bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Law and Society— North and South
Authors: Matthews Jean V.
Published: March 2011

Michael Stephen Hindus. Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.285 + xxviii pp. Paul Finkelman. An Imperfect Union: Slavery Federalism, and Comity. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1981.378 + xii pp. These two new works in the University of North Carolina's "Studies in Legal History" series are both excellent examples of the way in which legal history is increasingly breaking away from a narrow professional focus to an aware- ness that legal developments must be seen as part of social and political history. The law evolves partly from its own logic and the dynamics of its own intellectual processes as well as from the compulsions of its professional organization. But it is not hermetically sealed from influences from the rest of society and must in some degree be molded by the intellectual currents, political problems and class conflicts and power of that society. It is the interface—the ways in which society shapes the law and the effects which legal developments in turn have upon society—which is of interest to the general historian. Yet this is a very difficult kind of history to write, since it requires enough expertise to understand the internal, technical determinants of legal decisions and changes, without being so enmeshed in the disciplinary ethos that one can discern only a continuous Whig evolution toward ever increasing rationality and enlightenment.
Recent Nin Criticism: Who's on First?
Authors: Hinz Evelyn J.
Published: March 2011

Rose Marie Cutting. Anaïs Nin: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, [1978]. 218 + xxvi pp. Benjamin Franklin V and Duane Schneider. Anaïs Nin: An Introduction. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979.309 pp. Bettina L. Knapp. Anaïs Nin. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc., 1978. 168 + viii pp. Sharon Spencer. Collage of Dreams: The Writings of Anaïs Nin. Expanded Edition. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. 213 + ix pp. "Why should we too not enjoy an original relationship to the universe," asked Ralph Waldo Emerson, articulating that desire to be first, that self- reliance, which is perhaps the definitive characteristic of the American psyche. Anaïs Nin too was a champion of the self and the avant garde, and that she should have achieved fame in America is therefore not ultimately surprising. What Nin also came to understand, however, is the extent to which a rebellious commitment to the new is symptomatic of the adolescent mentality : "At twenty we all created our own manifestos. We were eager to be innovators. But the more culture we have, the more we know that everything has roots in the past."1 That, in the early part of her career, she and America were at odds can in turn be traced to a kind of immature arrogance on both sides, with Nin complaining that Americans could not appreciate her work because she was too far ahead of the times and American critics and pub- lishers rejecting her work on the grounds that her values were those of the old world and not sufficiently in tune with contemporary American realities.
Inference, Image and Inspiration: Three about Flannery O'Connor
Authors: McGifford Diane
Published: March 2011

Robert Coles. Flannery O'Connor's South, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.166 + xxx pp. Barbara McKenzie. Flannery O'Connor's Georgia. Foreword by Robert Coles. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1980.78 + xxx pp. Carol Shloss. Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies: The Limits of Inference. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. 159 pp. The only thing these three recent publications have in common—apart from a propensity to quote some of O'Connor's nastier witticisms—is Flannery O'Connor's name in their titles. Each book reflects a radically different sensibility and engages a different facet of O'Connor's art or personality, so that the reader of all three is rewarded with a "mini" interdisciplinary view of this controversial woman from Georgia. Carol Shloss's Flannery O 'Connor's Dark Comedies is a scholarly, sophisticated work of literary criticism which explores the anagogical dimensions of O'Connor's art; photographer Barbara McKenzie in Flannery O'Connor's Georgia attempts to translate the comic and violent aspects of O'Connor's fiction into visual images; Robert Coles's Flannery O'Connor's South assumes the voice of Southern apologist, addressing us mere mortals on the complexities of the social and cultural fabric in O'Connor's South. Though these books are qualitatively uneven and each mirrors the limits of its discipline and author, read as a group they persuade the reader that the interdisciplinary approach to literature is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but also the most fruitful in elucidating the central mystery in O'Connor's fiction: her myth-haunted perceptions of reality filtered through the concrete peculiarities of her locale.
Reflexiveness and Metaphysics in Twentieth-Century Poetry
Authors: Labrie Ross
Published: March 2011

John Haffenden. John Berryman: A Critical Commentary. New York: New York University Press, 1980.216 + vii pp. Elizabeth Isaacs. An Introduction to the Poetry of Yvor Winters. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/ Ohio University Press, 1981. 216 + xiv pp. Grosvenor Powell. Language as Being in the Poetry of Yvor Winters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. 172 +xii pp. Kathleen Woodward. At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1981. 175 + xiii pp. Most twentieth-century American poets have concentrated on the lyric, and most have increasingly narrowed their field of vision to the drama of per- ception. Moreover, the ascendancy of science in the last hundred years has persuaded a number of contemporary poets that they have little authority to describe reality other than in terms of their own felt experience.
The Worlds of Science-Fiction Criticism
Authors: Khouri Nadia
Published: March 2011

