American Literature: The Twentieth Century

Lacy Rumsey, Stephen McVeigh, Elizabeth Nolan, Sarah MacLachlan, Rachel van Duyvenbode, Luigi Fidanza, Steven Price and A. Robert Lee This chapter has five sections: 1. Poetry; 2. Fiction 19001945; 3. Fiction since 1945; 4. Drama; 5. Native, Asian American, Latino/a and General Ethnic Writing. Section 1 is by Lacy Rumsey; section 2 is by Stephen McVeigh and Elizabeth Nolan; section 3 is by Sarah MacLachlan, Rachel van Duyvenbode and Luigi Fidanza; section 4 is by Steven Price; section 5 is by A. Robert Lee. Alan Rice's section on African American literature was unavoidably postponed this year; his section next year will cover material published in both 2003 and 2004.

1. Poetry

The year was rich in new editions of major poets. Particularly welcome was the publication by New Directions of Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos, edited by Richard Sieburth . This is the first time since 1948 that Pound's famously controversial text has received publication separate from the other cantos, and it is a pleasure to see such reputedly specialist material presented attractively and cheaply, with the kind of relationship Top between price and critical apparatus typically reserved for 1. Poetry classic fiction. The text, familiar to readers of the Faber and 2. Fiction 1900-1945 New Directions editions, contains no surprises; the extensive 3. Fiction since 1945 endnotes, however, include some material which will be new to 4. Drama 5. Native, Asian American,... many readers, even those familiar with Carroll F. Terrell's Books Reviewed Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (UCalP [1980]). Sieburth contributes a useful introduction, albeit one whose adoption of a biographical framework might be taken to suggest that the Pisan Cantos are primarily to be read through the perspective of Pound's lifewhich is, one might think, the perspective from which the poetry will need at some point to escape if its value is to be dispassionately assessed. Overall, the edition is a near-ideal one for students. Teachers will want to continue to refer to Carroll Terrell for the broader range of references (and interpretations) that he provides, but will not want to be without it. If the volume can bring the Pisan Cantos to the wide readership that the work's reputation demands, and if criticism can then build into its assessment of the poetry the responses of that wider readership, it will have performed an invaluable service.

Sieburth is also the editor of the Library of America's new edition of Pound's Poems and Translations, which contains all of Pound's published poetry except the Cantos, as well as the poems of Hilda's Book and the San Trovaso Notebook, and virtually all of Pound's published translations, including the Confucian prose texts. There is no introduction, but, as usual with this series, the texts are reliable, clearly set out, and followed by a restrained but helpful chronology and notes. These are clear and to the point, even if, as in other works reviewed here, foreign-language names have not been adequately checkedLa Dorotea becomes La Doreata, for example. A book-by-book listing of the contents of each of Pound's volumes is also provided. For those readers used to the pocket-sized intimacy of a Personae or a Translations, the volume comes as a defamiliarizing and salutary shock: the sheer extent of Pound's lyric output, and its presentation within a canon-making series, will oblige many to reconsider how it now reads page by page. Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter , is a massive book, but its mass is largely accounted for by the bulk of Lowell's poetry, the clear and comprehensive presentation of which is clearly this attractive volume's primary goal, and one in which it wholly succeeds. The notes, which identify allusions, set out poems publishing history, and cross-reference some of Lowell's subjects to his discussions of them elsewhere, notably in the Collected Prose, are informed, precise and helpful; the critical and introductory material is brief and to the point. Most important in a collection of the arch-reviser Lowell, of course, are the editorial decisions, and Bidart and Gewanter's are sensitive and explicit, and at times grounded, as Bidart states in his introduction, in a personal assessment of poetic value. Since the edition does not aim to be a variorum, only interesting variants are included; variations in spelling are not corrected, as, since Bidart correctly points out, after-dinner and after dinner and afterdinner are each different rhythmically, and in the few cases where the editors depart from the final published version of the text Bidart makes their motives clear, as in the case of Lowell's suppression of a stanza division in Night Sweat, a suppression which Bidart and Gewanter allow themselves to overrule here. The principal regret which some readers may have will be the suppression of Notebook in favour of the later versions of that volume's poems found in To Lizzie and Harriet and History; one hopes that the earlier volume will remain in print. Grace Schulman's edition of The Poems of Marianne Moore, on the other hand, leaves the reader slightly confused as to the detail of its editorial principles, which are nowhere set out, though they are at bottom probably very close to Bidart and Gewanter's. The edition, which is based on chronological order, reconstructs the original sequences in which poems received first magazine publication, yet in general (but not always) prints the final versions of them. Moreover, Schulman chooses not to print in sequence the famously reduced version of Poetry included in the body of the 1967 Complete Poemsa version about which Schulman notes the devastation it caused in many readerspreferring instead the longer version that Moore placed in the notes to that volume, where Moore hoped that the serious reader may look it up. As with Bidart, one can respect the editor's right to correct what she or he considers to be flagrant errors of taste on the poet's part, but this may be a step too far, since it will force on readers new to Moore exactly the process of disappointment that Schulman describes: would it not be preferable to discover the poem at its most concentrated, and then encounter the extra lines as a glorious bonus, rather than the other way around? These caveats do not distract from the fact that, in the unprecedented range of Moore's poemsmany previously uncollectedthat it makes available, and in its underlying chronological order, the volume is a rich and important one. The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, edited by Barry Ahearn , has a great deal to offer admirers of either poet. Rich in literary-historical information, permitting the reader to gauge the efforts made by Williams to see Zukofsky respected and

published, but also how at timesnotably during the 1930sthere is tension between the two, the volume also contains a certain amount of biographical material, particularly on Williams's side: the older poet is notably more discursive about his family life, and indeed about Zukofsky's. The correspondence's greatest interest, however, is in the many moments of critical insight it contains: there are heady moments of close reading (and high-handed dismissal) of other poets workWilliams on Pound, for example, and Zukofsky on Oscar Williams, whose ubiquity had been worrying his namesakeas well, of course, as multiple insights into Williams's and Zukofsky's own poetry. The correspondence regarding Zukofsky's A Marriage Song for Florence and Harry constitutes an exemplary critical exchange: Williams complains of the poem's obscurity but discerns a Herrick-like music within it; Zukofsky responds by explaining his syntactic reticence, confirming the Herrick connection, and expatiating on how he hopes his cadences will be read. In general, however, as Ahearn notes in his excellent introduction, the critical traffic flows the other way, with Zukofsky much the more confident in his ability to understand and improve upon the other's work. Particularly valuable in illustrating this is the volume's third appendix, which recounts the suggestions and alterations made by Zukofsky concerning Williams's The Wedge. Finally, Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Gloria Wade Gayles , contains interviews conducted with Brooks between 1964a Studs Terkel pieceand 1994. For many readers, the volume's primary interest will be in Brooks's discussion of her relationship to black political activism, and in particular to her radicalization after 1967. Also suggestive are Brooks's theoretical observations on poetry, and especially its reception; there is acute discussion, for example, of the readerly freedoms afforded by reading, as opposed to listening to, a poem. At such points the reader regrets that Brooks's interviewers seem on the whole to have been willingly distracted from such nuts-and-bolts questions of poetics, as such insights are rarely given space for development or detailed discussion. Looming large among the year's collective publications in the field is The Cambridge History of American Literature, volume 5: Poetry and Criticism, 19001950, whose general editor is Sacvan Bercovitch . The volume falls into three main parts: Modernist Lyric in the Culture of Capital, by Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois, which includes chapters on anthologies and their audience, and on Frost, Stevens, Eliot, and Pound; Poetry in the Machine Age, by Irene Ramalho Santos, which includes chapters on Stein, Williams, H.D., Moore, Crane, and Hughes; and Literary Criticism, by William E. Cain, which will not be considered here. Though attributed to Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois, the first part is an only slightly re-edited version of Lentricchia's Modernist Quartet (CUP [1994]), a work originally commissioned as a contribution to this volume. The many excellencies (and occasional weaknesses) of Lentricchia's work are too well known to need rehearsing here; the chapter on T.S. Eliot, in particular, remains as fresh as ever, and makes an excellent early port of call for any student of his poetry. New in this version of the text are a reordering of some material, the correction of some minor errors, and an epilogue on the fate of the modernist artist. It is perhaps a pity that more has not been made of the opportunity to pay renewed attention to the specificity of the publication context; in a work such as thiswhose readers, as Robert von Hallberg noted in volume 8 [1995], are likely to have more curiosity than knowledgethe chapter on Pound should surely make at least some mention of Cathay; some of that chapter's more tendentious interpretations would, likewise, need careful contextualization for the nonspecialist reader really to find them useful. The second section, despite bearing a Lentricchia-esque title, is a conventional set of singleauthor studies, in which Ramalho Santos has clearly taken great care to find the right mode of address for her readership. The opening to the chapter on Williams, for example, expertly

winnows out from a long quotation from the poet the points and questions that most require development, and then provides that development lucidly and instructively. Some of the conclusions offered could be disputed, and at times one finds oneself wishing for more of a sense of the fierce debate that has surrounded these authors, but on the whole this is an important job done well. Some criticisms must, however, be made of the production standards of this volume. There are too many errors of spelling (some, to be fair, inherited from Modernist Quartet): it seems remarkable that such names as de Gourmont and d'Aubign cannot be got right; ditto Louis Zukofsky, who becomes Zukovsky on several occasions, some of them, furthermore, absent from the index. I also notice a falling-off in paper quality as compared to earlier volumes in the series; the pages are less pleasant to the eye and hand, and, in the copy stocked in my institution's library, are already starting to yellow. For 75 one hopes for better. Frez Kuri, ed. , Brion Gysin: Tuning In to the Multimedia Age, is the first publication devoted to this British-born artist, naturalized American in 1946, whose invention of permutated poems, based on a cut-up approach to text, famously influenced William Burroughs in his composition of The Naked Lunch. Beautifully produced, rich in reproductions of Gysin's paintings and, to a lesser extent, of the original printings of his permutated poems, the volume will clearly become the primary resource for anyone interested in Gysin's work. Whether it will make new converts is a different matter. Reminiscences and essays (including texts by Burroughs and Gregory Corso) convey some of the fascination that Gysin exerts, but despite repeated assertions of his creative importance do not convince the non-aligned readerat least in so far as the poems are concerned. The essay most directly concerned with Gysin's poetry, Nicholas Zurbrugg's Letting the Mice In: Brion Gysin's Multimedia Poetics, is a useful compilation of original quotations, and makes some suggestive (if blunt) comparisons between Gysin and Roland Barthes, but Zurbrugg's choice of a largely narrative approach prevents the development of any real analysis, and this is largely true throughout the volume. Cook, ed. , From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan, is the first volume devoted to the Chickasaw poet and novelist. Most of the contributors concentrate on the novels; two essays, Jennifer Love's Rhetorics of Truth Telling in Linda Hogan's Savings and Ernest Smith's "The Inside of Lies and History": Linda Hogan's Poetry of Conscience, do discuss the poetry in depth, and make claims for it which seem accurate representations both of the poetry's ambitions and of the ways it is typically read. One notes a tendency for the bibliographies in this collection to contain citations of Hogan's own work, and perhaps one or two theoretical texts, but little evidence of an engagement with earlier poetic traditions. Romana Huk's collection Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally is a rich, admirable and necessary attempt, based on a conference held in 1996 at the University of New Hampshire, to set up a sense of dialogue between American avant-garde poets and critics and those from different Anglophone cultures. Language and post-Language practices are here revealed to be more nuanced, various and period-specific than either advocates or critics might suspect. The contributions are uneven; some pieces are too ready to express their author's sense of heroic embattlement, but others are informed and thoughtful, particularly thosesuch as Keith Tuma's Slobbering Distance: American, British, and Irish Exploratory Poetries in a Global Erathat place American avant-garde practice in direct contact with non-American models. Much comparative material can also be gleaned from the analyses of British, Irish, Australian and Canadian poetries presented here by figures such Alison Mark, Peter Middleton, cris cheek, Trevor Joyce and John Wilkinson. Most immediately useful to critics and researchers in American poetry, however, will probably be Steve Evans's survey of recent writing, The American Avant-Garde after 1989:

Notes Towards a History. Evans is an acute reader of poetry, and readers will be grateful for the lines of approach sketched in his opening overview, which, as well as giving ample bibliographical information, theorizes the renewed importance of George Oppen as an example to contemporary American poets as evidence of a refusal to subordinate the social to the linguistic which distinguishes contemporary avant-garde writers from their immediate predecessors. Evans's readings of six poetsKevin Davies, Lisa Jarnot, Bill Luoma, Rod Smith, Lee Ann Brown and Jennifer Moxleyinclude ample argument and quotation, and the variety of contemporary American and Canadian styles is made very visible. The volume is also notable for its inclusion of David Marriott's bracing attack, on psychoanalytical and political grounds, on the model of reading implicit in Language poetry (Signs Taken for Signifiers: Language Writing, Fetishism and Disavowal). Another set of conference proceedings, Delville and Pagnoulle, eds. , Sound as Sense: Contemporary US Poetry &/In Music, is slightly less successful in establishing a sense of dialogue between its contributors, who write on subjects as various as rock lyrics, Heidegger, and contemporary French opera, and on a wide range of late twentieth-century poets, including Robert Creeley, Clark Coolidge, Harryette Mullen and Hilda Morley. As Tim Woods points out very helpfully in one of the articles collected here ("Art Tracking Music": Louis Zukofsky's Po/Ethics of Music), the musicality of language has often been considered as a means to make of it a counter-discourse to reason and referentiality, and this counterdiscursive status underlies several of the pieces collected here. Only some, however, analyse how such a counter-discourse might function in detail. One such is Richard Quinn's Black Power, Black Arts, and the Ethic of the Ensemble, which provides a powerful argument linking the political implications of jazz improvisation with the formal strategies of Amiri Baraka, as well as a full and very useful bibliography. Other articles bring poetry and music into informative dialogue: these include Antoine Caz's study of contemporary French composer Pascal Dusapin's settings of Gertrude Stein ("Pas de Deux": Dusapin Sings/Stein to be Sung) and Erik Ullman's account of how his own compositional practice takes inspiration from the poetry of Charles Olson (Olson and Musical Composition). If not all participants avoid what the editors themselves identify as the danger of their project, a merely metaphorical use of music, the volume remains, nonetheless, a useful contribution to the field. A final work born of conference proceedings is Ferguson, ed. , Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co. As well as sections devoted to each of the three poets named in the title, the volume begins with an overview of The Middle Generation, featuring accounts of the personal and poetic relations between a group of poets whom Edward Hirsch, in his essay "One Life, One Writing!": The Middle Generation, suggests contemporary readers now find a more approachable and vulnerable group of democratic masters than are to be found among the earlier poets of modernism. Hirsch's passionate account of the pleasure to be found in these poets, and of their simple commitment to the humanly flawed is a high point of this volume, and is complemented by group studies by Steven Gould Axelrod, Gwendolyn Brooks and the Middle Generation, Thomas Travisano, Reflecting Randall Jarrell in the Bishop/Lowell Letters, and Jeredith Merrin, whose Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop: "The Same Planet" contains some particularly acute moments. Also valuable in its exposure of some of the mechanics and dynamics of this generation of poets is Diederik Oostdijk's "Not like an editor at all": Karl Shapiro at Poetry Magazine. This section is much the strongest in the book; those devoted to single-poet studies reflect too closely the limited ambitions set out in Ferguson's preface, which promises that the biographical and psychological sources of the poetry having been so exhaustively probed, the contributors to this volume look beyond these to the poets reflections of ... social constructions; that the focus might ever be on the poem as poem, to be read and lived with on its own terms, is clearly not to be countenanced.

Other ways of reading poetry are recalled by Elise Partridge's closing piece, "But we must notice": Lowell's Harvard Classes on Berryman, Bishop, and Jarrell. Robert H. Deutsch and John N. Serio, eds., The Poetry of Delmore Schwartz (WSSoc) and Marina Camboni, ed., H.D.s Poetry: The Meanings That Words Hide (AMS) were not received in time for the preparation of this review. Turning now to single-authored studies, William Patrick Jeffs's Feminism, Manhood, and Homosexuality: Intersections in Psychoanalysis and American Poetry contains chapters on Ginsberg and Rich, as well as on Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson. The work has an oldfashioned feel to it: its careful and humane readings in the different poets build to a conclusion that looks to the construction of a freer and less unequal world. The work's lack of a developed set of tools for either literary or theoretical analysis is, however, limiting; the discussion of Ginsberg, for example, is largely a narrative of his career, with brief discussion of the most thematically germane poems. Though the book could teach a new reader much about the poets discussed, and might well encourage a library browser to pick up them up and give them a try, it has relatively little to offer the specialist in American poetry. Merrill Cole's The Other Orpheus: A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality is a much more ambitious work, whose author states that he aims to reconnect prosody and aesthetics with political literary enquiry, with the broader goal of a rehabilitation of the concepts of affect and imagination. This way of putting things suggests that Cole's profoundest allegiances are political and ideological oneselsewhere he states, with a peremptoriness to which the reader must become accustomed, that his work avoids the ideological implications of chronological orderand such is indeed the case. Yet these allegiances are energized and complicated by Cole's repeated return to the aesthetic. The study is thus unusual in its movements across generic and disciplinary boundaries. At ease with popular culturethe book begins, rather disconcertingly, with an account of artistic, academic and journalistic responses to the murder of Matthew Shepardit is careful to distinguish between aspects of that culture that are and are not worthy of serious enquiry, and though focusing primarily on American poets (the early Eliot and Crane), the work contains two chapters on Rimbaud, and it makes excellent use of the writings of Leo Bersani, best known as a critic of French literature. The chapter on Crane is particularly notable for its ability to draw on what Cole sees as the distinctive methodological advances achieved by queer studies, while resisting the rigid opposition between historical reality and art which Cole identified as the risk of such methods. Its close readings in the detail of Crane's poetry examine sexual, political and linguistic-formal elements with equal attentiveness. Colin Falck's American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century: The Poetry that Matters is an unabashedly polemical work. Describing Romantic philosophy and poetry as unsuperseded, and his own work as a footnote to Wordsworth's 1802 preface, Falck argues that the literature must convey a sense of lived experience ... along with a degree of insight into an underlying order that that experience or life reveals. He sees much twentieth-century British and American poetry as having abandoned this mission in favour of a highbrow intellectualism that has little to offer most of its potential readers. Few readers will be wholly out of sympathy with Falck's account; his passion for lived complexity and the singing line is infectious, and his readings of the twentieth-century poets whose work he respects including Williams, Jeffers, Plath and Millaycan be warm and insightful. His critiques, however, are less attractive: dismissing Robert Creeley by relineating one of his weaker poems to improve it is an old and not particularly illuminating tactic in the absence of any sustained reflection on the nature of line-break, and it is surely negligent to dismiss Olson's poetry, and that of all those he influenced, simply on account of the weakness of his theories of breath. Most regrettable, however, is the loose structure of the book, which integrates

previously published and unpublished material in what feels like a meander through Falck's favourites and bugbears, and generates a distinct lack of theoretical intensity; one rarely has the sense that Falck is willing to engage in detail with the ramifications of a particular question, let alone with possible objections to his position. Kim Fortuny's Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel attempts to reconcile political and aesthetic approaches to the poet. It does so via two chapters devoted to overview and general discussionto what Fortuny calls Bishop's social aesthetic, and to The Ethics of Travel and three devoted to extended accounts of three of Bishop's great longer poems, Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance, Questions of Travel, and Crusoe in England. Fortuny quickly demonstrates her abilities as a close reader in the first chapter's account of the much-maligned Manuelzinho, and her critical acumen in several extremely acute perceptions, suggesting, for example, that the complexity of Bishop's poetry is linked to the demands which it makes on its lyrical subject, demands that may be overlooked because of the seemingly seamless texture of the language. The subsequent readings are, however, slightly lacking in focus, and the prosodic analyses which they include not always reliable. A full engagement with major Bishop critics such as Costello and Travisano is also wanting, and the bibliography is heavily weighted towards work published in the 1990s. Joon-Hwan Kim's Out of the Western Box: Towards a Multicultural Poetics in the Poetry of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson seeks to rectify what the author sees as a critical failure to distinguish Olson's poetic practice from that of Pound. For Kim, both poets searched for the Other outside the imperial discourse of the West, but whereas Pound sought to make room for the other within a closed poetic discourse, Olson attempted a radical opening-up of the working principles of poetic discourse. The author is well versed in the theoretical and critical literature surrounding these questions and these poets, but this study attempts too massive a synthesis; its accounts of Eliot and Cleanth Brooks as representations of the Unity in opposition to which Pound represents Diversity, for example, are schematic. Whether Pound can genuinely be identified with a multicultural poetics remains unclear, and the author's method is better adapted to Olson. Two other notable studies must be mentioned. Paul Wadden's The Rhetoric of Self in Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich: Doubling and the Holotropic Urge represents a scrupulous attempt to provide a nuanced view of both the poetry chosen for discussion and the conceptual framework within which it is addressed. Drawing, with reservations, on a Jungian vocabulary, Wadden shows how in both poets the use of doubles in key texts represents an attempt to rethink and refashion the self. The discussion intersects very productively with the specificities of the two poets, most notably in its tracing of the use and subsequent disappearance of male doubles in Rich's work. Wadden also suggests that the work of both poets provides a necessary complication of post-structuralist notions of the self. The closing chapter is devoted to the pedagogical potential of Bly's and Rich's work within the teaching of student composition. Finally, Mark Bauer's This Composite Voice: The Role of W.B. Yeats in James Merrill's Poetry is a sensitive, erudite and theoretically nuanced monograph. Providing multiple close readings in Merrill's early poetry, as well as in The Changing Light at Sandover, and drawing in particular on Yeats's A Vision as a source-text for Merrill, Bauer shows how Merrill's initially vexed relationship with Yeats's example gradually eases, becoming in Merrill's later poetry a significant source of authority and power. Some of the close readings, such as that comparing Sailing to Byzantium with Merrill's About the Phoenix, are very good indeed, and extensive use is made of Merrill's annotated personal copies of Yeats's works. Like Wadden's work, the study also includes a sustained critical engagement with its chosen

