bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The American Colonies Revisited
Authors: Sainsbury John
Published: March 2011

Kenneth Coleman. Colonial Georgia: A History. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976. 331 + xvii pp. Joseph E. Illick. Colonial Pennsylvania: A History. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976. 359 + xix pp. Sydney V James. Colonial Rhode Island: A History. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975.423 + xviii pp. Michael Kammen. Colonial New York: A History. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975. 409 + xix pp. Hugh T. Lefler and William S. Powell. Colonial North Carolina: A History. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973.318 + xvi pp. Robert J. Taylor. Colonial Connecticut: A History. New York: KTO Press, 1979. 285 + xvi pp. A cynic might be forgiven for assuming that America's Bicentennial cele- brations—which included such bizarre events as Mayor Rizzo of Philadelphia feting the Queen of England—would not encourage the production of any serious scholarship. Among the detritus of national celebration, however, one exceptional scholastic enterprise will deservedly endure: the Scribner's and KTO "History of the American Colonies" in thirteen volumes, six of which are under consideration here.
Plebiscitary Politics: Requiem for the American Dream?
Authors: Alexander Jon
Published: March 2011

Walter Dean Burnham and Martha Weinberg, eds. American Politics and Public Policy. Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 1978.418 + xi pp. James W. Ceaser. Presidential Selection: Theory and Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. 371 + xiv pp. Edwin Diamond. Good News. Bad News. Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 1978. 263 + xiv pp. Robert E. DiClerico. The American President. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1979. 374 + x pp. Recent history has been unkind to Americans. Gone are the simpler days of global hegemony, the mobilizing assumptions of cold war, the politics of clear and inspiring purpose. They have suffered one leader's assassination, two failed moral cripples, a caretaker and one chief of questionable com- petence.1 Their sense of national purpose hacked to pieces in Indochina, their dignity raked away with Watergate's muck, and their economy in pillaged shambles, who can say their distrust of all basic institutions is misplaced? The crisis is political; its pervasive spread threatens to crumble the last shards of the American dream into the dry dust of nostalgic longing.
Harrison and Blaine: No Reciprocity for Canada
Authors: Spetter Allan B.
Published: March 2011

In four short years, 1889-93, President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State James G. Blaine launched the most ambitious program of commercial reciprocity of the late nineteenth century. The effort centered on the rec- iprocity amendment attached to the McKinley Tariff of 1890 as part of a comprehensive attempt to strengthen ties with all the nations of the hemis- phere-except Canada. The legendary Blaine indeed made the struggle to establish commercial reciprocity "the last great political effort of his career...Yet he also fought for a "hemispheric system based on peaceful intercourse, arbitral procedures for the settlement of disputes, and con- ferences that would deal with general inter-American issues." He had the unqualified commitment of Harrison, "the first President since the Civil War who fully recognized the need to coordinate the strategic, diplomatic, and economic factors of [foreign] policy."1 But Harrison and Blaine had separate plans for Canada. As long as Canada remained part of the British Empire, the two statesmen could not integrate it into a hemisphere dominated by the United States.
Freud and the Radicals: The Sexual Revolution Comes to Greenwich Village
Authors: Fishbein Leslie
Published: March 2011

By the time that Freudianism arrived in the United States in the feverish years before World War I, the bohemians and radicals who lived in Greenwhich Village were ripe for its message—overripe, perhaps. The Villagers represented in extremis the social revolt that characterized the rest of the country as a result of urbanization and the dissolution of communal ties. The freedom from moral scrutiny that cities provided weakened methods of social control so drastically that a "revolution in manners and morals" occurred during the Progressive Era well before the first rumbles of the Roaring Twenties.1
Puritan Generations in New England
Authors: Morton Richard
Published: March 2011

David Levin. Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord's Remembrancer, 1663-1703. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. 360 + xvi pp. Frank Shuffelton. Thomas Hooker, 1586-1647. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. 325 + xii pp. Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, eds. So Dread/nil a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676- Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. 490 + viii pp. William K. B. Stoever. "A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven": Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. 251 + xi pp. The Antinomian controversy and King Philip's War were the two formative crises of seventeenth-century New England Puritanism: the first intellectual, the second physical. The generation coming to maturity before these troubles is epitomized by Thomas Hooker, the English minister, trained in the Elizabethan church and brought to North America in his middle years. The generation succeeding the events—more complex and less susceptible of easy embodiment in one figure—may nevertheless be fairly represented by the New-England born, Harvard-educated historian and activist Cotton Mather. These four books illuminate from many directions the shifts of purpose and achievement in the Puritan experiment.
The Revolution After Two Hundred Years
Authors: Mugridge Ian
Published: March 2011