Brian Attebery. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. 212 + viii pp. H. Bruce Franklin. Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. 232 + ix pp. Wayne L. Johnson. Ray Bradbury. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.173 + xiii pp. John J. Teunissen, ed. Other Worlds: Fantasy and Science Fiction Since 1939. Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba, 1980. 225 + xiv pp. Explorations into science fiction have become symptomatic of a growing desire to investigate its origins, genres and subgenres, its uses and meta- morphoses. We are indeed very far from that crypto-cliquish fandom of the '30s for which only apocryphal stories about miracle-working gadgets and cheap-thrilling tales about robots and interplanetary invasions made true science fiction. The cultural phenomenon has since then ramified and graduated into schools, colleges and universities. Arguments about the pre- history, traditions and categories of science fiction began to multiply. The archaeological unearthing revealed a much older history than what Hugo Gernsback, the "father" of a type of technological science fiction (but by profession a designer of batteries) presented as an aboriginal freak in his launching of the magazine Modern Electrics (1908). For instance, some critics will claim that the first space opera is to be found as far back as the second century A.D. (around 125-85), in the True History of the Greek writer Lucian of Samosata. Others will establish the ancestry of modern science fiction with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Others will argue that in every mythical tale are to be found ingredients of conjectural fiction of which science fiction is an outgrowth. Yet what characterizes the cultural criticism of science fiction is an effort to provide a meaningful synthesis for all these trends. The point here is not merely to compile data as with an encyclopedia, but to attempt to circumscribe the field while disclosing its contradictions, to explain its diversified nature while establishing the history of the genre, to analyze its extent and limitations and to study its social significance.
"Intimate Immensity": On the Poetics of Space in MacLeish's Einstein
Authors: Lane, Jr. Lauriat
Published: March 2011

In 1926 Archibald MacLeish included in PART TWO, "Several Shadows of a Skull," of Streets in the Moon, one longer poem, "Einstein."1 Published separately three years later,2 Einstein has been included in every collection of MacLeish's poetry since.3 Twice it was gathered with other longer poems in a separate section; in the latest edition it is placed chronologically with the other poems of the 1920s. It has been anthologized in a few collections of American poetry.4 But it has not, to my knowledge, received extended critical attention. Nor has it been fully appreciated for what it is: both one of MacLeish's most distinguished longer poems and one of the most distin- guished longer American poems of this century.
Theodore Dreiser Visits Toronto
Authors: Griffin Joseph
Published: March 2011

In the latter part of September 1942, Theodore Dreiser visited Toronto at the invitation of the Toronto Town Forum to address an Eaton Auditorium audience on a topic advertised as "Democracy on the Offensive." His brief stay in Toronto, his forced and abrupt departure after making anti-British statements at a press conference, and the aftermath of these events in Canada, the United States and abroad have been the subject of only brief mention by commentators on Dreiser's life and work. The most extended account is to be found in W. A. Swanberg's Dreiser, and allusion is made to these occurrences as well by Robert H. Elias in his Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature, and in his Letters of Theodore Dreiser where he cites relevant correspondence and comments on it.1 Swanberg's account is generally accurate, if sketchy: understandably it is not his purpose to dwell for any length of time on events that are of only marginal importance for one concerned with the whole of Dreiser's life. But the story of the Toronto visit and its repercussions bears re-telling in more extended fashion with as many as possible of the gaps filled in and especially with an eye to the circumstances that led to Dreiser's saying what he did and that prompted the kinds of reactions his statements received. The Dreiser biography would benefit from a more complete examination of these unfortunate incidents which caused Dreiser considerable upset at a time when he was in feeble health, and which put his reputation is some jeopardy, at least for a while, in his own country and abroad.
Impressionism and Ideology: The State of Recent Genre Film Criticism
Authors: Grant Barry K.
Published: March 2011

Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies. New York : Norton, 1980.351 pp. Stephen Neale. Genre. London : British Film Institute. 1980.74 pp. Eugene Rosow. Born to Lose: The Gangster Film in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 422 + xv pp. Thomas Schatz. Hollywood Genres: Formulas. Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: Random House, 1981.297 + xiv pp. When film study began to mature in the mid-seventies, interest in the narrative film, which had been nurtured a decade earlier by auteurism's enthusiasm for popular film, waned in favor of more formal concerns. Critical interest shifted from the signified of films to the practice of signification, from what a film means to how it produces meaning. Structural film was particularly amenable to such an approach. No longer was film assumed to have an inviol- able meaning ; rather, meaning was now understood to arise from the con- junction of various discursive codes at work in the cinematic text. Auteurs no longer existed apart from such contexts, nor could they acceptably be studied in this manner again; as Roland Barthes had shown, writing degree zero was impossible.1
pynchon's New Nature : The Uncertainty Principle and Indeterminacy in The Crying of Lot 49
Authors: Olsen Lance
Published: March 2011