critical tools, in this case Harold Bloom's model of poetic influence, which Bauer finds productive but limiting. Other single-authored studies requested but not received include Bonnie Costello, Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry (HarvardUP), Tim Dayton, Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead (UMissP), Elisabeth A. Frost, The Feminist AvantGarde in American Poetry (UIowaP), Nick Halpern, Everyday and Prophetic: The Poetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill, and Rich (UWiscP), Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (UCalP) and Rod Philips, Michael McClure (BoiseSUP); and, among reference material, Christopher Beach, The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (CUP) and Emmanuel S. Nelson, Contemporary Gay American Poets and Playwrights: An A-to-Z Guide (Greenwood); likewise Elizabeth Gregory, ed., The Critical Response to Marianne Moore (Praeger). We hope to discuss a selection in next year's volume. In a slightly lean year for journal articles, two publications stand out. The Spring 2003 number of American Literary History is devoted to two panel discussions organized by Sacvan Bercovitch in 2001 among contributors to the Cambridge History of American Literature, focusing on what Bercovitch, as the general editor of that work, identifies as the two most regularly problematic fields within it: poetry and ethnicity (in Problems in the Writing of American Literary History: The Examples of Poetry and Ethnicity (AmLH 15[2003] 13)). The poetry panel includes five contributions, and its discussions constitute an illuminating intervention in the field. Barbara Packer, Two Histories Contending (AmLH 15[2003] 46), identifies two poles within debate about how to write literary history: the historical determinism of a Taine, and the contrasting approach of critical idealists such as Robert von Hallberg, author of the Cambridge History's section on poetry since 1945. For critics such as von Hallberg, Packer argues, the critic is a kind of museum curator, a presenter of perfect specimens. In distinguishing the two approaches, Packer makes the unusualand startlingly directpoint that different critical methods may fit the professional needs of specialists in different eras: Like fastidious shoppers at an upscale supermarket examining a pile of identically sized peaches, historians of twentieth-century American poetry forget the plight of their colleagues in earlier eras, rummaging through bushels of packinghouse culls at sad local groceries. The lines of allegiance suggested by Packer's argument are borne out by the other contributions: Shira Wolosky's The Claims of Rhetoric: Toward a Historical Poetics (1820 1900) (AmLH 15[2003] 1421) argues for and exemplifies an approach to the American poem that is grounded in history and culture, while those contributors whose field of expertise is the twentieth century all mount a more or less sustained defence of evaluation. Robert von Hallberg, in Literary History and the Evaluation of Poetry (AmLH 15[2003] 713), contributes a defence of his Cambridge History piece that is explicitly and articulately grounded in his scepticism regarding the ultimate value of historical enquiry within criticism: The best poems resist not only the erosion of memory but also absorption by other discourses, and what one says historically about poems is not going to be what makes them poems rather than some other form of discourse. Arguing that poets, not critics, make literary history, von Hallberg makes persuasive use of examples as diverse as Paul Celan and Bob Dylan; this brief piece constitutes an important reference point for future discussion of the relationship of evaluation and criticism. Other contributors make similar points in different ways. Andrew DuBois, Historical Impasse and the Modern Lyric Poem (AmLH 15[2003] 226), notes what DuBois sees as an almost Pavlovian reflex against evaluative criticism of poetry, and indeed against all criticism that is not explicitly historical in ambition. Ascribing this reflex to a cultural

shorthand and slippage that sees formalism as necessarily ahistorical, the ahistorical as equivalent to the universal, and the universal as actually ideological imperialism, DuBois echoes Packer in arguing for the need for a range of critical methods to be drawn on in responding to poetry of different periods: if post-war American poetry is particularly suited to evaluative sifting (the term is von Hallberg's), earlier periods require a different approach. Finally, Alan Filreis's contribution to the debate, Tests of Poetry (AmLH 15[2003] 2734), recalls a Sewanee Review piece of 1948 by Vivienne Koch, which preferred Louis Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry to the literary histories published by E.M.W Tillyard in that decade on the grounds that it enunciate[d] some principles of judgment, and goes on to locate what he sees as the historical-cultural orientation of much contemporary nineteenth-century scholarship as indicative of a latent anti-modernism. American Literary History's Summer issue also contains an important study: Bonnie Costello's Elizabeth Bishop's Impersonal Personal (AmLH 15[2003] 33466). Costello argues powerfully against readings of Bishop that absorb the lyric speaker into the biographical author, and proposes that voice and identity be decoupled, with the voice of each poem interrogated for the historical rhetorics and discourses of which it is the site. The study includes dense, extended analysis of one of Bishop's most discussed poems, Crusoe in England, arguing persuasively that the poem combines a compelling personal voice with a set of preoccupations much wider than can be resolved within any individual; hence its, and the poem's, continuing power to hold readers. An instructive complement to the approach to Bishop taken in Costello's article can be found in Steven Gould Axelrod, Elizabeth Bishop and Containment Policy (AL 75[2003] 84367). After a long biographical overview of Bishop's arm's-length relationship to Cold War politics, Axelrod reads View of the Capitol from the Library of Congressa poem which, as he neatly puts it, refuses to saluteas a manifestation of a subversive relationship to a Cold War lexicon (Axelrod interrogates, in particular, the use of the word intervenes) and, following Camille Roman, as a covert expression of Bishop's lesbianism. Like American Literary History, the Journal of Modern Literature published an excellent range of articles in the field in 2003. J.T. Barbarese's Theology for Atheists: Reading Ammons (JML 26:iiiiv[2003] 7383) provides an attractive account, based on close reading, of Ammons's negotiations of self and nature, and of the enthusiastic ambivalence onto which these negotiations give. The article also contains an illuminating aside on what Barbarese considers to be the basic structural principle of Ammons's lyrics, a series of precepts mated to corresponding examples. JML's Fall 2003 number is devoted to modern poetry, much of it American. Joanna Gill's "My Sweeney, Mr Eliot": Anne Sexton and the "Impersonal Theory of Poetry"" (JML 27:i[2003] 3656) seeks to nuance the familiar opposition between modernist impersonality and the self-revelation by which confessional poetry is defined. This opposition, which has recently been challenged by accounts of the place of personality in Eliot, is for Gill too dependent, in Sexton's case, on a naive identification of the Anne and I of her work with the poet herself. Reading Sexton's Hurry Up Please It's Time against its model, The Waste Land, Gill shows how Sexton uses multiple personae and allusiveness in a dialectic of personal and impersonal voices. David Sanders's Frost's North of Boston: Its Language, its People and its Poet (JML 27:i[2003] 708) provides an expert and highly readable overview of Frost's ambitionsdescriptive, dramatic, moral and prosodicin preparing his second volume of poems. Sanders's emphasis on the relationship between Frost's technical and moral goals, and on differences in this respect between Frost and Wordsworth, Emerson, and Pound, is valuable. Pound himself receives considerable attention from contributors to this number of JML. Feng Lan's Ezra Pound/Ming Mao: A Liberal Disciple of Confucius (JML 27:i[2003] 7989) performs a service to Pound scholarship by providing the first reading of an article on

Confucianism submitted by Pound to The Egoist in 1914, although published under the name M.M; the chain of reasoning by which Feng Lan connects M.M to Pound is itself a pleasure. 1914 is a much earlier date than is customary for the identification of the beginning of Pound's interest in Confucianism, and Feng Lan argues that the connections in Pound's thought between Confucianism, aesthetic individualism, and the construction of a counterdiscourse to Christianity are already fully in place in the Egoist article. Massimo Bacigalupo, America in Ezra Pound's Posthumous Cantos (JML 27:i[2003] 908), explains the rationale of his Milan edition of selections of Pound's unpublished fragments (Canti postumi, Mondadori [2002]), and provides descriptions of some of the material contained therein. Janine Utell's Virtue in Scraps, Mysterium in Fragments: Robert Graves, Hugh Kenner, and Ezra Pound (JML 27:i[2003] 99104) uses Pound and Kenner to critique what Utell sees as the attempt by Graves and Laura Riding to foster the annihilation of history. Other poets to be considered in this number include the pleasing and unusual pairing of Elizabeth Bishop and Allen Ginsberg. Jonathan Ellis's "A Curious Cat": Elizabeth Bishop and the Spanish Civil War (JML 27:i[2003] 13748) seeks to defend Bishop from accusations of political aloofness during and after her 1936 visit to Spain. Ellis's argument may not convince all readersit seems not quite to convince Ellis himselfbut his emphasis on Bishop's admiration of Shelley, his use of (and extensive quotation from) an unpublished poem (In A Room: Seville 1936), his scepticism regarding a criticism that has fallen in love with a tragic life, and his quizzical but passionate involvement with Bishop's poetry, are all welcome. Justin Quinn's Coteries, Landscape and the Sublime in Allen Ginsberg (JML 27:i[2003] 193206) seeks to rehabilitate the sublime as a literary-critical category, via a concentration on sublimes that are not naive in the sense that Emerson's is. For Quinn, Ginsberg's early poetry socializes and familiarizes the sublime via its creation of a coterie of friends and fellow visionaries. The subsequent development of Quinn's argument is very valuable in its tracing of a development and change in Ginsberg's poetics. He argues that the willingness of Kaddish to distinguish sanity from insanity provides evidence of the poet's successful identification of the difficulty which is inherent to Beat culture, the difficulty of recognition and distinction, and that the newly detailed descriptions of landscape to be found in Wichita Vortex Sutra are part of an attempt on Ginsberg's part to refine his poetic sublime in order to make it resistant to charges of antinomianism, such as were levelled at Ginsberg by Norman Podhoretz. A final appeal for more critical attention to be paid to the non-naive sublime of a Ginsberg, a Pinsky, a Clampitt or a Jorie Graham, completes this subtle and invigorating piece. This issue of JMLalso includes articles on Wallace Stevens: Ann Mikkelsen, "Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!"Wallace Stevens's Figurations of Masculinity (JML 27:i[2003] 10521), and Lisa Goldfarb, "Pure Rhetoric of a Language Without Words": Stevens's Musical Creation of Belief in "Credences of Summer" (JML 27:i[2003] 12236); Marianne Moore: Alison Rieke, "Plunder" or "Accessibility to Experience": Consumer Culture and Marianne Moore's Modernist Self-Fashioning (JML 27:i[2003] 14970); and Sylvia Plath: John Gordon's brief but illuminating Being Sylvia Being Ted Being Dylan: Plath's "The Snowman on the Moor" (JML 27:i[2003] 18892). Modernism/Modernity published two interesting articles on less-studied poets. John Timberman Newcomb's The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems (Mo/Mo 10[2003] 97125) discusses relatively little-known poems by Teasdale, Ridge, Bent, and poets published in The Liberator and The Masses, linking them to the complex of symbolic values connecting skyscrapers to modernity. The article constitutes a useful historical account, particularly in its steady focus on poems about the Metropolitan Life Tower, even if not all readers will share the author's conviction that in a postmodern academic climate such poems should [be taken] as seriously as the poems of Pound, Eliot, Stevens or Moore. Donna K. Hollenberg, "History as I desired it": Ekphrasis as Postmodern Witness in Denise Levertov's Late Poetry (Mo/Mo 10[2003] 51937),

provides a careful and sensitive account of Levertov's use of painting and painters (notably Anselm Kiefer, Chaim Soutine and Emmanuel de Witte) as vectors of humanist, and subsequently of Catholic, values, and in particular as symbols of a maintained faith in human possibility. Other notable articles published this year include Chris Beyers's Louis Zukofsky in Kentucky in History (CollL 30:iv[2003] 7188), which brings detailed local knowledge to bear on what Beyers calls the Kentucky theme in A. Though identifying everything from Zukofsky's awareness of the poverty in the town of Hazard, Eastern Kentucky (A 14) to the national attention given to Kentucky chair-maker Chester Cornett in 1965 (A 18), Beyers draws larger conclusions from his research. He suggests that the Kentuckyan theme reveals an inviolable individualism within Zukofsky's politics, and that, though the meanings of many references in A may remain unknown, that does not mean that they are unknowable, so that accounts of the poem that depend on its inscrutability are premature. Bringing a different variety of specialist expertise to bear, David W. Clippinger, The Prophetic Gaze of Orpheus: Charting New Lands in Small Poetry Journals (AmPer 13[2003] 10516), focuses on a single journal, Maps, which appeared from 1966 to 1974, and notes its eclecticism, which for Clippinger distinguishes it both from traditional poetry journals, represented by Poetry, and the more tightly focused innovation of radical anthologies such as those edited and co-edited by Donald Allen.

2. Fiction 19001945
Top 1. Poetry 2. Fiction 1900-1945 3. Fiction since 1945 4. Drama 5. Native, Asian American,... Books Reviewed

In terms of critical focus very little changed in 2003. William Faulkner continued to dominate both book and journal studies, followed by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is good to see, though, a number of other novelists making an appearance in studies this year, notable amongst them Theodore Dreiser and Owen Wister in books, and Sinclair Lewis, Dashiell Hammett, and Jack London in articles and papers.

William Faulkner received a variety of book-length considerations in 2003. The proceedings of the 2000 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Robert W. Hamblin and Ann J. Abadie , provides the usual excellent range of perspectives on the state of Faulkner criticism. The conference from which the essays emerge, in its twenty-seventh year, asked whether there is anything left to say about Faulkner and his works. The first five essays represent new approaches or current trends; the later ones offer fresh ways of thinking about long-standing Faulkner topics. In some ways the first half is the most interesting. Theresa M. Towner offers an interrogation of canonicity, of the traditional classifications of Faulkner's works as major and minor, and seeks to move away from Faulkner's so-called major phase of 192942 and explore the more neglected of his characters, to examine the central marginality or marginal centrality ... in Faulkner's novels. In line with one of the more apparent trends in Faulkner criticism in journals this year, there are two essays offering postcolonial perspectives. Deborah N. Cohn highlights Faulkner's works relevance to the other south of postcolonial Latin America. She explores the influence Faulkner had on Spanish authors from 1930 to the present and makes the point that

recognition of Faulkner's utility among Spanish Americans has only recently created a reciprocal North American response, a situation she believes will be at the forefront of Faulkner studies in the twenty-first century. Annette Trefzer offers a different postcolonial perspective by exploring Faulkner's contradictory treatment of Indians in the short stories Red Leaves and Lo!, and details Faulkner's use of not simply binary opposition but mimicry to produce an uncomfortable doubleness that blurs any clear hierarchical distinctions within a wider discussion of the politics of ethnicity. All in all, this is a significant work and one which suggests that Faulkner will continue to occupy scholars for a long time to come. In Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morrison and the Economies of Slavery, Erik Dussere argues that the writers engagement with the past is enabled by an engagement with the economics of slavery. He suggests that both writers construct novels around the enduring, fractured memory of slavery and that this encounter is frequently couched in the language of the marketplace. Taking the idea that, primarily, slavery represented the attempt to transform people into monetary value, he suggests that this attempt was the initial act in an ongoing process by which cultural traditions of race in America have been figured through concepts such as debt and repayment, exchange and accounting, property and the market. From this perspective, Dussere interrogates the figures. Through analysis of such perspectives as the ledger as a form of written history, history as debt, and the regulation of blood, Dussere provides a fascinating and convincing set of connections. Helen Oakley , in The Recontextualisation of William Faulkner in Latin American Fiction and Culture, relates the novelist's work to a number of authors and texts in Latin American literature, specifically to Maria Luisa Bomball's A Rose for Emily, Juan Carlos Onetti's La Novia Robada and Tan Triste Como Ella, and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo. At one level, Oakley's book offers a comparative literary analysis situated within the broader context of relations between the US and Latin America. As such she examines the cultural contexts of Argentina in the 1930s, Argentina and Uruguay in the 1940s and 1950s, and Mexico in the 1950s. At another level the book addresses the labyrinth of perspectives, interactions and reciprocal exchanges between Faulkner and Latin American writing. On William Faulkner by Eudora Welty is a fascinating anthology, a collection of speeches, lectures, writing and musings on Faulkner by his literary neighbour. As the introduction makes clear, they did not have a direct relationship, but each was aware of the other's work. The book in its entirety presents Welty as one of Faulkner's most astute critics, ever Faulkner's apologist, admirer and defender. The material in the collection is wide-ranging, entertaining and illuminating, from comedic pieces such as the previously unpublished caricature of Faulkner, through reviews of his works and even an odd postcard written to Welty, praising her work although seemingly attributing Zora Neale Hurston's Gilded Six Bits to her in the process. Faulkner's works receive a large amount of attention in journals this year. Two articles have as their focus Faulkner's Snopes trilogy. Owen Robinson in Interested Parties and Theorems to Prove: Narrative and Identity in Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy (SLJ 36:i[2003] 5873) discusses the different narrative approaches employed by Faulkner in The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion. He indicates that, while The Hamlet is delivered by an authorial voice with contributions of others, most notably V.K. Ratliff, The Town is entirely constructed from first-person accounts of Ratliff, Charles Mallison and Gavin Stevens. In The Mansion these three figures feature prominently but are joined by an authorial voice in certain sections of the story: most importantly for Robinson, the sections featuring Mink and Linda Snopes, who themselves are never given a narrative voice of their own. For Robinson, these narrative setups have very distinct effects on the material they deal with. So, he argues, the authorial voice with contributions means we observe Ratliff and the chorus reading Flem Snopes, but our

own necessary uncertainty with regard to reading them reminds us of the doubt at every level from writer to character to reader. The narrative device of The Town seeks to keep the reader at arm's length. The Mansion, Robinson suggests, represents a merging of the two styles, which offers a balance but also develops some of the possibilities of such narrative techniques. He argues that in each case what we are presented with are the possibilities and problems of reading, of considering the spaces between character, event and perspective. In Tradition and Change in William Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy (McNR 41:ii[2003] 2640), Earl G. Ingersoll argues that Faulkner's fiction has a long-standing concern with the relationship between tradition and its other, change. He seeks to demonstrate this by employing Jacques Derrida's reading of Plato's Phaedrus and its enquiry into the relationship between speaking and writing as representing the old order and its modernization. He argues that, even though he is so often (mis)read simplistically as a cultural conservative, Faulkner may be more interested in representing a rich complexity in the conflict between tradition and change. In "Liable to be anything": The Creation of Joe Christmas in Faulkner's Light in August (JAmS 37:i[2003] 11933), Owen Robinson argues that, because of the complexity of his role and presence in the novel and, more widely, Yoknapatawpha, Christmas suggests himself strongly as a means of considering the personal manifestations of the county's sprawling networks of readings and writing as a theoretical mass. The paper explores Christmas as means of comprehending the analagous nature of the writing and reading to be found within Yoknapatawpha with that of the series of novels in which the county is sited. For Robinson, Christmas is the archetypal Yoknapatawphan: he is a southern chronotope who throws into focus the infinite heteroglossia that works to construct him. In "Memory believes before knowing remembers": Faulkner, Canetti and Survival (PLL 39:iii[2003] 31634), Jeffrey J. Folks offers a comparison of the works of Faulkner and Bulgarian novelist Elias Canetti, a contemporary of Faulkner's (though there is no evidence of mutual influence). Folks argues that, despite their differing cultural, political and intellectual backgrounds, both writers have similar concerns and, more importantly, arrived at strikingly similar conclusions concerning mankind and its propensity for violence. Folks suggests that both men used their art to search for ways to transform social existence, with its implicit fear of persecution and violence, into a more enlightened and compassionate condition: like Canetti, William Faulkner spent a lifetime engaged in an effort to uncover the hidden realities of power, instinct and fear within human society, and to encourage humanity to transcend these destructive instincts through self-knowledge and acts of courage. Thomas Argiro, in "As though we were kin": Faulkner's Black-Italian Chiasmus (MELUS 28:iii[2003] 11132), sets about investigating certain elements of Faulkner's biography from a very particular vantage point as a means of gaining insight into his writing. He argues that, although Faulkner never publicly acknowledged his mulatto or shadow kin, he persistently created fictional figures whose lives are made problematical by racial and social contradictions similar to those present within his own family. Argiro discusses Faulkner's use of an unexpected route through representations that feature Italian Americans. He sees Faulkner employing a strategy for dealing with ambiguous racial identity that sees the identities of blacks and Italian Americans being assimilated and reversed in a signifying arrangement involving both displacement and substitution. In all of this, Argiro throws light on a writer who is attempting to negotiate the problems he believes he carries because of family secrets and his public role as a writer confronting racial politics. His solution, according to Argiro, an anxious literary surrogacy with Italian Americans covertly enabling Faulkner's confession of his unspoken kinship with African-Americans.

