bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dreiser Revealed and Restored
Authors: Griffin Joseph
Published: March 2011

Theodore Dreiser. The American Diaries 1902-1926. Edited by Thomas P. Riggio, James L. W. West, III, Neda M. Westlake. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.471 + xi pp. Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie. Edited by John C. Berkey, James L. W. West, III, Neda M. Westlake, Alice M. Winters. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. 679 + xi pp. Yoshinobu Hakutani. Young Dreiser-. ,4 Critical Study. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980. 228 pp. Yoshinobu Hakutani's Young Dreiser: A Critical Study and Dreiser's Ameri- can Diaries 1902-1926 in one way or another cover substantial portions of the first two-thirds of their subject's life : Young Dreiser takes the reader up to the turn of the century and Sister Carrie; in the American Diaries, Dreiser furnishes the record of his days from the time of his down period after the Sister Carrie publication fiasco to (with the exception of a large gap between 1903 and 1916) 1926, a year after An American Tragedy ap- peared. Sister Carrie came at the mid-point in this extended period of Dreiser's life, on the one hand the result of some twenty-five years of ex- perience, reading and thinking, on the other hand the partial cause, because of the unfortunate circumstances surrounding its publication, of his taking up the writing of a personal diary. The new University of Pennsylvania Press edition of Sister Carrie reminds us of the central place of Dreiser's 1900 novel, whose high critical reputation is a major reason for the continued interest in Dreiser, evidenced by such books as the Hakutani study and the publication of Diaries.
Theater in North America, 1880-1980
Authors: Anthony Geraldine
Published: March 2011

Gerald M. Berkowitz. New Broadways : Theatre Across America, 1950-1980. Totowa. N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982. 208 pp. L. W. Conolly, ed. Theatrical Touring and Founding in North America. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1982. 245 + xiv pp. Robert Karoly Sarlos. Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. 265 + xii pp. Theater in North America from 1880 to the present day—its actors, touring companies, professional theaters, regional companies, noncommercial insti- tutional playhouses, alternative theaters, experimental companies, and the contemporary realignment of theatrical organizations for economic and political reasons—is the subject of this review essay. The three books under consideration treat of different aspects : L. W. Conolly has edited thirteen essays written by notable theater scholars and focusing on actors and com- panies and theaters—European, British, American and Canadian—as they toured North America from 1880 to the present. Robert K. Sarlos studies only one of these companies, the Provincetown Players, in its brief history of seven years, 1915 to 1922; Gerald Berkowitz describes the evolution of a national American theater beginning and ending with Broadway but having traversed the continent and returning home a far different theater from its initial leavetaking. This clear and sweeping view of theater in North America over the past one hundred years leaves the reader quite breathless and much more knowledgeable of roots.
Joshua Moody's Funeral Sermon for Thomas Daniel as Political Jeremiad
Authors: Engebretsen Terry
Published: March 2011

To show how thoroughly conventional seventeenth-century American jeremiads had grown, Perry Miller felt it necessary only to observe that they had become "as fixed and stereotyped as the funeral sermon or latin oration."1 While Miller is right that without exception funeral sermons, like the deceased saints for whom they were written, appear other-worldly in their theology and biography, the ministers who delivered them did not separate—as modern readers are apt to—the changeless lessons of theology from immediate practical concerns. Especially as challenges to the New England Way mounted during the final decades of the seventeenth century, ministers carefully constructed funeral sermons to apply traditional metaphors of Protestant sainthood to the specific political or social problems facing New Englanders. A brief survey of the development of the political jeremiad in colonial funeral sermons will provide the background for an examination of Joshua Moody's funeral sermon for Thomas Daniel, The Believers Happy Change By Dying, a sermon which exemplifies especially well the rhetorical strategies of these political jeremiads.
Native Studies: The New American Fur Trade
Authors: Schultz G. A.
Published: March 2011

Loretta Fowler. Arapahoe Politics. 1851-1978: Symbols in Crises of Authority. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.373 +xx pp. Michael D. Green. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 237 + viii pp. William K. Powers. Yuwipi: Vision and Experience in Oglala Ritual. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.112 + vi pp. Francis Paul Prucha. Indian-White Relations in the United States: A Bibliography of Works Published 1975-1980. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1982.179 + viii pp. James R. Walker and Raymond J. DeMallie, eds. Lakota Society. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 207 + xvi pp. It is common wisdom that Americans and Canadians are presently discovering "their" Indians. A colleague of native ancestry, tongue in cheek, points out that the process has reached the stage where the native fact is now recognized in Canada's national anthem in the phrase, "Our home and native land." The discovery of the native presence in our histories is part of a growing awareness of the pluralistic dimensions of societies, although the professional historians still tend to regard material, technological and institutional themes as their most legitimate concerns. Human elements are more suspect and unmanage- able. But increasingly American and Canadian scholars are discovering the disinherited in their histories—the Indians, the blacks, the Hispanics.
The Military Mind and Philippine-American Relations
Authors: Jenkins Brian
Published: March 2011