Dirk Hoerder. Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780. New York, San Francisco, London: Academic Press, 1977, 394 + xvi pp. Elizabeth R McCaughey. From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. 362 + xi pp. Gary B. Nash. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. 548 + xv pp. Charles Royster. A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and the American Character, 1775-1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 452 + xi pp. As Americans celebrated their nation's first centennial in 1876, they had before them George Bancroft's massive History of the United States, com- pleted five years before, to describe, in heroic terms, the story of American progress towards independence. They could look at Bancroft's work and know that truly there were giants in the world in those days but that those giants were merely the leaders of a proud and independent people dedicated to the search for freedom and justice. Bancroft, in other words, portrayed the nation's founders as their heirs wanted them portrayed and depicted the revolution as an inspiration to later generations. Since 1976, the people of the United States have been celebrating their second centennial; but the contribution of the historians to this event is almost such as to make one ask, where are you, George Bancroft, now that we need you?
Emerson and the Rhetoric of Belief
Authors: Martin John Stephen
Published: March 2011

Kenneth Marc Harris. Carlyle and Emerson: Their Long Debate, Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1978. 194+ xi pp. Joel Porte. Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. 361 + xxix pp. David Porter. Emerson and Literary Change. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1978. 232 + xvi pp. William J. Scheick. The Slender Human Word: Emerson's Artistry in Prose. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1978. 162 + xiv pp. R, A. Yoder. Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978. 240 + xiv pp. Emerson, despite the reverence given him for over a century, remains an elusive figure in American letters. In his own lifetime he was considered a moral sage and a quasi-religious leader for an entire region of the United States, and later he became the Spokesman for American Ideals, particularly as he popularized individualism and democracy. Still later, beginning in the 1930s, the critical revival of Emerson studies sought to make readers con- scious that Emerson was a man of worthy intellectual ideas as well.1 These studies were not, however, without major difficulties. First, if they hailed Emerson as a thinker, they had to contend with the fact (which was often treated as a reason for his historical importance) that Emerson was hardly original and picked up his terms and ideas, so it was said, from Coleridge, Wordsworth and Kant, as well as from Orientals, Neo-Platonists and hosts of lesser lights, past and contemporary. But more importantly, if readers managed to excuse this "source-hunting" approach, it remained difficult for moderns to take Emerson seriously.
Abolitionism, Women's Rights, Labor Reform and Evangelicalism: The Search for Connections
Authors: Lightner David L.
Published: March 2011

Marcus Cunliffe. Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860. Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures No. 22 Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1979.128 +xix pp. Walter M. Merrill, ed. Let the Oppressed Go Free, 1861-1867. Vol. V of The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979. 597 + xxx pp. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds. Antislavery Reconsidered: Mew Perspectives on the Abolitionists. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. 348 + xvi pp. The topic of abolitionism no longer engages historians in quite the way that it did back in the 1960s when the parallels between the antebellum campaign against slavery and the modern struggle for civil rights fired the imagination of a generation of young scholars.1 Nowadays, historians are tending to approach abolitionism obliquely, less for its own sake than for the light that it throws upon other aspects of American social development. Antislavery Reconsidered is a sampler of recent research. Its editors, Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, have collected fourteen essays, most of them appearing here for the first time, and many of them concerned with the connections between abolitionism and such contemporaneous phenomena as evange- licalism, labor reform and women's rights.
The Progressive Era: Revisited and Rejuvenated
Authors: Adams, Jr. Graham
Published: March 2011

John Whiteclay Chambers, II. The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1900-1917. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980. 280 + vii pp. James R. Green. Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. 450 + xxiv pp. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. Violence and Reform in American History. New York: New Viewpoints, 1978. 242 + x pp. Irwin and Debi Unger, The Vulnerable Years: The United States, 1896-1917. New York: New York University Press, 1978. 205 + vii pp. Progressivism in America has never ceased to fascinate historians. We are now witnessing the emergence of a new school of interpretation which once again changes our image of the nation as it entered the twentieth century. The Vulnerable Years by Irwin and Debi Unger, and The Tyranny of Change by John Whiteclay Chambers, II, present challenging overviews of progressivism; Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's Violence and Reform in American History and James R. Green's Grass-Roots Socialism examine the roles played by violence and radicalism during this same period.
Black Culture, the Black Esthetic, Black Chauvinism: A Mild Dissent
Authors: Levesque George A.
Published: March 2011

Whether cause or consequence, the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s revived a militant brand of black nationalism among (especially) young American blacks. In academic circles ostentatious nationalism (popularly celebrated by the slogan "Black is Beautiful" and the wearing of Dashikis) generated a heated debate over whether black culture was different from, and therefore distinct from, the larger American culture. Generated by events which took place nearly two decades ago, the black culture topic has literally opened the floodgates to a Niagara of publication. Shamefacedly partisan and polemic as much of this outpouring has been, it is not surprising that much of it should be characterized by confusion concerning the culture concept as well as by a careless disregard for the canons of historical evi- dence as these relate to the black experience in both Africa and America.
Willa Gather: Between Red Cloud and Byzantium
Authors: Klug Michael A.
Published: March 2011