In "What else could a southern gentleman do?": Quentin Compson, Rhett Butler and Miscegenation (SLJ 35:ii[2003] 4163), Ben Railton analyses Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind and Absalom, Absalom!, and specifically the supporting characters of Compson and Butler as representative of the writers personal understanding and attitudes towards the role of race in the southern past. Railton argues that the novels, published in the same year [1936], epitomize two key tendencies, of southern thought and issues of race in the past, that were heading towards conflict at precisely this moment. Mitchell, he argues, presents the reconstruction in such a way as to reinforce the tradition of hatred and exclusion that was a part of the established historical tradition, and this endorsement helped spread such ideas to a new and larger generation of Americans. Faulkner on the other hand is not given enough credit for the complex understanding of the issue of race in southern life in Absalom, Absalom! The tortured prose that he described becomes for him evidence of the confrontation between Faulkner and layers of myth and evasion in not only the southern consciousness but also (and in a similar vein to Argiro and his focus on Faulkner's shadow kin) his own. In Southern Postcoloniality and the Improbability of Filipino-American Postcoloniality: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Hagedorn's Dogeaters (MissQ 57:i[2003] 4154), Sarita See outlines the problems Filipino Americans face in staking a claim to US postcolonial identity. The problems, she suggests, issue from the PhilippineAmerican war's fate in American history: one of forgetting both by colonizers and the colonized. See offers a number of contexts (historical, legal and literary) in which she explores the reasons for these problems. She uses Faulkner's novel in relation to Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, as texts that are masterful experiments with narrative ... in the distortion of sequence [that] use multiple narrators and perspectives, texts that loudly say something about history, memory, and the particular pressures that history comes to bear upon the children of war, to argue that Lost Cause nostalgia in its past and present formsthe insistence on the South as an occupied regionconstitutes a major site for postcolonial discourse in the U.S. From this argument, See asks the question, Who is inside and outside America? That is, while US postcolonial discourse remains fixated on the Occupied South, the Filipino Americans will remain outside that discourse. In The Political Economy of Southern Race: Go Down, Moses, Spatial Equality and the Color Line (MissQ 57:i[2003] 5564), Hosam Aboul-Ela argues that analysis of the literature of the Americas, a burgeoning trend within the discussion of literature in American studies, has not been sufficiently concerned to highlight spatial inequalities in the hemisphere. The paper advocates an awareness of the difficulties in simply discussing a North American writer in relation to a South American writer: it may not be enough, in other words, for us to speak as though the entire hemisphere has one history, one culture, and one literature, when the history and culture of the southern half of the hemisphere are so clearly marked by neocolonial domination, while the history and culture of the United States have become a history of empire. Aboul-Ela sees in Go Down, Moses a novel that gives primacy to such spatial inequalities and may provide a model for the discussion of the literature of the Americas. Ernest Hemingway was the subject of a great deal of criticism in 2003. A comprehensive collection of essays exploring The Sun Also Rises, two themed anthologies of his writings, and a reference guide to A Farewell to Arms constitute the book-length studies. Linda Wagner-Martin , one of the foremost Hemingway scholars, has, in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: A Casebook produced an edited collection of the finest calibre interrogating every aspect of Hemingway's first novel. It brings together essays from a broad timeframe 19582000and this scope is a key feature of the stated aim of the book: to create a montage, a palimpsest of ideas that may help to give The Sun Also Rises a life relevant to the twenty-first century. One of the strengths of the book is the way in which it offers a view of

the evolution of critical perspectives on the novel. The essays cover all the major themes (sexuality, gender, race, Lost Generation), and this is an immensely satisfying collection. Wagner-Martin has also produced a magnificent resource in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: A Reference Guide. The stated aims of the book are straightforward: it is aimed at describing the way the novel has achieved its audience, as well as helping readers understand Hemingway's important book from a variety of perspectives. The book is, however, more than that. This is not a dry, academic crib sheet for the novel; it is exhaustive, without being prescriptive in its provision of a range of contexts into which the novel can be placed (biographical, historical, literary, cultural). Add to that a realistic bibliography and Wagner-Martin has produced a text that will be of use to academics, students and the general reader alike. Hemingway on Hunting, which received its paperback release in 2003, provides a comprehensive sampling of the author's writings (short stories, extracts from the novels, journalism, letters) that deal with one of his greatest passions. From a biographical introduction, written by Sean Hemingway , the anthology presents in roughly chronological structure the writings that illuminate Hemingway's relationship with the sport, and, of crucial importance, its place within his work. Framing the intentions of the whole is the excerpt from Death in the Afternoon, which articulates Hemingway's unusual perspective on the meaning of hunting and killing: Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you aesthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of the human race. Sean Hemingway is concerned with trying to convey through the collection a multitude of perspectives that he sees in his grandfather's writing: not only the process of hunting, the actions leading up to the kill, but as many different dimensions as possible: the country, the weather, the element of chance, the hunter's thoughts, and ... the perspective of the hunted. Much of the material can be readily found elsewhere, although there are some pieces that have not been previously collected, specifically in the section on Hemingway's journalism. Given its focus on killing, albeit killing wildlife, Hemingway on Hunting makes a neat companion piece to the second anthology, Hemingway on War, again edited by Sean Hemingway . If the subject matter of the first collection to some extent explains elements of Hemingway, this collection details a concern that in many ways created him in the first instance. The anthology is structured in much the same way, with an introductory biographical chapter that locates Hemingway and his war experiences, and then offers selections of his writing, arranged around specific wars and conflicts. Given his position as a witness to many of the major conflicts of the first of half of the twentieth century, there is in Hemingway's oeuvre much to collect, and it is to the merit of the volume that it is full, varied and resonant. The editor makes his selection from Hemingway's journalism and fiction, and a number of things emerge. First, we see a figure who is engaged with a host of political contexts, and informed and knowledgeable about a range of historical, social and cultural contexts. Secondly, we see a writer who is not merely trying to capture the experience of war by reporting it, but trying to gain and subsequently project a psychological representation of war's effects on an individual, personal level. Of note in these regards are the selections made from Ken magazine which present a series of harrowing images that go beyond mere reportage of a context, beyond that with which Hemingway is normally associated. The collection does not offer any new material, although some pieces are certainly more obscure. The first short story in the anthology, The Mercenaries, is one such example. Written by a very young Hemingway, and described as undistinguished by the editor, the story does make for an excellent starting point for an exploration of Hemingway's interaction with war. As a text for Hemingway scholars, this is a useful one-stop resource, but its appeal is wider than that: this is a valuable text for anyone interested in America and war.

Articles, essays and papers dealing with Hemingway and his writings predominantly fell into two distinct categories this year: those dealing with issues of gender and sexuality and those that approach his work from a biographical direction. Scott Donaldson, in The Averted Gaze in Hemingway's Fiction (SR 111:i[2003] 12851), explores the form and function of scopophilia in the author's writings. He argues that there are few examples in Hemingway's novels of the traditional masculine gaze that would suggest male dominance, and that this is initially counter-intuitive. That is, that the absence of the degrading male gaze may seem odd given Hemingway's public macho persona. Donaldson makes the distinction here between Hemingway as a public figure and Hemingway as writer. From this perspective, Donaldson proceeds to offer a series of close readings and biographical vignettes that illustrate the centrality of looking in Hemingway's writing, and how that motif evolved. In so doing, Donaldson presents the averted gaze as a major vehicle for emotions and feeling, a subtextual motif that corresponds not only with the iceberg style, but also Hemingway's self-professed aversion to writing love. The range of Hemingway's fiction that Donaldson analyses is broad, though The Sun Also Rises and Hemingway's short fiction provide specific focus. This is an interesting article that opens up a fascinating element of Hemingway's tendency. Richard Fantina in his challenging and contentious Hemingway's Masochism, Sodomy, and the Dominant Woman (Hemingway Review 23:i[2003] 84105) also begins by making a distinction between Hemingway the writer and Hemingway the public persona, and seeks to locate Hemingway's work within recent debate in gender theory that deals with masculine sexuality and masochism. Fantina suggests that masochism has been falsely connected to homosexuality and/or femininity in contemporary criticism. He sees in Hemingway an indication of a masochistic sensibility coexisting with his cult of traditional masculinity. Although he recognizes that this is diametrically opposed to his public persona, he argues that Hemingway's writing embodies diverse models of masculinity [which] may be his greatest legacy. Fantina proceeds to illustrate how Hemingway's work dethrones the male phallus and celebrates sodomy performed on the man by the woman. This sodomy is revealed in direct fashion, as in The Garden of Eden, or through metaphor, usually in relation to a gun or rifle and its nearness to the male. In all of this, his concern is male penetration, such that a gunshot wound contains the necessary sexual allusion. Fantina takes examples from characters such as Brett Ashley, Margot Macomber, Helen and Miss Mary, but he suggests that Catherine Bourne in The Garden of Edenis an accumulation of these concerns. Continuing the gender/sexuality theme, Marc Hewson, in "The Real Story of Ernest Hemingway": Cixous, Gender and A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway Review 22:ii[2003] 51 62), explores a way of reading the novel as detailing Hemingway's dissatisfaction with cultural definitions of gender. Working with Hlne Cixous's definition of bisexuality (that all people are innately both masculine and feminine, but that Western culture has privileged masculinity and created a hierarchy of gender in which the masculine value is positive and the feminine negative), he suggests that A Farewell to Arms is a nascentif unconscious example of Cixous criture feminine. Hewson argues that, although the early parts of the novel see Frederick Henry trying to work within a traditional masculine narrative, increasingly it presents such constructions being undone. Hewson extends his analysis to look in detail at the central relationship between Henry and Catherine Barkley. In it he sees a similar dynamic: once Henry is removed from the combat situation, the relationship moves from masculine concepts of proprietorship and commodification to a clearer, equal love. Hewson is careful to note that this reading is not infallible, and presents several counterarguments, but the essay does highlight some very interesting connections between Hemingway and Cixous's ideas, and illuminates Hemingway's concerns with gender and his attempts to come to terms with them.

In relation to the biographical trend in Hemingway criticism this year, Sean O'Rourke, in Who Was with Pascin at the Dome? (JML 26:ii[2003] 1603), discusses a moment in A Moveable Feast where Hemingway recounts meeting the painter Jules Pascin at the Dome in Paris in 1925. He argues that on the surface it is a banal piece of writing, but that, if scrutinized more closely, the episode actually dramatizes what O'Rourke sees as the key themes of the book: industry and idleness, poverty and affluence, innocence and corruption. In a meticulous deconstruction of the episode, O'Rourke effectively answers questions such as why Hemingway would devote a chapter to a 2nd rate artist and man about town: the chapter's subject is Hemingway and not Pascin. Hemingway, he argues, uses Pascin to portray himself as hard-working and a devoted family man. O'Rourke concludes that the scene is a composite: Hemingway did not meet Pascin in 1925, but, regardless, the scene illuminates Hemingway's purpose. This ability of Hemingway to fictionalize real events effectively also lies at the heart of Matthew Stewart's "It was all a pleasant business": The Historical Context of On the Quai at Smyrna (Hemingway Review 23:i[2003] 5871). By exploring the specifics of the event itself, and the process by which Hemingway would have learned of them, Stewart offers an insightful reading of the story. At the heart of the essay is an attempt to understand and account for its remarkable and puzzling narrator. In his search for answers, he offers historical and diplomatic contextualization of the event and biographical detail that he believes will help the reader to form a better sense of the whole. He concludes that the tone of the narrator can be explained: his mind has been working overtime to overcome the self-disgust engendered by an enforced and prolonged powerlessness. Stewart gives a fascinating combination of perspectives that provide illumination on an ambiguous story. John Leonard, in The Garden of Eden: A Question of Dates (Hemingway Review 22:ii[2003] 6385), provides an insight into the vexed issue of when the novel was produced. Biographers and critics have proposed a wide variety of conflicting dates for its composition, ranging from 1946 to 1958. Leonard, through an examination of dates written in the margins of Hemingway's manuscripts, argues that chapters 13 to 35 were written between 20 May and 11 September 1957. He proceeds to overlay these dates on events in Hemingway's life, aiming to establish The Garden of Eden as a fully achieved narrative written very late in the life of a great American author. The article is a comprehensive and valuable piece of primary research. Paul Quick, in Hemingway's A Way You'll Never Be and Nick Adams Search for Identity (Hemingway Review 22:ii[2003] 3044), also focuses closely on one story and makes use of biographical information in its analysis. The essay explores Nick's crisis of self in the wake of his wounding. Quick argues that Adams has returned to the site of the wounding to affirm his sense of self, but is continually confronted with obstacles. Beginning with an interrogation of the purpose of his visit and subsequently analysing the two hallucinations, Quick explores issues and symbols such as cowardice and the yellow house, the repeated questioning of Adams's identity, and issues of post-traumatic stress. Quick's handling of chronological issues is somewhat contrived, something that he recognizes. However, this paper offers an interesting perspective on a traditionally undervalued story. In Hills Like White Elephants: The Jilting of Jig (Hemingway Review 23:i[2003] 7283), Nilofer Hashmi explores one of Hemingway's most acclaimed but also most divisive stories. Nilofer sets out to determine why it is that critics have been able to read the story in so many different ways. The ambiguous ending leads Nilofer to discuss three existing versions of the end of the novel: the girl will have the abortion ... and stay with the man; the girl will have the abortion and leave the man; or the girl will not have the abortion having won the man over to her point of view. Crucially, he proceeds to add a fourth: that the girl will have the

abortion, expecting to stay with the man, but will be abandoned once the operation has been performed. In an authoritative interrogation of existing perspectives Nilofer persuasively argues for his fourth way. Suzanne del Gizzo, in Going Home: Hemingway, Primitivism and Identity (MFS 49:iii[2003] 496523), offers an authoritative look at the way in which white writers use racial difference to construct white identity. Looking at Hemingway's African safaris, she suggests that while his race changes express his longing for authenticity and origins, they ultimately point to the hybridity and performativity of identity. She argues that the primitive is a theme that exerted a powerful influence over Hemingway at every stage of his development and that he continued to return to it even after its cultural moment was over. Trying to unravel what the primitive actually connotes for Hemingway, she suggests that initially he exploited assumptions about the primitive, specifically its resonance in Anglo-American culture with physicality and authenticity, to cultivate and fuel his public persona, but ultimately it was his engagement and identification with primitive cultures that allowed him to distance himself from that persona and articulate a profound self-critique. She presents Hemingway as not simply an observer of different cultures but one who wishes to identify with them, one who sought through rites and feats to become one of them. Del Gizzo, by tracking these themes through his life and work, from Native Americans through the Paris years, from Africa to his unfinished works, concludes that Hemingway's concern with the primitive is not simply about being authentic, but acts as a means for rewriting the self. F. Scott Fitzgerald was relatively neglected this year, although a number of book-length studies published in 2003 were unavailable for review: Ronald Berman, FitzgeraldWilson Hemingway: Language and Experience [UAlaP]; Harold Bloom, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby [ChelseaH]; Jackson R. Bryer, Ruth Prigozy and Milton R. Stern, eds., F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Twenty-First Century: Centennial Essays [UAlaP]; and Bernard R. Tanner, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Odyssey: A Reader's Guide to the Gospel in The Great Gatsby [R&L]. Of note is Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman . The anthology collects thirty-seven interviews spanning 192039. As noted in the introduction, these are not traditional interviews; indeed only one, a three-part interview that appeared in the St. Paul Daily News in 1922, fits the description readily. The rest are reports that use quotes from Fitzgerald. The real interest generated by these pieces emerges from the insight into Fitzgerald's public image, the lack of savvy he displays in his dealings with the media, and consequently the way in which he did not receive the same respect as his contemporaries. Weighed against the revival in the post-war period of his literary merit, and his current place in American literature, the reports in the collection are fascinating. In Fitzgerald's French (TCL 49:i[2003] 12330), Michael Hollington discusses the fascination the novelist had with the French language as a vehicle not only for dreams but also for issues of class and social pretension. Hollington describes Fitzgerald's childhood years in St Paul, Minnesota, a city that was originally French Canadian, where he was surrounded by French names. From this basis, Hollington discusses the way in which French became for him a language of dream expressing fantasies and glamour, elegance, sexual conquest and upward mobilityeven if all these were equally understood by his daytime consciousness as pretensions offering apt targets for social satire. Hollington also suggests that failure to speak French well becomes a symptom, in Tender Is the Night in particular, of the modernist preoccupation with decline and dissolution. In White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing and Performing in The Great Gatsby (MFS 49:iii[2003] 44368), Meredith Goldsmith reads the novel against post-First World War African American identity formation. Specifically, she argues that Gatsby's parties

miniaturize the process of identity formation that characterizes the novel as a whole. Goldsmith, by identifying the racial analogies with which the characters describe the scandal of Jay Gatsby's success, points to the ways in which racial miscegenation and immigrant ethnic assimilation provide models of identity formation and upward mobility more easily comprehensible than the amalgam of commerce, love and ambition underlying Gatsby's rise. In all of this Goldsmith is pointing to a gap in the narration of white working-class masculinity, one that reveals an interdependence of such working-class identity with African American and ethnic models, and consequently exposes an alternative genealogy for the man who remains, in Maxwell Perkins's words, "more or less a mystery". There was a body of material this year dealing with the less prominent novelists of this period. Theodore Dreiser has two books worthy of mention. First, the Library of America has produced a fine edition of An American Tragedy with illuminating notes by Thomas P. Riggio. The other book is Newlin, ed. , A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia, which attempts to synthesize the vast body of material written by and about the author into a wide-ranging single reference volume. Made up from contributions by well-established Dreiser scholars as well as newer academics, this volume is an essential resource, with a comprehensive and nuanced bibliography and the benefit of being not only academically rigorous but also lively and engaging. It is welcome to see among the more renowned names a book discussing a novelist, and specifically a novel, that tends to be overlooked. In Graulich and Tatum, eds. , Reading The Virginian in the New West, the contributors seek to offer readings that challenge the traditional conception of Owen Wister's novel. The collection, published to commemorate the novel's centennial, challenges the traditional view that the novel is notable because it inaugurated the generic Western. By applying a range of theoretical perspectives to the novel, the contributors illuminate a variety of themes and issues. Graulich suggests in the introduction that Wister and the novel are often dismissed on the grounds of racism, misogyny, imperialism and elitism, and the collection does not necessarily try to rectify these criticisms. Rather, it seeks to illustrate how the novel has functioned and continues to function as a social text, whose interpretation evolves with the historical and cultural context. As such the writers illuminate and account for the novel's continuing relevance. The eleven essays which make up the collection foreground the theory a little too heavily at times, leaving textual analysis sometimes unsatisfactorily underdeveloped (there is no attempt for example to broaden findings in relation to Wister's other works). The collection is varied, illuminating and engaging. The stated aim is to give readers the opportunity to think differently about Wister and The Virginian, and in that they have been eminently successful. In Before the White Negro: Sin and Salvation in Kingsblood Royal (AmLH 15[2003] 311 33), Jennifer Delton seeks to rescue Sinclair Lewis's novel from the charge that it fails to have any impact upon the issue of race relations in the US by arguing that it extends a critique of American society to notions of whiteness and blackness and sin and salvation, overturning the traditional pairings of these concepts. The piece offers a broad sense of the novel's fit historically and socially, and provides a detailed reading of the story itself. Delton suggests that in the pages of Kingsblood Royal two previously separate phenomena converged: "the African-American struggle for justice ... and white cultural anxieties about purpose and salvation in modern, capitalist America". For Delton the contradiction between white antiracism, which promised whites a way out of the consequences of material abundance, and black civil rights, which promised blacks a way to partake of the benefits of this abundance has, by keeping open a door for salvation and grace, save[d] white America from itself. In From Modernity's Detection to Modernist Detectives: Narrative Vision in the Work of Allan Pinkerton and Dashiell Hammett (MFS 49:iv[2003] 62959), Christopher T.