Pynchon's penchant for science—particularly for the science of physics— is common knowledge and commonplace. He employs science as a metaphor, a guiding schema for his art. an esthetic model representing the phenomenal and spiritual worlds. For Wittgenstein, of whom Pynchon makes multiple mention in V..1 "Die Welt ist allés, was derFall ist. "and for Pynchon the case is primarily one of disorder, heat-death, white noise, communication collapse and existential blur. In criticism concerning Pynchon's use of science as metaphor, one most often finds discussed the concept of entropy, in which nature, according to the second law of thermodynamics, will reach a state of maximum disorganization and minimum available energy, at which time all change will cease.2 Entropy is most often spoken about with respect to Pynchon's early stories and V. The next most commonly discussed scientific notion is that of white noise and distortion in information systems.-1 This appears in relation to all of Pynchon's work. Then comes "Maxwell's Demon." the idea of nineteenth-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who posed the existence of a small intelligent being who can sort out swifter and slower Molecules in a box divided into two compartments, thereby creating an inequality in energy (heat) without the expenditure of work.4 One usually finds "Maxwell's Demon" mentioned with respect to The Crying of Lot 49. very little criticism has been devoted to Pynchon's use of relativity theory. which emphasizes the subjectivity of the observer, and it appears most often in Conjunction with Gravity's Rainbow.
British Traditions and Revolutionary America
Authors: Lawson Philip
Published: March 2011

John Philip Reid. In Defiance of the Law: The Standing-Army Controversy, Two Constitutions, and the Coming of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 239 pp. Peter Shaw. American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution. Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1981. 231 pp. David P. Szatmary. Shay's Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1980. 134 + xiv pp. The wheel has turned practically full circle in American historiography of the revolutionary period. These three interdisciplinary studies follow a recent trend of investigation that concludes that it is no longer acceptable to write of a unique American revolutionary ideology in the 1760s and 1770s. This should come as no surprise to those who have read the work of historians like D. G. Allen and E. B. Tucker.1 If social and religious life in New England could be similar to that of village communities in rural Norfolk during the seven- teenth century, it does not require too great a leap of historical imagination to accept that other aspects of day-to-day existence had undergone little change in crossing the Atlantic. In these three studies it is clear that the singular British attitude to authority of any sort remained deeply etched in the American psyche before, during and, to some extent, after the Revolution. This line of approach has certainly produced a more reasonable interpretation of the colonial break with Britain, putting the required emphasis on how painful it was for most Americans to turn from resistance to rebellion. One drawback common to all three studies, however, is their concentration on Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular. The reader is constantly being asked to take local behavior as representative of a wider and more disparate society, and this is not always convincing. The recent work done by B. W. Labaree warns that such an approach to the thirteen colonies can be beset with difficulties.2
Rescuing Chandler: Crime Fiction, Ideology and Criticism
Authors: Snyder Stephen
Published: March 2011

David Geherin. Sons of Sam Spade : The Private Eye Novel of the 70s. New York : Frederick Ungar. 1.980. Stephen Knight. Form & Ideology in Crime Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1980. John S. Whitley. Detectives and Friends: Hammett's "The Glass Key "and Raymond Chandler's "TheLong Goodbye." Exeter: University of Exeter (American Documentation Centre). 1981. The grand project of structuralism, the de-mystification of the world, has been, to say the least, a peculiar goal in light of the present technocratic domination of society and the homogenization of the urban environment. Indeed, artists and humanistic philosophers have been proclaiming for two hundred years that the rationalist sensibility of science coupled with the zeal of big industry has done an extensive job of reducing our psychic climate to a condition of depersonalized monotony. The world of IBM in all its trembling immanence seems to be a structuralist view of what the world should be: an impersonal (subjectivity is non-existent) coded system all of whose functions must be intelligible. There are no inner mysteries to things, no dark spots in man inaccessible to societal structure, no process of change beyond the ken of dialectical explanation. Psychic reality dwells within linguistic structures whose dynamics are based upon binary oppositions.1
Lionel Trilling as a Literary Critic
Authors: McSweeney Kerry
Published: March 2011

