bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Dilemma of American Political Parties
Authors: Waller Harold M.
Published: March 2011

Ralph M. Goldman. Search for Consensus : The Story of the Democratic Party. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979.417 + xi pp. Paul Kleppner. The Third Electoral System, 1853-1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 424 + xxii pp. Allan J. Lichtman. Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 366 + xiii pp. Larry Sabato. The Democratic Party Primary in Virginia: Tantamount to Election No Longer. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1977. 169 + xii pp. It is widely agreed that the present state of American political parties is a sorry one indeed. The two party system has persisted, but appears to be very weak. Voter turnout is declining, citizen apathy is on the increase, more and more people are willing to identify themselves as independents, and two of the last four presidential elections involved significant independent candidacies. A venerable party system, determined by some to be in the fifth (perhaps sixth) phase of an historical process that began nearly two centuries ago, seems to be wallowing in irrelevancy. Single issue interest groups were prominent replacements for the parties in many of the policy battles of the 1970s, while more recently ideological groups with a broader focus have joined the fray, with notable success on the conservative side. Surely it is appropriate to characterize this situation as a "crisis" not only for Republicans and Demo- crats, but for the American political system as a whole, for the parties have played a vital role in American political development since their founding and still perform valuable functions. Should the process of atrophy persist, the effects are likely to be significant, especially in terms of the stability and continuity of the system.1 In the past, the two parties have shown considerable resiliency and a surprising ability to revitalize themselves by adapting to changing conditions. One may be reluctant to argue that the present situation rivals the aftermath of the Civil War or the Great Depression in terms of the challenge faced by the parties; nonetheless there is a great deal at stake and not much reason for optimism.
Upton Sinclair and the Socialist Response to World War I
Authors: Buitenhuis Peter
Published: March 2011

It was maintained by many historians until quite recently that 1912 was the high point in the influence of socialism in the United States. Daniel Bell wrote in 1952: "The War and the defections of many party leaders merely completed, but were not themselves the cause of, the isolation of the socialist movement from American politics. The eclipse of American socialism took place in 1912; the rest of the years were trailing penumbra."1 Ira Kipnis in his book of the same year. The American Socialist Movement. ended the work in 1912 with the claim that the party had then started on its irreversible decline because of opportunism, racism and the lack of party democracy. Another common belief was that Wilsonian democracy pre-empted many of the planks that the Socialist Party had been fighting on.
Canadian Penetration of the American Political Process : A Case Study
Authors: Wagner J. Richard , O'Neil Daniel J.
Published: March 2011

Foreign penetration of the American political process has inspired minimal academic productivity. Yet, given world interrelationship, the international role of the United States, and the external web of American interests, it is obligatory that most nations support a Washington lobby. Recent newspaper headlines proclaim the activities of the Korean. Israeli and Taiwan lobbies. These occasional dispatches represent but the peak of the iceberg.
America as Discourse
Authors: Waller Gary F.
Published: March 2011

David Cowart. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1980.154 + ix pp. James M. Mellard. The Exploded Form : The Modernist Novel in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1980. 208 + xv pp. Sanford Pinsker. Between Two Worlds: The American Novel in the 1960s. Troy, N.Y.: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1980.139 + x pp. Thomas Hill Schaub. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1981. 165 + x pp. John 0. Stark. Pynchon's Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. 183 + ix pp. Mark Royden Winchell. Joan Didion. Boston : Twayne Publishers. 1980. 185 pp. America doesn't exist. I know—I've lived there. (Alain Resnais: Mon Oncle dAmérique) Toto. I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.... (Dorothy arriving in Oz: epigraph to Part 3 of Gravity's Rainbow) "Why... is everybody so interested in texts?" ( The Crying of Lot 49) "If," Roland Barthes asserted in his inaugural lecture in the Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France, "by some unimaginable excess"' all but one of our learned disciplines "were to be expelled from our education sys- tem, it is the discipline of Literature which would have to be saved, for all knowledge, all the sciences, are present in the literary monument."' That is a large claim and, coming from the iconoclastic semiologist of S/Z and Le Plaisir du Texte, gratifyingly soothing to beleaguered humanists. It is after all in part because of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and other members of the French nouvelle critique that the much-cherished American insistence on the autonomy of the literary text and the uniqueness of the artistic vision has been so disturbingly and fundamentally challenged in recent years. With Barthes on our side after all, are we perhaps permitted to see texts as more than nodes within differential networks of significance carrying with them an illimitable force of multiple, disseminated meaning? Perhaps we can cau- tiously continue to privilege "literature" as society's unusually acute under- standing (or lack of understanding) of itself? Celebrating the festival of words, we might after all learn to cheat the facticity of the world.
Text and Contexts in Afro-American Criticism
Authors: Sanders Leslie
Published: March 2011