Stuart Creighton Miller. "Benevolent Assimilation": The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. 340 + xii pp. Carol Morris Petillo. Douglas Mac Arthur: The Philippine Years. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. 301 + xviii pp. Shiro Saito, compiler and editor. Philippine- American Relations : A Guide to Manuscript Sources in the United States. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. 256 + xx pp. "Sophisticates in the last quarter of the twentieth century are disdainful of military intellect, but great captains have always been men of genius," observed William Manchester with an asperity born of defensiveness in his popular biography of Douglas MacArthur. And nowhere has the disillusion with the military been more manifest than in the United States. In the light of the sordid conflict in Vietnam, and especially in the somber gloom of the American defeat, it is scarcely surprising that the military mind has excited a somewhat scornful renewed interest. Not that it has ever inspired great confidence among the rank and file of academic and intellectual civilians. There have been all too few Napoleons and all too many Neys; for every "Stonewall" there has been a company of stoneheads. Anecdotes, both accurate and apocryphal, to illustrate this point are themselves legion. Field Marshal Haig saw no future for the machine gun and is alleged to have declared that the tank would never replace the horse; Kitchener certainly dismissed the tank as a "toy," while Joffre thought so little of the telephone that he declined to have one installed in his headquarters.
Agency, Autonomy and Authority: The Ethos and Modernization
Authors: Tagg James
Published: March 2011

Hamilton Cravens, ed. Ideas in America's Cultures: From Republic to Mass Society. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982. 199 + xxv pp. John P. Diggins and Mark E. Kann, eds. The Problem of Authority in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981. 255 pp. William Graebner. A History of Retirement: The Meaning and Function of an American Institution, 1885-1978. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980. 293 + x pp. Char Miller. Father and Sons: The Bingham Family and the American Mission. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. 308 + xi pp. H. Wayne Morgan. Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800-1980. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981. 233 + xi pp. These are five disparate works. Superficially, they have one common characteristic; their chronological turf roughly spans the period from the Civil War to the present, with minor exceptions. After that, the fragmented nature of modern research takes over, with purpose, genre, content, research design, sources, argumentation and analysis differing greatly. Char Miller's study of the Bingham family, a work which fails in the ways Turgenev's Fathers and Sons succeeds in analyzing generational relationships, is a brief biography of five generations of Binghams and a survey of their drive to combine will and action into purposeful mission. Ideas in America's Cultures is a. festschrift com- memorating Stow Persons' many contributions to American intellectual history; its eight articles on religious and social ideas, of very uneven quality and diverse subject matter, come together somewhat in their focus on the relationship of clusters of ideas to individuals or groups. Morgan's Dings in America is a tightly organized, coolly written survey on the employment of, and general social responses to, drugs from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Expressing greater subtlety and complexity of thesis than Morgan, William Graebner examines the changing purposes and manipulations of age discrimination, the concept of retirement and old age pensions. The Diggins and Kann collection of conference papers—incorporating history, political science, literary criticism and psychology—demonstrates how treacherously broad and varied approaches can be to a philosophical concept such as authority.
Social Class and the Progressive Era
Authors: Finkel Alvin
Published: March 2011

David Colburn and George E. Pozzetta, eds. Reform and Reformers in the Progressive Era. Westport, Conn,: Greenwood Press, 1983.196 + xi pp. Robert M. Crunden. Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1920. New York: Basic Books, 1982.307 + xii pp. Gerald G. Eggert. Steelmasters and labor Reform, 1886-1923. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. 212 + xvii pp. John F. McClymer. War and Welfare: Social Engineering in America, 1890-1925. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. 248 + xvi pp. Richard L. McCormick. From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York Slate, 1893-1910. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981, 352 pp. Gerald T. White. The United States and the Problem of Recovery after 1893. University: University of Alabama Press, 1982.160 + x pp. Both the impetus for reform during the so-called "Progressive" era (roughly 1900-1918) and the character of that reform have been debated by American historians for the past twenty years. Especially contentious have been the questions of what social forces promoted reforms in American institutions and what social forces benefited. At bottom, one discovers divergent views about the relationship of the state to society in America, varying from optimistic pluralist accounts in which the state acts as a mediator among the various social classes to hardline Marxist accounts in which the state in a capitalist country is little more than the "executive committee of the bourgeoisie," as Marx once called it.
Hollywood Heavy and Light: Jewish Images and Favorite Fluff
Authors: Evans Gary
Published: March 2011

