bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sherlockholmesing Mr. Kenner
Authors: GIBSON KENNETH
Published: March 2011

Hugh Kenner. The Pound Era. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971. 606 pp. HughKenner. Bucky: AGuidedTourof BuckminsterFuller. New York: William Morrow, 1973. 338 pp. Hugh Kenner. A Homemade World: The American Mod- ernist Writers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.196 pp. He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and Sherlockholmesing hirn up, ever since he clapped eyes on him. —Mind you, I'm not saying that it's all a pure inven- tion, he resumed. Analogous scenes are occasionally, if not often, met with. —Ulysses. "The test of exegesis," Hugh Kenner wrote some years ago, "is that it enlightens. ... [I]f the critic's function is to help the reader see what he is reading, then he will pass beyond exegesis in two ways only: by the judgements implicit in his choice of subjects to write about, and the comparisons implicit in any discussion of a particular work's or writer's nature. The latter are best articulated by the technique of unexpected juxtaposition." Behind this technique, a kind of literary montage, or jump-cutting, is Kenner's concern, demonstrated for nearly thirty years now, with "the significant life of the mind."
Thoreau's Autumnal Indian
Authors: LANE, JR. LAURIAT
Published: March 2011

Thoreau's great interest in the North American Indian is a commonplace. The Indian had many meanings for Thoreau, embodying many, perhaps all, of his most central concerns. Some of these meanings Thoreau made clear in published writings; others remained half-expressed or implicit in the notebooks and jour- nals he had gathered against the day - which never came - when he would write his book on the Indian. For Jonathan Bishop, "the meditations on Indian facts are a convincing part of Thoreau's total experience of the sacred."1 Edwin Fussell singles out five "uses" of the Indian for Thoreau: as the Past, as Fundamental Man, as Nature, as Language, and as the Frontier.2 In an analysis of The Maine Woods I have suggested that the Indian "summed up in his person the various dimensions of Thoreau's response to the Maine Woods: ... natural, topographi- cal, historical, social, comic, and moral."3 But the Indian also had meaning for Thoreau as part of what I choose to call Thoreau's autumnal vision.
Anita Loos and Sexual Economics: "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"
Authors: BLOM T. E.
Published: March 2011

In January, 1926, Edith Wharton wrote Frank Crowninshield that she was "just reading the Great American novel (at lastl) 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,' & I want to know if there are - or will be - others, & if you knew the funny woman, who must be a genius -." Crowninshield did indeed know Anita Loos; he sent Wharton's postcard to her, and when Loos suggested to Wharton that she had overpraised the book, Wharton responded: "I meant every word I wrote about 'Blondes.'"1 In February of the same year, William Faulkner wrote Loos, I have just read the Blonde book. ... Please accept my envious congratulations on Dorothy- the way you did her through the (intelligence?) of that elegant moron of a cornflower. Only you have played a rotten trick on your admiring public. How many of them, do you think, will ever know that Dorothy has something, that the dancing man, le gigolo, was really somebody? My God, it's charming - best hoax since Witter Binner's Spectral School in verse - most of them will be completely unmoved - even your rather clumsy gags won't get them - and the others will only find it slight and humorous. The [Sherwood] Andersons even mentioned Ring Lardner in talking to me about it. But perhaps that was what you were after, and you have builded better than you knew; I am still rather Victorian in my prejudices regarding the intelligence of women, despite Elinor Wylie and Willa Cather and all the balance of them. But I wish I had thought of Dorothy first.2
Portnoy's Complaint: The Jew as American
Authors: BLUESTEIN GENE
Published: March 2011

Despite his more recent excursions, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969) is likely to endure as his most important contribution to American literary tradi- tion. Raising in that book some themes that Jewish-American writers have not been able to deal with candidly, he explores them on a level of diction that has been equally taboo in the history of Jewish-American literature. Given the generally puritan cast of that tradition, it is not surprising that Roth's treatment of sex appeared so scandalous - almost as scandalous as his attitudes toward Jews. Now that the dust has settled a bit it's possible to see that in regard to both subjects he employs shock techniques which, especially in the sexual themes, recall Walt Whitman and Henry Miller. As has been the case with both Whitman and Miller, the first responses of critics inevitably miss the serious thematic intentions of the author because they are so outraged at what seems to be the immorality of the work. It's an old American custom, as the Wall Street Journal noted not long ago when it reprinted the comments of a Boston critic who characterized the author of a book of poetry published in 1855 as "some escaped lunatic raving in pitiable delirium," suggesting finally that "he be kicked from all decent society as below the level of the brute."
Eros and Thanatos in Catch 22
Authors: FRANK MIKE
Published: March 2011