The Works of Lionel Trilling: Uniform Edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: Toronto: Academic Press Canada. 1978-1980. The Liberal Imagination : Essays on Literature and Society ( 1950). 284 + xiv pp. The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. (1955).204 + xpp. Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning ( 1965). 204 + xiv pp. Sincerity and Authenticity ( 1972). 174 pp. The Last Decade : Essays and Reviews. 1965-J975. ed. Diana Trilling ( 1979). 241 pp. Speaking of Literature and Society. ed. Diana trilling (1980). 429 + xii pp. Lionel Trilling died in 1975 at the age of seventy. Since then, in a remarkable act of serious trade publishing that bespeaks Trilling's pre-eminence in the United States as a critic of literature, society and culture, his publishers have brought out a uniform edition of his collected works. The existence of these twelve handsome volumes provides an opportunity to survey Trilling's canon, assess strengths and limitations, note major tendencies, and identify appropriate criteria for gauging his critical achievement. My survey will, however, be restricted to Trilling's principal works of literary criticism and will consider only half of the volumes in the Uniform Edition. I shall not mention his one novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947) nor the volume of collected shorter fiction. Trilling's first book, the celebrated Matthew Arnold (1939), is not discussed because it is basically an intellectual biography, not a work of literary criticism. Because my space is limited I make no mention of the 1943 critical study of E.M. Forster. And I have excluded A Gathering of Fugitives and Prefaces to the Experience of Literature on the grounds that these two collections of critical pieces are comparatively minor and peripheral.
Joyce Carol Oates: The Critical Response Matures
Authors: Manning Gerald F.
Published: March 2011

Joanne V. Creighton. Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G.K.Hall. 1979.173 pp. Ellen G. Friedman. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Frederick Ungar. 1980. 238 + x pp. Mary Kathryn Grant. The Tragic Vision of Joyce Carol Oates. Durham. N.C.: Duke University Press. 1974.1978.167 + xiv pp. Gary F. Waller. Dreaming America : Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press. 1979. 224 + xii pp. The quite prodigious outpouring of fiction and poetry from Joyce Carol Oates since the early 1960s has provoked diverse and sometimes curious responses from reviewers and critics. Prior to the publishing of Wonderland in 1971, commentators were struck by the inevitable violence—at times, seemingly gratuitous—in Oates's work, and uneasy comparisons with various traditions were made: with the naturalists, with Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O'Connor, with realists who anatomize contemporary urban society. Dubious, perhaps, about the quantity of stories and novels, their frequent appearance within a relatively short period, and some repetitiveness of theme and character, critics of Oates's first decade of publishing worried about the quality of her work and how to classify it. Now that another decade has passed, the body of work has taken definite shape and critical response is becoming mature and valuable.
American National Security and the Defense of the Northern Frontier, 1945-1951
Authors: Aronsen Lawrence R.
Published: March 2011

For much of American history the defense of the northern frontier extended only as far as the 49th parallel. It was not until President Roosevelt's 1938 "we will not stand idly by" address at Kingston, Ontario, later codified in the Ogdensburg and Hyde Park Agreements of 1940 and 1941 respectively, that the defense of Canada came to be viewed as relevant to American national security.1 Initially, American planners addressed the problems of formulating a workable contingency war plan (ABC-22), but as the war progressed purely military matters became less important than the economic ones of coordinating North American defense production. After 1945 the situation was to be reversed, the problems associated with updating ABC-22 and revising preparedness measures coming to the forefront.
Change and Persistence in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Fischer Lewis R.
Published: March 2011

David Grayson Allen. In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Trans ferrai of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1981. 312 + xxi pp. Stephen Saunders Webb. The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569-1681. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1979. 549 + xxi pp. In a recent work T. H. Breen reminds us that both change and persistence were major characteristics of life in the American colonies during the seventeenth century.1 This is a salient rejoinder, because it is indisputable that a majority of American historians have chosen to emphasize the process of transforma- tion. That is, as a group we have tended to ask Whiggish questions along the lines of "how did we get where we are today?" This approach has always held a special attraction for colonialists, who can seldom forget that the transition from colony to nation marks a very obvious end of their particular period.
The Tellers and the Tales: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville
Authors: Hayne Barrie
Published: March 2011

Raymona A. Hull. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The English Experience, 1853-1864. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.307 + xvi pp. David Ketterer. The Rationale of Deception in Poe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. 285 + xv pp. G.R. Thompson and Virgil L. Lokke, eds. Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville and Poe. Critical Essays in Honor of Barrel Abel. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1981. 383 + xix pp. Arlin Turner. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New York : Oxford University Press, 1980. 457 + xiv pp. It is now nearly a quarter of a century since Harry Levin's droll observation (in The Power of Blackness) that the academic study of Melville had replaced the whaling industry as the principal activity of New England. The inter- vening years have done nothing to reverse the process. "Save the Whales" buttons proliferate, but the notes of "Woodman, Spare that Tree" are sounded less these days. The lumber room in which even Moby-Dick was locked up for seventy-five years has now been fully opened for inspection, and even Clarel dusted off for a masterpiece. The Godhead is broken up like the bread of the Supper, and Melville's works are the pieces.
Mormons: The Most Peculiar People of All
Authors: Sinclair-Faulkner Tom
Published: March 2011