Raczkowski offers a fascinating and insightful comparison of Pinkerton's post-Civil War memoirs and the prohibition era detective fiction of ex-Pinkerton detective Dashiell Hammett. He suggests that between the works of the two men there is a critical shift in how vision is constructed: visual-oriented enlightenment, as Raczkowski suggests, being a source of disillusionment for modernism. He presents Pinkerton's memoirs as representative of a type of vision that makes crime and criminals visible to the state. In that sense the detective has a rational, scientific, technocratic gaze ... [and is] an instrument of American political and economic modernity. Hammett, he argues, refuses this epistemological priority of vision and from this perspective transforms the character of the detective into a literary modernist agent for the critique of modernity. In "No ties except blood": Class, Race, and Jack London's American Plague (PLL 39:iv[2003] 390430), David Raney argues that The Scarlet Plague offers a literary version of the issue of twentieth-century immigration and national identity. He suggests that London had long been interested in germs and infection, and that it appears as a theme in several of his works. Raney discusses the arrival of such terms in historical, social and literary contexts and the way in which they became representative of issues such as class and race. He discusses The Scarlet Plague's opening sequence as indicative of London's tendency. The image of the decrepit railroad, a symbol of man's ascendancy, now overrun by nature, offers an immediate suggestion of man's place having been reclaimed by nature; but this attack on the natural order, Raney argues, was constructed only so that nature's royalty, the Anglo-Saxon, can reinstate it. In Rethinking Authorship: Jack London and the Motion Picture Industry (AL 75:i[2003] 91117), Marsha Orgeron discusses London's relationship with cinema, and specifically the willingness he demonstrated in selling himself, his brand name, while in the process rejecting the sacred status of the single author. Although his cinematic dealings, as Orgeron describes them, were not terribly successful, he remained to the end optimistic that motion pictures offered a future for him. In London, Orgeron presents a writer who foreshadows the many other writers who would experience a similar fate and attempt to make their name and fortune by adapting their work to and working in Hollywood. The substantial, four-volume Willa Cather: Critical Assessments, edited by Guy Reynolds , provides a rich resource for Cather scholars this year. The collection forms part of a series which aims to offer students and researchers authoritative overviews of the often discouraging mass of critical material on significant writers, and to make accessible, difficult to locate and out-of-print documents. Volume 1, Memoirs and Recollections: General Responses and Critical Overviews, includes the reminiscences of close personal acquaintances of Willa Cather, including Edith Lewis and Yehudi Menuhin, together with a range of critical responses to her writings from Lionel Trilling, V.L. Parrington, and Carl Van Doren, amongst others, which chart developments in Cather studies from the 1920s to the 1960s. Volume 2, Critical Reviews and Intertextualities, contains reviews of individual Cather works dating from 1913 to 1950, and essays on her connections with writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. In volume 3, Essays on Specific Works, Reynolds brings together the critical assessments of notable Cather scholars including Sharon O'Brien, Hermione Lee, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff. Volume 4, New Approaches to Willa Cather, is organized according to the multiplicity of readings and interpretations Cather's writing has generated. This section includes writings from Susan J. Rosowski on Cather and the literature of place, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar on Cather and gender studies, and Paul Borgman on Cather and religion. This collection is an invaluable resource for Cather scholars, providing an impressive survey of the changing responses to the writer and her work throughout the twentieth century. In Perry and Weaks, eds. , The History of Southern Women's Literature, published but not reviewed last year, Willa Cather's work is considered in a regional context, as part of a broad

survey of female-authored literature from the southern states. With contributions from notable scholars including Helen Taylor, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Anne Goodwyn Jones, this comprehensive text identifies traditions, and traces developments in southern women's writings from the antebellum era to the present day. In addition to addressing issues of evolving genre and form, the volume brings together critical interpretations of the work of a great diversity of writersHarriet Jacobs, Mary Chestnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Katherine Anne Porter, and Zora Neale Hurston amongst them whose writings are informed by a distinctly southern culture. In her appraisal of Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which she describes as Cather's only southern novel, Elizabeth Jane Harrison discusses the author's rejection and revision of the masculine "pastoral impulse" to feminize the landscape and objectify women characters. Cather's alternative female pastoral, she notes, undermine[s] the mythic construction of the southern garden, enabling the psychological development of a woman protagonist and the creation of autonomous female characters. Two articles take as their theme the unspoken Native American presence in Willa Cather's writings. In The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (AL 75:ii[2003] 275304), Melissa Ryan considers Cather's latent ambivalence toward the pioneering enterprise. Exploring the tensions in the novel between the freedom of the unbound space and the boundaries imposed as that space is civilized, she identifies a subtext of anxiety about the displacement and confinement to reservations of the indigenous population. Identifying numerous Native American resonances as, for example, in the fantasy figure of Alexandra Bergson's recurring vision, Ryan asserts that this anxiety constitutes the most deeply disavowed layer of meaning embedded in Cather's complex motif of enclosure. In "Fragmentary and Inconclusive" Violence: National History and Literary Form in The Professor's House (AL 75:iii[2003] 571600), Sarah Wilson reads the 1925 novel as Willa Cather's historicist critique of nostalgia, and as a commentary on the construction of national identity through an appropriation of Native American artefacts. Paying particular attention to the fragmentary form of the text, she identifies the stand alone narration of the archaeological recovery, sale and ownership of ancient relics as formal witness to Cather's discomfort with, and ambivalence about, the colonial gaze at work in the building of national histories. Ancient American relics and artefacts also figure in Mara Carla Snchez's Immovable: Willa Cather's Logic of Art and Place (WAL 32:ii[2003] 11730). Citing Walter Benjamin's theory that even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be, Snchez interrogates Cather's association of particular aesthetic cultures with specific regions and the loss of meaning which accompanies reproduction, substitution and, most of all, movement. In an essay which interprets the novel Death Comes for the Archbishop as a lament for the pillaging of southwestern artifacts, Snchez claims that, for Willa Cather, Just as carved images detached from Catholic churches in New Mexico may not signify what they should or could, in Chicago, Robert Browning poems become pathetic when recited by a lush in a frontier bar. In Willa Cather's Reluctant New Woman Pioneer (GPQ 23:ii[2003] 16173), Reginald Dyck argues that in Alexandra Bergson, the single, independent, entrepreneurial female protagonist of the 1913 novel O Pioneers!, Willa Cather creates a contradictory and ambiguous version of the New Woman. The article discusses the way in which the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the period generated a demand for nostalgic literary representations of pioneer life, connecting this with Cather's interrogation of the options available to women as a result of the new cultural conditions, options which are figured in terms of both opportunity and personal loss: Alexandra is emblematic of the struggle the United States faced at the turn of the twentieth century in reconciling its rural, pioneer past with the cultural transformations inherent in the urban New Woman and the industrialism

from which she emerged. Janis P. Stout takes an original approach to Cather's writings this year, focusing not on her extensively debated prose works, but on her lesser-known poetry. In Willa Cather's Poetry and the Object(s) of Art (ALR 35:ii[2003] 15974), Stout notes that Cather wrote poetry throughout her life, and that it was an activity which provided her with a vehicle for her prolonged engagement with the nature of art and the artist and the social function of the artist's work. Tracing Cather's poetic maturation, she identifies a move away from early Arcadian artifice to a celebration of the commonplace, a development which Stout claims is reflected in the author's prose fiction. In a consideration of the poem Poor Marty, which is a tribute to the daily work of the humble household servant in the kitchen, the essay identifies the linkage of art with home, or dailiness as Cather's central and most important literary theme. In Henderson, ed. , Seers and Judges: American Literature as Political Philosophy, published but not reviewed last year, Christine Dunn Henderson applies the work of Alexis de Tocqueville to the writings of Willa Cather. Responding to the social theorist's comments on the derivative nature of American literature and the absence in the nation of a distinctive literary voice, she identifies Cather, along with Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as a particularly American artist. Henderson describes The Song of the Lark as a decidedly American novel, pointing out that the individualism, independence and selfdeterminism demonstrated by Thea Kronborg, the novel's central protagonist, correspond to Tocqueville's observations about the American character. She notes that both Cather and de Tocqueville are critical of such democratic individualism, de Tocqueville concentrating on its harmful effects on American politics, Cather focusing on its deleterious effects upon human beings. Despina Korovessis's contribution, The House of Mirth: Edith Wharton's Critique of American Society, examines The House of Mirth through a de Tocquevillian lens, and claims to engage a previously unexplored aspect of the text. There is, however, much that is familiar in this discussion of a society debased by its preoccupation with materialism and a heroine ruined by her desire for wealth. Cather and Wharton also share space in Civil Wars: American Novelists and Manners 1880 1940, by Susan Goodman , a study that also treats the work of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Ellen Glasgow and Jessie Fauset. Tracing the relationship between manners and American fiction around the start of the twentieth century, Goodman identifies the emphasis on manners as a defining quality in American letters. While acknowledging that Willa Cather is not a novelist of manners in the traditional sense, her discussions of The Professor's House, Shadows on the Rock and Sapphira and the Slave Girl suggest that Cather repeatedly arrests a moment in history and tests her characters against accepted standards of conduct and that the author's understanding of manners is tied to her brand of "regionalism". Across the body of her fiction, Goodman notes, Cather demonstrates a continued interest in social boundaries. Unlike Cather, Wharton is discussed in terms of the traditional novelist of manners. Drawing on Wharton's long association and deep affinity with the customs, practices and traditions of Europe, Goodman examines The Decoration of Houses, The Valley of Decision and The Age of Innocence to consider the way in which Wharton uses manners as cultural indicators in her critique of modern American society. The keen interest in architecture and interior design that infuses her work, together with her frequent association of people and place, human character and architecture, are interpreted as Wharton's attribution of a spatial dimension to manners. In the Student Companion to Edith Wharton, part of the Greenwood Press Student Companions to Classic Writers series, Melissa McFarland Pennell offers an introduction to Wharton's life and work, designed to meet the needs of students and general readers. Following the series template, Pennell includes an informative biographical chapter and one which provides a general overview of Edith Wharton's writings, together with a consideration

of her contributions to the short story, travel writing, the novel of manners, and the Gothic. Subsequent chapters address a selection of individual works: The House of Mirth [1905], Ethan Frome [1911], Summer [1917] and The Age of Innocence [1920], each divided into headed sub-sections which pay attention to issues of setting, plot, character, theme, and symbol. While the layout suggests a standard, rudimentary study guide, the Companion distinguishes itself through the inclusion of alternative reading sections that introduce a range of critical approaches and interpretations to encourage independent, analytical understandings of the work. With reference to Foucault and Bakhtin, Pennell discusses The House of Mirth in the context of new historicist criticism; she offers a Marxist reading of Ethan Frome, and applies feminist literary theory to Summer. These accessible elementarylevel engagements with critical interpretation are supported by an extensive bibliography. The volume offers a basic but effective introduction to Wharton studies. This year saw the publication of a valuable contribution to the Norton Critical Edition series: Wharton's The Age of Innocence, edited by Candace Waid . In addition to the scholarly annotations to the novel and an informative introduction, Waid includes an extensive range of documents, maps, photographs, and illustrations, which effectively situate the text within social, cultural, and historical frameworks. In bringing together a rich variety of material contemporary with the novel's late nineteenth-century setting, the Background and Contexts and Sources sections provide an illuminating picture of the economic climate, attitudes to marriage and divorce, changing social etiquette and mores, and the lifestyles of the leisureclass, old New York aristocracy. Particularly worthy of note are the extracts from an 1888 newspaper interview with Ward McAllister, the recognized master of protocol, and the recipes for Roman Punch from The Encyclopedia of Practical Cookery. Waid's selection of critical approaches to the novel is divided into Reviews and Modern Criticism. The former includes early responses from prominent figures in America and Britain, including the frequently reproduced Our Literary Aristocrat by Vernon L. Parrington. The latter reprints extracts from important studies of Wharton's work, for example, The Age of Innocence as Bildungsroman, from Cynthia Griffin Wolff's A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, as well as including several new essays written specifically for this edition. In "To read these pages is to live again": The Historical Accuracy of The Age of Innocence, Julia Ehrhardt explores the extraordinary number, depth, and breadth of the historical references in the novel and the controversy and debate that ensued as, post-publication, Wharton responded to her critics petty preoccupation with minor textual inaccuracies. Jennifer Rae Greeson offers a consideration of the composition of the novel, and the careful creative process in which Wharton engaged, discussing the three plot outlines of The Age of Innocence housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Further contributions to this section include an examination of Martin Scorsese's 1993 cinematic adaptation of the novel and an essay giving prominence to issues of race, reading Ellen Olenska as a dark heroine. This authoritative edition also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Wharton criticism. Carol J. Singley makes a significant contribution to Wharton scholarship this year, editing both Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth: A Casebook, and A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. In the casebook Singley provides an introduction to the novel and its critical reception, reproduces Wharton's introduction to the 1936 edition of The House of Mirth, and includes extracts from the author's autobiography, A Backward Glance. She also reprints eleven essays which will be very familiar to scholars of Wharton but which are, nonetheless, important studies and offer a range of critical approaches to the novel. Included here are Elaine Showalter's The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton's House of Mirth, which draws comparisons between Wharton's narrative and Kate Chopin's The Awakening, both identified by Showalter as examples of the novel of the woman of thirty; and Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, by Wai Chee Dimock, which explores the significance of economics and market forces in the text. The work of notable Wharton

scholars Shari Benstock, Amy Kaplan, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff is also represented in this study, which provides a useful resource for students new to the novel. The Historical Guidehistorical in the sense that it places Wharton and her work within the literary, political and social contexts of a particular cultural moment between Victorianism and modernitybrings together a series of new essays written specifically for the volume. Shari Benstock contributes A Brief Biography of Edith Wharton. Ranging widely across Wharton's fiction (The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, The Custom of The Country, Ethan Frome, The Mother's Recompense), Martha Banta considers the author's use, particularly of women's fashions, but also of domestic interiors, architectural styles, modes of transport and communications, as important markers by which she traced shifts in the social habitus occupied by her fictional characters in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on the 1913 novel The Custom of the Country, Cecelia Tichi examines the influence of Darwinian theory on Wharton's writing, and Dale M. Bauer discusses Wharton's complex portrayals of female sexuality, suggesting that, for her female characters, sexual expression is frequently substituted by drug addiction. Through an examination of The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree and Ethan Frome, Bauer argues that Wharton's ambivalence about modern sexuality surfaces in her social critique of alienation, which she understood not as repression or absence of passion, but as passion misdirected toward objects and ideas, or, worse, as passion degraded to desire-driven consumerism. The volume also contains an illustrated chronology of Wharton's life and work, and includes contributions from Nancy Bentley on Wharton, Travel, and Modernity and Linda Costanzo Cahir on cinematic adaptations of the author's writings, and a comprehensive Bibliographic Essay from Clare Colquitt. Two essays in Papke, ed. , Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism, are devoted to Edith Wharton. Donna M. Campbell explores the literary relationship between The House of Mirth [1905] and David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise [1917], a novel for which Wharton expressed particular admiration. Describing the later novel as both a retrospective commentary and a dark mirror version of The House of Mirth, Campbell draws parallels of plot, characterization, and language, including the language of Darwinian thought, between the two naturalistic narratives. In Susan Lenox, she claims, Edith Wharton found a vindication of her own literary vision and social critique. In "Hunting for the Real": Responses to Art in Edith Wharton's Custom of The Country, Lilian R. Furst draws on the work of Walter Benjamin to explore the novel's preoccupation with the authentic work of art. Discussing the naturalistic struggle for survival in which the old social order is pitted against the new money invader, she notes that differences are articulated primarily through divergent attitudes toward works of art. In Property and Identity in The Custom of the Country (MFS 49:iv[2003] 687713), Ticien Marie Sassoubre argues that, although Wharton's novel is most often interpreted in semiautobiographical terms, as a narrative about divorce or the patriarchal oppression of women, it can also be read as a novel about the changing property relations and the ways in which those property relations are constitutive of personal identity. Discussing Wharton's articulation of the commodification of human attributes, she figures Undine Spragg, the novel's protagonist, as, a creature of new market conditions, who is willing to exchange sex for status and her child for cash as a reflection of Wharton's concern that the collapse of stable property relations precipitates a failure of interpersonal relationships. The Custom of the Country also features in Debora Clarke, Women on Wheels: "A threat at yesterday's order of things" (ArQ 59:iv[2003] 10336), which considers the way in which women's access to the automobile ... profoundly transformed American culture and helped to shape twentieth-century American literature. Clarke offers a fascinating insight into the carefully managed marketing campaigns employed by companies such as Ford, which sought to negate

cultural anxieties about the greater freedoms afforded to women by auto-mobility, by positioning them as consumers while at the same time presenting them within traditionally domestic roles. She goes on to offer a reading of The Custom of the Country in which Undine Spragg like the motor-car, seems to represent the new age of automobilityrapacious and unfeeling, highlighting the tension between old and new and, increasingly between men and women. Anne M. Fields, "Years hence of these scenes": Wharton's The Spark and World War I (EWhR 19:ii[2003] 19), argues that despite the novella's nineteenth-century setting, its many references to time and change identify it as a part of Wharton's World War I corpus, informed by the author's anxiety about writing, as a woman, in the male-dominated arena of war. She makes connections between this text and the body of Wharton's war writings in terms of their shared sense of the incommunicable and motifs of interrupted expression. An essay worthy of note this year is "This isn't exactly a ghost story": Edith Wharton and Parodic Gothic (JAmS 37:ii[2003] 26987), in which Janet Beer and Avril Horner discuss Wharton's indebtedness to, but also her independence from, previous practitioners of the Gothic mode, including the Bronts, Hawthorne, Stevenson and Le Fanu. The introduction of parodydefined as a literary mode that, whilst engaging with a target text or genre, exhibits a keen sense of the comic, an acute awareness of intertextuality and an engagement with the idea of metafictionis identified as the feature that distinguishes Wharton's Gothic from its precursors. Considering the short stories Miss Mary Pask [1926], Bewitched [1926] and All Souls [1937], and making connections between these narratives and texts such as Wuthering Heights and The Scarlet Letter, the essay examines Edith Wharton's skilful appropriation and manipulation of the genre, including her excessive and humorous use of Gothic clichs. Beer and Horner note that Wharton's shift into parodic mode most often occurs when the sexual appetite of women is at the heart of the narrative. They argue that, rather than being subversive in the classic Gothic sense of taboo-breaking and challenges to legitimacy, in her ghost stories Wharton uses comedy and the idea of the supernatural to unsettle conventional values and beliefs. Also considering Wharton's writing in the context of Gothic fiction this year is Kathy Justice Gentile's contribution to Hoeveler and Heller, eds. , Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions. Discussing Wharton's short stories The Lady's Maid's Bell [1904] and The Pomegranate Seed [1931], alongside others by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gentile offers strategies for teaching the writings which she describes as supernaturalized commentaries on gendered fin de sicle anxieties. The essay also includes a brief discussion of Gilman's best-known short story, The Yellow Wall-paper. Studies of the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman continue to concentrate on analysis of this particular story, and two publications this year take as their focus pedagogical approaches to the text. Weinstock, ed. , The Pedagogical Wallpaper: Teaching Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-paper, offers a range of strategies for utilizing the text, as a teaching tool, including Formalist, Existentialist, Genre, Reader Response, and Dialogic approaches. Aimed at a secondary and early-stage undergraduate studentship, the volume includes contributions from educators who offer both critical appraisals of the text and ideas for practical classroom application. Many contributors suggest lists of questions for classroom discussion; some offer reflection on learning outcomes and a consideration of student responses. Janet Gebhart Auten advocates encouraging students to engage with the text through the production of what she calls a sequential-response journal, their initial impressions and emotional responses recorded as they read. Jim O'Loughlin recommends dividing the student group, having one half read Gilman's text alongside Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, while the others read it in conversation with Steinam's Ruth's Song, a practice which, he testifies, stimulates vigorous debate about generic convention and expectation. Debra K. Peterson introduces the innovative concept of student interaction with the characters and setting of The Yellow Wall-

paper through the medium of computer technology and virtual space, although to appreciate this strategy fully the less computer literate will first have to negotiate explanations of MOO or Multi User Domain, Object-Oriented Spaces. Some contributions are, perhaps inevitably, less useful than others, providing rather rigid and prescriptive lesson plans which lack the flexibility for adaptation. In the main, however, this text provides a useful pedagogical tool. In Knight and Davis, eds. , Approaches to Teaching Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper and Herland, a contribution to an established series, Denise D. Knight and Cynthia J. Davies bring together strategies for teaching The Yellow Wall-paper as well as a range of approaches to Gilman's 1915 utopian novel Herland. Highlights of this volume include Carol Farley Kessler and Priscilla Ferguson Clement's Using Role-Playing in Teaching "The Yellow Wall-paper", which seeks, through dramatization of the text, to broaden students understanding of male and female gender-role expectations at the time of the story's composition in 1892, and an essay by Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams which suggests that Gilman's problematic treatment of race and ethnicity in the novel is more complex than simple bigotry, identifying her racist sentiments as a part of her social evolutionary theory in which some races were positioned at a more advanced stage of progression than others. A useful contribution from Cynthia J. Davis considers Gilman's short story in the context of American literary realism and naturalism. The volume also contains a section offering approaches to teaching a wider range of Gilman's writings. Notable amongst these is Michelle N. McEvoy's examination of the way in which Gilman employs a variety of forms and genres, including utopian novels, short stories, Gothic writings, journalism, sociological studies and poetry, as vehicles to promote her socialist reform agenda. Gilman's socialist vision is also the subject of Jennifer Hudak, The "Social Inventor": Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the (Re)Production of Perfection (WS 32:iv [2003] 45577), which examines the influence of the discourses of evolution and eugenics on the utopian novel Herland. This essay discusses the ways in which Gilman's writings were shaped by scientific and evolutionary theories, most particularly those of reformer-Darwinist Lester F. Ward.

3. Fiction since 1945

In Inventing Orders: An Essay and Critique on 20th Century American Literature (19502000) Aaron Sultanik presents a Top 1. Poetry wide-ranging, chronological survey of individual texts such as 2. Fiction 1900-1945 Invisible Man, The Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, the stories of 3. Fiction since 1945 John Cheever, Catch-22, Herzog, The Crying of Lot 49, 4. Drama Slaughterhouse-Five, Gravity's Rainbow, In Cold Blood, The 5. Native, Asian American,... Armies of the Night, The Bluest Eye, The Color Purple, the Books Reviewed stories of Raymond Carver, John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, Love Medicine and Beloved. These are grouped into three styles/periods (existential realism, radical realism and postmodern realism) which constitute the second part of his study, Defending Orders. Part 1, Inventing Orders, provides a rationale for his grouping of the texts in relation to these specific categories of realism. Sultanik asserts that his study of literary craft provides a streamlined critical vocabulary which revisits the notion that text is context.