The virtual absence of references to a foreign enemy in Catch 22 - which is, after all, ostensibly about World War II - is one of the more striking features of Heller's work, and has been often enough noted. But beyond the absence of such refer- ences there is an abundance of allusions to a different and even more pernicious enemy, one located on "our" side and implicit in our ideology. Yossarian, whose growing moral awareness is the focus of the novel, confronts not the forces of a foreign enemy but the realization that the enemy is within; by the novel's end he is certainly ready to second Pogo's classic notion that "we have met the enemy and he is us."
Horny Hands across the Border
Authors: ARMSTRONG CHRISTOPHER
Published: March 2011

Robert H. Babcock. Gompers in Canada: A Study in Ameri- can Continentalism before the First World War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. 292 pp. His title succinctly conveys the theme of Professor Babcock's book, and a very fine book it is, undoubtedly a major contribution to the labour history of Canada. Babcock describes the growing domination of the Canadian labour movement prior to 1914 by Samuel Gompers' American Federation of Labour. By the First World War only shreds and patches of unionism remained under Canadian control, a few dual and industrial unions along with the confessional organiza- tions in Quebec. The Trades and Labour Congress, instead of being the vital centre and voice of Canadian unionism, retained little more independence than a state council of A.F.L. locals in Ohio or Indiana. The consequences for both membership recruitment and political activity by organized labour were consid- erable, and decisions taken then cast a shadow right to the present day.
The Historian as Pessimist
Authors: CUFF ROBERT
Published: March 2011

Robert Wiebe. The Segmented Society: An Historical Pre- face to the Meaning of America. New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1975. 209 pp. Although this highly speculative book is likely to disappoint appreciative read- ers of Robert Wiebe's earlier work, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (1962), a thoughtful monograph, and The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1967), an impressive and influential piece of historical synthesis, it is not without interest. This is so not only for the interesting perspective it offers on the nature of Wiebe's creative, historical imagination; it also allows us to see more clearly some of the assumptions which have informed his previous writing. More importantly still, it raises persistent, if intractable, questions about the nature of historical writing itself.
The Selling of the Great War
Authors: BUITENHUIS PETER
Published: March 2011

Nothing more clearly reveals a nation's character than a crisis. A striking example of this truism is revealed in the way in which the various combatant nations used propaganda in the first World War. Germany tended to see propaganda as a branch of military intelligence. France tended to see it as an arm of the Quai D'Orsay; Great Britain, perhaps reflecting the contemporary prestige of the writer, tended to make it a literary enterprise. As Paul Fussell has observed in The Great War and Modern Memory, the war occurred at a time when the appeal of popular education was at its peak, and when the educative power of classical and English literature was very strong: "The intersection of these two forces, the one 'aristocratic,' the other 'democratic,' established an atmosphere of public respect for literature unique in modern times."1 When the United States entered the war, propaganda was seen in terms of a huge advertising campaign.
Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire: The Financier as Artist
Authors: SMITH CARL S.
Published: March 2011

Cowperwood was innately and primarily an egoist and intellectual, though blended strongly therewith was a humane and democratic spirit. We think of egoism and intellectualism as closely confined to the arts. Finance is an art. And it presents the operations of the subtlest of the intellectuals and of the egoists. Cowperwood was a financier. Instead of dwelling on the works of nature, its beauty and subtlety, to his material disadvantage, he found a happy mean, owing to the swiftness of his intel- lectual operations, whereby he could, intellectually and emotionally, rejoice in the beauty of life without interfer- ing with his perpetual material and financial calcula- tions. 1
The "Ash-Can" School: The Magazine as Matrix
Authors: KWIAT JOSEPH J.
Published: March 2011

It is well established that newspaper work served as an invaluable apprentice- ship for the American realist painters who, in the period before the First World War, came to be known as the "Ash-Can" School, the "Revolutionary Black Gang," and "Apostles of Ugliness." Robert Henri was the exception; all the others, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, William J. Glackens, and George Luks, worked as newspaper artists in Philadelphia and New York during their formative years.1 Soon, however, they "graduated" to magazine work in New York where, under the guidance and encouragement of Robert Henri (first in Philadelphia and then in New York), they eventually emerged as serious and, as we have noted, even notorious painters. (See illustrations 4-7 accompanying this article.)
Richard Weaver, Southerner: The Paradox of American Conservatism
Authors: DE MAIO GERALD
Published: March 2011

In commenting upon the vocabulary of politics of our day, Michael Oakeshott has written that "political discourse has become so thickly orchestrated that we are unable to distinguish, or even to hear, the melodies which are at the heart of the matter."1 This observation is especially true in discussions of conservatism, particularly American conservatism. It is now more than a generation since the so-called 'New Conservatism' surfaced upon the American intellectual scene. The rather amorphous movement, which consisted of an assorted group of right-wing journalists and academicians, was beset by seemingly contradictory positions of libertarianism and concern for the community. (While a standard academic exercise by academicians who wrote articles on the 'New Conser- vatism' in the nineteen fifties was to demonstrate the incompatibility of such positions, this type of exegesis is no longer necessary since the movement has gradually become differentiated into more or less coherent ideological postures with libertarians refusing the appellation conservative.)
Vernacular Art: Canadian and American
Authors: MCPHERSON HUGO
Published: March 2011