Austin and Alta Fife. Saints of Sage and Saddle : Folklore Among the Mormons. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1980. 367 + xviii pp. Klaus J. Hansen. Mormonism and the American Experience. (Chicago History of American Experience) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. 257 + xviii pp. Louis J. Kern. An Ordered Love : Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias—the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1981.430 + xiii pp. The Mormons (or "Latter-day Saints," to use the name of the largest branch of the family) are a peculiar people in three senses of the word. In the eyes of most non-Mormons (or "Gentiles," as the Mormons say) they are an exotic group, perhaps slightly dangerous. Clergy in mainstream American denominations often apply the question-begging term, "cult," to them. But in their own eyes Mormons are a peculiar people in the sense of I Peter 2:9: "a peculiar people, a holy nation, a royal priesthood." If their nationhood has waned in this century, priesthood remains at the core of Mormonism. And thirdly, in the eyes of an increasing number of historians, Mormons are peculiar to America. Their faith is perhaps the most American of all religions.
Impressionists, Satirists, Radicals and Romantics : Investigating the Eccentric Response
Authors: Matheson Terence J.
Published: March 2011

Hilbert H. Campbell and Charles E. Modlin, eds. Sherwood Anderson: Centennial Studies. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1976. 275 pp. Elizabeth Evans. Ring Lardner. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979.150 pp. James Nagel. Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980.190 pp. Robert C. Rosen. John Dos Passos: Politics and the Writer. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1981. 191 pp. If asked to consider possible ways in which Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos and Ring Lardner, of all people, could be thought of together, one might remember that Dos Passos and Anderson were friends who at one time shared an interest in left-wing politics. It might also be recalled that three of the four—Anderson, Dos Passos and Lardner— share the dubious distinction of having enjoyed initial periods of considerable popularity followed by a lengthy decline in public interest, while Crane's reputation has continued to grow with the passage of time. Beyond that, they would seem to have little in common. There is a sense in which the four can be mentioned in the same breath, however, for in spite of their obvious differences, all were literary pioneers, of sorts. As such, each writer at some point in his career tended to be praised or condemned for what was seen as an eccentric, if not perverse, approach to subjects themselves considered either too volatile and controversial, or too trivial, for direct investigation. It may well be that for this reason, none of the four—with the possible exception of Crane—has received quite the critical treatment he deserves. This last fact in particular leads one to welcome any new studies that might stimulate renewed interest in these writers, whose works have always tended to be eclipsed by other, more familiar names in American literature.
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha
Authors: Robson H. P.
Published: March 2011

Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie, eds. 'A Cosmos of My Own": Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1980. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981.304 pp. John Pilkington. The Heart of Yoknapatawpha. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981. 328 pp. Noel Polk. "Requiem For a Nun": A Critical Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. 273 pp. A necessary condition for an author's survival over the years must, of necessity, be a strong desire on the part of his readers and critics that he survive. When criticism and commentary on Faulkner's amassed work continues to be published so prolifically, therefore, we, as devotees of the author and Yoknapatawpha's history, should rejoice. These three books, the latest in the ever-growing body of Faulkner criticism, provide new perspectives on that Southern world and exhaustive study of his individual novels.
Taking Woody Allen Seriously
Authors: Feldman Seth
Published: March 2011

Foster Hirsch. Love, Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life: Woody Allen's Comedy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. 231 pp. Eric Lax. On Being Funny : Woody Allen and Comedy. New York : Manor Books, 1977. 242 pp. James Monaco. American Film Now. New York : Oxford University Press, 1979. 540 pp. Maurice Yacowar. Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen. New York : Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979. 243 pp. In his American Film Now, James Monaco advances the not too startling thesis that Hollywood has become big business. Sophisticated marketing techniques package artists and ideas. Talent comes to fruition by following a circuitous route through the many subsidiaries of interlocking conglomer- ates. Ultimately, the independents become less so. Monaco's Hollywood, like his diagrammatic presentation of the importance of various film artists, is a Copernican solar system. Some stars illuminate; most simply revolve around the centers of power and influence. Some spin off from the centers; others fall into them.
Liberty and Discipline in Covenant Theology*
Authors: Peacock John
Published: March 2011

