above.
Ezra Pound: Poetry and Politics
Authors: Smith Douglas
Published: March 2011

David Anderson, ed. Pound's Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes and Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 297 + xxxvi pp. Daniel Hoffman, ed. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. 247 + xx pp. E. Fuller Torrey, M.D. The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984. 339 + xx pp. These three books testify to the continuing growth of Pound studies, and two of the three suggest that if readers are going to consider the poet's work at all, they must consider it in the light of his politics. E. Fuller Torrey, for example, begins his book on Pound's controversial incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital with the bold assertion that "recent release of files in the [U.S.] Department of Justice... has made it possible to understand Ezra Pound"; he also claims that an understanding of the man "in turn permits an understanding of his poetry, for the man and the poems are one" (p. xix). That one can truly "understand" any author, let alone one as complex as Ezra Pound, and thus "understand" his poetry, is a claim that sees very little literary sophistication in its making; a mere undergraduate's passing familiarity with the biographical fallacy would suggest as much, while a more finely tuned critical sensibility might regard a statement such as "the man and his poems are one" as particularly irresponsible and foolish, especially when applied to a poet whose oeuvre stresses objectivity and includes a book called Personae.
THE AMERICAN DREAM HOUSES OF ANDREW JACKSON DOWNING
Authors: Conron John
Published: March 2011

I The books of Andrew Jackson Downing have fared better than his houses and gardens, and it is the books which allow us—now that modernist fervor against a 'literary' architecture has abated—not only to reconstruct his work, but also to read it. Downing's books imbue American picturesque architecture with a multiplicity of meanings and nest it in a multiplicity of nineteenth-century contexts.
"A Separate Intention of the Eye": Luminist Eternity in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Authors: Radaker Kevin
Published: March 2011

In 1851, two years after the publication of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau wrote the following sentence in its defense: "I trust that it does not smell [so much] of the study and library, even of the poet's attic, as of the fields and woods; that it is...[an] unroofed book, lying open under the ether and permeated by it."1 To be sure, this journal entry is partly a response to critics like James Russell Lowell, who objected to the digressive "snags" of the travel narrative.2 But it is also a key to how Thoreau read his own text. Despite the book's many speculative and critical essays, its poems and anecdotes, Thoreau would have his readers realize how his experiences in nature, his life under the open sky, informs the text as a whole. More specifically, his assertion that >4 Week is "permeated" by the ether strongly suggests the importance of those landscape passages where the light of the ether, or sky, brings revelation. As several modern critics have noted, A Week represents Thoreau's boldest attempt to merge the real and the ideal and to recognize the divine qualities of both body and mind.3 These two concerns (and others) govern the light-filled landscape descriptions, where Thoreau suggests what is to be "seen" in this world and how we are to "see" it. In so doing, he presents several verbal landscapes that strikingly resemble the landscapes of the luminist painters. Though the complexity of Thoreau's vision of nature is not to be realized through the luminist vision only,4 luminism does indeed play a significant role in this most transcendental of Thoreau's works, especially in the development of his thoughts on time and eternity. In short, Thoreau's landscape passages, like the luminist paintings, focus on our powers of perception, on our ability to perceive truth here and now.
REALITY AND ILLUSION IN THE WEST
Authors: Bold Christine
Published: March 2011

Richard E. Lingenfelter. Death Valley and the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1986. viii + 664 pp. Illus. Carol Fairbanks, Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. xi + 300 pp. Illus. Will Baker. Mountain Blood. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. xi + 175 pp. Illus. Richard Batman. James Pattie's West: The Dream and the Reality. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. xii + 378 pp. Illus. Joseph C. Porter. Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and his American West. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. xviii + 362 pp. Illus. In the last tale of Will Baker's Mountain Blood, the narrator crawls through a tunnel deep into a mountain, pursuing a thin vein of gold. His guide is a Mexican miner who is reworking an old site abandoned long ago by the Spanish. Within the story, the incident clearly functions as a metaphor for the writer's attempt to rework the subject of the West from a new perspective, and so expose hidden nuggets of meaning. Not all the authors under discussion use this metaphor, but it applies to all their endeavours. Often by means of prodigious research, these five works mine different regions for stories, images or characters which were previously unknown or misunderstood. In the process, they all tap a familiar vein: the amalgamation of reality and illusion in the West.
CITIES AND SUBURBS, AT HOME AND ABROAD
Authors: Olsen Donald J.
Published: March 2011

Andrew Lees. Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820-1940. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. xi + 360 pp. Illus. M. Christine Boyer. Manhattan Manners: Architecture and Style, 1850-1900. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. vi + 258 pp. Illus. Kenneth T. Jackson.. Crab grass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. xi +396 pp. To the occasional visitor from outer space, the changes over the past two centuries in the number, size, structure, and aspect of the great cities of this planet must be a subject for wonder and comment. But if he has troubled to read much in the literature on such phenomena, he will have had his patience abused more than his curiosity satisfied. Not the least of the evils of the modern city is the banality it has tended to elicit from those who have written about it.
the built environment and the shaped landscape
Authors: O'Dea Shane
Published: March 2011