J. Russell Harper. A People's Art: Primitive, Naive, and Folk Painting in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974.176 pp. with 125 plates, many in color. Jean Lipman and Alice Winchester. The Flowering of American Folk Art: 1776-1876. New York: The Viking Press and the Whitney Museum, 1974. 288 pp. with 410 plates, many in color. These two exciting books belong together: they illuminate the history of Canadian-American realities in unexpected ways; though the images must be more revealing than the printed text, the text is invaluable.
The Uses of History in Canadian-American Relations
Authors: WRIGHT GERALD
Published: March 2011

J.L. Granatstein. Canada's War: The Politics of the Mac- kenzie King Government, 1939-1945. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1975. 436 pp. R.D. Cuff and J.L. Granatstein. Canadian -American Re- lations in Wartime: From the Great War to the Cold War. Toronto: Hakkert, 1975. 205 pp. Roger Frank Swanson, ed. Canadian - American Summit Diplomacy 1923-1973: Selected Speeches and Documents. (The Carleton Library No. 81). Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975. 314 pp. It is salutary to be shown how the symbols and strategies that currently guide policy makers have originated in, and been shaped by, a political culture. The image of counterweights has, for example, been so indelibly printed on Canada's policy community that its government's pursuit of the much-vaunted "third option," to alleviate Canadian dependence on the United States, must be related to factors that are visceral as well as rational. History, therefore, has its practical uses in understanding the contemporary issues of Canadian-American relations. These uses are limited, perhaps justifiably, by the historian's frequent preoccu- pation with the conscious perceptions, motivations and reasoning of political actors. Less justifiable, however, is the historian's occasional failure to base assessments of men and events on clearly defined criteria of judgement.
War, Society, and the "New" Military History of the United States
Authors: Stuart Reginald C.
Published: March 2011

Analysts of America's military past have long labored beneath a cloud. Their study of war and warriors has focused upon the causes of conflict and the methods of combat. Liberal scholars have often felt uncomfortable with both topics. Furthermore, the orientation of military writers has been largely either popular or professional, emphasizing the heroic aspects of American wars or the strategic and tactical lessons which servicemen might extract from them. But a "new" military history has emerged since the close of World War II, with a broader scope and less dominated by popularizersand professional soldiers. Since 1945 America's military past has been steadily reinterpreted from a civilian perspective. T here has been an increasing emphasis upon the social origins of American military institutions, the development of civil-military relations, the intellectual perspectives of both military history and civilian views of the armed forces, and an awareness of how political as well as economic realities have shaped military policy and activity in the United States.1
Toward Walden Pond: The American Voice in Autobiography
Authors: Fendelman Earl
Published: March 2011

The personal narrative casts a longer shadow in America than elsewhere. Its evolution reveals many of the contradictions and paradoxes that are pervasive in American society. On the one hand, American autobiographers have approached experience from an entirely private perspective and have celebrated the power of individualism. They have confronted the implications of a literary form which, as de Tocqueville says about democracy itself, throws man "back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to cofine him entirely within the private solitude of his own heart."1 On the other hand, they have used autobiography as a way to provide an ideal example for society. In so doing they have run the risk of losing the uniqueness of per- sonality in the search for a universal model, much as democratic society risks the "tyranny of the majority." The conflict between the two approaches to autobiography recapitulates and feeds upon the corresponding conflict in the national life. As a result, autobiography has been the most consistently popular American literary form from the seventeenth century to the present. Such diverse figures as Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, P. T. Barnum, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Norman Mailer became "best sellers" in their own times because they addressed the divided sensibility of the country even when they wrote most openly of themselves.
A Neglected Source for The Great Gatsby: The Influence of Edith Wharton's The Spark
Authors: Peterman Michael A.
Published: March 2011

F. Scott Fitzgerald's development as a serious artist prior to 1925 has been a subject of continuing critical interest. According to James E. Miller Jr., "Sometime between The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald won "intellectual control" over his imagination, and, in doing so, abandoned one literary tradition and embraced another."1 For Miller, it was Fitzgerald's emerging consciousness of form, of the need for selectivity and shaping, that accounted for this change. "By the time Fitzgerald was ready to write The Great Gatsby? Miller concludes, "... Wells, Mackenzie, and Mencken had been replaced in his critical esteem by Joyce, Cather, and Conrad, all novelists acutely conscious of the primary significance of technique" (p. 81). Because in later years Fitzgerald himself lent credence to these connections, particularly the influence of Conrad, Miller's argument has seemed highly persuasive.2
Faulkner's Popeye: The "Other" As Self
Authors: Adamowski T. H.
Published: March 2011