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century formulations of liberty by the people or their inferior magistrates to oppose kings became intimately related to the theology and politics of Christian liberty and church discipline. In Old and New England, as on the continent, the ancient notion of covenant (from foedus, federal) was generally enlisted to justify civil and ecclesiastical polities based on disciplined reciprocity between members, on conditions to be fulfilled rather than fixed prerogatives, on freedom within specified limits to make those conditions (which, once made, were binding), and on due process.1 Covenant theology contributed different particular ideological implications depending on political circumstances: in France the Huguenot minority supplemented covenant between God and people with legal and nationalistic arguments, as well as with natural rights of a non-majoritarian kind, in order to attract alienated Catholic nobles in the fight against Catherine de' Medici. The resulting monarchomach defense of revolution was that when compact between king and people had been violated, inferior magistrates (not the people per se) were ordained and duty-bound to seek Vindiciae contra Tyrannos.2 In England, Puritans had waged a popular campaign in 1572 with a best-selling Admonition to Parliament. They appealed to the people again after their campaign of the 1580s had failed to purify the church from the top down by act of Parliament or Queen. But Puritans were not democrats, felt suspicious of the unregenerate mass, and needed as much to discipline the people as to sanctify their rights. Covenant became an important instrument for expressing and resolving Puritan ambivalence about the people, delimiting their sovereignty as much as it did patriarchal authority, and expressing the Puritan cause as both popular and a dictatorship of the saints.
The Political Culture of Middle-Period United States
Authors: Sharp James Roger
Published: March 2011

Kermit L. Hall. The Politics of Justice : lower Federal Judicial Selection and the Second Party System, 1829-61. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1979. 268 + xvii pp. Daniel Walker Howe. The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979. 404 + vii pp. Richard B. Latner. The Presidency of Andrew Jackson: White House Politics, 1829-1837. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1979. 291 + ix pp. Harry L. Watson. Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County North Carolina. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.354 + xii pp. Since the publication of Lee Benson's The Concept of Jacksonian Democ- racy more than twenty years ago, the progressive, socioeconomic inter- pretation of the Jacksonian period has been under heavy siege. A number of historians, the so-called "new political historians," following Benson's footsteps, have argued that it was ethnocultural factors such as ethnicity and religion that shaped antebellum voting patterns. Challenging the claims of the progressive historians, Benson concludes, in his study of middle-period New York, that "the stand of the major parties on socioeconomic issues had relatively little effect upon bloc voting." Instead, New Yorkers cast their ballots in response "to factors initially associated with positive and negative reference groups and subsequently with fulfillment of political roles."1 A student of Benson, Ronald Formisano, tested his mentor's hypotheses in Michigan and finds similar results. It was cultural and moral issues that divided the parties, with the Democrats appealing to the "antievangelical social groups who rejected the moral society which pietist Protestants pro- moted through Anti-masonry and then Whiggery." Formisano challenged his colleagues to confront the "brute fact that large portions of the electorate do not have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that have formed the basis of intense controversy for substantial periods of time."2
The Belated Renaissance of University History in the United States
Authors: Bruneau William
Published: March 2011

Steven J. Diner. A City and Its Universities : Public Policy in Chicago, 1892-1919. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. 263 + xii pp. Ronald Story. The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980. 256 + xvi pp. This essay sports a particularly ironic— and thus irresistible—title. It speaks of a re-emergent, expanding and potentially revolutionary field of historical studies: the investigation of universities in their broad historical contexts.' Yet this renaissance, coming after a half-century's neglect, coincides both in the New and in the Old Worlds with a crisis of contraction in the "official," university-based profession of history.
Old-Fashioned Literary Criticism
Authors: Probert Kenneth
Published: March 2011

Robert J. Begiebing. Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1980. 209 pp. Anthony Channell Hilfer. The Ethics of Intensity in American Fiction. Austin and London : University of Texas Press, 1981. 208 + xiii pp. Alvin F. Kernan. The Imaginary Library: An Essay on Literature and Society. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1982.186 pp. Burton Pike. The Image of the City in Modern Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.168 + xv pp. These four books unwittingly suggest that it may well be time that we heed the call of Geoffrey Hartman and others for a more philosophical literary criticism that will provide a new language to examine both classic and contemporary texts. All four competently examine the relationship between literary works and their milieux (be they philosophical, historical or social), but none illuminates any new critical avenues that might lead us away from the pre- vailing Anglo-American disinclination to investigate radically the relationship between text and society.
Recent American Diplomatic History: A Mouse's Eye View
Authors: Bothwell Robert
Published: March 2011