Internal division is the central theme of Willa Gather's life. Granville Hicks was one of the first to recognize something of the extent of her personal conflict and to describe the mark that it left upon her work. He sees Willa Cather caught between the "heroic idealism" which dominates the first half of her career and the defeatism which darkens her work after My Antonia.1 In a different spirit, Leon Edel describes much the same fissure running across Cather's life and work as her youthful ambition and hunger for a personal triumph give way to despair and disillusionment. For Edel, these emotional and psychological extremes are the source of Cather's two central themes- conquest and death—"The triumph and achievement of the pioneer yields to disillusion, and disillusion harbors in it a wish for extinction."2 Frederick J. Hoffman also places Willa Cather between "two worlds," but he emphasizes the historical basis of her conflict rather than the psychological. She was forced to choose between living in a twentieth-century America vulgarized by a "utilitarian ethic" or withdrawing into the past in the hope of preserving her own cultural and moral values.3 While all of these critics provide some useful insights, Lionel Trilling gives us the most sensitive diagnosis of Cather's conflict.4 He sees that Cather did not simply lose her youthful idealism and harden into despair. The polar terms of her division were present from the very beginning of her career. Also, Trilling clearly recognizes the dimensions of Cather's conflict. She was driven by the conviction of her personal mission as an artist; at the same time she contained a deep counter urge to escape from individual striving and lose herself in something universal—in nature or the community of mankind. As Trilling explains, these antithetical claims show up all through Gather's work in her obsession with the eternal "striving of art" and in an opposing desire for "dissolvement." They indicate the painful separation between Cather's ideal of art and her experience of ordinary reality, between her personal ambition and her need for community.
Colonial Nonfiction: On the Road to Literary Awareness
Authors: Davis Richard C.
Published: March 2011

Charles Berryman. From Wilderness to Wasteland: The Trial of the Puritan God in the American Wilderness. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979. 214 + ix pp. Wayne Franklin. Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 252 + xiii pp. Steven E. Kagle. American Diary Literature 1620-17')'/. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979. 203 pp. Donald P. Wharton. In the Trough of the Sea: Selected American Sea-Deliverance Narratives. 1610-1766. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. 295 + xxi pp. When a culture lacks confidence in its literary accomplishments it suffers a sort of cultural paranoia that directs all critical attention toward a limited range of generic forms. The lyric poem, the novel, the drama, the long verse narrative—these forms and few others have proven the vehicles of previous great literature in English; hence, so the thinking goes, when an exceptional work surfaces, it surely will find expression in one of these genres. During this initial diffident period, which may last for centuries, nonfiction will almost certainly be ignored and considered of mere pragmatic utility, without esthetic or literary interest. But once convinced of the value of its imaginative literature, the culture is free to indulge itself in this nonfiction which, although among the first writings to emerge from a society, is the last to be examined by literary scholars. Put under critical scrutiny, exploration accounts, private diaries and travel narratives loom up as significant aids to the comprehension of subsequent and more highly evolved forms of expression; records that had once appealed solely to the historian begin to intrigue the man of letters, not only as examples of cultural and literary history, but as intrinsically important works possessing self-contained rhetoric, language and form.
Another Early America: Getting and Begetting in the Chesapeake
Authors: Steele Ian K.
Published: March 2011

David Thomas Konig. Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts. Essex County, 1629-1692. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.215 + xxi pp. Aubrey C. Land, Lois Green Carr, and Edward C. Papenfuse, eds. Law, Society, and Politics in Early Maryland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. 350 + xvi pp. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds. The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 310 + viii pp. A "new social history" of the early tobacco colonies has been born. The event was celebrated by two conferences held in 1974, each of which has now yielded a substantial volume of updated scholarly essays. It is too early to evaluate this new development, but the initial perspectives and findings are significant in themselves and suggest questions which seem more urgent in the light of the work to date.
Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century America
Authors: Fellman Michael
Published: March 2011

Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. 322 + viii pp. David R. Johnson. Policing the Urban Underworld: The Impact of Crime on the Development of the American Police, 1800-1887. Philadelphia: ' Temple University Press, 1979. 240 + viii pp. Roger Lane. Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. 193 + xiii pp. Not a visitation from evil social outcasts, violence was an intrinsic part of the American personality and social structure, or so state these three authors, and most contemporary historians would agree. The authors considered here place violence and crime within wider intellectual frameworks, analyze the functions violence and crime served, and deal with violence and crime as personal and social indices to some broader historical questions. What is lost in this general approach is any sense of horror, or of the specialness of these forms of human action, or of their consequences upon perpetrators and victims alike. Perhaps one cause of this detachment is a desire to move beyond the past fifteen years' historical and sociological breast-beating that Americans were extraordinarily and perhaps uncontrollably violent. While none of these authors denies that there was a great deal of violence in American society, all want to explain it in context, rather than simply to count it up and categorize it in a bout of America Firstism gone perverse. Much explantory power clearly is gained by such detachment, yet the danger remains of rendering violence banal and ordinary in the end.
Country, Folk and Gospel: Three Variations on a Theme
Authors: Rempel John , Rempel Ursula
Published: March 2011

Edward D.Ives .Joe Scott: The Woodsman-Songmaker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. 473 + xxvii pp. Bill C. Malone. Southern Music: American Music. Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1979. 203 + x pp. Sandra S. Sizer. Gospel Hymns and Social Religion: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Revivalism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978. 222 + xi pp. These works are considered seriatim, since all they have in common is American music, largely texted. None of these authors is a musicologist— Ives teaches folklore, Malone history, and Sizer the history of religion. It follows that a non-musicologist who ventures to publish on music bears watching, just as a literary critic's learning might be viewed with suspicion on the subject of Byzantium, Brueghel or Bach. Ives grapples occasionally and unsuccessfully with the problems of the relationship between the arts of music and poetry, Malone gives a catalogue of big names in Southern music, and Sizer attempts to sidestep the problem of word-tone relationships, her infrequent ventures into music ending unconvincingly.
Art for Americans
Authors: Bochner Jay
Published: March 2011

Dan Graham. The Fiction of Frank Norris: The Aesthetic Context. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1978. 172 pp. H. Wayne Morgan. New Muses: Art in American Culture, 1865-1920. Norman, Ok,: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. 232 + xiv pp. Arthur Frank Wertheim. The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908-1917. New York: New York University Press, 1976. 276 + xiii pp. The issue I find the most interesting in Wayne Morgan's book is one which receives its most satisfactory treatment in Don Graham's study of Norris. New Muses early on poses the basic question of the value of art for American society between the Civil and First World wars. It is a most exciting ques- tion, and it is a most difficult one to answer. In terms of method, how shall we go about evaluating the growing function of art in this presumably Philistine society? For how many and which sorts of Americans could art, of one kind or another, play a serious cultural role, whether to soothe the soul at home or demonstrate to European snickering that America indeed was a culture at all? This large question, with its many ramifications, is not to be answered by a survey of the critics who held sway in the pages of Harper's Weekly, Century; Scribner's, Atlantic and other publications of that ilk, and yet it is the paraphrased opinions of those critics which make up the main body of Morgan's study. Certainly these critics represent something, one aspect of a cultured elite, but their arguments and their tastes leave us quite alienated from the actual fabric of American culture. At best we learn that many critics were conservative, and that a few hoped that the promotion of art would bring some culture to an energetic but materialistic America. As to what inroads art actually did make, no attempt is made to tell us, though the earlier chapters often whet our appetite.
The Big Game
Authors: Akin William E.
Published: March 2011

Edwin H. Cady. The Big Game: College Sports and American Life. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978. 254 + xivpp. Before the seventies, writing about sports was confined largely to professional sports writers. True, the Journal of Health, Physical Education and Recreation served for decades as a vehicle for the few researchers in those fields of study. For the most part, however, scholars in traditional disciplines dared not admit their interest in sports, at least if they wished to retain their standing in serious academic circles.
Climbing the Poundian Alps
Authors: Stevens Peter
Published: March 2011

Michael Alexander. The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979. 247 pp. William Harmon. Tune in Ezra Pound's Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. 165 + xiii pp. Leon Surette. A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound's Cantos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. 306 + xiv pp. The greatest stumbling block in modern poetry is probably Ezra Pound's Cantos. What are we to make of this shambles of a long poem? This sequence which occupied almost fifty years of a poet's career raises almost every question about the nature of the long poem in the twentieth century. If it is possible to construct a poem of any length, the Cantos have already worried at the nature of its structure—can there be an epic in the twentieth century? What form will give it coherence? Can there be an epic hero? If epic is not possible, can there be any other kind of mythic narrative? And what of narrative itself? Can poetry at length still tell a story? Can there be a hero suited to modern demands? And will such a poem be able to radiate outwards from some moral center or has modernism put paid to the didactic element in poetry?
"Grokking" Science Fiction
Authors: Ketterer David
Published: March 2011