In the criticism devoted to Popeye, in Faulkner's Sanctuary, there can be found what is best described as the "electric-light-stamped-tin" syndrome. A typical example comes in this passage from Melvin Backman's study of Faulkner: "More symbolic than real, he seems deliberately 'modernistic' and unnatural. He is cold and hard like steel, weightless like aluminum, and depthless like stamped tin."1 Only the reference to Faulkner's "electric light" metaphor is missing (Sanctuary, Vintage ed., p. 4). At first glance Popeye does appear to be a character reminiscent of many of the Snopeses, the kind of creation that Scholes and Kellogg call the "type," a creation referable to "the most general sort of idea, as Everyman is a type of general humanity; or to a specific non-human entity as Vergil's Fama represents rumor; or to a mental state, as in Spenser's Despair."2
Canadian Trade Policy in the Age of American Dominance and British Decline, 1943-1947
Authors: Bothwell Robert , English John
Published: March 2011

"Canadian trade with both the United Kingdom and the United States is of a complementary nature, and is a classic example of a basically sound division of labour," the Rowell-Sirois Commission wrote in 1940. It continued: "Canada's position is similar to that of a small man sitting in a big poker game. He must play for the full stakes, but with only a fraction of the capital resources of his two substantial opponents; if he wins, his profits in relation to his capital are very large, and if he loses, he may be cleaned out."1 In the 1930's, this economic equation had not worked very well for Canada. Buffeted by an unfavorable international economic climate, Canada in 1938 possessed a standard of living lower than that of Great Britain; it went without saying that the American standard of living was an unattainable height for most Canadians.2 The small man in the poker game had been nearly cleaned out, a fact which few Canadian officials or economists dared forget in the years that followed.
Ernest Hemingway et le clan des expatriés américains à Paris
Authors: Tavernier-Courbin Jacqueline
Published: March 2011

Le Paris des artistes expatriés était notre seul monde jour et nuit1 Comme nous le savons, l'exode de la jeunesse intellectuelle américaine vers la France a été fort important pendant les Années Vingt: avec un ensemble remarquable, un grand nombre d'écrivains, ayant tous à peu près le même âge, quittèrent leur pays natal au début de la décennie et, avec un ensemble non moins remarquable, il y retournèrent à la fin de celle-ci, laissant la place aux nouveaux arrivants attirés par la réputation de la "génération perdue" Cette deuxième vague d'expatriés arriva, en réalité, dès la deuxième moitié de la décennie.
Pictures in/and Print
Authors: White Robert
Published: March 2011

Between Friends/Entre Amis. Edited by Lorraine Monk. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. 294 pp. Robert Harney and Harold Troper. Immigrants: A Portrait of the Urban Experience, 1890-1930. Toronto and New York: Van Nostrand Rein- hold, 1975.212 pp. Michael Lesy. Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties. New York: Panth- eon Books, 1976. 237 pp. VousufKarsh. Karsh Portraits. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976.203 pp. Richard Avedon. Portraits. Introductory essay by Harold Rosenberg. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. Unpaged. In the fall of 1976, two weeks before the U.S. presidential election, Rolling Stone printed (on its usual tabloid-paper stock) 73 of Richard Avedon's painfully straightforward photographic portraits. This portfolio of photo- graphs, titled "The Family 1976," constituted the whole of the center matter for that issue. According to the editors, Renata Adler, author of the then recently published Speedboat, assisted in assembling the portfolio, and "the final edit — from more than 100 portraits — was done by her. Aside from the accompanying Who's Who biographies, there is no text; we think the portraits speak for themselves."
Picturesque and Pastoral: Two Views of Cooper's Landscapes
Authors: Redekop Ernest H.
Published: March 2011

Blake Nevius. Cooper's Landscapes: An Essay on the Picturesque Vision. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. 127 + xii pp. H. Daniel Peck. A World by Itself: The Pastoral Movement in Cooper's Fiction. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977. 213 + xivpp. In her introduction to The Deerslayer, Susan Fenimore Cooper gives us some insights into her father's perception of, and attitudes toward, lands- cape. A mile and a half from Cooperstown, along the eastern shore of Lake Otsego, Cooper had a farm, "a poet's farm" as his daughter calls it, "more romantic than profitable." It covered the side of a hill, at the top of which he found a cabin from which one could see almost the entire lake, including "the heights of Springfield to the northward, and southward the village, picturesque in position, with the valley of the winding Susque- hanna beyond."1 Cooper's actions here imitate in small the experience of his father in the last decade of the eighteenth century and of his father's artistic reincarnation, Marmaduke Temple of The Pioneers', they also reveal some of the imaginative origins for the transformations of wilderness by Captain Willoughby in Wyandotte, by the three generations of Littlepages, and by Mark Woolston in The Crater. Several decades of frontier experience are compressed into the few years Cooper spent on his "improvements." His daughter describes the process:
From Words to Images: Five Novelists in Hollywood
Authors: Snyder Stephen
Published: March 2011