E. Quita Craig. Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era : Beyond the Formal Horizons. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. 239 + x pp. Addison Gayle. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980. 342 + xvi pp. Robert O'Meally. The Craft of Ralph Ellison. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 212 + ix pp. Carolyn Wedin Sylvander. James Baldwin. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980. 181 + ix pp. In a 1950 essay, Blyden Jackson suggested to Phylon readers that Afro- American literature had come of age and that what remained was the critical task of examining its contents, elucidating its meaning and placing it within a literary tradition. Since that time, a battle has raged over how to accomplish that task, principally over whether established critical canons properly illumi- nate black literature. Most stridently as a revolt against all established critical canons in the sixties and early seventies, more recently as a controversy over current methods, the debate continues. The debate is not confined to Afro- American literature; in that field, however, it acquires a certain urgency, for the soil is fresh and comparatively untilled, the task immediate and vital.
Anachronism, Context and Progress in Nineteenth-Century American Communitarianism
Authors: Fellman Michael
Published: March 2011

The Presidential Address to the Canadian Association for American Studies, Banff, Alberta, October 28,1983. "He that commiteth sin is of the devil." When John Humphrey Noyes, a twenty- two year old theology student preached that text to his Yale Divinity School colleagues one afternoon in 1834, he knew full well the religious and personal implications. That night he "received the baptism" of freedom from sin in this life forbidden to neoCalvinists. Thus armed, he could face the inevitable onslaught which began the very next day. A fellow student came by and asked Noyes, "Don't you commit sin?" "I knew that my answer would plunge me into the depths of contempt, but I answered deliberately and firmly—NO !" The other man stared at Noyes as if struck by lightning, made Noyes repeat his blasphemy and then bolted, spreading the word that Noyes had said he was perfect, and then that Noyes was crazy. "Thus my confession was made, and I began to suffer the consequences."
Heaped Words in the Void: Some Recent Dickinson Criticism
Authors: Steele Charles R.
Published: March 2011

Sharon Cameron. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.280 + x pp. Karl Keller. The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty : Emily Dickinson and America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. 340 + xiv pp. Rebecca Patterson. Emily Dickinson's Imagery. Ed. with intro. by Margaret H. Freeman. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. 238 + xvii pp. David Porter. Dickinson : The Modem Idiom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. 316 + xii pp. In 1970 Willis T. Buckingham published a thorough and invaluable historical survey of the literary commentary on Emily Dickinson as the introduction to his Emily Dickinson : An Annotated Bibliography. He identified therein three major, and quite conventional, strains in that commentary: biography, scholarship and criticism. He identified himself with the academic predilection of our own day by deprecating biographical interests and applauding the efforts of scholars and critics. Now, there is of course, in some measure, good reason for this reaction. Buckingham quite correctly pointed out that in the first two historical eras of Dickinson commentary, "The Period of Todd and Higginson" (1890-1913), and "The Period of Bianchi" (1913-1930), biographical interests dominated both scholarship and criticism, producing on the one hand corrupt editions of Dickinson's writings, and on the other criticism "by epithet," evoking the legend of "the Nun of Amherst," and "calling her anything from the Gnome of Amherst to the American Sappho." In the third era, according to Buckingham, the era he entitled "The Johnson era" (1930-1968), biographical concerns receded from dominance and editorial and critical undertakings proved their superior worth. He was especially satisfied that the emphasis had switched from the life of the poet to her life as artist. Nonetheless, he continued to be worried by the persistent "primordial desire to peep behind Miss Dickinson's window shades," though he expressed the hope, almost the confidence, that "we are armed with Johnson's texts, Leyda's log, Rosenbaum's concordance, and a history of some excellent criticism among much that is flawed and irrelevant. We have, in short, the tools to seek the poet, Dickinson, and the wisdom to let the White Moth of Amherst fall where she may" (p. xxi).
Hemingway and the Demimonde of Hollywood
Authors: Ohlin Peter
Published: March 2011