Rudy Behlmer. America's Favorite Movies: Behind the Scenes. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1982. 342 pp. Lester D. Friedman. Hollywood's Image of the Jew. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1982.400 pp. America's largest propaganda machine is the movie industry. For almost eight decades, control of that important cultural reflector has rested in the hands of so-called movie moguls, most of whom have been Jews. Their alleged power to persuade, direct and reflect public opinion has long attracted those who think about and analyze contemporary America. Lester D. Friedman has undertaken a decade by decade survey of Hollywood movies to examine how they have dealt with perceptions of the Jew. The result, Hollywood's Image of the Jew, is thoughtful, evocative and most readable.
Gobble, Gobble, Gobble : Critical Appetites
Authors: Fogel Stanley
Published: March 2011

Arthur D. Casciato and James L. W. West III, eds. Critical Essays on William Styron. Boston: G. K, Hall & Co., 1982.318 pp. Charles Clerc, ed. Approaches to "Gravity's Rainbow. "Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983. 307 pp. Robert F. Kiernan. Gore Vidal New York : Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1982.165 pp. Charles Molesworth. Donald Barthelme's Fiction: The Ironist Saved From Drowning. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. 89 pp. M. Gilbert Porter. The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey's Fiction. Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 1982.102 pp. "Literature" is omnivorous. Genteelly, with the proper fork, itself part of the inflexible recipe, it works its way relentlessly through the contemporary American world of words. "Authors" and "oeuvres" are its favorite comestibles. Obligingly, "Gore Vidal" is trussed. This is not, you understand, Gore Vidal, the one who several times taunted William F. Buckley, Jr. with the moniker, "proto-crypto-Nazi," in a television debate, whereupon Buckley replied: "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face." This is "Gore Vidal," "author," creator of fifteen or so novels as well as numerous scripts, screenplays and essays, whose output can be shown to reveal growth, consistency, coherence, and whose spat with Buckley would be placed in the category, "anecdote."
The Devil and Dame Chance: The Life and Writings of Walter Blackburn Harte
Authors: Doyle James
Published: March 2011

In September 1890, the New England Magazine of Boston featured an article entitled "Some Canadian Writers of To-Day." The author, Walter Blackburn Harte, had recently emerged on the American literary scene as a reporter and interpreter of Canadian subjects: his pieces on "The Canadian Legisla- ture" and "Social Life at Ottawa" were the lead articles in The Cosmopolitan of New York for April and August 1889; his series on Canadian politics and culture for the New England had begun in December 1889 with "Intellectual Life and Literature in Canada." The work of this previously unknown author was soon a topic of considerable interest in Canadian literary circles. Bliss Carman, who was on the staff of the New York magazine The Independent in 1890, wrote a brief but enthusiastic notice of Harte's article, as well as a personal letter of praise to Harte, and exchanged letters on Harte's view of Canadian literature with Archibald Lampman.1 In the Toronto Globe column of 1892-93, "At the Mermaid Inn," both Lampman and Wilfred Campbell paid tribute to Harte's recent achievements in magazine writing. "Mr. Harte," Campbell declared, "is rapidly making for himself a continental reputation as an able and strong writer of an aggressive character, and his truthful unveiling of humbug is making its influence felt in more than one quarter."2
"Only One Truth": Assimilation and the American Indian
Authors: Dippie Brian W.
Published: March 2011

Larry W. Burt. Tribalism in Crisis: Federal Indian Policy, 1953-1961. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982,180 + x pp. Thomas W. Dunlay. Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army. 1860-90. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 304 + xii pp. Laurence M. Hauptman. The Iroquois and the New Deal. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981. 256 + xviii pp. Peter Iverson. Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1982. 222 + xv pp. Clyde A. Milner II. With Good Intentions: Quaker Work among the Pawnees. Otos. and Omahas in the 1870s. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 238 + xvi pp. Richard K. Nelson. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. 292 + xvi pp. W. Raymond Wood and Margot Liberty, eds. Anthropology on the Great Plains. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.306 + vii pp. Celebrating the passage in 1887 of an act designed to break up the reservations and provide individual Indians with their own allotments, the Indian Rights Association offered a model definition of assimilation: the "general policy of gradually making the Indian in all respects as the white man."1 A constant in American thinking about the "Indian problem," often posited as the only alternative to racial extinction, assimilation dominated policy in the years after the Civil War. A vigorous attack on its assumptions through the 1920s shaped the Indian New Deal in the next decade, but assimilation was back in vogue in the wake of World War II. By the 1960s it was out of favor again, but it still constitutes a major ideological position in policy debate as one of the poles implied by the current catch-phrase "self-determination." Indians should be free to choose whether to live outside or inside white society, to remain distinctive, in short, or to assimilate. Not surprisingly, the issue of assimilation looms large in most studies of the American Indian.
Nouvelles tendances dans l'historiographie afro-américaine
Authors: Vandal Gilles
Published: March 2011