Tom Dardis. Some Time in the Sun. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976.274 pp. Since the 1930's when serious writers first migrated to Hollywood, the popular phrase to describe their exodus has been that of "selling out." In the popular eye the movie empire has been envisioned as a prurient Mammon unconscionably exploiting and ruining the literary artists drawn to her by the lure of great lucre. This view was conventionalized by Edmund Wilson in his book, The Boys in the Back Room (1941), wherein he notes that "both West and Fitzgerald were writers of a conscience and with natural gifts rare enough in America or anywhere; and their failure to get the best out of their years may certainly be laid partly to Hollywood, with its already appalling record of talent depraved and wasted."1 Budd Schul- berg's novel, The Disenchanted (1950), reinforced this popular cliche by focusing upon a writer, transparently modeled on Fitzgerald, who is plagued by a sense of failure and waste in his Hollywood career. The myth of the Hollywood Mammon was challenged by Leslie Fiedler and replaced with one of his own in which the writers became Gentile boys in search of an archetypal Jewish father (many early studio heads were Jewish) lured to the glitter of the studios by a desire for self-destruction.2
The Americanization of Henry Kissinger
Authors: Randall Stephen J.
Published: March 2011

Bruce Mazlish. Kissinger, The European Mind in American Policy. New York: Basic Books, 1976. 330 + xiii pp. When one considers the plethora of terms — everything from isolationism to imperialism — which has been employed to describe United States foreign policy, it is interesting to notice that only one political figure has come to be synonymous with an American foreign policy tradition. That figure is, of course, Woodrow Wilson. Wilsonianism, as much as it may have seemed a dangerously myopic idealism to a George Kennan, has come to be viewed — and more accurately, one might add — as a quest for international stability and world order under United States leadership, safe from the extremes of revolutionary socialism and nationalism which Wilson and his closest associates perceived were tearing apart the interna- tional fabric.
Boundaries: Both Physical and Metaphysical
Authors: Henning Uphaus Suzanne
Published: March 2011

Joyce Carol Oates. Crossing the Border. New York: Vanguard Press, Inc., 1976. 256 pp. Joyce Carol Oates is an author known for both the quality and the quantity of her work. More specifically, her many novels and short stories deal most frequently with violence, both physical and psychological, and they often feature lower class protagonists. Firmly rooted in the tangible and sordid details of American life, her fiction is typically set in the back streets or the suburbs of specific American cities or in the dreary shacks of the poor white in the South or the American Midwest. Indeed, the particularization of the oppressive details of lower class American life has become Oates' trademark.
The Park and Whiting Family Stones Revisited: The Iconography of the Church Covenant
Authors: Walters David
Published: March 2011

The rich artistry of the gravestones of Grafton and Rockingham, Vermont, provides a unique opportunity to investigate the manner in which early American stonecarving reflected the religious and private life of the church community. Stones placed for children, including the Betty Lane and children, the Whiting children, and the Park family stones, not only are the best-known markers in these cemeteries, but they also define the congregations' doctrinal disputes over the status of children in the church.
The Game of Life: Idealism, Reality and Fantasy in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth- Century Versions of a Milton Bradley Game
Authors: Bum Thomas A.
Published: March 2011

The Milton Bradley Company undertook to create and market as part of its centennial celebration an updated version of the game that Milton Bradley had first invented and marketed, The Checkered Game of Life. It was The Checkered Game of Life that had successfully launched the Milton Bradley enterprise. Perhaps the game makers at Milton Bradley, thinking somewhat magically, felt that since The Checkered Game of Life had proved an auspicious start for the company's first century, a modernized version might prove an equally fortuitous beginning for its second. Whatever the motivation—magical, commemorative, commercial, or likely a mixture of all three—it was apparent that a revision of the old Checkered Game was required. Although the Checkered Game had sold well in its first fifty years of production, its sales since 1910 had dropped steadily until by the later 1950's a marginal number of sets were being sold, mostly to a clientele of traditional and religious orientation.1
Communal Architecture: Social and Physical
Authors: Thompson William P.
Published: March 2011

Kenneth Rexroth. Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. 305 + xviii pp. Dolores Hayden. Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1915. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1976. 401 + ix pp. + 246 b/w illus. That the last several years should have produced a spate of books on the subject of communalistic societies is not surprising. In many ways it con- stitutes the literary correlative, response or reaction to certain trends which have been enacted in the society and culture of the past decade and a half. Disillusionment with American politics as evidenced by the Vietnam War, for example, together with the world recession of the 1960's and '70's, occasioned the formation of hundreds of communes by "drop outs" from the mainstream of Western society. Similarly, that element in Western civiliza- tion which has always been critical of materialism and capitalism, and accordingly has been attracted to the philosophies of anarchism and socialism, was given added stimulation by the "energy crisis" of the 1970's and by the discovery of corruption in high places which climaxed with the resignation of Richard Nixon as President in August, 1974.
The Capitalist Hegemony In America
Authors: Ramirez Bruno
Published: March 2011