Anthony Arthur's collection of essays about notorious feuds between American writers, Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrelsfrom Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe, provides a humorous and enjoyable supplement to existing biographical scholarship of American writers. In his preface, Arthur makes a bid for the reappraisal of literary feuds as vehicles through which the social and intellectual history of the twentieth century is made visible. However, his rationale for the reflexive power of literary feuds does not seem to be borne out in the course of the study. His anecdotal discussions of literary quarrels include analysis of the relationships between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, and Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Though compelling, the collection is clearly orientated towards a popular readership, although the final chapter on John Updike and Tom Wolfe shows scholarly application by virtue of original correspondence between the Arthur and these warring writers. Kimberly A. Freeman's Love, American Style: Divorce and the American Novel, 18811976 examines how the marriage plot and its dissolution remains central to studies of the American novel. Freeman's book locates a shared symbology of divorce in the works of William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Mary McCarthy and John Updike, and argues that divorce functions as an ambivalent emblem of American personality. Love, American Style demonstrates that the idea of divorce constitutes a resolutely American commitment to individual liberty, selfreinvention and social duty and, moreover, that the social and literary practices of divorce lend themselves to the development of ideas of American modernity. Of special interest to this section are chapters 4 and 5, which discuss the work of Mary McCarthy and John Updike. In these chapters, Freeman analyses selected texts such as McCarthy's A Charmed Life [1955] and The Group [1963], and Updike's Marry Me: A Romance [1976]. Freeman's comments about the presence of divorce registered on the level of form seem particularly innovative, and the author makes a compelling case for the reading of McCarthy's use of the figure of divorce as a mode of questioning the limits of realist representation. Similarly, Freeman argues that Updike's structuring of divorce collapses the polarities between realist and romance forms. Overall, this study is a welcome contribution to the field and illuminates the scripting power of the sign of divorce as a tool for literary and cultural forms of representation. In Strehle and Carden, eds. , Doubled Plots: Romance and History, the theoretical and textual work of the romance plot is subjected to critical re-examination. In the introduction to the edition, the authors argue that the narrative of love ventriloquizes cultural values that naturalize patriarchal models of gender while the narrative also critiques the ideology of the heterosexual romance. Doubled Plots foregrounds the interaction of history and romance by deploying a wide variety of applications of the terms of history, text and desire. Equally, the collection showcases productive crossings of genre, period and literary field, illustrated by the wide treatment of popular, canonical and ethnic romance novels. Of particular interest to this section are the essays by Mary Paniccia Carden, Stephanie Burley and Charles H. Hinnant, which attend to the form and function of the contemporary American romance. Carden's essay, entitled Making Love, Making History: (Anti)Romance in Alice McDermott's At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy, identifies an epistemology of romance in McDermott's popular 1992 and 1998 novels, and shows how the equation of romance and history is put under pressure by the failure of the promise of the heterosexual union. In a different vein, Stephanie Burley turns her attention to the problem of subterranean homoeroticism in popular Harlequin romances. Her article, What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing Reading a Book Like This?: Homoerotic Reading and Popular Romance, explores how discursive apparatuses prevent romance readers from seeing themselves as homoerotic subjects. Burley's essay adopts a queer reading strategy to manifest the instabilities inherent in theorizing reading practices, and concludes her article with an appeal for critics to inspect anew the counter-discursive effects of the embedded homoerotic narrative. Similarly, Charles

H. Hinnant's focus, in Desire and the Marketplace: A Reading of Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower, rests upon a broad analysis of the dynamics of reading. Structured around a discussion of Woodiwiss's seminal 1972 novel, Hinnant explores the relationship between romance writing and economic fields of production. Equally, Hinnant's article shows the symbiotic rapport between the contemporary American romance and the formation of modern, liberal market ideologies. While Love, American Style and Doubled Plots aim to provide fresh readings of the occluded forms of romance writing, Clare L. Taylor's Women, Writing, and Fetishism 18901950: Female Cross-Gendering claims to reformulate the concept of fetishism as both a sexual practice for women and textual practice for modernist women writers. Conceived as a corrective to existing psychoanalytical models of female fetishism, this study reformulates Freudian fetishism to suggest that female cross-gendering enhances the sexual body/self of the female author and/or protagonist. Taylor examines the work of Sarah Grand, Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Djuna Barnes and Anas Nin, but it is her extended treatment of the relationship between Barnes and Nin that reveals the full force of Taylor's innovative and meticulous scholarship. In chapter 5 Taylor links her treatment of Barnes to readings of Nin's diaries and fictional works. Her extended analysis of the House of Incest and Cities of the Interior series reveal the author's adept transition between paratextual and literary play, and Taylor's close attention to matters of form and viewpoint produces original readings of Nin's work. Although decidedly modernist in its focus, Taylor's book addresses explicitly the contemporary author's debt to the fictional and critical writings of Barnes and Nin. Taylor notes in her afterword that the exploration of the "dark unconscious" of fetishistic desire, manifest in the work of Nin and Barnes, demonstrates that these authors set the standard for subsequent writers adoption of the model of fetishistic cross-gendering as textual practice. Taylor's agile manoeuvrings between theory, text and context can be seen to complement a similar methodological position adopted by Michael T. Gilmore in his study of the quest for legibility in American culture. In Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture, Gilmore straddles the twin disciplines of psychoanalysis and literary studies by illuminating the persistent American fascination with regimes of visibility and the vexed relationship between writing and seeing. Surface and Depth engages a heterogeneous range of literary works including foundational documents of the American republic, studies of film, psychoanalytical theory and the canonical writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. In chapter 7 Gilmore addresses the forms of obscuration, silence and illegibility in the contemporary works of Ralph Ellison and Philip Roth and underscores the salience of race as an operative dynamic structuring the discourse of legibility. In this chapter, Gilmore demonstrates how the signs of race and ethnicity denote the refusal of ideas of transparency, textual and otherwise, and appeals to critics to address their oversights surrounding discourses of social class within American literature and culture. Gilmore's study of the leitmotifs of occularity in a diverse range of American texts exemplifies the rise in popularity of reading strategies that produce border crossings between literary fields and historical periods. Two notable pieces of scholarship in the field underscore this evident methodological turn, yet their inclusion in this section for review constitutes in itself a trespassing of boundaries. Madsen, ed. , Beyond the Borders: American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory and James A. Snead's Racist Traces and Other Writings have been selected for review in this section because of their appeal to critics to analyse the cross-fertilization of influences that complicate the facile separation of ethnic and unmarked (i.e. white) American writing. Beyond the Borders brings together a diverse range of essays concerned with the redirection of current theories of postcoloniality to the study of American literature. Of particular importance to critics of contemporary American literature is Deborah L. Madsen's introduction to the

collection, American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory, which traces the implications of the theoretical work of postcolonialism and, in turn, probes the contours of American canonbuilding. In the process of examining texts beyond the geographical borders of America, Beyond the Border demonstrates the peculiar tendency of multiethnic literatures to naturalize and reinscribe inherited concepts of American cultural identity as being equivalent with the United States. In other words, Madsen makes the case for the presence of a shared symbology associated with the place of the United States and the idea or identity of the American functioning in both ethnic and canonical (white-authored) American literatures. Madsen's call to examine the identificatory criteria of American literature is taken up in the book's final essay by Geraldine Stoneham: U.S. and US: American Literature of Immigration and Assimilation. Stoneham's article attempts to move beyond the signs of race and ethnicity to probe the opposition between mainstream and marginal American literatures. She opens her analysis with an exploration of the condition of otherness in white European American narratives and shows how the myth of autonomy and individuation constitutes a more productive analytical tool through which to explore ideas of Americanness than paradigms of race, class and language. Her efforts to blur the boundaries between literary fields, though inadvertently reverting to problematic definitions of the universal, serve as a useful reminder of what is at stake in our adoption of reading methodologies and curriculum selection. Palgrave's publication of the collected essays and fictional works of James A. Snead, Keeling, MacCabe and West, eds. , Racist Traces and Other Writings: European Pedigrees/African Contagions, is a worthy tribute to Snead's exceptional contribution to the study of German, English, and African American literature, film studies and critical theory. Kara Keeling's introduction to the book underscores how Snead rejected the idea that African American intellectuals must confine themselves to studying only Black culture and he repudiated the notion that Black culture could itself be adequately understood in isolation. The nine essays collected in the volume demonstrate Snead's intellectual commitment to the convergence of philosophical traditions and the mutuality of European and black cultural thought. Echoing Madsen's appeal to reconsider the borders between marginal and mainstream American literatures to inspect for their points of continuity and difference, Snead's work challenges the easy separation between black and white literary and theoretical traditions. Reading Snead's work again, one is struck by his prescient call to read against the grain and to open up literary works, such as those of William Faulkner and Herman Melville, and cultural texts such as basketball, MTV, and film to the rigours of deconstructionist theory and cross-disciplinary analysis. This collection of his seminal critical essays, including On Repetition in Black Culture and Litotes and Chiasmus: Cloaking Tropes in Absalom, Absalom!, and five short stories, finally makes Snead's work widely available and is indispensable reading for scholars of American literature. Amy Hungerford's treatment of the work of personification in postwar literature argues that the conflation of texts and persons has...been crucial to postmodern understandings of both nuclear holocaust and ethnic holocaust. Further, in The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature and Personification, Hungerford connects strategies of textual and cultural personification to the ascendance of the theoretical work of New Criticism and Multiculturalism, which privileges the centrality of ethnic identity and authorship to formulations of human subjectivity. The Holocaust of Texts moves from an exploration of the disembodied text in Sylvia Plath's work to a focus on the political and cultural uses of personified texts in Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 and the work of nuclear analyst Herman Kahn and philosopher Jacques Derrida. In Chapter 3, Hungerford poses questions about memory and modes of identification in Schindler's List, Art Spiegelman's work and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and then moves, in Chapter 4, to a study of the communication of traumatic experience enacted by Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments [1996]. In Chapter 5, Hungerford turns her attention to the work of Philip Roth and Saul

Bellow, arguing that these authors present an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between persons and texts. Hungerford shows that Roth and Bellow make space for forms of identification that are not determined by history; moreover, framed by the fulcrum of performativity, Roth and Bellow liberate their characters identities from the binds of race, ethnicity and past history. In her conclusion, Hungerford expands on the ethnical problems posed by conflating texts and persons by invoking the powerful and essential function of recognizing alterity: I argue that justice requires us to be able to recognize the otherness of other persons, an otherness that is belied by an understanding of literature based on the mechanisms of identification. Michael Davidson's Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics is an important contribution to the mechanics of compulsory heterosexuality in poetic/artistic communities and a marker of the growing influence of masculinity studies on literary criticism this year. Davidson examines citations of normative masculinity in the context of post war consensus seen, for example, in David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd. The centre of Davidson's argument is that the potentially subversive masculinities of poetic/artistic communities are subject to similar processes as the performative citationality of normative masculinity of larger Cold War anxieties about gender and subversion. In chapter 3, The Lady from Shanghai: California Orientalism and "Guys Like Us", Davidson submits Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac to the charge of orientalizing the west as a strategy of normalizing beat masculinity. Of particular interest is Chapter 6, Definitive Haircuts: Female Masculinity in Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath, where Davidson argues that masculinity is made more legible and visible when removed from the male body. In Male Sexuality Under Surveillance: The Office in American Literature Graham Thompson makes interesting connections between public discussions of the ClintonLewinsky scandal, the issue of homosexuality in the military, and the Iraq conflict to suggest that they are similarly informed by a number of assumptions about masculinity, sexuality, and power whose historical development can be mapped in American literary representations of the office. It is Thompson's contention that literary representations of the office ... lay witness to many of the demands, constraints, and contradictions implicit in the formation of a normative male heterosexual identity in the wider culture. Thompson discusses the traditionally male space of the office as an arena of desire, in which, drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, malemale relationships take place in a continuum between the homosocial and the homosexual which must be policed by the rigid separation of the heterosexual and the homosexual, a disruption of Sedgwick's continuum based upon a comparison between the invisibility or naturalness of the heterosexual male body and the visibility of the homosexual body, a distinction which gives rise to a culture of surveillance. As a space in which male sexuality and masculine identity can be understood as in a perpetual crisis of definition, Thompson's literary offices of the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth centuries are connected by their importance as visual regimes at that moment in Western culture when the epistemological nature of society is changing, when, in Michel Foucault's terms, surveillance and disciplinary society as epitomized in Bentham's Panopticon are rearranging the organization of power relations. Thompson's study is divided into three sections. Managing Desire begins in the 1830s with a discussion of the work of Herman Melville, William Dean Howells and Sinclair Lewis, focused on the ways that representations of male friendship speak of the fluidity of masculinities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (presenting possibilities for the consideration of a continuum of male sexuality) which are nevertheless closed down. Postwar Unsettlement discusses structural changes in office work from the end of the Second World War to the 1970s as they are treated in the work of Sloan Wilson and Joseph Heller, changes which cause anxieties manifested as a fear of feminization. The final section, A Word for Windows, a discussion of the work of Nicholson Baker and Douglas Coupland, informed by recent developments in queer theory,

suggests that positive male experiences of the contemporary breakdown of traditional office structures due to changing work patterns speak of an escape from constraining masculinist discourses reliant on an economy of surveillance. This is a theoretically informed and compelling intervention in the burgeoning cross-over field of literary criticism and masculinity studies. Marilyn C. Wesley's Violent Adventure: Contemporary Fiction by American Men challenges the popular assumption that violent contemporary American fiction reinforces the male violence dramatized by, for example, the Columbine school shooting, September 11, boxing and gang warfare. Wesley questions the contradictory popular impulses which condemn violent behaviour and its representation on the one hand, while celebrating the kinds of violence promoted by Hollywood in masculine coming-of-age narratives on the other. She argues that recent fiction by writers such as Tobias Wolff, Pinckney Benedict, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, Thom Jones, Tim O'Brien, Ernest Gaines, Walter Mosley, Russell Banks and Don DeLillo is engaged in the revision of narratives of violent adventure which are central to conventional constructions of a powerful, white American masculinity. For Wesley, the revision of traditional genres by these writers, such as the Western, detective fiction and war stories, challenges popular assumptions about the significance of violence for masculine identity. However, while she recognizes that part of the appeal of narratives of male violence lies in the ways that their repetition reinforces a sense of male power, she does not consider the possibility that contemporary revisions may also function in the same way, reinforcing male violence in a stylistic, if not thematic, way. In Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship, Nathaniel Lewis explores another literary arena for the representation of masculinity to focus on the ways in which it essentializes its subject matter as outside cultural construction. This is a wide-ranging, theoretically informed and innovative critical contribution to the emergent field of New West criticism. Lewis's starting point is that the very struggle over authenticity ... [is] perhaps the only "true" condition of the western cultural imagination. It is Lewis's contention that writers and critics of Western literature privilege a connection between the West and the real at the expense of an attention to textuality, and he attempts to reroute discussion back to stylistic designs and cultural and canonical contexts. For Lewis, Western literature is conceived as merely a historical record, and he points to the lack of theoretical critical approaches to the area, suggesting that this is the result of conceptions of the West as pure space outside the demands of contemporary culture. For Lewis, treating western literature as simulation rather than representation redirects our attention from history and place to text or screen; makes the connection between language and reality not only suspect but playfully unnecessary; and helps us to project and finally glimpse a previously invisible history of western literature. It is Lewis's claim that such an unsettling of traditional approaches to Western literature reveals an unsettling body of writing which might be seen as postmodern writing par excellence, whose banality, reliability, and repetitive imitations cloak its extraordinary achievement: the production of a hyperreal West. Lewis discusses a wide historical range of writers, but of particular interest in this section are the final chapters Coming Out of the Country: Environmental Constructivism in Western Nature Writing, which discusses the work of Terry Tempest Williams and Gary Snyder, and Inside Out in the Postmodern West, which references writers such as Nathanael West, Thomas Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson, E.L. Doctorow, Vikram Seth, Cormac McCarthy, E. Annie Proulx, Jonathan Franzen and T. Coraghessan Boyle, while focusing on Native American writers and providing a substantial discussion of Vladimir Nabokov's interest in the West. Also published in this field is Lyons, ed. , Literature of the American West: A Cultural Approach, an anthology of writing on the American West. This is intended as a teaching aid and no new scholarship is presented. There have been a number of publications in the field of ecocriticism, often related to studies of the West. Dana Phillips's The Truth of Ecology:

Nature, Culture and Literature in America represents an attempt to redefine ecocriticism from a theoretical perspective. Here, Phillips negotiates tensions between literary and scientific realism, of experience and representation and theory and practice of nature writing. Of interest to this section is Phillips's examination of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek [1974]. Not received for review was Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology and the Environment by Glen A. Love. Continuing the attention to gendered literary spaces, Nancy Gerber , in Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction, considers the ways that interactions between class, race and motherhood are dramatized in relation to the figure of the mother-artist in contemporary women's writing. Gerber sketches how creative explorations of motherhood at the margins produce a distinct literary tradition from an intersubjective perspective to subvert Western understandings of creativity, subjectivity and authorship. She discusses the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, Tillie Olsen, Cynthia Ozick and Edwidge Danticat in relation to the topics of domesticity, silence, history and memory. General studies of postmodern fiction are in short supply this year, while single-author journal articles and monographs (below) continue to appear steadily. In The Myth of the Descent to the Underworld in Postmodern Literature, Evans Lansing Smith charts the use of archetypal images and ancient texts in a focused and highly specific study of postmodern literature which sees the underworld as metaphor for that which lies beneath the surface. For Smith the repeated occurrence of myths of the underworld (or necrotypes) in postmodern texts speaks of a connection back to the modernist texts of Eliot, Joyce and Pound, in which postmodern adaptations are unconvincingly envisaged as markers of continuity with the past. Of interest in this section are chapters on Ken Kesey, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover. Studies of popular fiction seem similarly thin this year, with the exception of Doubled Plots (above) and The Trash Phenomenon: Contemporary Literature, Popular Culture and the Making of the American Century, in which Stacey Olster considers the ways in which popular culture is integrated into contemporary literature as part of a consideration of the role of the popular in processes of nation-building. Olster is interested in how contemporary writers subvert the nationalist designs integral to popular cultural texts. The study initially discusses how the works of Gore Vidal, John Updike and Larry Beinhart are concerned with the role of mass media in the rise of US dominance in the twentieth century, before moving on to discuss literary considerations of the imperial influence of American popular culture in England, Argentina and Japan. Olster concludes in the US with a consideration of treatments of media spectacle in post-1963 literature, in texts such as Don DeLillo's Libra, as they variously respond to such spectacles as unifying devices. The publication of journal articles and single-author monographs on the post-1945 period showed a steady decline in 2003. American Literature has a proliferation of articles about early American literature, with Susan Mizruchi's article entitled Lolita in History (AL 73:iii[2003] 62952) being the exception that proves the rule. Her article traces the references to historical events that haunt Nabokov's novel, and Mizruchi identifies the embedded historical subtexts of the Holocaust and American consumer culture that reveal the novel's larger perspective on the moral questions it raises. The first volume of 2003s American Literary History was devoted to the study of ethnicity, poetry and multiculturalism, emerging out of the Cambridge Literary History of the US forum in May 2001. The subsequent parts of volume 15 show a similar decline in the number of articles published on post-1945 American literature. However, of notable interest was Jennifer Dalton's article, Before the White Negro: Sin and Salvation in Kingsblood Royal (AmLH 15[2003] 31129). Dalton's discussion of Sinclair Lewis's 1947 best-seller notes how this novel constitutes both a radical critique of white racism and the inability to transcend the logic of racial difference. Dalton links her

analysis of racial passing to current studies of whiteness and, further, argues that ideas of American nationalism in the post-war period were inextricably tied to ideas of racial whiteness, consumerism and suburbanization. An article on Burroughs, Oliver Harris's William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, reappraises his novels from the perspective of his biography. Harris places Burroughs's work in the productive correspondence of the other beat writers. This is a significant addition to the body of work on Burroughs and is illustrative of beat literary community. Sid Sondergaard's Unable to Queer the Deal: William S. Burroughs's Negotiations with "Eugene Allerton" (Crit 44:ii[2003] 14456) follows Harris's methodology of locating explication in Burroughs's biography. Sondergaard examines how the pressures of Burroughs's successful antecedents may have influenced his writing. Situating the writing of Queer just after the accidental shooting of his wife, Sondergaard argues for the representation of guilt in the novel. The Lee/AllertonBurroughs/Marber relationship is represented in capitalist terms, with Lee/Burroughs as the consumer. The importance of biography is continued in Susanne VeesGuiani's Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (Crit 44:ii[2003] 17584). Vees-Guiani emphasizes Vonnegut's war experience of the bombing of Dresden to contextualize Billy Pilgrim's schizophrenic temporal existence. Vonnegut's writing is seen as part of a therapeutic approach to post-traumatic stress disorder. Biography is also the key to Brendan Nicholls's article The Melting Pot that Boiled Over: Racial Fetishism and the Lingua Franca of Jack Kerouac's Fiction (MFS 49:iii[2003] 52449). Here, Nicholls argues that Kerouac attempts to map his marginal identityas a French Canadian ethnic minorityonto the American landscape by masking him in the racial attributes of African Americans, Mexicans, and Native Americans. In a careful Freudian reading of Kerouac's fetishization of his mother's bathrobe, Nicholls argues that America is figured as a castrating and castrated dark woman. He sees this as part of a larger mythology of self, enacted through the Duluoz Legend. Andrea Levine's The (Jewish) White Negro: Norman Mailer's Racial Bodies (MELUS 28:ii[2003] 5981) reassesses Mailer's essay in terms of a remasculinization of the Jewish male body. This depends on a dissociation of the Jewish male from the feminine and history. An interesting range of articles and a few single-author monographs continue to appear on writers in the post-1970 period, particularly in relation to the topic of postmodernity. Two significant single-author studies which seek to expand the boundaries of postmodern criticism are David Cowart's Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language and Christopher Palmer's Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern. Cowart charts DeLillo's rise as a major contemporary American author, discussing each of his twelve novels. His wide-ranging study makes connections between DeLillo's work and a host of other writers and thinkers such as Walt Whitman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, as well as considering the ways in which DeLillo's work interacts with the fields of post-structuralism and postmodernism, which are more usually the focus of attention in DeLillo criticism. Cowart's overarching attention is on DeLillo's use of language, and he argues that it is this aspect of his work which provides the key to understanding his engagement with postmodernism, but also his resonance with the work of earlier writers and critics. Palmer discusses the work of Philip K. Dick in relation to its simultaneous excitement about the possibilities of postmodern transformations and fears about the loss of ethical certainties those possibilities gesture towards. This dual focus is discussed as a marker of Dick's historical position at the intersection between humanism and postmodernism, and Palmer suggests that the ongoing, unresolvable clash between these discourses informs Dick's work. A range of sophisticated journal articles appeared in relation to postmodern writers. In Literary Narrative and Information Culture: Garbage, Waste, and Residue in the Work of