George M. Frederickson. White Supremacy : A Comparative Study in American & South African History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. 356 pp. Howard N. Rabinowitz, ed. Black Leaders o f the Reconstruction Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. 422 pp. Mark Tushnet. The American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. 262 pp. Walter L. Williams. Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877-1900. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. 259 pp. Un consensus s'est développé parmi les historiens américains contemporains pour reconnaître que les questions raciales ont été un des facteurs politiques dominants de l'histoire récente des Etats-Unis. L'historiographie afro-américaine n'a pas été sans subir le contre-coup des péripéties du problème noir aux Etats-Unis depuis 1950. Aussi, la nouvelle génération d'historiens a non seulement abandonné la thèse raciste de l'école Dunning, mais n'a pas cessé depuis 20 ans de raffiner et de reviser ses propres interprétations de la nature de l'escavage, des causes de la ségrégation raciale, et des conséquences que ces deux phénomènes ont eues sur l'évolution de la société noire. De façon différente, ces livres reflètent cette nouvelle tendance et représentent tous un apport historiographique important par leur approche méthodologique ou les nouvelles questions qu'ils soulèvent.
James and Modernism: Some Further Interventions
Authors: Hoople Robin P.
Published: March 2011

Paul B. Armstrong. The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983. 242 + xiv pp. Stuart Hutchinson. Henry James: An American as Modernist. New York and London: Barnes & Noble; Vision Press, 1983.136 pp. Janet Holmgren McKay. Narration and Discourse in American Realistic Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.212 + x pp. William Stowe. Balzac, James and the Realistic Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 203 + xviii pp. Edward Wagenknecht. The Novels of Henry James. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983. 329 + vi pp. The question is, what is there left to write about Henry James? If we listen to John Carlos Rowe in his Henry Adams and Henry James (1975), there is still left the job of translating our perceptions of James into the idiom of our own moment. Rowe is strongly seconded by some phenomenologists who propose an end to speculation about James and a beginning, through some scientific method, of finding out the final truth at last. Ruth Bernard Yeazell's Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (1976) certainly lights a path to new explorations and promulgates a study often hinted but never so fully seen when she chastizes those who wish to "moralize the text" in seeking refuge "in the distinctions of another, more epistemologically stable world" (p. 11). Others, variously, have also touched some important and productive Jamesian motifs recently: Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination (1977), interestingly cognate with Yeazell in his demonstration of both Balzac's and James's focus on the melodramatic as an imitation of bathos but as arising from "the desacralized remnants of sacred myth" left in the wake of the French Revolution; Stephen Donadio in Nietzsche, Henry James and the Artistic Will (1978) where Nietzschean will stands between weak man and chaos; Strother Purdy in The Hole in the Fabric (1977) who sees clearly how the "progressive breakdown in stability and fixity" of our concept of the universe has cut us loose from our sense of the absolute authority of the cosmos in defining the significances of objects and systems and who thus provides a gloss on the epistemological instability of the environment of James's late novels in much the same sense as Yeazell has presented it. Nor do the editors of the recently founded Henry James Review believe that James studies to date have exhausted the values of his work.
Power and Prominence in Washington, D.C.
Authors: Goodwin G. F.
Published: March 2011

Thomas C. Reeves. The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography. New York: Stein and Day, 1982. 819 + xvi pp. Donald A. Ritchie. James M. Landis: Dean of the Regulators. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 267 + xiv pp. Jordan A. Schwarz. The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917-1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 679 + xvii pp. In 1787 the Constitution of the United States created a national government in which political power was divided between the President and Congress. Although both remained central, others soon began to exercise political power. In the early nineteenth century, the federal judiciary established the right to review executive and legislative actions. The rise of mass political parties meant that elected officials would have to consider the popular will. Politician-administrators in the Cabinet and lobbyists who represented special interests demanded influence on the making of laws and policy. Even in the nineteenth century, the small federal bureaucracy possessed the power to impede or facilitate the execution of laws and policies.
Thomas Wolfe
Authors: McNamara Eugene
Published: March 2011