Frank M. Laurence. Hemingway and the Movies. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981.329 + xix pp. Gene D. Phillips. Hemingway and Film. New York : Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980.192 + xv pp. One would have thought that with a subject like Hemingway and the movies it should be impossible to go wrong. On the one hand we have an author who is clearly one of the giants of American prose fiction in the first half of the century—an author, furthermore, who made himself deliberately into a public figure and public performer. On the other is a medium that is defined by its glamorous images and the opulence and sensuality of its stars. The combination seems unbeatable.
A Mug's Game: Critical Shortcutting
Authors: White Robert
Published: March 2011

Marie Boroff. Language and the Poet : Verbal Artistry in Frost, Stevens, and Moore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 198 pp. Daniel Hoffman, ed. Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. 618 pp. Rushworth M. Kidder. E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.275 + xxviii pp. David Shapiro. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.190 + xx pp. Howard Nemerov once began an "omnibus" review essay by noting that "Books of poetry are written, published, reviewed, forgotten, that's how it goes. Probably the first two steps in the process could be omitted without making any significant change in the highly ritualized situation, in what we may fairly call the 'status in reality' of books of poetry." All a reviewer might be able to do would be to "blow into them," on their way to oblivion, "a brief and puffy little life, so that they live a little. For it is well known that existence, among us, is conferred only by public acknowledgement, and for many a poem it would be a greater tragedy not to be reviewed than not to be written."
Two Poems of Place: Williams' Paterson and Marlatt's Steveston
Authors: Hall Chris
Published: March 2011

We live only in one place at a time but far from being bound by it, only through it do we realise our freedom. Place then ceases to be a restriction, we do not have to abandon our familiar and known to achieve distinction but far from con- stricting ourselves, not searching for some release in some particular place, rather in that place, if we only make ourselves sufficiently aware of it. do join with others in other places.1
Women in Industrializing America: The Legacy and Lessons of History
Authors: Early Frances H.
Published: March 2011

Susan D. Becker. The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism Between the Wars. Westport, Conn,: Greenwood Press, 1981.300 + vii pp. Daniel E. Sutherland. Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1800 to 1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. 222 + xv pp. Winifred D. Wandersee. Women's Work and Family Values, 1920-1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.165 pp. The industrial revolution in the West created a more rigid and extreme sociosexual division in society than had existed in pre-industrial times. The capitalist nature of the revolution not only brought into being a new class system, it also modified gender arrangements in important ways. As men, building upon their already substantial base of patriarchal power and privilege, arrogated for themselves the public sphere of production and statescraft, women were accorded the private sphere of reproduction and homemaking.1 A legitimizing ideology for the exclusion of women from participation in the economy and the modern state, except in a marginal way, emerged in the course of the nineteenth century stressing a separate but "complementary" woman's sphere centering on the role of Mother. Termed variously by his- torians as "the cult of true womanhood," "the woman-belle ideal," and "virtuous womanhood," the ideology associated with woman's sphere was class-based: the true woman in capitalist America was physically frail, emotionally volatile, intellectually limited, yet morally pure and innately maternal, a state of supposed grace which only middle-class or upper-middle- class women were expected fully to experience.2
The Play of the Double in A Separate Peace
Authors: Slethaug Gordon E.
Published: March 2011

By Johan Huizinga's account in Homo Ludens, play is present in a broad range of cultural activities, including religious observance, poetry, philosophy and organized combat: "The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play ; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play. Wisdom and philosophy found expression in words and forms derived from religious contests. The rules of warfare, the conventions of noble living were built up on play-patterns."1 Later critics such as Roger Caillois and Jacques Ehrmann, however, find this definition too narrow, for one thing because Huizinga retains only one characteristic of play, agon, its competitive aspect, whereas another important consideration is paidia, spontaneous play.2 These are two important kinds of play, each with a beginning and end, a magic circle of activity, players, the goal of winning, and certain rules, the violation of which is without question foul play. Through the device of the double, John Knowles in A Separate Peace compares two fundamentally different conceptions of the game of life, Gene's, which is a great, hostile and crushingly serious agon for domination, and Phineas' which is flippantly playful, truly paidiac.
William Irwin Thompson, the Utopian Tradition and American Transcendentalism
Authors: Irwin Zachary T. , Redenius Charles M.
Published: March 2011

Introduction Many Utopian writers would affirm with William Irwin Thompson that their thinking presents an apposite assessment of society and offers a practical prescription for its transformation. As cultural historians, such thinkers critique their societies from perspectives that challenge existing com- placencies. Moreover, these critiques often uncover in the disintegration of the culture in which they live out their lives the materials for building a new and radically different society. It is in describing their vision of a transformed humanity or a drastically altered civilization that Thompson and other like- minded authors are most often branded Utopian dreamers.
War, Revolution and People
Authors: Gormon Condon Ann
Published: March 2011