Walter E. Meyers. Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. 257 pp. Patricia S. Warrick. The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980. 282 + xvii pp. Gary K. Wolfe. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979. 250 + xvii pp. There are many good reasons why students of American literature and culture should take note of science fiction. In the present context I need simply point out that not only is genre science fiction essentially an American inven- tion (whatever illustrious antecedents might be adduced) but it is an invention which has made a considerable impact on the world at large. Although there is a "respectable" British and European tradition of "mainstream" "science fiction" which predated or arose in blissful ignorance of the various American pulp magazines which fostered genre science fiction (such as Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories and John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction), that tradition consists of only a handful of texts. Science fiction as we know it today (that is to say, basically American and British science fiction) was shaped, directly or indirectly, by those tawdry American magazines. It is this body of work, which appeared from roughly 1930 onwards, that forms the subject matter of the three books under review. Walter E. Meyers speaks for all three authors when he observes that "The material surveyed here is chiefly American, with a large helping of British fiction, a blend typical of the genre as a whole" (p. 3).
Any Hope for Canadian-American Relations Scholarship?
Authors: Rawlyk G. A.
Published: March 2011

John Sloan Dickey. Canada and the American Presence: The United States Interest in an Independent Canada. New York: New York University Press, 1975. 202 + xxi pp. Roger F. Swanson. Intergovernmental Perspectives on the Canadian-US. Relationship. New York: New York University Press, 1978. 278 + xvii pp. Janice L. Murray, ed., Canadian Cultural Nationalism. New York: New York University Press, 1977.139 + ix pp. Elliot J. Feldman and Neil Nevitte. eds., The Future of North America: Canada, the United States, and Quebec Nationalism. Cambridge: Harvard Center for International Affairs, 1979.375 pp. W. R. Willoughby. The Joint Organizations of Canada and the United States. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980.289 + xi pp. The Committee for an Independent Canada has atrophied into bleak obliv- ion. The Waffle Movement disintegrated into tiny sectarian cults and then disappeared from the Canadian political stage. Most Canadians in early 1981 obviously want more U.S. investment rather than less. Unemployment, recession, the threat that Québec might leave Canada and the fact that the United States is perceived by many to be withdrawing from its ill-considered imperial hegemony, have all helped to neutralize anti-Americanism in the land. As a result, Canadian nationalism has apparently lost its cutting edge and Canadians are, as Michael Bliss has recently put it, "drifting and purposeless." They no longer care "about national inspiration, national leadership, national visions." They are not over concerned with the threat from the south. Rather, many appear to have come to the realization that George Grant was right after all. The ethos of American liberal individual- ism seems to have undermined the fragile foundations of the national col- lective will. And the ideology of progress has made redundant the Canadian nation-state. The "True North, Strong and Free," for many, is no longer true, strong or free.
Jocoserious or Without Qualities? The (Hi)story of Recent American Literature
Authors: Waller Gary F.
Published: March 2011

Jennifer Bailey. Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist. London: The MacMillan Press Ltd.. 1979. 157 + ix pp. Warner Berthoff. A Literature Without Qualities American Writing Since 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 204 + xii pp. James Lundquist. J. D. Salinger New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979. 194 + ix pp. David Thorburn and Howard Eiland, eds. John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979. 222 + ix pp. Tellus tellas allabouter...Notes and queries, tipbids and answers, the laugh, and the shout, the ards and downs.1 Thus the blind seer, jocoserious Joyce, mocking our anxious searchings for significance in the writings of what, in his new book, Warner Berthoff calls an era "when all personal being and the natural universe as well are felt to be threatened by vast conspiracies of degradation" (p. 86). The great modernists (Joyce, Beckett or, in Berthoff s narrative of our forefathers' deeds, Miller and Stevens) seem to stand in judgment not only on our world but upon our literature which, he argues, is "without qualities." He is, of course, not alone in his puzzlement : even so enthusiastic a celebrant of postMODERNISM as Ihab Hassan or Jerome Klinkowitz would agree with Berthoff s remark that both "critical partisans and antagonists alike... have felt compelled to raise the question" of whether what passes today for "literature" "really belongs in the category...as commonly understood" (p. 27).
Saul Bellow's Sixth Sense: The Sense of History
Authors: Newman Judie
Published: March 2011

For Nietzsche, the historical sense in our time forms a sixth sense, pervading the philosophy, history and culture of the modern era.1 For most critics, however, the notion of a "sixth sense" operating in the novels of Saul Bellow more readily suggests a sense of transcendent realities, Platonic homeworlds, Steineresque meditations and intimations of immortality. Overwhelmingly, critical orthodoxy sees Bellow as a writer more concerned with the universal than with the contingent and the particular.2
The Urban South in Historical Perspective
Authors: Lachance Paul F.
Published: March 2011