Richard S. Kennedy, ed. Beyond Love and Loyalty: The Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Elizabeth Nowell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.164 + xxii pp. Suzanne Stutman, ed. My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein. Foreword by Richard S. Kennedy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.390 + xxii pp. Thomas Wolfe. The Autobiography of an American Novelist. Ed. Leslie Field. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.152 + xii pp. Thomas Wolfe. Welcome to Our City: A Play in Ten Scenes. Ed. Richard S. Kennedy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. 132 + xii pp. It has been almost fifty years since the death of Thomas Wolfe and the case has not been settled yet. The publication of these four books indicates that the jury is still out and asking for more evidence. Vexing questions continue to nag: Wolfe was accused of using real people and incidents in his fiction and doing very little to disguise them. The results included, besides adverse criticism, death threats and lawsuits.
"National" War Among Indians of Northeastern North America
Authors: Eid Leroy V.
Published: March 2011

The fundamental question of survival forces any society to maximize its institutional skills and energies in the presence of war and peace situations. Scholars diverge widely in their views about how skilfully American Indian societies in the northeast woodland cultural area defended their societal and territorial interests. A large number of the most thoroughly informed first- hand observers of Indian life in the eighteenth century believed that the Indians were relatively sophisticated in military matters. Some of these observers linked this military expertise with an emphasis on a private/public war-making distinction in which two entirely different types of warring took place. The terrorist-type action needs to be distinguished from the large- scale public armies whose appearance always seemed to surprise most colonial military. Tactically and strategically the two types of war differed immensely. The formal use of councils to control public war constituted the characteristic political difference between the two types of war; however, many primary and scholarly sources that challenge the very possibility of large-scale Indian military organizations following council directives can be readily adduced. Only the acceptance of the general outlines of a model of societal relations founded on recent, viable stateless societies can begin to explain both the apparent administrative anomalies of Indian woodland war and its wide success.
Making the Emerson Text Adequate: Problems, Approaches and Revisions
Authors: Martin John Stephen
Published: March 2011

Gay Wilson Allen. Waldo Emerson: A Biography. New York: The Viking Press, 1981.751 + xxvi pp. Emerson in His Journals. Selected and edited by Joel Porte. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. 588 + xx pp. David Robinson. Apostle of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and Lecturer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. 205 + xiv pp. Erik Ingvar Thurin. Emerson as Priest of Pan: A Study in the Metaphysics of Sex. Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1981. 292 + xviii pp. The central problem of Emerson studies, it was once said, is that of accounting for Emerson's impact upon the reader. We know his "ideas" but we do not easily grasp why they have effect upon us as readers, for they are often dated as Neo-Platonic, Romantic or Transcendental. Indeed, in his own day, when the "ideas" were in vogue and receptive audiences came to enjoy his lectures, Emerson was enthralling, but no one was sure what he was saying: he did something to those "ideas" which transformed them. For a long time this problem has seemed the result of our not having full access to the more personal aspects of Emerson's life, for the assumption has been that to know what he said to himself or to close friends and family would provide keys to the ideas of his published works. There was an awareness that this private side was initially guarded or filtered by Emerson's son, Edward Waldo, and then an awareness that to get the full record would require a new edition of Emerson's journals and miscellaneous notebooks. In the meantime, since the 1940s, scholarship has interpreted Emerson's "ideas" from what portions of the private man were available; and here, as Joel Porte put it, it was clear that many interpretations assumed that beneath the public Emerson "there lies a finite consciousness troubled with a tragic sense of contingency and loss."1 Indeed, several of the very best critical interpretations have spoken of how Emerson's thought and work were either a result of expressing those personal tragedies or else a symbolic if not rhetorical response to smooth away those private experiences for survival.2 The point is, the current problem of accounting for Emerson's impact on the reader has been approached from two distinguishable directions: by trying to find more personal "documents" on the presumption that in them Emerson will explicitly clarify his "ideas" and indicate their meaning as he used them; or by structuring a "finite consciousness" (called "Waldo" at home) through which influences and "ideas of the time" pass, are intensified by experience, and then are exited with artful expression and moral force. Neither approach, I suggest, is adequate because of their inherent limitations. The true job is in making the available texts of Emerson—both "public" and "private"—adequate for an explanation of Emerson's transmutation of the pressures of his life into art that is universal and enduring.
Western Lives and Legends
Authors: Horne Lewis
Published: March 2011