Edward Countryman. A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in Hew York, 1760-1790. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. 388 + xviiipp. Adele Hast. Loyalism in Revolutionary Virginia: The Norfolk Area and the Eastern Shore. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982. 227 + xii pp. Robert Middlekauff. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. 696 + xvi pp. William Pencak. War, Politics & Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981. 314 +xvi pp. Charles Royster. Light Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.301 + xiv pp. The eighteenth century, much like our own times, was a century of total war. Periods of peace were brief and infrequent. Periods of conflict engulfed the continents of both Europe and North America and surged along the major trade routes of the world. Wars for empire, native uprisings, colonial rebel- lions and civil wars were all part of the century's history. Canada was trans- ferred, India conquered, America liberated, France convulsed and England made very, very rich. Under the repeated hammer blows of war, social and political structures were pounded thin, pierced and then reconstituted to admit new groups and new values. The enduring fascination of these wars is the insights they provide into the nature of global conflict and the changes which individuals and societies undergo in times of such severe stress.
"Antidotes Against Oblivion": American Transcendentalism
Authors: Heath William G.
Published: March 2011

Peter Carafiol. Transcendent Reason: James Marsh and the Forms of Romantic Thought. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1982.222 + xviii pp. Edith E. W. Gregg, ed. The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson. 2 vols. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1982.1,383 + xxvii pp. Philip F. Gura and Joel Myerson, eds. Critical Essays on American Trans- cendentalism. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.638 + li pp. Leonard Neufeldt. The House of Emerson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.272 pp. Exactly two decades ago, Walter Harding noted the abundance of studies dealing with the star attractions of Transcendentalism, Emerson and Thoreau, and the scarcity of work being done on a host of secondary figures. He suggested that scholars "might do well to turn their attention to some of these figures and thus make some real contributions to our knowledge of Transcendentalism."1 Since then, books and articles have appeared which seem almost to be an answer to Harding's call. These studies—in Emerson's phrase, "antidotes against oblivion"—have shed new light on such individuals as Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Jones Very, David Wasson, Cyrus Bartol, Convers Francis and Sylvester Judd, to name only a few. The scholarly imbalance that existed twenty years ago has all but disappeared. Nor have the lesser luminaries of the movement been the only recipients of this in- creased attention. Interest has also grown in such general topics as the intellectual and religious background to the movement, the history of the Transcendental Club and of the Dial, the communitarian experiments at Brook Farm and Fruitlands, and the literary and esthetic contributions of Transcendentalism to American literature.
Modern American Fiction
Authors: Seamon Roger G.
Published: March 2011

William R. Macnaughton, ed. Critical Essays on John Updike. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. 308 + viii pp. Steven Mailloux. Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.228 pp. Steven Moore. A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's "The Recognitions." Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.337 + xi pp. Craig Hansen Werner. Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction Since James Joyce. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. 237 + x pp. Each of the books under review belongs to a separate genre of academic literary commentary. At one end of the ordinary spectrum (scholarship, criticism, theory) is Steven Moore's A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's "The Recogni- tions," a work of scholarly annotation which also includes other material designed to assist the puzzled reader of Gaddis' complex novel. There are two works of criticism, one a collection of reviews and essays on the works of John Updike, the other a suite of essays loosely tied together by the idea of James Joyce's influence on various American writers. Lastly, Steven Mailloux's Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction is a work of theory; it is an attempt to improve upon the formulations of reader-response theory offered by Culler, Iser and Fish. I wish not only to assess each work in the light of its purpose, but to comment upon some of the implications of each enterprise.
The Case of Willa Cather
Authors: Stineback David
Published: March 2011

I begin with the complacent but completely sincere assertion that no major American novelist in the twentieth century has been as misunderstood and mistreated by literary critics as Willa Cather. The mistreatment is personal as well as professional; indeed, its single most pervasive quality is an unreason- able conflation of personal and professional judgments—that is, the confusion of judgments about her character with judgments about her art. She has become, quietly and relentlessly, a "case"1 for some of the crudest amateur psychoanalysis to be found in American literary criticism. Moreover, such confusion of biography and criticism characterizes the work of her admirers as well as her detractors. The result is a persistent invasion of her life in the name of evaluation, as if the critics were retaliating for being put on trial by her.2 Perhaps they were. Cather's aversion to critics, particularly after their response to One of Ours in 1922, is well known. But the analysis of that aversion has come from the critics themselves: the familiar picture of Cather as nostalgically incapable of coping with contemporary American society became current as she withdrew from critics and made that withdrawal a matter of principle in essays like "The Novel Démeublé"Escapism" and "Miss Jewett."3 Yet when one ignores non-fictional statements like these and concentrates on the novels themselves, a different image of Cather emerges.
Autobiography and American Characters
Authors: Neuman Shirley
Published: March 2011