E.L. Doctorow (Crit 44:iii[2003] 50135), Michael Wutz extends postmodern discussions of waste as a symptom of the modes of production of late capitalism to suggest that the trope of garbage is extended in relation to narrative function in the works of E.L. Doctorow. Wutz suggests that for Doctorow waste becomes a metaphor for marginal or residual knowledge, a domain that is outside the boundaries of received disciplinary practices as well as the contemporary media landscape yet which is central to the understanding of culture. Within this context, Wutz argues that dirt and dust in Doctorow's works function as metaphors for the role of print narrative in an electronic age. In Wrong Numbers: The Endless Fiction of Auster and Deleuze and Guattari and ... (Crit 44:ii[2003] 21324) Robert Briggs discusses Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari's rethinking of the book in relation to the concept of the rhizome, a metaphor which suggests that the book is without subject or object, having multiple connections within and without itself which nullify endings and beginnings. Such a position informs Briggs's argument that Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy is not so much focused on the ways in which meaning is conveyed or refused by a text but how it makes connections beyond itself. Briggs points out that not only is each part of the trilogy incomplete, but that the trilogy is a trilogy is a fiction, in that each part does not complete a whole and gestures more widely towards the entire range of Auster's texts. Timothy Melley's Postmodern Amnesia: Trauma and Forgetting in Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods (Crit 44:i[2003] 10631) sketches a contemporary American cultural climate of traumatic amnesia which speaks of the instability of the liberal subject: they operate on a profound sense of self-divisiona sense that one's experience can be secret even to oneself. Melley connects this crisis of subjectivity to a crisis of historiographythe idea that it is no longer possible to ground historical narratives securely leads to dangerous forms of collective forgetting. Amnesia in O'Brien's text is discussed as an important trope through which the correlation between failures of individual memory and failures in representing the historical past, as they relate to postmodern theories of subjectivity and history, can be evaluatedthe traumatic personal event compares with the real of history and, as O'Brien's text illustrates, both are inaccessible: the traumatic must remain hidden in order for it to function as an authentic space which is outside contaminated or flawed narratives. Copestake, ed. , American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon, signals a renewed interest in Pynchon this year, particularly in relation to the reassessment of The Crying of Lot 49 and the ways that Vineland and Mason & Dixon mark a shift in his earlier concerns. Essays consider the ways in which Pynchon's ethical strategies evolve in relation to notions of postmodernity, discussing his work in relation to Marshall McLuhan's account of mass media and the decentring of the subject (David Seed, Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49); ethics: David Dickson, Pynchon's Vineland and "That fundamental agreement in what is good and proper": What Happens When We Need to Change It?, and David Thoreen, In which "Acts have Consequences": Ideas of Moral Order in the Qualified Postmodernism of Pynchon's Recent Fiction; metafiction: Francisco Collado Rodrguez, Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction and the Unstable Reconciliation of Opposites; science: William B. Millard, Delineations of Madness and Science: Mason & Dixon, Pynchonian Space and the Snovian Disjunction, and Ian D. Copestake, "Off the deep end again": Sea-Consciousness and Insanity in The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon; hybridity: Martin Saar and Christian Skirke, "The realm of velocity and spleen": Reading Hybrid Life in Mason & Dixon'; American comic traditions: John Heon, Surveying the Punchline: Jokes and their Relation to the American Racial Unconscious/Conscience in Mason & Dixon and the Liner Notes to Spiked!; and mapmaking and representation: Robert L. McLaughlin, Surveying, Mapmaking, and Representation. The desire to update Pynchon criticism continues in journal articles. In Japan, Creative Masochism, and Transnationality in Vineland (Crit 44:iv[2003] 37188) Terry Caesar and Takashi Aso attempt to explain the presence of Japan in Pynchon's text by restoring its

specificity as a national space, an attention neglected in Pynchon criticism. Caesar and Aso employ the concept of masochism as a metaphor for Japan's cultural dependence on the US, exploring the ways in which transnational exchange in Vineland subverts that dependence; hence, creative masochism is a reference to Pynchon's representation of in-between spaces which are the site of the untranslatable. In Pynchon in Popular Magazines (Crit 44:iv[2003] 389404) John K. Young argues for the importance of recontextualizing Pynchon's work in relation to the popular magazines of the mid-1960s, such as Esquire and Cavalier, which were the site for much of its original publication. It is Young's contention that only by understanding the textual history of Pynchon's work can we appreciate his position within popular media, as well as his responses to the consumer culture through which he developed his initial authorial image. The further significance of Young's argument is forcefully demonstrated by a discussion of the public visibility of Toni Morrison in relation to Pynchon's (more recent) invisibility. Young suggests that an uncritical acceptance of Pynchon's status as a genius recluse, detached from specific contexts of production, allows an ongoing assumption that the work of white, male authors represents universal concerns. In Pynchon's Ghosts (Crit 44:ii[2003] 25074) Daniel Punday takes as his starting point the idea that ghosts provide alternatives to official accounts of history in Pynchon's work, suggesting that in Pynchon's later texts, particularly Mason & Dixon, the focus has shifted from the demands of the haunted to the responsibilities of the haunted, a transformation linked to his changing ethical approach to the past. Punday argues that Pynchon's recent work engages with the notion that our debt to the past is one of mourning, as part of a process of responsible involvement. The continued popularity of Cormac McCarthy is demonstrated again this year and the following three articles provide welcome theoretical interventions in the field. In The Flawed Design: American Imperialism in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian' (Crit 45:i[2003] 324), Christopher Douglas compares the ways in which Momaday and McCarthy attend to migrations and colonizations in the south-west as part of their interrogation of Western modernity as it relates to white imperialism, considering both as postcolonial critiques. In Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy's Border Fiction (MFS 49:i[2003] 15580) Mark A. Eaton references debates about McCarthy's regional affiliations as a writer (which necessarily connect him to canonical southern or Western writers) to suggest that he might be more productively considered alongside Chicano and Latin American writers as part of the emerging genre of post-nationalist fiction, a move which in turn allows reflection upon the changing concerns of the Western and southern literary traditions. In The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius: Abjection, Identity, and the Carnivalesque in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree (Crit 44:iv[2003] 66496), J. Douglas Canfield opens with a surprising reference to Adorno which situates Suttree as a text which demonstrates the post-Holocaust impossibility of meaning. The varied concerns of the article, informed by the work of Julia Kristeva and Mikhail Bahktin, are perhaps best summed up by the statement that McCarthy respond[s] to modern abjection by indulging in a nostalgia for Bakhtin's holistic vision of the folk humor of the middle ages without providing any sense of transcendence or truth, only an unfailing attempt to present a new, albeit sometimes comic, dawning to balance against the abject evening redness of the west. In "Everything a hunter and everything hunted: Schopenhauer and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (Crit 45:i[2003] 2533) Dwight Eddins extends some of the familiar and rather tired concerns of existing McCarthy criticism, arguing that McCarthy's engagement with the ontoepistemological problematic is a marker of his sophistication and stature as a worthy successor to Joyce, Faulkner, Mann and Pynchon. McCarthy is discussed in relation to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Studies of women writers were in surprisingly short supply this year. Paul Christian Jones's article on Anne Tyler is a welcome exception and its attention to post-feminism may explain

this shortage. In A Re-awakening: Anne Tyler's Postfeminist Edna Pontellier in Ladder of Years (Crit 44:iii[2003] 27183), Jones assesses critical reception of Tyler's work as part of a feminist backlash to suggest that Ladder of Years is actually a post-feminist revision of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, one that posits a feminist trajectory for women that does not necessitate a complete flight from the domestic sphere. Jones outlines definitions of postfeminism to suggest that Tyler's work is most usefully viewed as presenting a form of feminism adapted to a postmodern age in which feminism evolves in relation to uncertainty, ambiguity and pluralism. For Jones, Anne Tyler's post-feminism lies in her presentation of a protagonist empowered within a transformed homespace. It may well be that the established tradition of reading women's writing in relation to feminist frameworks in this section has led to a difficulty in engaging with such texts in a post-feminist era. Perhaps the evolution of feminist concerns as they relate to notions of post-feminism has yet to be sufficiently developed for new frameworks of literary criticism to emerge. Nancy Gerber's study of the mother-artist, above, provides a welcome return to feminist concerns, which nevertheless feels rather dated. A writer who continues to attract interest is Barbara Kingsolver, whose work engages the fields of postcolonial studies and ecocriticism as part of a feminist critique. In The Africa of Two Western Women Writers: Barbara Kingsolver and Margaret Laurence (Crit 44:iii[2003] 28494), Kimberly A. Koza discusses the ways in which the lack of African voices in Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible is part of a critique of American arrogance, connections between feminism and critiques of colonization being made via the narrative of the female members of the American family. Koza compares Kingsolver's focus on the American burden of guilt for colonization in which Africa is a background for essentially American concerns to Canadian writer Margaret Laurence's work, which foregrounds African voices. Koza suggests that Kingsolver draws attention to the complicity of the women in the text (who are nevertheless subject to white, male colonial authority) to ask American readers to revise their understanding of their own responsibilities. An interesting article which focuses on the self-conscious treatment of whiteness as a constructed identity (a growing area of enquiry in literary studies, introduced above in John K. Young's article on Pynchon, Deborah Madsen's collection, and James Snead's collected writings) is Heather J. Hicks, On Whiteness in T. Coraghessan Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain (Crit 45:i[2003] 4364), which seeks to understand Boyle's text as a comment on white, suburban, middle-class group identity in America which can be understood to point in directions that critical race studies might take in its interrogation of whiteness. Finally, an interesting publication, Eudora Welty on William Faulkner, draws on Welty's admiration for Faulkner. Reproduced are Faulkner's postcard encouraging Welty, extracts from Welty's review of Intruder in the Dust and speeches from the presentation of the Gold Medal for Fiction presented to Faulkner in 1962 and the Southern Literary Festival in 1965. The volume is concluded by Noel Polk's essay, Welty and Faulkner and the Southern Literary Tradition, which puts the collection into context. The following titles published in 2003 were unavailable for review: Kim Loudermilk, Fictional Feminism: Representing Feminism in American Bestsellers (Routledge); Gene D. Phillips, Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction and Film Noir (UPKen); Roland Walter, Narrative Identities: Intercultural In-Betweens in the Americas (Lang); and Jeffrey Weinstock, Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (UWiscP).

4. Drama
Top 1. Poetry 2. Fiction 1900-1945 3. Fiction since 1945 4. Drama 5. Native, Asian American,... Books Reviewed

(a) General Publications in the field of American drama display two continuing trends: criticism of drama is increasingly being displaced by interdisciplinary studies of theatre, and work on individual playwrights is diminishing in favour of studies of groups of authors and historical analyses.

For example, discussion of even the most seminal African American playwrights is highly compressed in Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch's A History of African American Theatre. This is slightly disappointing, because many of the most accessible surveys of the dramafor example, Samuel A. Hay's African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (CUP [1994])have glaring deficiencies. Nevertheless, given the authors self-imposed restrictions, and the vast range of the material, one could not reasonably ask for much more from this remarkable study. Hill and Hatch largely restrict their scope to North America, and focus on drama, although they also provide selective coverage of relevant developments in musical theatre and dance, including of course minstrelsy as well as vaudeville and cabaret acts. They have also resisted any temptation to theorize such phenomena as minstrelsy and blackface, and the treatment of individual plays and playwrights is strictly subsumed within the larger narrative, but what a narrative it is: despite the 600-odd pages (over a hundred of which are devoted to notes, bibliography and index), the book rattles along, with an astonishing breadth of detail and a seamless fluency in the style. This will be the standard reference work for years to come. No other book published this year can hope to match Hill and Hatch for range. Instead, a remarkable number of studies focus on particular periods and developments within American drama. While few radically alter the familiar narrative arc of twentieth-century American drama, almost all add new detail, unfamiliar primary material, or distinctive connections. There is little to surprise in John H. Houchin's Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century: in this account, conservative social forces implement censorship in order to restrain the expression of ideas that threaten to subvert an established order. Houchin begins by establishing the history of censorship prior to the twentieth century before exploring the period from 1900 to 1930, in which the concern was primarily with sex; later, censorship was more rigorously focused on attempts to muzzle politically subversive theatre. The final two chapters explore sex as a metaphor for political and social radicalism. All of the topics one would expect to encounter are surveyed in detail: Mae West, the Federal Theatre Project, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Living Theatre and Off-OffBroadway, and the Culture Wars post-1972, culminating in the coalition of conservative, anti-federal politicians and Christian fundamentalists that drove the New Right's attack on the National Endowment for the Arts, for example in its response to the growing number of 1980s plays about AIDS. For the most part it is a familiar and increasingly depressing story, and although Houchin has no particularly new angle, that is because the issues have never been more starkly or bleakly apparent. The book combines magisterial scope with lucid and convincing detail. One can piece together a standard chronological history of American drama of the twentieth century from the several studies published this year that concentrate on a particular development within the field. Cheryl Black's The Women of Provincetown, 19151922 takes

a fresh look at what is widely regarded as the century's first significant advance, the establishment of the Provincetown Players. Black aims to offer a different approach and emphasis than previous studies have provided by focusing on the achievements of women in all aspects of the Players work. Of fifty-one dramatists who wrote for the Players, sixteen were women, who were involved in writing over a third of the plays that emerged. Susan Glaspell, of course, is a key figure in the chapter on writing, but Black places her in a broader context and discusses the recurrent concerns of female playwrights, many of whom Black regards as feminist in their often critical views of marriage, their creation of heroic female characters, their avoidance of female stereotyping, and their pacifist politics. One would have welcomed a longer chapter, but Black is specifically concerned to argue for the centrality of women in all aspects of production, including managing, performing, stage-directing, and designing. She also argues for the feminist politics of contemporary Greenwich Village as an influence as important as the European aesthetics that the Players are widely credited with importing. Not surprisingly, Black also interweaves biographical information on the women working in Provincetown with their theatrical achievements. Although the study bears some traces of the doctoral dissertation from which it is drawn, it is a timely and well-researched contribution to the growing field of literature both on the Provincetown Players and on female dramatists working in the early decades of the twentieth century. The papers in Gewirtz and Kolb, eds. , Experimenters, Rebels, and Disparate Voices: The Theatre of the 1920s Celebrates American Diversity, are derived from a conference held at Hofstra University in 1994. Unusual contributions include several pieces on set design, a discussion of African American theatre critics, an account of Howard University's 1920s drama programme, and a short account of Chinese dramatists. The pieces on playwrights can be broadly grouped under three headings: several welcome contributions looking at the work of John Howard Lawson; African American playwrights; and women dramatists (almost inevitably, Sophie Treadwell and Susan Glaspell). Particularly noteworthy among these is Kornelia Tancheva's argument that Treadwell's Machinal was successful precisely because it was not seen as a feminist play. A very useful contribution to deixis and other semiotic systems within theatre studies generally is Beverly Bronson Smith's They Knew What They Wanted: American Theatre's Use of Nonverbal Communication Codes to Marginalize NonNative Characters in the 1920s. The origins of most of the papers are all too apparent, however; although the collection of conference proceedings is a useful means of circulating work in progress, the reprinted conference paper as an individual item is usually just too brief and provisional to be rewarding in published form. Barry B. Witham's The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study begins by making the same kind of observation that Houchin's book on censorship compels: Imagine a new play on Broadway in 1985 subsidized by the United States Congress urging support for the Contra movement in Nicaragua. Insert your own, post-2004 re-election analogy here. Like Houchin, Witham finds little to overturn received views of his subject, but he does approach the FTP from a different angle and unearths substantial new primary material by presenting a case study of the unit in Seattle. In so doing, he moves beyond the familiar, cherry-picked successes of the FTP to ask questions about the thousands of other productions across the States. He gives a detailed analysis of the establishment of the unit, its research activities, the Negro unit and racial tensions, the Living Newspapers, the Children's Theatre, and several productions, before coming to a balanced set of conclusions about the Seattle unit and, at least by implication, the FTP generally. It never satisfactorily defined its audience, or found a way to reconcile ambivalent demands: committed and relevant theatre with the box office, populism with legitimization, centralization and professionalism with outreach and local interest. Unlike the many accounts of marginalized topics that feel compelled to argue for an unwarranted quality and centrality, Witham accepts that the quality of the work was not consistently professional and often painfully amateurish, although there were some

successes, most notably the work produced by the Negro unit. Despite the failure of the federal government actively to combat racism, the Negro Repertory Theatre was the centerpiece of the Seattle unit and symptomatic of what was fundamentally forward looking and decent about the whole New Deal enterprise. As for the suspicions of many conservatives that the FTP had been infiltrated by subversives, Witham finds little evidence of communist activity, and indeed identifies many in the Seattle programme who were actively opposed to the radical left. Dennis G. Jerz , Technology in American Drama, 19201950: Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine, argues that in this period bookended by the two world wars the obsession with technological progress at once glorifies and demystifies the machine because of its increasing ubiquity in everyday domestic life. Over three decades, dramatists illustrate three distinct stages in the individual's responses to the machine: first, self-destructive hostility; second, socialized acceptance; and finally, a full, deeply intimate integration. Jerz illustrates this argument in a chronological sequence of chapters, each of which explores two or three plays in detail. At the start of the 1920s, O'Neill's The Hairy Ape and Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine expressionistically dramatize apparent polarities: the alienated individual and mechanization, nature and technology. The climax of such plays tends to present a grimly ironic fusion that becomes explicit at the end of the decade in O'Neill's Dynamo, Rice's The Subway and Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, which express a profound horror in the recognition that, far from being our polar opposite, the machine is, in the eyes of the protagonists, a conduit of power, inspiration, and even lovebut only at the cost of one's soul. During the Depression era the benefits of mechanization became more apparent, and the drama revolved around ownership, as plays such as Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty, the Federal Theatre Project's Altars of Steel and Clare Booth Luce's O, Pyramids debated industrialization and the related issues of regionalism and class, and explored the conflict between unionized labour and capital. By the 1940s technology had become domesticated, and [t]he internally complex characters of Wilder, Miller, and Williams are not silhouetted against a technological background but are instead knitted into a richly developed technological context in which these dramatists hold the characters (and audience members) morally accountable for their own failures. Throughout, Jerz inscribes these plays within an informed analysis of the dialectic of theatrical representation and industrial change, while his fascinating but regrettably and needlessly highly compressed introduction provides some fascinating perspectives on the broader cultural meanings of technological change. This is a fine, suggestive study of an important topic that could easily have been developed at greater length. The most significant theoretical development in this field is to be found in Bruce McConachie's remarkable American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 19471962. In focusing on the issue of spectatorial pleasure, and by tracing this to ways of seeing that have been pre-formed by presemiotic changes in the dominant culture, McConachie enters territory that is more familiar in film than in theatre studies, which seem largely to have assumed that affective pleasure is a result of immediate engagement with the unfolding performance. McConachie feels that the usual arguments advanced to explain changes in American theatre and drama after the Second World War military victory, the rise of the Cold War superpowers, economic advance, and the internal struggle against dissent and subversionare inadequate. Instead he develops an approach via cognitive psychology that strongly recalls some recent developments in the misleadingly entitled post-theory in film studies, associated for example with the work of Nol Carroll and David Bordwell. McConachie draws extensively on psychological studies of containment, whereby the spectator perceives phenomena via an image schema that creates the perception of an image as having an inside, an outside, and a boundary, and relates this to the period's dominant ideology, the containment liberalism exemplified in the National Security Act of 1947. (From this point of view the book works well alongside John H.