Arrell Morgan Gibson. The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies: Age of the Muses, 1900-1942. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.305 + xiii pp. Joseph G. Rosa. They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickock. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974. 377 + xxi pp. Glenn Shirley. Belle Starr: The Literature, the Facts, and the Legends. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. 324 + xi pp. Helen Winter Stauffer. Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.322 + xii pp. Jon Tuska. Billy the Kid: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. 235 + xvi pp. From the material he or she gathers, a biographer tries to find the shape of a life and to discover some of the features of personality that give an individual both public and private being. However much such a statement neglects, it provides a point from which one can consider the five works surveyed here. All concern the western United States as far back as the Civil War, a concern that means that the region defined as "the West" varies according to what one considers the line of the frontier. Sometimes it is today's "Midwest," sometimes "the far West." It is also a west that has been variously characterized through methods ranging from fact to fiction, with the two frequently mingled. Three of these works are biographies of famous, even legendary, figures that try to correct current false portraits by cutting through the fabric of legend to the material of fact. Another is a biography of one who wrote about the West, and the last reviews a segment of the "lives" of two western artists' communities. The problems each writer faces are different; but from each a reader looks for the same thing. As Cynthia Ozick writes in Art and Ardor (1983), "A good biography is itself a kind of novel. Like the classic novel, a biography believes in the notion of 'a life'—a life as a triumphal or tragic story with a shape, a story that begins at birth, moves on to a middle part, and ends with the death of the protagonist" (p. 6). A reader might want to argue with some of Ozick's terms, but two of them point to problems in some of the works treated here. The terms are "shape" and "protagonist."
Mythology in Music: The Ballad of Loretta Lynn
Authors: Banes Ruth A.
Published: March 2011

Well, I was borned a Coal Miner's Daughter In a Cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler (Loretta Lynn) The ballad of Loretta Lynn is a legend born through a complex interaction between truth and fiction, individual and social history, myth, region, music, urban society and folk culture.* The "Coal Miner's Daughter," a popular myth of working-class Southern women which Loretta Lynn has both created and portrayed, may become as pervasive as the myth of the antebellum Southern lady, the belle, Scarlett O'Hara, or the benighted, but beautiful hillbilly, Daisy Mae. Through music and autobiography, the image and reality of Loretta Lynn have become so nearly equated that it is difficult to untangle the threads of regional and national culture which are so tightly bound in her image. Closely and consistently resembling the married woman portrayed in her lyrics and recordings, Loretta Lynn is a rural Southerner who represents the traditional value-orientation of Southern culture through her original compositions and her authentic folk style. Her autobiographical music and her life story provide important information about the social history of white, working-class, rural Southern women, and she appeals particularly to a female audience by combining liberated and traditional gender roles in her lyrics. At the same time, she reinforces the American values of individualism, patriotism and freedom. The fact that Loretta Lynn's often repeated life history has become the basis of a popular song, a popular film and a best-selling autobiography—each entitled Coal Miners Daughter— indicates the public's receptivity to her portrayal of Southern culture. She has become a contemporary Southern myth.1
Separate Spheres: Woman's Place in Nineteenth-Century America
Authors: Todd Barbara
Published: March 2011

Donna A. Behnke. Religious Issues in Nineteenth Century Feminism. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing, 1982. 299 pp." Barbara M. Brenzel. Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856-1905. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1983. 206 + xi pp. Faye E. Dudden. Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983. 344 + viii pp. Janet Wilson James. Changing Ideas about Women in the United States, 1776-1825. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1981. 337 + xxix pp. Altina L. Waller. Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America. Amherst, Mass. : University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. 177 + xiii pp. The idea of "separate spheres" has for the past two decades dominated writing about woman's role in the nineteenth century. Since Barbara Welter identified the notion and Kathryn Sklar defined it more precisely,1 historians have devoted much effort to describing the effects of the idea that Victorian women were assigned the responsibility for creating in the home a haven of morality and tranquility.
The Changing Face of Modern Medicine
Authors: Howell Colin D.
Published: March 2011

John S. Haller, Jr. American Medicine in Transition, 1840-1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.457 pp. Regina Markell Morantz, Cynthia Stodola Pomerleau, and Carol Hansen Fenichel, eds. In Her Own Words: Oral Histories of Women Physicians. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. 284 pp. George Rosen. The Structure of American Medical Practice, 1875-1941. Edited by Charles Rosenberg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.152 pp. In his seminal study, The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault has outlined the transition in medicine from classical metaphysical explanations of the nature of disease to the kind of empirical investigation that now lies at the heart of modern medical understanding. This epistemological shift, which Foucault locates in the latter half of the eighteenth century, involved an abandonment of systems and untested theory and demanded the creation of a rational and scientifically structured discourse centered upon the individual, the discrete or the specific. In the clinic, Foucault argues, a way of teaching and saying (i.e., the demonstration of already known truths) became a way of learning and seeing. "The clinic," he writes, "was probably the first attempt to order a science on the exercise and decisions of the gaze."
Norman Fiering and the Revision of Perry Miller
Authors: Butts Francis T.
Published: March 2011