Brian M. Barbour, ed. Benjamin Franklin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979.179 pp. Estelle E. Jelinek, ed. Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington, London: University of Illinois Press, 1980.274 + xii pp. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall, eds. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. A Genetic Text. Knoxville : The University of Tennessee Press, 1981. 188 + xiv pp. Albert E. Stone. Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts: Versions of Identity from Henry Adams to Nate Shaw. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.349 + xvi pp. So great is the power of the Franklin persona that, until recently, readers of his Autobiography have far more frequently judged the character than they have the work. Seen by his admirers as a personification of the entrepreneur- ial shrewdness, honest responsibility and self-reliance that emancipated the New World from the Old, he becomes, when limned by his detractors, the grubbily materialistic ancestor of all the Babbitts of America. Where his admirers remark the philanthropist, the diplomat, the experimenter, and reconstruct the spirit of eighteenth-century science and reason, his detractors remark the uninformed heart, the exteriorization of the self, the disdain for the spiritual life, and reconstruct a "prototypical" American business men- tality crushing the emotional and reflective life of the country. In the debate, Franklin's character becomes America's character, and the transubstantiation necessitates endless efforts to situate Franklin in the American scene.
Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalist: A Re-assessment
Authors: Hlus Carolyn
Published: March 2011

In my research I realized over and over again that women's achievements had been left out of history and the records of their lives had apparently disappeared. (Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: a symbol of our heritage, 1979) [I]n the process of researching our book we realized that, like many other feminists, we were trying to recover not only a major (and neglected) female literature but a whole (neglected) female history. (Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979) During the current recovery of female artists and writers from between the lines of history textbooks, feminists should question as well the accuracy of what has been written about women. The achievements of American journalist and feminist Margaret Fuller (1810-50) have been estimated, but are these estimations correct? Critics consider in detail the events of Fuller's life: her friends in America, her occupations there, her trip to England, her romance with Count Ossoli—often worrying obsessively about the authenticity of his professed nobility or about the legality of their professed marriage—her role in the 1847 Italian revolution, and her death in the shipwreck off Fire Island; but few consider her as a major figure1 in the intellectual circle of which she was a part from 1836 until 1844 when she moved from Boston to New York. Margaret Fuller was a teacher, travel writer, poet, journalist, editor, foreign correspondent and radical reformer. There is evidence in her career and in her writings that she was an eminent Transcendentalist; her application of Transcendentalist principles to justify the natural rights of women is her unique contribution to the Transcendentalist movement.
Mark Twain vs. the Critics
Authors: Lauber John
Published: March 2011

Louis J. Budd. Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.266 pp. Jane Curry. The River's in My Blood: Riverboat Pilots Tell Their Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. 288 + xx pp. Susan K. Harris. Mark Twain's Escape From Time: A Study of Patterns. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. 169 + vii pp. James L. Johnson. Mark Twain and the Limits of Power: Emerson's God in Ruins. University of Tennessee Press, 1982. 206 + x pp. Horst H. Kruse. Mark Twain and "Life on the Mississippi. " Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. 183 + xviii pp. Elizabeth McMahan, ed. Critical Approaches to Mark Twain's Short Stories. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981. 147 + x pp. Robert Keith Miller. Mark Twain. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983. 221 + xii pp. One does not find, and should not expect, original criticism in Robert Miller's Mark Twain. The book is one of a series ("Literature and Life," covering a mixture of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American writers ranging from Joseph Conrad to Joan Didion), and follows the series format, including lengthy plot summaries of all works discussed. The author does not seem to be a Twain scholar (he has written on Oscar Wilde for the same series), and his book will be of use principally to the undergraduate student and the general reader. Still, through its very lack of originality, such a book may have its interest for the scholar as a compendium of accepted opinion, presenting the Mark Twain of our day. That Mark Twain is still the Twain of Justin Kaplan's Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1967) or, for that matter, of Van Wyck Brooks's The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920)—a man and writer divided against himself, split between East and West, between humor and the genteel tradition, between present and past, between progress and nostalgia.
Recent Southern Studies: From Romance to Ritual
Authors: Royden Winchell Mark
Published: March 2011