Gabriel Kolko. Main Currents in Modern American History. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. 433 + xiv pp. Gabriel Kolko needs little introduction. With over half a dozen books to his credit, not to mention scores of articles, he deserves the notoriety he enjoys both in North America and abroad. It seems appropriate, therefore, that at this stage of his prolific career he should produce a volume that is intended to be both a work of synthesis and a balance-sheet of his contributions to American history. Main Currents in Modern American History returns to the themes of Kolko's earlier writings and elaborates them into a broader and more up-to-date historical vision.
The Watershed in Hemingway Criticism
Authors: Brasch James D.
Published: March 2011

Scott Donaldson. By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway, New York: The Viking Press, 1977. 367 + xiv pp. Michael S. Reynolds, Hemingway's First War: The Making of "A Farewell to Arms." Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. 309 + ix pp. In October 1976, scholars from the United States, Europe and Canada met at the University of Alabama for a symposium to "revaluate" Hemingway, Several decades of psychological mining and biographical debris had provided the chief source for critical commentary, and scholars were beginning to discover that many aspects of Hemingway's novels and short stories had been ignored because of the exaggerated emphasis on biography.
Private Amusement or Public Salvation? The Poetry of Wallace Stevens
Authors: Scott Robert Ian
Published: March 2011

Susan B. Weston. Wallace Stevens, An Introduction to His Poetry. Sew York: Columbia University Press, 1977. 151 + xix pp. Lucy Beckett. Wallace Stevens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974, rptd. 1977. 222 pp. Books in Print now lists eighteen books titled Wallace Stevens. The two under consideration here claim that his poems reward us for remarkably different reasons. Read them, Susan Weston says, and we "find the world robed in the imagination's sequined harmonies" and "ourselves, robing and disrobing the world." Lucy Beckett hopes that the example of Stevens' progress toward some absolute will help to save "the modern world" from the chaotic barbarism left by the collapse of religion. Both books uncritically repeat Stevens' own assumptions about his language.
Howells and the City of Quebec
Authors: Waterston Elizabeth
Published: March 2011

"Quebec of the heights and spires, grey, quaint, beautiful"; "No scene in Canada, or the United States, can boast of the combination of objects, comparable in variety and magnificence, to those here presented to view"; "Here was a small bit of mediaeval Europe, perched upon a rock, and dried for keeping, in the north-east corner of America."1 The Citadel, the Plains of Abraham, the prospect of the river (see p. 156), the contrasting Upper and Lower Towns: the physical drama of Quebec city combined with the religious, linguistic and social strangeness of this French, Catholic, monarchic city have always made it attractive to travellers and travel-book writers from the States as well as from Britain.
William Faulkner and Willard Huntington Wright's The Creative Will
Authors: Gidley M.
Published: March 2011

Commenting on an article by Louis Cochran in 1932, Faulkner's one-time friend and mentor Phil Stone wrote: "You have left out of your article all mention of'The Creative Will' by Willard Huntington Wright, the S.S. Van Dine of popular Detective fiction. I think this is a serious omission because the aesthetic theories set forth in that book, strained through my own mind, constitutes [sic] one of the most important influences in Bill's whole literary career. If people who read him would simply read Wright's book they would see what he is driving at from a literary standpoint."1 Wright (1887-1939) enjoyed a certain fame as a trend setter from a position not quite at the centers of American literary circles during the second decade of the twentieth century. He was an aesthete, dressed extravagantly, and liked to startle.2 He is almost forgotten now—except, perhaps, as the author of no longer popular detective tales — so it would seem best to follow Phil Stone's advice and to "simply read Wright's book" in an effort to test the likelihood of its influence on Faulkner's thought and art.
Britain and Russia in America
Authors: White Patrick C. T.
Published: March 2011

Hovurd Jones. To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty: \ Stud) in Anglo-American Relations, 1783-1843. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. SI + XX pp. Howard I. Kushner. Conflict on the Northwest Coast: Werkan-Russian Rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867. tetport. Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975. 227 + xii pp. The relations between Canada and the United States in the nineteenth century were characterized by political crises followed by diplomatic compromise. The great and single exception to this was the War of 1812. The causes of this war were to be found largely in the great European conflict which raged between Britain and France, although for reasons of tactics the American military operations were carried out along the Canadian border. The peace which followed was a compromise that accurately reflected the state of the fighting which had occupied Britain and the United States for three years. Yet the peace left unresolved problems which were soon to exacerbate | relations between British North America and the United States. First among these were matters involving the accurate drafting of the boundary line separating the countries in both the east and the west.
Religion and Irreligion in America: From Edwards To Melville
Authors: Berkowitz M. S.
Published: March 2011