During the century after 1650 the theoretical foundations of Western moral philosophy underwent an extraordinary revolution. By the mid-1600s the skeptical and empirical mentality associated with the revolution in science and the demise of Scholasticism was beginning to undermine the traditional authority of religion and to provoke a sense of impending crisis in moral philosophy. In response there occurred a remarkable outburst of innovative speculation designed to resecure the ethical values of Christian civilization upon new secular moorings. Accepting the premises of the new critical outlook, many thinkers turned away from supernatural Christianity to formulate moral philosophies whose foundations were naturalistic. They took a number of tacks, but the foremost trend, exemplified by the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, sought to embed moral behavior in man's supposed sentiment of benevolence. The rise of this "new moral philosophy" of "benevolism" is the subject of Norman Fiering's Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard.1
The Doubloon: Trilling's Melville Problem
Authors: Monteiro George
Published: March 2011

Writing about his Partisan Review years, William Barrett retails an anecdote about the reaction of Philip Rahv and Delmore Schwartz to the news that Alfred Kazin was about to turn his critical attention to the works of Herman Melville. "I wonder what Alfred will make of Moby Dick" asked Rahv, "when he turns all that Jewish schmaltz loose on Captain Ahab and the White Whale." The question brought laughter and inspired Schwartz to strike a harpooner's pose in hot pursuit of the great white whale, shouting "Whale ahoy!" Then, heaving his imaginary harpoon, Schwartz yelled out gleefully, "Gefilte fish!"1
The Lure of the North: American Approaches to the Canadian Wilderness
Authors: Harvey David D.
Published: March 2011

Canada has for long represented something to the potential American immigrant which is different from images held by immigrants from other countries. After all, this person has chosen an alternative to "the American Dream," apparently, whereas the American and Canadian dreams are fused in the imaginations of most immigrants. Another very obvious yet very important distinction between the immigrants' imaginative images is based upon the American's relative familiarity with Canada, geographic propinquity, and the comfort of travel. Geography has encouraged the American immigrant to think of himself only as a traveler, moving overland, northward, into an extension of his own country. Not only has travel been relatively easy, these immigrants have generally come from easy circumstances, very rarely from abject poverty, famine, feudal bondage or persecution. Canada was clearly a refuge, it is true, for the Loyalists, for fugitive slaves, for draft dodgers and deserters, even for a few religious groups and communities. Most American immigrants, however, have seen Canada as an extension of geography as well as of opportunity.
What to See in London
Authors: Beauchamp Gorman
Published: March 2011

Carolyn Johnston. Jack London—An American Radical? Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.205 + xviii pp. Stoddard Martin. California Writers: Jack London, John Steinbeck, The Tough Guys. London: Macmillan, 1983.224 pp. Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, ed. Critical Essays on Jack London. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983.298 + viii pp. Charles N. Watson, Jr. The Novels of Jack London: A Reappraisal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.304 + xv pp. Since his death in 1916 there has been no dearth of books on Jack London— but most have been biographies. The tacit consensus seems to hold with Alfred Kazin that "The greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived"; and the story that he lived all but obscured the stories that he wrote. Both his second wife, Charmian, and his elder daughter, Joan, offered their versions of the life in The Book of Jack London (1921 ) and Jack London and His Times (1939), respectively. In addition, his rags-to-riches-to-remorse saga has been rehearsed book-length about once every decade since: Irving Stone, Sailor on Horseback (1938); Philip Foner, Jack London: American Rebel (1947); Richard O'Connor, Jack London: A Biography (1964); Franklin Walker, Jack London and the Klondike (1966); Andrew Sinclair, Jack: A Biography of Jack London (1977); and Russ Kingman, A Pictorial Biography of Jack London (1979). Only half way through the 80s, the accustomed quota of London biography has already been met twice over: first, in Joan Hedrick's quirky psycho-biography, Solitary Comrade: Jack London and His Works (1982), which sets out to expose "the man who hid behind the celebrated public persona" not by reading his life into his work—the usual procedure— but his work into his life: transforming, that is, all his fictions into crypto- biography; and second, in one of the works here under review, Carolyn Johnston's more standard, but also more sensible study, Jack London—An American Rebel? Whether this accelerating rate of production in the London- bio industry will continue unabated or whether a saturation point approaches, I dare not hazard a guess; but even so fascinating a life as London's begins to pale after so many retellings. Besides, like most lives, it is depressing to read about.
America's First Bid for Empire
Authors: Martel Gordon
Published: March 2011