Daniel Joseph Singal. The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.453 + xvi pp. Marcelle Thiebaux. Ellen Glasgow. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982. 222 + xiii pp. Linda W. Wagner. Ellen Glasgow: Beyond Convention. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. 150 + x pp. Floyd C. Watkins. Then and Now: The Personal Past in the Poetry of Robert Penn Warren. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. 184 + xii pp. As a native Midwesterner who has lived half his life below the Mason-Dixon Line, I have often wondered why my present home claims an indigenous regional literature and my old one does not. Although it frequently has been contended that the South has produced a disproportionately large number of gifted modern writers, that boast does not hold up to scrutiny. Of the figures included in Jackson R. Bryer's Sixteen Modern American Authors, six (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, Anderson, Hart Crane and Eliot) spent their formative years in the Midwest, and six (Frost, Stevens, Pound, Williams, O'Neill and Robinson) in the Northeast. With only two writers (Faulkner and Wolfe), the South is tied with the Far West (Steinbeck and Cather) for last place. Even if we enlarged and updated Bryer's consensus list, it is doubtful that the relative position of the South would improve.
Some Recent Faulkner Studies
Authors: Tucker John J.
Published: March 2011

Francis J. Bosha. Faulkner's "Soldiers' Pay ": A Bibliographic Study. Troy, N.Y.: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1982. 531 + viii pp. Bruce F. Kawin. Faulkner's M G M Screenplays. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1982. 558 + xl pp. John Pikoulis. The Art of William Faulkner. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982. 242 + xii pp. Hugh M. Ruppersburg. Voice and Eye in Faulkner's Fiction. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1983. 189 + xi pp. Eric J. Sundquist. Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. 183 + xiii pp. Because they address problems that still trouble us and employ techniques that remain a challenge, the works of William Faulkner continue to engage literary critics. In addition, the haste and scale of his writing and rewritings, which inner vision urged and finances required, have left enough loose ends to keep scholars profitably busy for years. Hence the five works examined here. Chosen from the immense annual outpouring of erudition, they offer a representative sample of the available approaches. One examines the treatment of racial themes in Faulkner's fiction, enunciating the patterns which become intelligible only when his works are read within their historical context. Two subject his work to more formal scrutiny. The remaining two are dedicated to making available what Faulkner actually wrote. Although the weight of exegesis may seem enough to overwhelm its subject, Faulkner's enormous vitality and idiosyncracy survive it all. The new lights cast, as new lights will, new shadows. But the flickering images projected by the elucidators create a moving picture from which the audience appears as yet unwilling to depart.
War and Social Change
Authors: Brown Peter
Published: March 2011

Gordon Brook-Shepherd. November, 1918. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981.461pp. Robert de V. Brunkow, et al., eds. World War II from an American Perspective: An Annotated Bibliography. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, Inc., 1983. 227 + xiv pp. N. F. Dreisziger, ed. Mobilization for Total War: The Canadian, American and British Experience, 1914-1918,1939-1945. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981. 155 + xvi pp. Robert K. Griffith, Jr. Men Wanted for the U.S. Army: America's Experience with an All-Volunteer Army Between the Wars. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. 260 + xvii pp. Russell F. Weigley. Eisenhower's Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944-1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. 800 + xviii pp. Twice in this century the Atlantic democracies of northern Europe and America have become involved in total war. They have won those wars but, in the long term, victory has had less effect on their societies and polities than had the national effort to produce those victories. Among the effects have been vast changes, as yet only hazily understood, in the relationship between citizens and government, with consequent fears for democratic ideals and responsible government. Except for France, the Atlantic democracies began the period with constabulary forces—armies designed to pacify distant colonial frontiers like the Northwest frontier and the Powder River country. Nevertheless, by 1918, Canada, Great Britain and the United States had experienced the political and social trauma of producing large conscript armies—something which Germany and France had been doing since the eighteenth century. Each had been forced to reorganize industry and society for total war. Moreover, each of them had to learn the diplomacy of total war: the pursuit of an international, rather than national, grand strategy and the techniques of shared command on the battlefield. Thus, when victory came in 1945, it was truly the work of an alliance. No nation could claim victory as exclusively hers. Nations could claim only participation in a victorious campaign.
The Documentary Film in America
Authors: Nichols Bill
Published: March 2011