Apocalyptic Writings. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 5. Edited by Stephen J. Stein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. 501 + x pp. T.Walter Herbert, Jr. "Moby-Dick" and Calvinism: A World Dismantled. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1977. 186 + xii pp. In his Journal for April 16, 1857, Henry Thoreau wrote: "when [Frank. San- bom] first came to town and boarded at Holbrook's, he asked H. how many religious societies there were in town. H. said that there were three,— the Unitarian, the Orthodox, and the Walden Pond Society."1 In contrast to Concord's two official "religious societies," the Walden Pond Society was, of course, never a society in the sense of a formal institution with a regular dues-paying membership. Indeed, it seems never to have been a society at all, but rather an informal group of romantic enthusiasts who preferred the outdoor worship of the Oversoul to the indoor worship of the God of either John Calvin or the Reverend William Ellery Channing. But however the remark in question was actually meant, it aptly calls attention to the fact that in nineteenth-century America, as throughout much of Western Europe, an increasing number of individuals was discovering secular alternatives to traditional Christian theocentrism, liberal or orthodox.
The Limitations of Quantification in Local Historical Studies
Authors: Russo David J.
Published: March 2011

Robert Doherty. Society and Power: Five New England Towns, 1800-1860. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. 128 pp. Robert D. Mitchell. Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977. 251 + xiv pp. Statistical studies of American urban history now appear to be at least as important as more traditional ones in the literature of the field. In the long view, this is something that happened with astonishing swiftness. As recently as 1965, Charles Glaab, in his "The Historian and the American City: A Bibliographic Survey" (in The Study of Urbanization, eds. Philip Hauser and Leo Schnore), commented on various kinds of writings — urban biography, period studies, special themes in urban history—with very little reference to quantification. Today's surveyor would be compelled to focus on such work. Similarly, statistically-oriented studies —most notably those by historian Merle Curti (The Making of an American Community, 1959) and, more recently, by historical geographer James Lemon (The Best Poor Man's Country, 1972) — have greatly affected the kind of inquiry now being made into the history of rural areas and populations.
Three Thoreaus (in One?)
Authors: Lane, Jr. Lauriat
Published: March 2011

Richard Lebeaux. Young Man Thoreau. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.1 262 + x pp. Michael Meyer. Several more lives to live: Thoreau's Political reputation in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. + xii pp. Robert F. Sayre. Thoreau and the American Indians. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. (240 + xx pp. In one widely-accepted map of the literary situation, there are four recognized coordinates: the work, the world, the artist, and the audience. M. H. Abrams links these four coordinates with four emphases in literary criticism: mimetic theories based on the world imitated; pragmatic theories based on the audience affected; expressive theories based on the artistic personality or identity; and objective theories, based on the art object itself.1 In our day, it has been usual to place the art object at the center of this map, relating centripetally and centrifugally to the less central coordinates of world, artist, and audience.2 For some modern critics of literature, however, the specific literary object almost disappears within a whirling total complex of world, work, audience, and artist, all four interacting, combining, even fusing into a single locus of meaning often called a "myth." To quote Leslie Fiedler, who elsewhere calls his work "a venture in literary anthropology": "There is no 'work itself,' no independent formal entity which is its own sole context; the poem is the sum total of many contexts, all of which must be known to know it and evaluate it."3 Thoreau obviously conceived and carried out his literary career with an intense awareness of all four coordinates of his literary terrain. The three books about Thoreau under review here fall almost perfectly under the three headings of audience, author, and world, respectively. Together, they pose two questions: how meaningfully can our Thoreau be considered in each of these contexts? how relevant can each context be made to the fourth and— for many of us, the most important object of our attention— to Thoreau's own formal published writings?
Critics Gather To Look Again At The American West
Authors: Gilliland Marshall
Published: March 2011

The Westering Experience in American Literature: Bicentennial Essays. Edited by Merrill Lewis and L. L. Lee. Bellingham: Western Washington University, 1977. 224 pp. Black Elk recounts the song the oldest Grandfather sung, which he heard while looking down on the Lakotas during his Great Vision: "There is someone lying on earth in a sacred manner. There is someone —on earth he lies. In a sacred manner 1 have made him to walk." John G. Neihardt's record of this song in Black Elk Speaks serves me as an opening for this review because the "someone" in the collection of essays in question is the white man for nearly all the critics. This near-sighted view of the people in or writing about the West has been around a long time. Its pre- dominance in this collection is a little surprising because the editors believe the essays to be "revisionist in spirit and conception." The ambitions of the editors are grand and admirable, but the Preface is short, and since it is a preview of what is in the book, it is appropriate to quote some of it:
From Old Left To New Right
Authors: Webb Douglas G.
Published: March 2011

John P- Diggins. Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History. New York: Harper & Row, Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd., 1975. 522 + xvii pp. One of the more intriguing phenomena in recent American intellectual history is the startling transformation of men and women who had been ardent political radicals during the 1930's into conservative stalwarts after World War II. While the large majority of those who embraced Marxism or other forms of radicalism in the depression years continued to think of themselves, at least in some vague sense, as men of the left, a significant, if rather small, minority grew so disenchanted with their earlier positions that they moved all the way to the political right. Frank Meyer, Whittaker Chambers, Max Eastman, Eliseo Vivas, John Chamberlain, William Henry Chamberlin, James Burnham, Willi Schlamm, Henry Hazlitt, Suzanne La Follette, John Dos Passos, Ralph de Toledano, Eugene Lyons, Freda Utley and Will Herberg are only some of those who made the journey. In their new guise, such people had a strong and often decisive impact on the conservative intellectual movement which emerged in America after 1945, providing the right with a hard-nosed understanding of Soviet intentions and reinforcing already powerful anti-Communist impulses. Their imprint on the National Review in particular, the journalistic center of the movement, has been deep and enduring.
Incense and Honeysuckle: Men and Women In Faulkner
Authors: Adamowski T. H.
Published: March 2011