Gregg Herken. The Winning Weapon : The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945-1950. New York: Knopf, 1980.425 + xiv pp. Timothy P. Ireland. Creating the Entangling Alliance: The Origins of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.264 pp. Akira Iriye. Power and Culture : The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.336 pp. William W. Stueck. The Road to Confrontation : American Policy Toward China and Korea, 1947-1950. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 337 pp. Of all the forms of contemporary historiography, diplomatic history has had the worst press over the past decade. Scorned as an elitist preoccupation with personalities and mere chronology, diplomatic history has receded from the consciousness of many of today's graduate students, making way for vast, quantifiable waves of oppression, violence and crime. While facing this assault from the front, diplomatic historians have found that their flanks have been turned by the disappearance of their political-science auxiliaries into a wonderland of computerology, word counts (disguised as "opera- tional codes"), graphs and jargon—opaque and splendidly costly, if some- what baffling and fruitless. Compared to the heuristic mansions in which political science's international relations specialists now dwell, diplomatic historians labor, or slumber—according to choice—in hovels better suited to the cottage industry that is their specialty.
Ideology and Social Change in Revolutionary America
Authors: Stuart Reginald C.
Published: March 2011

Aleine Austin. Matthew Lyon : "New Man " of the Democratic Revolution 1749-1822. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981. 192 + xii pp. Lawrence Delbert Cress. Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. 238 + xiv pp. Drew McCoy. The Elusive Republic : Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. 268 + xi pp. Ever since J. Franklin Jameson published his little book on the American Revolution as a social movement, historians have probed the issue of social change in Revolutionary America. Currently, social and intellectual history have blended comfortably, and in turn inform more traditional topics. So it seems a natural product of historiographical evolution to have a social study of the military and an intellectual study of economics. But this trend relates closely to another aspect of the historiography of the Revolutionary era— the ideological interpretation of politics, constitutionalism and law that began with Bernard Bailyn's seminal studies of the 1960s.
Slavery and Identity
Authors: McDonnell Lawrence T.
Published: March 2011

Charles E. Beveridge and Charles Capen McLaughlin, eds. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Volume II: Slavery and the South, 1852-1857. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.503 + xxi pp. John W. Blassingame, ed. The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One : Speeches, Debates and Interviews. Volume 1:1841-46. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 530 + cii pp. Carol Bleser, ed. The Hammonds of Redcliffe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.421 + xxii pp. Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames, eds. The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison. Volume VI: To Rouse the Slumbering Land, 1868-1879. Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1981. 637 + xx pp. C. Vann Woodward, ed. Mary Chesnut's Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.886 + Iviii pp. "This new man," the American Crevecoeur sought to understand in 1782, was a man tainted by slavery. Slavery gave the lie to his highflown revolu- tionary ideals, mocking equality, twisting democracy, denying progress. For most of the nineteenth century the American's developing identity—indivi- dual, class and national—was primarily bound up with the conflict over black servitude. The process of sectional division, civil war and national reconciliation which destroyed slavery also transformed American identities. The brash American who hailed William Henry Harrison's administration in 1841 became a new man once more—chastened, but brash still—before the advent of Benjamin Harrison's presidency two generations hence. The volumes under consideration here provide a fine opportunity to retrace aspects of that transformation.
American Diplomatic History: The State of the Art
Authors: Carroll F. M.
Published: March 2011

Richard Dean Burns, ed. Guide to American Foreign Relations since 1700. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, Inc., 1983.1311 + xxvi pp. Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds. American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1981.369 + xiii pp. Paul Gordon Lauren, ed. Diplomacy : New Approaches in History, Theory, and Policy. New York: The Free Press, 1979. 286 + xvi pp. Gordon A. Craig, in his 1982 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, "The Historian and the Study of International Relations," focused his remarks on the paradoxical situation that characterizes the current position of diplomatic history. Despite the turbulent and often dis- illusioning record of international relations since 1945, both student and professional interest in diplomatic history has waned in recent years. Citing the records of the American Historical Association's annual meetings during the period from 1976 to 1982, Craig noted only five sessions per year out of 128 dealt with what he would call international relations. This decline of interest has been reflected in university departments, curricula and course enrollments. Indeed the appearance in the last six years of the journals Diplomatic History in the United States and The International History Review in Canada was as much a response to the declining proportion of articles on the history of international relations that appeared in the major historical journals in the 1960s and early 1970s as it was the result of the maturation of diplomatic historians. Nevertheless, while this erosion has been taking place. Craig observes, the writing of international history has become more sophisticated and penetrating. "We are a long way," he says, "from the time when the standard monograph in diplomatic history was literally copied out of the bound volumes of the Foreign Office papers in the Public Record Office, tricked out with Latin tags and formidably arcane footnotes, and set forth to grace the lower shelves of university libraries."1 In other words, no longer can diplomatic history be dismissed by the quanti- fiers and social historians with G. M. Young's pitiless remark that it is "little more than the record of what one clerk said to another clerk," a reputation out from under which diplomatic historians have been struggling to climb ever since.2 Current writings are likely to examine topics, Craig suggests, "like the moral and intellectual roots and assumptions of national policy, domestic factors as determinants of policy, interagency competition in decision making, public opinion and the way in which it is influenced by the media, comparative political systems and ideological convergence, and much else" (p. 3).
A Place to Come From : The Nashville Agrarians and Robert Penn Warren
Authors: Winchell Mark Royden
Published: March 2011