William Alexander. Films on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.355 pp, Sol Worth. Studying Visual Communication. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.216 pp. Set opposite each other, in the way in which Lumière and Méliès are, Dziga-Vertov and Robert Flaherty established the terrain of the documentary film as the social, political and cultural quality of lived experience. Differentiated by their roots in Russian formalism and American romanticism, Dziga-Vertov and Flaherty nonetheless gave substantive weight to a nascent tendency which has gone on to become a major tributary of filmmaking practice. The documentary film does not represent a radically distinct practice from narrative film; indeed, it frequently borrows the same conventions and strategies, even though the effect may be noticeably different (a difference itself deliberately set into play in most docu-dramas). What most distinguishes documentary today is what distinguished it in the time of Dziga-Vertov and Flaherty: a distinct form of material practice, supported by specific individuals and distinct agencies or institutions, with its own distinct rhetoric and accompanying sense of purpose. In many instances these distinctions blur as we trace them toward the avant-garde or the feature fiction film, but as an overall organizing principle the difference is real enough.
Recent American Fiction: In Search of Appropriate Modes
Authors: Manning Gerald F.
Published: March 2011

Philip D. Beidler. American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. 220 + xiv pp. R G. Collins, ed. Critical Essays on John Cheever. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982. 292 + viii pp. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.305 pp. Larry McCaffery. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. 300 + xi pp. Gabriel Miller. John Irving. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982. 226 + x pp. Critical writings about recent American fiction are full of an excited and also confused sense of diversity. Certainly the burgeoning activity of the 1970s—the great variety of fictional works produced and the provocative debates among critical theorists—has resulted in some useful (and in some cases brave) attempts to explain and summarize that activity. The books grouped together here illustrate this diversity but also show clearly some common concerns which are currently dominating the practice and study of fiction, as my discussion will indicate. All are useful and all should be made available to those who read and study contemporary American fiction. Each succeeds well in summarizing and ordering its subject: the career of the later John Cheever (Collins); the first stage of John Irving's career (Miller); the increasingly prevalent concerns of metafiction and its practitioners (McCaffery's books); the Vietnam experience and its literature (Beidler).
William S. Hart's Hells Hinges: An Ideological Approach to the Early Western
Authors: Palmer R. Barton
Published: March 2011

For the last decade an allegoresis that reads both character and story as expressions of psychic or social conflicts has dominated the contextual criticism of the film Western. One of the central assumptions of this approach is that popular narratives, because they are products of so-called mass culture, are escapist in the sense that their various discourses are largely esthetic (i.e., symbolically significant) rather than mimetic.1 Speaking of formulaic story types like the Western, John Cawelti, for example, observes that their ''purpose is not to make me confront motives and experiences in myself that I might prefer to ignore but to take me out of myself by confirming an idealized self image." While Cawelti concedes that such patterns do exist "in a complex dialectic with other aspects of human life," he maintains that the escapist functions of popular story are indeed dominant, effective only when presented, of course, "within a framework that the audience can still accept as having some connection with reality."2 In The Six-Gun Mystique, his influential study of the genre, Cawelti therefore emphasizes that the continuing appeal of the Western lies less in its evocation of certain aspects of historical discourse about the West and the frontier than in its various psychological dynamics: "the Western's capacity to accommodate many different kinds of meaning—the archetypal pattern of heroic myth, the artistic imperatives of dramatic clarity and unity, the influence of media, the tendency of popular forms to assume a game-like structure, the need for social ritual and for the disguised expression of latent motives and tensions—as well as its ability to respond to changing cultural themes and concerns- have made the formula successful as popular art and entertainment over many generations."3
Re-Viewing the New World
Authors: Thacker Robert
Published: March 2011

James Doyle, ed. Yankees in Canada: A Collection of Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives. Downsview, Ont.: ECW, 1980.231 pp. Stephen Fender. Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 241 + ix pp. Carolyn Gilman. Where Two Worlds Meet: The Great Lakes Fur Trade. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1982. 136 + vii pp. William H. Goetzmann and Joseph C. Porter. The West as Romantic Horizon. Omaha: Center for Western Studies, Joslyn Art Museum, 1981.128 pp. Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Paul Hulton. America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press and British Museum Publications, 1984. 213 + ix pp. Lee Clark Mitchell. Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.320 + xvii pp. Bryan Jay Wolf. Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 272 + xx pp. Surely among the most-quoted passages in American fiction is the final scene of The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway offers his musings the evening before he flees the "haunted" East for his home in the West. Sprawled out on the beach behind Gatsby's now-closed house, Carraway gazes across Long Island Sound, toward the Buchanans' also-closed house—its green light extinguished—and watches the moon rise. Gradually, he says, he "became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world"; at that moment, he thinks, "man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired...." He continues, of course, and links Gatsby's wonder with that of these sailors, concluding, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." In this same vein, too, Carraway says that he is "brooding on the old, unknown world." Without rehearsing yet again well-known interpretations of these passages, crucial both to any understanding of this novel and of American culture, it is evident that Fitzgerald here strikes a chord that has continued to sound, not only in American fiction but in American scholarship as well. Like Carraway, scholars have found themselves perpetually drawn to the "old, unknown" land, to that "fresh, green breast of the new world" which met our forebears as they stood in "the presence of this continent" stretched out ever-westward before them.1
Religious and Esthetic Vision in Mark Twain's Early Career
Authors: Wilson James D.
Published: March 2011