Gary Lawson Browne. Baltimore in the Nation, 1789-1861. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980.349 + xiii pp. Blaine A. Brownell and David R, Goldfield, eds. The City in Southern History. Port Washington, N.Y./London: Kennikat Press, 1977. 228 pp. Whitman H. Ridgeway. Community Leadership in Maryland. 1790-1840. Chapel Hilh The University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 414 4- xxi pp. The South has often served as a foil to set off the progress of other regions of the United States. Urbanization is a case in point. Sociologists and historians conventionally remark a fifty- or sixty-year lag in the pace of southern urban growth relative to the nation as a whole.1 According to the editors of The City in Southern History; this perceived lag has been responsible for preoccupa- tion with the traditional, rural South to the neglect of cities like Baltimore, Charleston, Richmond, Memphis, New Orleans and Atlanta. The five chron- ologically-ordered essays in their collection offer the best overview to date of southern urban history.
Writing About the Western United States
Authors: Gilliland Marshall
Published: March 2011

James K. Folsom, ed. The Western: ,4 Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1979. 177pp. L.L. Lee and Merrill Lewis, eds. Women. Women Writers, and the West. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing, 1980. 252 pp. John R. Milton. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. 341 pp. William W. Savage, Jr. The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History & Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. 179 pp. MEMORANDUM From: Jonah Cetacea, Chairman To: Prof. Izaak Walton Re: Classes in 1981-82 Since the popularity of Canadian Literature of the West continues to result in overflow enrollments, the Class Committee wishes you to teach the long-dormant Western American Fiction next year, in order to accommodate those students wanting to study in the department. Please send your text list.... I will return to this excerpt, but first picture in your mind's eye a saloon in College town, in which five men are playing poker. They come from an ordinary town of its sort, picturesque and populated mostly by Homosapien Scholars and their disciples, who pursue money, promotion, degrees and hockey pucks. At this poker table are Mythhunter, Compiler, Wheeler-Dealer, Teacher, and Reviewerskeptic. They have been winning and losing money for several hours; it is late and they are betting on the last hand of five-card draw. Compiler bets a dollar...and the betting goes on until first Wheeler- Dealer and then Mythhunter decide the game is too rich for their weak cards. Then Compiler folds. Teacher bets three dollars (these modest amounts are typical of Collegetown poker games). Reviewerskeptic likes the odds and raises a dollar, whereupon Teacher calls. His aces and fours beat the kings and tens.
Female Minds, Feminine Experience: The Emerging Definition of Female Intellect in American History
Authors: Strong-Boag Veronica
Published: March 2011

Margaret Vanderhaar Allen, The Achievement of Margaret Fuller. University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979.212 pp. Jan Cohn. Improbable Fiction: The Life of Mary Roberts Rinehart. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. 293 pp. Mary A, Hill. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-18%. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. 362 pp. Una Mainiero, ed. American Women Writers, From Colonial Times to the Present. A Critical Reference Guide, 2 vols. New York : Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1979-80.1., 601 pp., II.; 575 pp. Joan Shelley Rubin. Constance Rourke and American Culture. Chapel Hill": The University of North Carolina Press, 1980.244 pp. Marie Mitchell Oleson Urbanski. Margaret Fuller's "Woman in the Nineteenth Century ": A Literary Study of Form and Content, of Sources and Influence. Westport, Conn, and London : Greenwood Press, 1980. 189 pp. Women's Studies and American Studies developed as collective efforts by critics of traditional disciplines to transform fundamentally the public record of America's past. These revisionist scholars of history, literature and culture challenged long-accepted methodologies and subject matter. Narrow textual criticism, political history and exclusively male subjects, together with approaches which ignored the essential operational context—whether the home and the workplace or the United States itself—were challenged as failing to present an accurate portrait of human experience. First American Studies, and then Women's Studies, aroused widespread consciousness that there were substantial gaps in the accepted account.
Thomas Merton: The Prolific Monk
Authors: Higgins Michael W.
Published: March 2011

James Forest. Thomas Merton: A Pictorial Biography. New York : Paulist Press, 1980. 102 pp. Monica Furlong. Merton: A Biography. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980. 332 + xx pp. Ross Labrie. The Art of Thomas Merton. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University, 1979. 188 + xiii pp. Sister Thérèse Lentfoehr. Words and Silence: On the Poetry of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, 1979. 166 + viii pp. George Woodcock. Thomas Merton, Monk and Poet: A Critical Study. Vancouver, B.C.: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1978. 200 pp. When the far-from-anonymous Trappist monk Thomas Merton died of acci- dental electrocution in Bangkok in December 1968, he succeeded with this single act in opening the floodgates of critical and biographical commentary which hitherto he had largely kept closed. Although there had been a modest number of master's and doctoral theses on various aspects of his work since the 1950s, his death provided the occasion for a flood of scholarly studies and fraternal tributes. Like Louis XV, Merton could have appropriately remarked on that fateful day in December: 'Après moi le déluge. "
American Poets: Stevens, Eberhart, Roethke, et al
Authors: Surette Leon
Published: March 2011

Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel, eds. Wallace Stevens: A Celebration. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 361 pp. Richard Eberhart. Of Poetry and Poets (Foreword by James Dickey). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979,312 pp. Jay Parini. Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. 203 pp. Helen Vendler. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1980. 376 pp. It may be no more than the irremediable slide into middle age being experi- enced by this reviewer, but it seems to him that the academic study of letters is undergoing a similar malaise. In the 1950s—before Sputnik, ecological awareness and the energy crisis; before xerography, electronic tape and computers; before McLuhan, Lévi-Strauss and Derrida—the study of letters seemed to be a serious occupation addressing important moral, philosophical and social issues through well-grounded and autonomous techniques proper to humane studies. We were heirs of the brilliant critical formulations of the 1930s by such men as Richards, Empson, Brooks and Warren. It seemed then that the study of letters was the last bastion of humane studies, but one that was secure, protected by scholar critics of unquestioned intellect who could address any issue and bring to it wisdom, penetration and illumination. This sense of the centrality of the study of letters may have been merely an illusion in the 1950s, but it was an illusion that was abroad. That illusion— if such it was—is no longer with us.
Politics and Peace Testimony in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania
Authors: Tully Alan
Published: March 2011

On June 4, 1756, six Quaker legislators resigned from the Pennsylvania Assembly pleading that they could not provide the "services in a military way" that their constituents demanded during wartime. Four months later four others followed suit.1 This "Quaker withdrawal from government" has attracted a great deal of historical attention. Some observers have pointed to the event as illustrative of the limitations, if not the hypocrisy and utter failure, of pacifists in government.2 Others have been more sympathetic, foremost among them those Quaker historians who have depicted the with- drawal as the great early American example of principle conquering expedi- ency. From the founding of Pennsylvania through the French and Indian War, these historians maintain, Quaker politicians succeeded in remaining true to their pacifist beliefs: when war was finally thrust upon them and they could no longer uphold their pacifism, they withdrew from politics rather than compromise those beliefs.3
Prophetic Self and the Problem of Voice
Authors: Waterston Elizabeth
Published: March 2011

G, Thomas Couser. American Autobiography : The Prophetic Mode. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. 222 pp. S. C. Neuman. Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1979. 74 pp. Autobiography has traditionally been considered a sub-area of history. Memoirs, though taken with a grain of salt, have enriched a diet of documents and statistics. Recently, however, psychological critics, offering to decode autobiographies (as in Jeffrey Mehlman's structuralist study of Proust, Leiris, Sartre and Lévi-Strauss), have led to a revaluation of the genre. Distortions of the past now appear as the special interest—indeed the glory—of the form, rather than as its weakness. Of the two books under review here, one studies the techniques of exploring and exploiting distortion developed by Gertrude Stein, while the other examines American motivation for a special kind of distortion, in specimens of autobiography chosen from three hundred years of experimentation in the mode.
Eugene O'Neill and Maxwell Anderson: Controversial Experimentalists
Authors: Anthony, S.C. Geraldine
Published: March 2011

Laurence G. Avery, ed. Dramatist in America: letters of Maxwell Anderson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. 366 + lxxxiii pp. Jean Chothia. Forging a Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O'Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 243 pp. Virginia Floyd, ed. Eugene O'Neill: A World View. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979.309 + ix pp. Eugene O'Neill and Maxwell Anderson, whose lives and plays are rooted in America's most creative era in theater—the 1920s to the 1950s—each had an extraordinary interest in forging new languages for their drama. Moved by similar historical, political and sociological backgrounds, their individual needs to experiment with dialogue arose from their unique visions of America and their desire to translate those visions into meaningful plays. Each knew and used the power of tragic drama in highly different ways—O'Neill with a new, awkward prose rhythm which gradually matured in his final great trag- edies, Anderson with a revitalization of verse drama in his largely historical tragedies. Both met with disfavor among the critics, who dismissed O'Neill's dialogue as unworthy of him and chose to concentrate on other elements in his plays, as they dismissed Andersons dialogue as an anachronism, worthy of another age but unsuited for the twentieth century. In both cases the problem has remained unresolved. The three books under discussion shed light on this question of language—Floyd's book indirectly in the fifteen essays devoted to O'Neill's drama from European and American scholars; Chothia's book directly as a first serious in-depth treatment of O'Neill's use of language; Avery's book as a statement of purpose in this first edition of Anderson's Letters which can be read for many other reasons as well.
Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos: Some Recent Studies
Authors: Griffin Joseph
Published: March 2011