Estella Schoenberg. Old Tales and Talking: Quentin Compson in William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" and Related Works, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977. 156 + xi pp. David Williams. Faulkner's Women: The Myth and the Muse. Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's, 1977. 268 + xiii pp. There is a kind of literary criticism which insists on the importance of the writer with whom it is concerned, which may speak of the social, political, moral and philosophical issues that define that importance, and yet which remains curiously distant from the life of the reader to whom it is directed and from the world in which its chosen authors wrote. An urgency is missing from its discourse, and in that absence the issues raised by the critic are drained of much of the importance claimed for them. This is a criticism more interested in the "insights" it offers than the demands on the life of the reader that such 1 insights might seem to imply. It is a criticism that is not intended for the life but rather for the scholarly and pedagogical activity of the reader. One can call this criticism "academic," since it comprises the great bulk of the writing that issues from the pens of the professors—who write for the professors. Also, it is the academic profession of criticism—that congeries of "methods," "heresies" and conventions that make up "literary studies" at the present time—that accounts for the space between the critical discourse and the life of the reader.
Joseph Stevens Buckminster: The Making of a New England Saint
Authors: Buell Lawrence
Published: March 2011

Joseph Stevens Buckminster (1784-1812), Boston minister and man of letters, is a pivotal but elusive figure in New England intellectual history. His impor- tance has been recognized without being fully understood. In his own day he was praised without discrimination by his admirers. All the eulogies agreed that he was "one of the most eminent men whom our country has produced."1 During the seven years before his pastorate at Brattle Street Church was cut short by epilepsy, liberal Congregationalists came to regard Buckminster as their intellectual leader, despite his youth. After his death he was credited with a major role in instigating a revolution in pulpit oratory, the Unitarian move- ment, the New England literary renaissance, and the rise of American biblical studies.2
Hamlin Garland and Frederick Philip Grove: Self-Conscious Chroniclers of the Pioneers
Authors: Kaye Frances W.
Published: March 2011

Hamlin Garland and Frederick Philip Grove each witnessed the end of the pioneer period in his own part of the North American West, and each self- consciously assumed the role of chronicler of the pioneer process. Critics of frontier and farm writing have proposed various reasons to account for novelists' taking up of this genre. Henry Nash Smith, the dean of these critics, portrays James Fenimore Cooper, the writers of dime novels and the other practitioners he discusses as both reacting to and propagating an aggregate of "myths" and "symbols" through which Americans viewed their West and themselves.1 Roy Meyer, discussing realistic fiction in The Middle Western Farm Novel, suggests that part of the reason for the rise of this genre lay in the improvements in rural education that created more potential novelists from farm backgrounds, though like Smith he views the audience as more important than the practitioners in creating the genre.2 Contem- porary Canadian prairie writers Margaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch in an interesting "conversation" agree that they both write about the prairie because they need to record their own backgrounds and thus to create their own identities through their fiction.3 Smith's explanation is not pertinent to Garland and Grove, since Smith believes that his "myths" and "symbols" were exhausted by 1890 — when Garland was just turning to fiction and while Grove was still a child. Whether or not Smith was right in his cut-off date is a moot point here, though certainly the most important western writing after that date went in a different direction. Meyer's suggestion is no more useful, since Garland grew up before any improvements in rural education, while Grove was educated in Europe. Laurence and Kroetsch offer the most promis- ing suggestion in the search for identity, and the purpose of this paper is to show how for both Garland and Grove the search for identity demanded that they become chroniclers of the pioneers.
From Market to Manager
Authors: Cuff Robert D.
Published: March 2011

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. 608 pp. In 1965 John Higham drew attention to a new genre then emerging in American historical writing: "Deriving partly from studies in entrepreneurial and business history and partly from contemporary American sociology, this kind of history is less concerned with motives than with structure and process. It shows men managing and being managed through rational systems of control and communication. Perhaps we may call this the new institutionalism; for it is bringing back to life a morphological study of organizations, now freed from the formalistic, evolutionary emphasis of 19th century scholarship. Although institutionalists thus far have not gone much beyond the monographic level," he continued, "the breadth and importance of their contribution seem sure to grow."1 There is no better example of the accuracy of Higham's prediction than The Visible Hand. It is a model institutional history, a magisterial historical synthesis and interpretation of modern corporate enterprise, and a penetrating examination of the interaction of technology and administrative structure in economic and organizational growth.