Discussions of Mark Twain's theology and attitudes toward religion usually focus on the deterministic cosmic view, the savagery of his attacks upon an implacable deity, and the unrelenting despair characteristic of the last fifteen years of his life. The publication of Bernard DeVoto's edition of Letters from the Earth (1962), the recent widespread availability of letters, autobiographical dictations, fables and fragments from the last decade of Mark Twain's life have enabled those interested in Mark Twain to construct a reasonably coherent theological system under which the aging author labored, and which he articulated forcefully and unremittingly from 1896 (the publication of Joan of Arc) to his death in 1910.1 Mark Twain's oft-quoted reference to "the damned human race" becomes, Stanley Brodwin contends, "a theological condemnation and judgment" that reflects both the author's childhood training in Presbyterian theology and his mature intellectual commitment to the scientific determinism prevalent in late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture.2
American Women
Authors: Gelfant Blanche H.
Published: March 2011

Langdon Lynne Faust, ed. American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. Abridged ed., 2 vols. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.449 pp., 456 pp. Kristin Herzog. Women, Ethnics, and Exotics: Images of Power in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. 254 pp. Edward Wagenknecht. Daughters of the Covenant: Portraits of Six Jewish Women. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983.192 pp. As a subject of study, women—whether figures of history or of fiction— seem to raise the same issues, even in singularly different works like the three reviewed here: Kristin Herzog's study of nineteenth-century American literature, Women, Ethnics, and Exotics; Edward Wagenknecht's account of six Jewish women, Daughter of the Covenant; and American Women Writers, two volumes that span the centuries since colonial times with their biographic sketches. All draw attention to the issue of women's power. They discern its presence, despite appearances of powerlessness, define the forms of its manifestation, and enumerate its effects. Inseparable from the issue of power are, of course, political issues: indeed, the two may well be synonymous. For the literary critic, politics involve specifically the making or breaking of a literary canon. Herzog seeks to change the traditional canon of nineteenth- century American fiction by making it increasingly "multi-ethnic." She would eliminate major and minor literature as categories by showing that both invest the same power in women, ethnics and natives or "exotics," a power that makes them all generically "feminine." Hawthorne and Melville, no less than Harriet Beecher Stowe, create "feminine" characters who possess "natural" power. In this respect, their work has themes and values in common with those of "neglected" black writers and of Native Americans, whose omission from the canon constitutes a historical mistake that Herzog hopes to rectify.
Merrill and Others: Studies in American Poetry
Authors: Macdonald D.L.
Published: March 2011

James E.B. Breslin. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 272 + xvi pp. David Lehman and Charles Berger, eds. James Merrill: Essays in Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.329 pp. Anthony Libby. Mythologies of Nothing: Mystical Death in American Poetry 1940-70. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. 225 + x pp. Judith Moffett. James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry. Columbia Introductions to Twentieth- Century American Poetry. John Unterecker, Gen. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 247 + xxiv pp. Ronald Wallace. God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984. 235 + x pp. In an earlier book, James E.B. Breslin traced the history of what he calls "the Modern Revolt" and of the role that William Carlos Williams played in it.1 In From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965, he begins by tracing the decline of that revolt and its replacement in the late 1940s by a new, double orthodoxy: the New Criticism and what he calls the New Rear Guard of poets (his chief examples are Richard Wilbur and Adrienne Rich) who adhered to traditional metrics and symbolist esthetics. Breslin has chosen five poets to discuss as representatives of significant movements of renewed revolt: Allen Ginsberg, of the Beats; Robert Lowell, of the confessional poets; Denise Levertov, of the Black Mountain group; James A. Wright, of the Deep Image group that also included Louis Simpson and Robert Bly; and Frank O'Hara, of the New York group that also included John Ashbery.