Donald M. Kartinganer. The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.206 + xviii pp. Robert Emmet Long. The Achieving of "The Great Gatsby ": F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920-1925. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979.226 pp. Bernard Oldsey. Hemingway's Hidden Craft: The Writing of "A Farewell to Arms. " University Park and London : The Pennsyl- vania State University Press, 1979. 123 + x pp. Linda W. Wagner. Dos Passos: Artist as American. Austin and London : University of Texas Press, 1979. 220 + xxiv pp. Judith Bryant Wittenberg. Faulkner: The Trans- figuration of Biography, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. 264 + viii pp. Other than the fact that they all deal with important American novelists who began to produce during the first half of the 1920s, the five books under examination here have little in common. Even though they were committed to certain common modernist themes, the subjects of these books have attained individualities in the current consciousness, each identified with peculiar, if shifting, subject matter and characteristic form and style. It will no longer do, if it ever did, to refer to these four merely as writers of the twenties: Faulkner reached his peak during the thirties; re-evaluation of Fitzgerald's post-Jazz Age work dispels the myth that he was a one-decade man; Hemingway and Dos Passos produced significant novels well after the Crash. And as for the five critiques themselves, each takes its own stance, focusing on a larger or lesser portion of its subject's work and adopting a unique perspective on it.
The Multiple Murders in "Ligeia": A New Look at Poe's Narrator
Authors: Matheson Terrence J.
Published: March 2011

Poe's contention that "Ligeia" was his "best tale"1 is difficult to justify if we read it on the literal level alone, as certain critics suggest we should.2 The story is not, after all, sufficiently complex in terms of plot to set it quali- tatively apart from other Poe stories such as "Berenice" or "Morella." Nor does the tale, considered as a horror story pure and simple, possess characteristics which make it obviously better than "The Black Cat," "The Fall of the House of Usher," or even "The Pit and. the Pendulum." Indeed, when considered from this standpoint it is difficult not to see the story as flawed. The abruptness of the ending, for instance, leaves us with many issues unresolved. When Usher's house crumbles or when the narrator of "The Black Cat" is exposed, the reader has a clear feeling that in the strict sense of plot at least, nothing more has to be said, for in each case we are given complete packages of information. But in "Ligeia" the reader is presented with a seemingly unfinished story. Surely many readers must feel they have been left hanging in mid-air, in a manner which does nothing to enhance the tale's effect. What actually happened in the concluding sections? Did Ligeia really possess the corpse of Rowena? If so, was the possession of Rowena only temporary, or did Ligeia's spirit remain in her successor's body? What took place immediately following the narrator's apparent conclusion that Ligeia had indeed returned? What are the rea- sons behind the narrator's ensuing years of suffering? All are important
Alternative Technology: The Machine in the Garden Revisited?
Authors: Novek Joel
Published: March 2011

A vigorous tradition in American historical writing has outlined the largely optimistic reaction to the onset of American industrialization in the first half of the nineteenth century when the social fabric was irreparably transformed by the advent of the railroad, the steamship and the textile mill. Writers as diverse as Perry Miller, Leo Marx, Hugo Meier, Thomas Parke Hughes and Lewis Mumford have argued that in America, unlike Europe, the dominant reaction among both intellectuals and the general public to early industrial developments was one of hope and enthusiasm.1 Far from the "dark and satanic mills" of the European nightmare, the powerful symbol of early American industrialism was, in the phrase of Leo Marx, a highly reassuring "machine in the garden": a new "middle landscape" in which the vexing antipathies between man and machine, nature and manufacture, would be resolved, then transcended.
The Vietnams of Michael Herr and Tim O'Brien: Tales of Disintegration and Integration
Authors: Jones Dale W.
Published: March 2011

Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there. -Michael Herr, Dispatches Things may be viewed from many angles. From down below, or from inside out, you often discover entirely new understandings. -Major Li Van Hgoc, Going After Cacciato Two of the most important books that have emerged thus far from the American involvement in Vietnam are Michael Herr's "journal" Dispatches and Tim O'Brien's novel Going After Cacciato.1 Both writers vividly depict the horror and brutality of the Vietnam War, and both, either implicitly or explicitly, decry our past military entanglement in that conflict. Yet, each writer, in attempting to present his own peculiar experience of the war, handles his subject matter differently. Dispatches chronicles Michael Herr's experiences as a war correspondent for Esquire Magazine from his arrival in Vietnam in November 1967 to his departure in October 1968. The journal format provides Dispatches with a basically chronological organization and sup- posedly limits Herr to reporting what he saw and to what he was told by others. Dispatches, however, is not simply the result of a random camera eye impersonally recording events, but it is, like most journals, thoroughly infused with the thoughts and emotions of its author. Dispatches is an interpretation of what Herr experienced in Vietnam. It is not exactly history; it is not exactly fiction either.