Richard Gray, ed. Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. 260 pp. James H. Justus. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.326 + xiv pp. Neil Nakadate, ed. Robert Penn Warren : Critical Perspectives. Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 1981.328 pp. Thomas Daniel Young and John J. Hindle, eds. The Republic of Letters in America: The Correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate. Lexington; University Press of Kentucky, 1981.232 pp. Thomas Daniel Young. Waking Their Neighbors Up: The Nashville Agrarians Rediscovered. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. 90 + xii pp. Historically, Americans have found the South easier to mythologize than to understand. Indeed, what is one to make of a people who are deeply conserva- tive and yet remain proud of having tried to overthrow the United States government by force and violence? Even today, one cannot drive through the South without confronting rebel flags and car horns that play "Dixie" when stopped at red lights. Although the Civil War was easily the gravest political, military and moral crisis ever faced by the United States, the North has long since relegated that crisis to the safe confines of a history text. For the South, however, the past continues to be a living part of the present. Perhaps for this reason, Southerners are a peculiarly literary people. As Garry Wills has noted: "winners erect their own monuments, while losers ache with music."1
Re-Interpretations of Nineteenth- Century American Literature
Authors: Harvey Roderick W.
Published: March 2011

Joy S. Kasson. Artistic Voyages: Europe and the American Imagination in the Works of Irving, Allston, Cole, Cooper, and Hawthorne. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982.206 pp. Linden Peach. British Influence on the Birth of American Literature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982. 218 + xi pp. Donald A. Ringe. American Gothic : Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth- Century Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982.215 + vii pp. John Carlos Rowe. Through the Custom-House-. Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modem Theory. Baltimore: Johns-Hopkins University Press, 1982. 218 + xiii pp. William H. Shurr. Rappaccini's Children : American Writers in a Calvinist World. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1981.165 pp. A decade ago the scholar interested in nineteenth-century American literature and intellectual history would often begin with such works as F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, R. W. B. Lewis' The American Adam and Charles Fiedelson's Symbolism and American Literature. Using a technique that combined literary analysis with the history of ideas, these studies attempted to view American literature as a field rather than simply as a collection of works by different authors. The scholar writing today might still use this approach, but in the last few years many studies have appeared that offer a greater degree of sophistication in their appraisals of American literature. Scholars have studied politics and literature, history and literature, art and literature, and other fields; most of these books have brought new attention to hitherto neglected areas of American prose and poetry. Five recent critical studies—Linden Peach's British Influence on the Birth of American Literature, Donald A. Ringe's American Gothic, Joy S. Kasson's Artistic Voyages, William H. Shurr's Rappaccini's Children and John Carlos Rowe's Through the Custom-House—present various innovative approaches that form, in effect, a series of re-interpretations of nineteenth-century American literature in an intellectual context.
The Question of Henry James (Revisited)
Authors: Macnaughton William R.
Published: March 2011

Alwyn Berland. Culture and conduct in the novels of Henry James. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1981.231 + xi pp. Nicola Bradbury. Henry James : The Later Novels. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. 228 pp. James Kirschke. Henry James and Impressionism. Troy, N.Y.: The Whitston Publishing Co., 1981. 333 + ix pp. R. W. J. Wilson. Henry James's Ultimate Narrative : "The Golden Bowl. "St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. 329 + xii pp. Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 1980.142 + vii pp. In a peculiar, hostile and fascinating review of James Miller, Jr.'s, book on The Waste Land, John Peter writes, "There's a bitter saying in North Ameri- can universities that the real difference between a businessman and an academic is that, when the businessman knifes a colleague in the back, he knows why."1 Although the smugness in the remark about businessmen seems somewhat chilling to me, I know enough about academic communi- ties to see a modicum of truth in this probably apocryphal observation. I note it here because in the following review of five relatively new books on Henry James, many of my own comments will be less than complementary, in a sense collegial knifings. Readers of this review essay should therefore be skeptical in advance about my motives and qualifications. I am not a Jacobite, and find the writings of Henry James beginning with The Spoils of Poynton to be difficult to read and at times not worth the effort. As a result, I occasionally suspect that his mammoth reputation is an unequi- vocal example of the Emperor's New Clothes, and wonder how a writer so narrow, so evasive, so—despite his self-justifications and self-glorifications in his Prefaces to the New York edition—frequently out of control, could inspire so much adulation.