John W. Coogan. The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899-1915. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981.284 pp. John Milton Cooper, Jr. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1983.442 + xiv pp. Lloyd C. Gardner. Safe for Democracy: The Anglo- American Response to Revolution, 1913-1923. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.383 + xii pp. Lester D. Langley. The Banana Wars: An Inner History of American Empire, 1900-1934. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983. 255 + viii pp. Arthur S. Link, ed. Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World, 1913-1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.241 + viii pp. Empires are suffused with the imperial mentalité; they are not to be confused with states having colonies. All states have colonies, i.e., areas under the control of the central authority that are treated as dependencies, that are deprived of some of the customary political privileges, that are given special treatment in economic, legal and cultural affairs. The error that confuses colonialism with imperialism imagines that, because a body of water separates the central authority from the dependency, an empire has been created. What distinguishes imperialism is ideology. Imperialists take the long view, are entranced by the big picture; they disparage temporary solutions, special interests and local concerns; they speak the language of universality—of natural rights, of new ages, of acting on behalf of all mankind. They compare themselves with empires of the past, and find the past wanting. Their empire will be of a higher morality: not for them are the empires founded upon the evil institutions of slavery, race or the bourgeoisie. In our own time, when empires have come to be tied to the memories of a wicked past, imperialists have had to eschew imperialism. This has produced the supreme intellectual muddle of our age.
The Importance of Being Earnest: Literary Critics in America
Authors: Fogel Stanley
Published: March 2011

George H. Douglas. Edmund Wilson's America. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983. 254 + ix pp. Leslie Fishbein. Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of "The Masses, "1911-1917. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982. 270 + xv pp. Gregory S. Jay. T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.256 + xii pp. Edward Said. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. 327 + vi pp. Frederick C. Stern. F.O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 281 + xv pp. by a poet I do not mean one who writes poems, but a terrorist or provocateur who never writes.... Arrabal Every so often a literary critic, living as he does in a culture that regards his pursuit as a frippery, as something remote from the so-called real world, gets the jitters. Either to himself, his students or his readers he launches an apologia pro vita sua. Although drawn to what Proust called the majestic beauty of something wonderfully unnecessary, an ideal the critic usually savors, he finds himself at some point on the defensive, his vocation appearing as elitist, arcane or jaded beside the hefty doings of his seemingly more engagé colleagues and non-university professional neighbors. The World, the Text and the Critic is Edward Said's cri de coeur, but it is only one of many recent confrontations of critics with their roles.
Faulkner's Fiction: Esthetics, Apocrypha and the Actual
Authors: Louise Fulton Keith
Published: March 2011

Cleanth Brooks. William Faulkner: First Encounters, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.230 + x pp. Martin Kreiswirth. William Faulkner: The Making of a Novelist. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1983.193 pp. Gail L. Mortimer. Faulkner's Rhetoric of Loss: A Study in Perception and Meaning. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.153 pp. Walter Taylor. Faulkner's Search for a South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. 242 + xii pp. ...I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about...by sub- limating the actual into the apocryphal....1 What is the relationship between the land and the literature, between society and the text? Faulkner began his career by imitating the esthetes and concluded it by imitating in his own life the public commitment created in his fiction. In between is the Faulkner usually studied. There, in his introspective protag- onists, Faulkner dramatizes his own introspection. Like Quentin, Faulkner writes about his native soil as it is in his mind, his own interior fictions, because "it is himself that the Southerner is writing about, not about his environment...."2 The actual is sublimated into the apocryphal, transformed from the stuff of the mind into the dramas and patterns of the text. "Sublimate" is defined psychologically as "to direct the energy of an impulse from its primitive aim to one that is culturally or ethically higher," but it also refers to the passing of an element directly from a gas to a solid.-1 The lovely crystallized patterns of hoarfrost result from sublimation.4 Apocrypha, Faulkner's metaphor for his writing,5 generally refers to the sacred texts not accepted in some canons and of doubtful authenticity. Appropriately, Faulkner's des- cription of his discovery for his fiction is about revealing and about hiding, for the novels that make the energy of an impulse visible to the mind's eye are dramatic in ways that evoke and yet call into question the authenticity of the "culturally or ethically higher" vision.
The American Negro as Historical Outsider, 1836-1935
Authors: Walker Clarence E.
Published: March 2011

The purpose of this essay is to examine the idealist tradition of Negro historical writing which dates back to the second quarter of the nineteenth century and which was ultimately rejected by W.E.B. DuBois in the 1930s. In many ways this history was no different from the American history being written at the same time by many whites. Indeed, it was very Bancroftian in its analysis of the race problem in that it placed great emphasis upon the role of Providence as a force of historical causation. Nevertheless, within the context of the blacks' struggle to find a place in American society the idealist historians' view that history could be an instrument of social change had particular significance. Underlying the work of the black idealists was the belief that history could be used to change the prejudicial attitudes surrounding the Negro, that self-conscious elevation of mind and manners would put prejudice to flight.