Walter L. Creese. The Crowning of the American Landscape: Eight Great Spaces and. Their Buildings. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986. xi + 289 pp. Illus. Phoebe Cutler. The Public Landscape of the New Deal. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. xiv + 182 pp. Anne Vernez Moudon. Built for Change: Neighbourhood Architecture in San Francisco. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986. xix + 286 pp. Illus. Marvin Trachtenberg. The Statue of Liberty: The Centenary of a Classic History and Guide. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986 (rev.) 230 pp. Illus. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, eds. Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia, 1986. xxiv + 529 pp. Illus. It is an irony of man's existence that the more he becomes attuned to the landscape and the more he becomes aesthetically sensitive to it, the more removed he becomes from his own kind. He who lives in the fields, the woods, the town or on the water and who is totally absorbed in his work—in the sense that there is little time for leisure—seldom analyses the nature of the environ- ment about him: it has a form and a function and that is all that is necessary. The man who attains leisure steps back from mere form and mere function to assess the whole of what is around him. In so doing he places a greater value on it, or on certain aspects of it, shapes it to his fancy and builds his house within it. These acts are done partially to distinguish him from his fellows, to set himself apart from them; but more than that, in the act of acquiring the land and reshaping it, of putting upon it his house or building, he puts a barrier between himself and his neighbours and seeks privacy from them. This is explicitly pointed out by James Borchert in his essay on the city of Washington (Common Places) where the alleys—when occupied by poor black families—were open common ground but since they have been occupied by young professional whites are now more closed. The appearance of the alleys and their physical environment has been improved with paint and plantings, but the old open social environment has been lost in the process.
PAINTING THE BIG PICTURE: SYNTHESES OF URBAN HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT
Authors: Daniels Bruce C.
Published: March 2011

Kenneth Fox. Metropolitan America: Urban Life and Urban Policy in the Unites States, 1940-1980. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 1986. xiii + 264 pp. Michael A. Goldberg and John Mercer. The Myth of the North American City: Continentalism Challenged. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986. xx + 308 pp. Jon C. Teaford. The Twentieth-Century American City: Problem, Promise and Reality. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. x + 177 pp. Cotton Mather, George Bancroft and Francis Parkman betrayed no intellectual diffidence when painting their versions of the big picture of American history. With an eye for both detail and panorama, they filled their canvases with unhesitant brush-strokes and created strong, clear portraits. Mather left us a picture of the New Israel, Bancroft of the flowering of democracy, and Parkman of the struggle among European nations to control North America. All three pictures have faded with time, but in their own times they were bright enough to command the attention of all who chose to look. Some viewed them with awe, some with anger: the contempt of their critics attests to their influence as much as the praise of their admirers.
the beaux-arts and the cultural geography of the american city
Authors: de Fort-Menares Anne Murray
Published: March 2011

Mardges Bacon. Ernest Flagg: Beaux-Arts Architect and Urban Reformer. The Architectural History Foundation, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986. xiii + 405 pp. Illus. Susan R. Stein, ed. The Architecture of Richard Morris Hunt. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. xiv + 192 pp. Illus. Richard Morris Hunt and Ernest Flagg were two architects at far poles of the nineteenth-century spectrum. Hunt was prominent, successful, conservative, and a leading member of the eastern design Establishment. Flagg was ostracized by the profession until the end of his career and pursued important but pragmatic development issues. Hunt's reputation is popularly associated with the frothy residences he concocted for the Vanderbilts and Astors on Manhattan and Rhode Island, most notoriously the spectacular Biltmore in North Carolina. While not so well known, the most important of Flagg's commissions, such as the Scribner and Singer buildings in New York, have been regarded more seriously by historians and architects as works indicating a progressive, 'modern' sensibility.
THE 'AMERICANNESS' OF AMERICAN ART
Authors: Cheetham Mark A.
Published: March 2011

Helen A. Cooper. Winslow Homer Watercolors. New Haven: Yale University Press for the National Gallery of Art, 1986. 259 pp. Ulus. Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley. The Paintings of Benjamin West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. 600 pp. Illus. Winslow Homer's name is synonymous with images of American life in the later nineteenth century: his large oil paintings of the Civil War and his genre pictures of contemporary events brought him fame and remain his best known works, but as Helen Cooper's book makes clear, his numerous watercolours are at least equally important to our assessment of Homer's aesthetic innova- tions and merit. Benjamin West's career began almost exactly a century before Homer's and he was if anything even more successful. Because of the importance of the artists, then, these books are significant individually. At the same time, the differences between West and Homer mirror the cultural growth of the United States and the question of their 'Americaness' makes a com- parison fruitful.