Houchin's study of censorship, reviewed above.) McConachie studies some of the major plays of the period in terms of three primary examples of different forms of containment: the narcissistic Empty Boys of plays like George Axelrod's The Seven Year Itch; Family Circles, including the empathetic mother in plays like William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs; and the passive Fragmented Hero. He argues that Arthur Miller presents heroes who resist this fragmentation, but at the price of demonizing female sexuality. For McConachie, a second major development to account for spectatorial pleasure is to be found in the formative influence of technological change, notably in the fields of photography and audiophony. For example, he suggests that the popularity of radio drama moved audience tastes away from realism and towards allegory and abstraction: radio privileges the mental over the material, makes distant things seem close, and (in an important commentary on the use of the word compulsion, often used uncritically to indicate the protagonist's assertive individuality) removes the sense of will. This aspect of McConachie's superb study usefully complements Jerz's account of technology and the American stage, above. Much more straightforward is David A. Crespy's Off-Off Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theater. This is a work of cultural and biographical history rather than dramatic criticism (although it touches on a large number of plays), a narrative account enlivened by extensive research, many photographs, interviews with many of the key figures, and a prefatory endorsement from Edward Albee. Although there is little in the way of contextualizing materialno lengthy introductory accounts of the state of Broadway in the 1950s, for example, although the sense of radical change and renewal explodes from practically every pagethis is at the very least an essential addition to the more sober accounts of the period in the standard histories. Several other studies were published that take a theoretical or thematic, rather than historical, approach. Of these, unquestionably the most important is David Savran's A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater. This is a diverse collection of essays, including Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism, the indispensable study of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, most of which are previously published, albeit sometimes in different form. There is not space here to summarize Savran's remarkably diversity of material and critical thinking that ranges from an occasionally gleefully unreconstructed Marxism to queer theory, abjection, and musings about the trains of thought provoked by walking along the beach on Fire Island. Savran is interested in the troublemakersthe ghost, closeted lesbian, masochist, drag king, anticolonist, or angry white malewho, because they are both present and absent, are never offered to the unobstructed gaze of the spectator. Many of the pieces, such as the Kushner essay or the discussion of middlebrow anxiety, already have the feeling of standard critical analyses. Despite the complexity and sometimes even the abstruseness of the approach, Savran is nevertheless repeatedly trenchant, illuminating, even blunt: one has to cheer a critic who, without resorting to the crude populism of Terry Eagleton's recent work, states frankly that postmodernism ... represents less a momentous epistemological shift than it does an attempt to divert attention away from increasingly uneven patterns of capital accumulation and economic development toward the cultural and the social. Two studies this year focus on the relationship between classical theatre and the contemporary American stage. In Drawing Upon the Past: Classical Theatre in the Contemporary American Theatre, Robert J. Andreach explores intertextual connections between classical theatre and a large range of plays by contemporary dramatists: A.R. Gurney, Tina Howe, Edward Albee, Charles Ludlam, Harry Kondoleon, Richard Foreman, P.J. Gibson, Adrienne Kennedy, David Rabe, Charles Mee, Ellen McLaughlin, John Guare, Eric Overmyer and David Greenspan. As this list suggests, the book includes extensive consideration of both canonical and non-canonical works, and of playwrights who affirm the

primacy of the verbal element in theatre as well as those drawn more to plastic experimentation. The organization of the book is somewhat problematic. Andreach divides it into three sections: the first two essentially deal with comedy and tragedy, while the third and final section, which consists of a single chapter, examines three plays, each for the self primarily actualized, although it is practically impossible to keep the three selves separate. This gives a good indication of Andreach's unsympathetic and sometimes baffling prose style, as well as suggesting that the concerns of the book are somewhat compromised by layering the classical/contemporary discussion on top of what apparently remains Andreach's primary concern, the presentation of self. There is also a certain grim inevitability about the approach to each play, as in the discussion of Albee's The Zoo Story, which jumps in a paragraph from recognizing that Jerry's description of the dog and description of the hag indicate that he understands the significance of the epic descent to finding in this an illustration of an initiatory death that then invokes an enumeration of a large number of examples from Dante and classical literature, none of which particularly aids in the understanding of the play. In short, Andreach's problem is that confronted by all studies that make a single element central to the reading of genre: they inescapably privilege similarity over difference at the expense of engaging with recalcitrant detail. This, and the style, make the book a dull and unrewarding read. A related but more focused study is Kevin J. Wetmore Junior's Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre, which examines how Greek tragedy has been used to explore African American identity. To this end, he makes a threefold distinction between Black Orpheus (which is Eurocentric, the African American being read metaphorically in terms of the European), Black Athena (the Afrocentric assumption that considers the Greek model to have been derived from Afro-Asiatic origins, a view questioned by Wetmore in a fascinating discussion), and Black Dionysus (which us[es] Greek material metaphorically, but presents the material in a counter-hegemonic, subversive manner ... to critique the dominant culture using its own material). A lengthy chapter explores the presentation of Greek drama on the African American stage and discusses aspects of production, including non-traditional casting, and the effects of the transcultural insertion of elements from one culture into another. This chapter contains analysis of works by Adrienne Kennedy, Lee Breuer and Rita Dove, while the next focuses specifically on productions of Medea; a final chapter discusses the Caribbean. It is unfortunate that the introduction to the book is somewhat declamatory and excessively self-conscious about terminology, because otherwise this is a lucid and engaging account. Konstantinos Blatanis's Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama surveys Hollywood, rock music, television and pulp fiction, before looking at the West and the figure of the cowboy. The book presses all of the likelier theoretical buttons, including Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, and covers a range of playwrights including Thomas Babe, John Guare, Len Jenkin, Adrienne Kennedy, Arthur Kopit, Michael McClure, Terrence McNally, Stephen Metcalfe, Marsha Norman and Jean-Claude Van Itallie. This is an impressively diverse range of playwrights, but in the final analysis the book rather suffers for it, perhaps because Shepard, who remains the dominant figure here, has been the subject of more detailed analyses along similar lines that dig deeper into the relationships between text and performance, the canonical author and popular culture, and modernism and postmodernism. Finally, Jenckes, ed. , New Readings in American Drama: Something's Happening Here, is a collection of nineteen essays on various dramatists and topics, all of which have been previously published in American Drama and therefore previously reviewed in YWES. The selection is judicious, and in keeping with the interests of the parent journal the essays are focused more on drama than on theatre.

(b) Individual Playwrights Two excellent essays provide illuminating historical contexts for Eugene O'Neill's work. In a superbly original discussion, Tamsen Wolff, in "Eugenic O'Neill" and the Secrets of Strange Interlude (TJ 55[2003] 21534), explains the contemporary popularity yet subsequent critical dismissal of O'Neill's problematic play of 1928 by historicizing its melodramatic anxieties about heredity in the context of a debate surrounding eugenics at the time of its first production. Eugenics provided O'Neill with a framework for exploring relations between past and present, visibility and spectatorship, and linear causality. Wolff's exceptionally thorough research convincingly supports her suggestion that, Given the flawed forces of heredity in O'Neill's play, arguably audiences were looking to theatre as much to contradict as to uphold the vision of linear causality that the eugenics movement asserted ... eugenics fed both desires and anxieties about what would be transmitted to a postwar generation. At the same time, in drawing on the phenomenon of eugenics and exploiting its inherent tensions, O'Neill began to rethink the shape and effect of drama. Equally good is Patrick J. Chura, "Vital Contact": Eugene O'Neill and the Working Class (TCL 49[2003] 52046), which historicizes the youthful O'Neill's many attempts to adopt working-class signifiers within the context of vital contact, wherein 1910s well-heeled liberals and radicals would attempt to acquire an invigorating masculinityor, for women, a surrogate maternal functionby means of cross-class contact. Chura traces O'Neill's engagement with this idea through the early plays up to The Hairy Ape [1922], which he analyses at illuminating length, concluding that, for O'Neill, this process was ultimately, and typically, marked by disillusionment: By the time O'Neill began writing Long Day's Journey into Night in 1939, he seems to have understood not only the ineluctable harm of cross-class interventions ... but also a potentially injurious oversimplification underlying his own youthful and adventure-driven "vital contact". Lawrence Dugan, The Tyrone Anthology: Authority in the Last Act of Long Day's Journey into Night (CompD 37[2003] 37995), argues that the play in effect concludes twice: the dramatic problems and questions have been resolved by the end of Act III, while the battle of quotations in Act IV is an essential element in understanding who speaks with most authority in the play, in discovering who is right and who wrong in its extended argument. Dugan analyses both the quotations and the contents of both of the bookcases on the stage: The first is a repository of authors quoted by Janie and Edmund, holding an analytic, fragmented modern romanticism, while the other bookcase represents Tyrone's older, broader tradition, one that seems well-integrated. Tyrone, however, lacks philosophy, and, a bad Catholic, is left holding the banner of a perverse Whig version of history as understood by a romantic, while his flawed sons are nevertheless not without a sense of intellectual confidence. Mary, on the other hand, is spiritually impotent and not sincere. Christopher J. Herr's Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre is a rare book-length study of the playwright who, after O'Neill, was arguably the most important playwright of the 1930s, and certainly the most important new playwright. Herr provides much useful information about Odets, and the substantial, central chapter on the marketplace in Odets Group plays is a valuable critical analysis of the writer's best work. If there is a certain sense of disappointment after reading Herr's book, it is perhaps because Praeger's new Lives of the Theatre series may have placed constraints on the writing, so that the book oscillates between social, critical and biographical analysis within such a short span (around 150 pages minus the chronology and bibliography) that it cannot do justice to all or any of these topics. There may, however, be a problem with Odets himself as subject. The outlines of the life are sufficiently well known, and in any case fall into a somewhat predictable career arc: the son of an immigrant, coming of age during the 1920s and joining Harold Clurman's Group Theatre in time to become its most important playwright as the Depression bit, his radical politics soon becoming unacceptable to a conservative Cold War mentality, and his work in the theatre losing out to the more commercial interests of Hollywood as his star waned.

Paradoxically, although Odets is one of those playwrights whose work seems inextricable from the life, one hardly needs the biography, because he is so easily inscribed within other, larger theatrical and social movements of the period: the immigrant experience, the Depression, the Group Theatre and the Federal Theatre Project, he Second World War, the HUAC hearings, the familiar standoff between Broadway and Hollywood. Consequently, Herr's solid study would have benefited from a still closer critical engagement with the plays. Philip C. Kolin, ed., The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams (Lang [2002]), will be reviewed next time. In Williams's The Demolition Downtown (Expl 62:i[2003] 3941), Kolin intriguingly notes that the apocalyptic elements of this one-act play of 1971, including its futuristic and revolutionary America and subtitle Count Ten in Arabic and Try to Run, invite comparison to our own joyous times. Reclaiming the piece for Williams's oft-overlooked radicalism, Kolin aptly describes it as the playwright's political comedy of terror. Brian Sutton, Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Uhry's The Last Night of Ballyhoo (Expl 61:iii[2003] 1724), notes that, although the two works are completely unrelated by theme or idea, Alfred Uhry's play almost entirely replicates some of The Glass Menagerie's characters and the relationships among them. It also replicates the earlier play's closing image and its political and social setting, even though the influence appears to have been, in a word that has acquired unfortunate connotations in Britain in the wake of the Hutton inquiry, subconscious. Martin Gottfried's substantial new biography, Arthur Miller: His Life and Work (Da Capo [2003]) will be reviewed next time. Several essays appeared on Miller, mostly devoted to Death of a Salesman. Terry W. Thompson, The Ironic Hercules Reference in Death of a Salesman (ELN 40:iv[2003] 737), observes that when Willy tells Biff he is Like a young God, Herculessomething like that, he characteristically does not realize that he is accurately both predicting his son's failure and implying his own inadequacies as a father. In Miller's Death of a Salesman (Expl 60:iii[2002] 1623), Thompson notes similar ironies in Willy's comparison of his sons to Adonises. James E. Walton, Death of a Salesman's Willy Loman and Fences's Troy Maxson: Pursuers of the Elusive American Dream (CLAJ 47:i[2003] 5565), takes a very familiar comparison between these plays of Arthur Miller and August Wilson, respectively, but turns it on its head by insisting that Troy Maxson caught more hell every day of his life than Willy Loman ever saw. A quick-off-the-mark Jeffrey D. Mason offers, in Arthur Miller's Ironic Resurrection (TJ 55[2003] 65777), a close reading of Miller's 2002 play Resurrection Blues, bookending the analysis with an argument that the play illustrates a shift in Miller away from the seemingly committed (and yet, Mason suggests, equivocal) activism of his earlier work towards a position in which irony is the essential mode ... The sine qua non of activism is not just conviction, but faith in one's convictions and in the potential for action to realize them. Miller's detailed vision of his characters weaknesses leaves him too cynical to find a resolution to the problems they create. Miller's own short speech Unlocking the Secrets of Cultures (printed in TDR 47:i[2003] 57) offers something of a footnote to his Salesman in Beijing by reflecting on the playwright's experiences of Japanese productions on his work and concluding that beneath the varieties of different etiquettes, social communication, local habits and conventions, there is a common humanity, a reassurance, but only up to a point. American Drama for 2003 is a special double issue devoted to the work of Arthur Laurents. It features excerpts from two of Laurents's plays (My Good Name [1996] and Jolson Sings Again [1999]), and celebratory remarks by Stephen Sondheim and David Saint. These pieces aside, the entire double issue is the work of Gabriel Miller. The most substantial of these pieces are The Meaning of the Moon: The Plays of Arthur Laurents (AmDram 12:iii[2003] 951), which offers a critical overview of Laurents's work for the stage as a whole, and An Interview with Arthur Laurents (AmDram 12:iii[2003] 57110), an exceptionally revealing

discussion in which Laurents discusses his life and work and makes trenchant observations about productions of many plays by himself and others. The remainder of the issue contains three further interviews, with Nicholas Martin on Directing Arthur Laurents (AmDram 12:i ii[2003] 14060), Andre Bishop on the Intelligent Craft of Arthur Laurents (AmDram 12:i ii[2003] 16174), which contains discussion about the potential for future productions at the Lincoln Center, and Bernadette Peters on Gypsy (AmDram 12:iii[2003] 17583). In all, this is a full and engaging collection that, with some revision and additional critical material, could easily have made a book. After a lengthy period in which almost nothing of note was published about Edward Albee, he is now receiving extensive attention, largely in the wake of Three Tall Women; one can expect this trend to continue after his brilliant The Goat; or, Who Is Sylvia? [2002]. That play appeared too late to receive more than a passing mention by the author as a work in progress in Mann, ed. , Edward Albee: A Casebook. This is a collection of all-new material, including the editor's wide-ranging discussion with the playwright that largely restates views Albee has expressed many times before but includes the fascinating observation that the ending of Three Tall Women was modelled on the fugue at the end of Don Giovanni. Anne Paolucci's Edward Albee: A Retrospective (and Beyond) is a celebratory survey that represents an overview of both Albee's career and the critical stance of this doyenne of Albee studies, rehearsing again her Pirandellian analysis and including an unusually extensive discussion and defence of The Man Who Had Three Arms. Two pieces consider the plays from the director's point of view, with Rakesh H. Solom discussing Albee's own work as director via a well-documented study of a 19789 production of Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, and Lawrence Sacharow's first-hand account of directing Three Tall Women. Not surprisingly, this 1994 play, which saw Albee's return to popular and critical acclaim, is the most extensively analysed work in the collection. Mann's Three Tall Women: Return to the Muses examines the autobiographical genesis of the play and compares it to other later-life autobiographical pieces such as O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Williams's Something Cloudy, Something Clear. Lincoln Konkle's study of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which presents Albee as an American Jeremiah, covers similar ground to that trodden previously by this critic in American Jeremiah: Edward Albee as Judgment Day Prophet in The Lady from Dubuque (AmDram 7:i[1997] 3049). Ronald F. Rapin takes a different approach to this problematic play in his contribution to the Casebook, The Lady from Dubuque: Into the Labyrinth, although the piece is rather too brief to make much headway with the selfreflexive complexities of the piece. Emily Rosenbaum's A Demystified Mystique: All Over and the Cult of True Womanhood is equally short, although more interesting in anchoring the play in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions of womanhood and femininity. Konkle, Rosenbaum and, indeed, Albee himself demonstrate one strand of criticism of this playwright that finds his recurrent concerns to be rooted deep in the foundational stories and structures of America. A different strand, represented to some extent by Rapin but more extensively in this collection by Lisa M. Siefker Bailey, Robert F. Gross and Norma Jenckes, locates those concerns somewhat later, at the boundaries of modernism and postmodernism. Bailey's Absurdly American: Rediscovering the Representation of Violence in The Zoo Story occupies largely familiar territory in tracing the violence of this play to the Cold War anxieties of 1950s America, and the invocation of a Derridean diffrance looks a little forced. The neologism in the title of Gross's Like Father, Like Son: The Ciphermale in A Delicate Balance and Malcolm refers to that recurrent figure in Albee's work, the characterological blank, male protagonists who exhibit a pronounced passivity that arises from loss. This well-researched and solidly theorized discussion persuasively roots the plays in the dynamics of gender and sexuality in mid-60s American culture, and argues that In place of in-depth psychological portraiture, the ciphermale is a collage of impulses, both diffident and passionate, that cannot be explained by references to a psychological case history. In Postmodernist Tensions in Albee's Recent Plays, Norma Jenckes argues that

Marriage Play, Fragments and Three Tall Women explore the tensions between postmodernist self-ironizing and modernist sincerity, with Albee ultimately remaining a high modernist with a nostalgia for meaning who cannot abandon the search for truth. That seems right, and in general the Casebook offers both a solid introduction for those with little prior knowledge of this important playwright as well as some stimulating discussion for the expert. Several of the essays are too short to be particularly useful, however, and at just 150 pages the book cannot possibly do justice to the range and depth of Albee's work. The inadequately short critical book is another depressingly notable feature of current publishing trends, as is the unavoidable observation that $114.95, like $80 billion, doesn't go very far these days. Rana Nayar's Edward Albee: Towards a Typology of Relationships categorizes the interpersonal relationships in Albee's plays as variously circular (rigid and without exit), dialectical (when violence, but with the possibility of synthesis and growth, becomes the only possibility), symptomatic (pathologically one-sided), symbiotic (sado-masochistic and over-dependent), transformative (a regenerative relationship between autonomous subjects) and abstract (existentialist, metaphysical and ontological; the category is to a large extent defined by contrast with the preceding five concrete kinds of relationship). Although the book captures to some extent the variety of relationships in Albee's work, it rapidly becomes tedious, partly because it is unconvincingly schematic but also because of its wholesale and largely unsubstantiated dismissal of much previous criticism, combined, at times, with a dangerously naive swallowing of some complacent right-wing humbug. For example, Nayar claims that All those critics who choose to talk about Albee's concern with problems other than that of human relationships somehow miss the point that he was, first and foremost, a humanist ... A great majority of Albee critics have chosen to ignore the fact that it is the problematics of relationships that gives to the diverse body of his work, a sense of coherence as well as continuity. Who are these critics who have somehow missed Albee's obvious humanism and the functions of relationships in his work? And is Nayar suggesting that it would be idiotic to write about anything other than relationships? Is it in any way helpful to cite approvingly Paul Johnson's description of the 1960s as the decade of illusion when, in the following sentence, Nayar notes that This was the period marked with anti-war protests, urban riots, rise of Black power and democratic explosion? Aside from the critical myopia and often imperfect English, there are some alarming errors: The Man Who Had Three Arms, which dates from 1982, becomes Man with Three Arms [1989], and it is simply not true that this play and Lolita not only dazzled the audiences across America, but also received rave reviews from the theatre critics; in fact, those plays represent the nadir of Albee's critical reception. Sam Shepard becomes Sam Shepherd, and Gareth Lloyd Evans becomes Gerath Llyod Evans, which will distress the Welsh. Frank Ardolino, in Nugent and Thurber's The Male Animal and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Expl 61:ii[2003] 11214) uses the fact that both Albee's work and Elliot Nugent and James Thurber's play allude to the nursery rhyme Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? to identify a few further connections. Lotta M. Lfgren, Clay and Clara: Baraka's Dutchman, Kennedy's The Owl Answers, and the Black Arts Movement (MD 46[2003] 42449), reads Adrienne Kennedy's play of 1965 as a response to Amiri Baraka's foundational play of the previous year. Lfgren situates this dialogue within a broader context in which Kennedy, initially marginalized by Baraka and other members of the Black Arts Movement for her supposed double consciousness, in fact represents a more fertile engagement with issues of race and sexual identity than does the monologic revolutionary voice espoused by the movement in the 1960s. For Kennedy, monologism is the true horror, and in Lfgren's supple analysis this is already revealed in the character of Lula in Dutchman, who is white and black, male and female, real and mythic. In fact, she mitigates Baraka's misogyny in fascinating ways. Similarly, Jacqueline Wood, in Weight of the Mask: Parody and the Heritage of Minstrelsy in Adrienne Kennedy's

Funnyhouse of a Negro (JDTC 17:ii[2003] 524), argues for the duality of Kennedy's work, in this case by analysing the parody of minstrelsy, and specifically blackface, via Henry Louis Gates's work on Signifyin, where Signifyin is itself seen as a black hermeneutics of the parodic performance. This is by now quite a familiar approach, although it remains productive, and in this essay provides a solid theoretical foundation for Wood's argument, which again resembles Lfgren's in presenting Kennedy as a playwright who at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century is finally beginning to receive credit for the complex manner in which she views and has always viewed American race politics. Laurin Porter , Orphans Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote, explores the nineplay Orphans Home Cycle, written in the 1970s. Porter makes the comparison to O'Neill that is inevitable not only because each wrote a major cycle but because Porter sees Foote's major theme as being the very O'Neillian preoccupation with time and the relation between past and present, although for Porter this is also inflected through a Faulknerian southern accent, this southernness, particularly in the approach to place and family, being the major broader context in which porter Places Foote's work. This aside, the discussion is rather embedded, Foote's uniqueness being taken somewhat for granted. Porter shares her subject's humanist interest in why some people's lives work out and others don't, in why people are the way they are, in the relationships between individual and family. She makes some useful core observations: unlike O'Neill's rather frantic and unconvincing attempts to capture demotic speech, Foote's characters all sound the same and can speak only the language their culture makes available; his language seems to disappear, and the plots have a kind of Chekhovian inactivity. The structure of both the plays and of Porter's book is underpinned by an awareness of leitmotifs, parallel characters, and parallel and inverted episodes, a strategy that Porter then expands to show how individual plays within the cycle are paired. This is the latest of a number of book-length studies that have been devoted to the previously neglected Texan, although Porter, like others, runs the risk of contributing to his marginalization by continuing to position him as a figure geographically and aesthetically at the edge of American drama. David K. Sauer and Janice A. Sauer , David Mamet: A Research and Production Sourcebook, is, like other volumes in this series, an invaluable resource. Beginning with a primary bibliography and selected shorter pieces and interviews, the Sauers proceed to an annotated bibliography of criticism, with sections on each of the plays, followed by a consideration of texts treating multiple works, before returning to listings of dissertations, film scholarship, and bibliographical work. It is a little disappointing that the work on film does not receive any annotation or commentary. This produces some strange distortions: for example, only the shortish section on plays in Gay Brewer's David Mamet and Film: Illusion/Disillusion in a Wounded Land (McFarland [1992]) receives any comment, with the bulk of the book being passed over in silence. This is probably due to the restrictions imposed by the series format, but in Mamet's case it is unfortunate. This caveat aside, the book is highly illuminating. A fairly meaty paragraph is devoted to each article, within which there is usually sufficiently lucid description or extensive quotation to give a reasonable flavour of the piece, and a remarkably, and often almost invisibly, dry wit informs much of the commentary. At least, I think it does. Two essays commenting on Mamet's films were published elsewhere. For Mike Digou, examples of Hitchcock's MacGuffin in the Works of David Mamet (LFQ 31:iv[2003] 270 5) include the coin in American Buffalo, the leads in Glengarry Glen Ross, the process in The Spanish Prisoner, and the bribe paid to Gino in Things Change. This list collapses a number of important distinctions, and in a curious discussion of The Spanish Prisoner Digou seems to miss his own point: Mamet's lack of humor results in the occurrence of short,

abrupt, incomplete, clich-ridden sentences in the discussions about the MacGuffin. Carried on for some length, a scene of this type becomes difficult to follow, and suggests that Mamet and his characters have no idea what the Process is. Three and a half pages are devoted to Mamet in Brian Woolland, Tricksters, Hucksters and Suckers: Jonsonian Cinema (in Woolland, ed. Jonsonians: Living Traditions, pp. 20328). The comparison to Jonson has been made before, but in small space Woolland nevertheless establishes a number of important points: that Mamet's view of characterization resembles Jonsonian Humours; that in House of Games Ford's desire to take unrealistic control of the world around her places her in the strange company of Sejanus, Fitzdotterel and Morose; that both dramatists are interested in the commodification of human exchange and use the confidence trick as a dramatic device to reveal self-delusion; and, most trenchantly of all, that Mamet's dislike of Method acting and psychological characterization is also revealing of a thoroughly Jonsonian tendency to want total control of his texts, and contrasts with the openness of the texts themselves ... Given the nature of his dialogue, which is often clipped, elliptical and selfreflexively performative, this is a deepand profoundly Jonsoniancontradiction. Fesmire, ed. , Beth Henley: A Casebook, provides the first substantial study of the works of a playwright who is largely known for a single play, Crimes of the Heart, first produced in 1979. Although, as one would expect, many of the contributions argue that this unfairly distorts and limits Henley's achievement, it is a gnawing obsession that ultimately defines the collection. Only one of the seven contributions, Gene A. Plunka's Existential Despair and the Modern Neurosis: Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, is devoted to this play, although Linda Rohrer Paige's essay looks at its film adaptation alongside that of The Miss Firecracker Contest. Several pieces broaden the understanding of Henley's work by placing her in the context of southern literature. In Lessons from the Past: Loss and Redemption in the Early Plays of Beth Henley, Larry G. Mapp briefly relates the themes of family, culture and the loss of community in six of Henley's plays to the work of writers such as William Faulkner, Kate Chopin and Zora Neale Hurston, while Gary Richards's Moving Beyond Mississippi: Beth Henley and the Anxieties of Postsouthernness more expansively sees the plays of the 1990s as engaging parodically with notions of southernness in order to escape from its confining constructions. One of the supposedly dominant modes of southern writing, the grotesque, is the subject of Miriam M. Chirico's "Dancing on the edge of a cliff": Images of the Grotesque in the Plays of Beth Henley. Chirico notes that although the grotesque is more prominent in the later plays it has been there from the beginning, contributing to one of this books primary aims: to argue for Henley as a more experimental and less realistic writer than is commonly assumed. Similarly, Chirico, like Richards, is concerned to take Henley beyond the constricting boundaries of southernness, although this runs the risk of collapsing important distinctions, as when she suggests that the grotesque engages with a portion of the human condition. Again, Rebecca King's The Lucky Spot as Immanent Critique seeks to distance Henley from the southern label, this time by intriguingly reading this play's critique of familial relationships and, in King's view, of liberalism more generally, through a lens that relates its presentation of liberalism and capitalism to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Karen L. Laughlin likewise argues for a radical feminism in Henley in Abundance or Excess? Beth Henley's Postmodern Romance of the True West, which compares Abundance [1989] to Sam Shepard's True West. Given the concerted attempts by the contributors to present Henley as a more radical playwright, politically and formally, than has generally been perceived, it is bizarre that in her introduction Fesmire admits that I always think of her in conjunction with songwriter and singer Christopher Cross, who burst upon the music scene at about the same time Henley achieved her first success in 1979. Cross's first album ... was one of the most celebrated debut albums of all time ... Just as many music fans consider Rendezvous [1992], or even Walking in Avalon [1998], to be Christopher Cross's best work, taking his music in new directions, many of Henley's later plays are rich texts for discerning critics. On the contrary, no real music fan would have any album by Christopher Cross

anywhere on the premises, and in making the comparison Fesmire unintentionally reinforces the one view of Henley that the Casebook is specifically designed to repudiate: that she, like Cross, is a one-hit non-wonder. In Been There, Done That: Paving the Way for The Vagina Monologues (MD 46[2003] 40423), Shelly Scott discusses the performance history and reception of Eve Ensler's play before situating it in the context of its forerunners in the feminist theatres of the 1970s. Scott ponders the implications of the fact that This sense of isolation and struggle for survival is an updated version of what the consciousness-raising groups of the seventies targeted, concluding ambivalently that history is repeating itself in a watered-down way.

5. Native, Asian American, Latino/a and General Ethnic Writing

Not a little boldly, Robert Dale Parker's The Invention of Native American Literature takes on the thorny perennial of what actually is meant by Native writing. Careful about his own ideological positioning, and at a lively turn of pace, he tries to think through which bearings best apply. Does Native writing encompass each and every work by writers of Native heritage? What, with due recognition Top 1. Poetry of the slipperiness of all literary-cultural category, has that 2. Fiction 1900-1945 body of writing most invented? The upshot is nothing if not 3. Fiction since 1945 engaging: revisionist readings of John Joseph Mathews's 4. Drama Osage-centred Sundown[1934] and D'Arcy McNickle's Salish5. Native, Asian American,... Flathead world of The Surrounded[1936] as fictions of restless Books Reviewed young men; a rethinking of how Native oral story works in written or video form and with case-analysis of the poetry and narratives of Ray Young Bear, Leslie Marmon Silko and Thomas King; and an epilogue taken up with ongoing issues of canonicity and representativeness from John Rollin Ridge through to Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Parker's own contextual savvy, which draws upon African American and Latino/a debate as well as a Native literary-critical roster of Robert Warrior, Craig Womack and others, serves him well. He rightly sees his orientation as deriving from critical multiculturalism, readings alert to the width and hybridity of recent Native American literature yet keenly centred in the imaginative specificities of his chosen texts. It makes for an agreeably bracing critique. Elvira Pulitano's Towards A Native Critical Theory, the work of a Swiss-based Italian scholar whose doctoral work was done under the supervision of Louis Owens, does important service in mapping the body of Native-generated literary theory. Using a spectrum of Paula Gunn Allen, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, Greg Sarris, Louis Owens and Gerald Vizenor, she delineates the span of comparative approaches and typologies. Her account thus turns on gynocentrism in Allen as a Native-feminist analogy with Alice Walker's African American womanism; Native red-stick viewpoint in Warrior and Womacka kind of culturalseparatist ethos in whose name Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is also invoked; dialogism, and other hybridities of form, as the refraction of mixedblood Native lives in the fiction of Sarris and Owens; and the trickster aesthetic of Gerald Vizenor as the pathway, in his best-known signature phrase, into a postindian sense of history. In eschewing non-Native scholarship

like that, say, of Arnold Krupat, Karl Kroeber or Brian Swann, Pulitano runs a certain risk of too exclusivist or hermetic a focus, the closed in-house comparison of the one Native track as against the other. But the returns are not to be denied. As Native writing emerges ever more into visibility, and with it the quickening cross-ply of debate about appropriate critical theory and etiquette, she offers a keen, elucidatory survey of ideological workings. Breinig, ed. , Imaginary (Re-)Locations: Tradition, Modernity, and the Market in Contemporary Native American Literature and Culture, bears witness to the ongoing German interest in Native culture. Based on a University of Erlangen-Nrnberg conference in 2000, this essay collection amounts to an inviting round of creative and interpretative work. The former includes a sheaf of poems by the White Earth Anishinaabe poet Kimberley Blaeser (especially Family Tree as a memory-gallery of dynastic voice); a Haida grandfather story by Jeane Coburn Breinig (unrelated to the editor) together with a brief but vivid memoir of potatoes, flowers and raven myth by her mother Julie Coburn; The Powwow Committee, a wry if fond swipe at community politics by the First Nations Peigan writer Emma Lee Warrior; and extracts by the Anishinaabe authors Gerald Vizenor (including a scene from his postindian novel Chancers) and Gordon Henry, author of The Light People [1994]. The critical contributions begin with a rich, carefully detailed anatomy by Breinig of identity positions and what he terms transdifference in, and behind, Native texts, whether oraltrickster or scriptural, from Leslie Marmon Silko to Gerald Vizenor. It sets a rallying note for the pieces to follow. These include James Ruppert on Native narratives of urban residence from Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn [1968] to Louise Erdrich's poem Jacklight and Gerald Vizenor's short film Harold of Orange; Klaus Lsch on imaginary and historic homelands in Momaday's Ancient Child [1989], Silko's Almanac of the Dead[1991] and Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus [1991]; Arnold Krupat on three modes of deconstructing Native writing which he terms nationalist, indigenist and cosmopolitan; Hartwig Isernhagen on the identity of discourse in Silko's Gardens in the Dunes [1999]; and, one of the collection's best-managed pieces, Brigitte Georgi-Findlay on the case for thinking the late Louis Owens's fiction and critical work as mixedblood in its literary fashioning as in the life-issues which most drew his interests as a writer. Rader and Gould, eds. , Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary Indian Poetry, brings together fifteen essays, a conspectus both general and particular of names and kinds from across the Native verse roster. Contributions, notably, include Eric Gary Anderson on the relevance or otherwise of received Western genre when applied to Native poetry; Daniel Heath Justice on the life-into-literature trope of weaving in the Cherokee poet Marilou Awiakta; Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez in a shrewdly comparative account of the oral as written in the poetry of Awiaka, Kimberley Blaeser (Anishianaabe) and Marilyn Dumont (Mtis); Patricia Clark Smith on family as both division and refuge in poets like Marnie Walsh (Dakota) and nila northSun (Soshone-Chippewa); Dean Rader in a spirited account of lyric epic as manifested in the poetry of Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), Simon Ortiz (Acoma) and Linda Hogan (Chickasaw); Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna-Sioux) on the bardic tradition in Native women's poetry; and the late Elaine A. Janner on Paula Gunn Allen's own evolving poetic style from the more abstract early poetry to the tough, circumstantial verse of a collection like Life is a Fatal Disease [1997]. There are two discursive pieces by leading poets: Carter Revard (Osage) in a series of paired comparisons (Simon Ortiz with Wallace Stevens for instance), in which healing acts as fulcrum, and Simon Ortiz, in an autobiographical essay, on song, dance and language as they shape his own and other Native poetry. The collection includes a useful primary and secondary bibliography. Brian Holloway offers scrupulous scholarship in his Interpreting the Legacy: John Neihardt and Black Elk Speaks, a full, due account of the collaboration between the Nebraska-based

writer and journalist and the Oglala Lakota healer from Pine Ridge reservation, South Dakota, which has become a landmark of Native autobiography. Holloway documents the critical reception of the work, the various manuscript drafts and histories and Neihardt and Black Elk as interviewees in the wake of their joint text. Using recent theory-work on autobiography, he concludes with a number of apposite pathways into both the spirituality and the narrative shaping of the Black Elk Speaks. This, overall, makes for genuinely careful annotation and scholarship. SAIL (15:i[2003]) devotes a complete issue to the Osage-born Carter Revard, the first-ever Native American Rhodes Scholar and the poet and writer of Ponca War Dancers [1980], Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping [1992] and An Eagle Nation [1993], the essay collection Family Matters, Tribal Affairs [1998] and the subtle, mixed-genre memoir Winning the Dust Bowl [2001]. This timely celebration of his considerable body of work includes the printed version of Revard's Some Notes on Native American Literature (SAIL 15:i[2003] 115), a consideration of literary genres, the role of anthologies and the environmental politics of fossil fuel and alternative forms of energy; the poem Transformations (SAIL 15:i[2003] 1621) on recent Anglo-US warmongering and its implications; and a short interview given to Janet M. McAdams mainly on form and measure in poetry. Critical accounts of his writing include Ellen Arnold on the operative seams of image in Revard's verse (SAIL 15:i[2003] 329); Lauren Stuart Mullen on his use of song allusion throughout the poetry (SAIL 15:i[2003] 539); Suzanne Evertsen Lundquist on Osage and related other Oklahoma ethnography as it enters Revard's different texts (SAIL 15:i[2003] 6773); a number of online exchanges as to Revard's general standing and achievement (SAIL 15:i[2003] 10941); and a selective but greatly helpful Revard bibliography (SAIL 15:i[2003] 1429). In Louise Erdrich's Lulu Nanapush: A Modern-Day Wife of Bath? (SAIL 15:i[2003] 92 103) Peter Beidler engages in a lively speculation as to the ChaucerErdrich connection. On offer is a shrewdly turned source-analysis, the overlapping similarities which give grounds for aligning Lulu Nanapush Morrissey Lamartine of Erdrich's Tales of Burning Love and her other fiction with Chaucer's Alisoun, the Wife of Bath, whether in the form of their respective forms of sexual initiation or their shared gapped teeth. Beidler returns to Erdrich's imaginative world in "In the Old Language": A Glossary of Ojibwe Words, Phrases, and Sentences in Louise Erdrich's Novels (AICRJ27:iii[2003] 5370), a brief reprise of Erdrich's use of Ojibway terminology in her fiction. Typically he alights on usage such as daashkikaa (cracked apart) as a key locution in The Antelope Wife. A listing of relevant Ojibway language dictionaries is also given. For Julie Tharp in Windigo Ways: Eating and Excess in Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife (AICRJ27:iv[2003] 11731), the windigo, defined as a cannibalistic monster set loose by human greed, envy, and jealousy, serves as one of the determining metaphors at work in the novel. In a narrative which begins with a US cavalry attack on a sleeping Indian encampment and continues its timeline through to modern-day Minneapolis, food becomes the very trope of survival, a way of sustaining Ojibway dynasty in all its tribal and mixedblood turns against odds and time. As Tharp convincingly demonstrates, male and female cooks proliferate in the novel, with Erdrich's deployment of nutrition reference and imagery necessary shaping tropes in her overall story. Patrice Hollrah's "The men in the bar feared her": The Power of Ayah in Leslie Marmon Silko's "Lullaby" (SAIL15:ii[2003] 138) develops a careful and extensive reading of the story Lullaby that was first published as a separate entity and then incorporated into Storyteller [1981]. Ayah's internal soliloquy, it is suggested, opens from her personal situation into a more inclusive dispensation of Navaho gender relations, matrilineal power, the complexities of hozho or balance, alcoholism, the role of tribal ritual and healing, and spiderwoman as figured in Ayah herself. It makes for an informed, well-taken reading.

SAIL(15:iiiiv[2003]) offers a joint issue on Latino/a and Native literary intersections and hybridities not only of subject-matter but expressive form. The coverage does good duty in dealing with the comparative resort to myth within English, Spanish and Native-language texts, and different kinds of code-switching and humour. A key name which recurs as reference-point is that of the leading Chicana feminist Gloria Anzalda, especially in issues of mestizaje. For Molly McGlennen in Adjusting the Margins: Locating Identity in the Poetry of Diane Glancy (SAIL15:iiiiv[2003] 12846), Glancy's (to date) thirteen poetry collections act as an ongoing imaginative site of mixedblood experience and memory. Highlighting Glancy's Cherokee, GermanEnglish heritage and Arkansas backcountry roots, she builds an informative map of borderline legacy as it operates in the poetry, typically in compositions like Iron Woman and The Revenant. A helpfully comparative essay is Shawna Thorp's Re-asserting the World: The Convergence of Mythic and Modern Realities in Enactment Narratives (SAIL15:iiiiv[2003] 14767). She addresses the interaction of tribal-indigenous myths of the supernatural with modernity in Silko's Ceremony [1977] and Louis Owens's Nightland[1996] in a close, well-observed examination of culture-specific Pueblo and Cherokee literary forms as against some amorphous pan-Indian allusion in the two novels. Lee Schweninger's Claiming Europe: Native American Literary Responses to the Old World (AICRJ 27:ii[2003] 6176) offers a nice reversal of the usual European and Euro-American discovery accounts of Native America. Using Native authorship like Carter Revard's Report of the Nation: Claiming Europe [1983], Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus[1991], James Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk [2000], Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes [1999] and Louise Erdrich's The Master Butcher's Singing Club[2002], Schweniger emphasizes the reverse-Atlantic reference within Native writing. In showing how each text uses a compendium of European reference, history and myth, he suggests a timely redress: Native America's vision of Europe seen both as endemic to its own modern cultural identity and, as it were, geography the other way round. AIQ for 2003 is currently not available; it will be covered in next year's YWES. Patti Duncan's Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech can be said to take up where King-Kok Cheung's Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa [1993] left off. Using texts which span Maxine Hong Kingston to Meena Alexander, the issue, for Duncan, centres on the multiple meanings of silence, the different styles through which Asian American women's texts address the cultural and gender politics both of being silenced and the liberation of articulating, and so commandeering, that silence. To this end she offers strong, pertinent readings of the energies of counter-discourse in Mitsuye Yamada's Camp Notes [1976], Joy Kogawa's Obasan [1981], Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dicte [1982], Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman [1997] and Anchee Min's Red Azalea [1994]. This account is assiduously grounded in queer and feminist theory as it holds for liberative writing, the refusal, as Duncan construes it, of Asian women writers to allow themselves to be situated at the margin or to participate in their own erasure. The contribution of Winnifred Eaton Reeve, an author Chinese British by birth and US and Canadian Japanese by pseudonym, to Asian American writing has increasingly won recognition, not least in the implications of the persona she invented for herself as Onoto Watanna. Jean Lee Cole's The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity adds greatly to the ongoing process of reappraisal. This is an exploration of the masks, the voices, which operate inside Eaton's fiction, and which contributed greatly to her success as an American popular writer. Ethnicity, in more than an obvious sense of setting or character, actually plays little central role in her work; but in Cole's account, the sixteen or so novels inaugurated with Miss Num of Japan [1899] and the plethora of short stories and different Hollywood scenarios and film scripts, come at it more obliquely. The Asian and

other ethnic legacy which would seem to enter a novel like A Japanese Blossom[1906], or conversely seem wholly absent, as in her last novel, His Royal Nibs [1925], in fact gets displaced into a deliberate run of invented authorial personae. These, intriguingly, Cole enumerates (and explores) as Eaton the flighty girl-author, a member of the urbane New York literati, booster of Japan, scrappy Hollywood screenwriter and arbiter of Canadian culture. Foster, Stewart and Fenkl, eds. , Century of The Tiger: One Hundred Years of Korean Culture in America, 19032003, with texts and visual materials under the auspices of the Centennial Committee of Korean Immigration to the United States, offers a handsome anthology of writing and art forged in the historical wake of the SS Gaelic's landing in Honolulu with the first Korean immigrants in January 1903. The literary extracts include sequences from Younghill Kang's pioneer Korea-to-America autobiographical fictions The Grass Roof[1931] and East Goes West [1937], Kim Ronyoung's memory novel of Korean Los Angeles Clay Walls[1986], Richard Kim's intimate autobiography Lost Names [1988] and Mary Paik Lee's rare, affecting emigrant story Quiet Odyssey [1990], together with selective storytelling and poetry by Gary Pak, Don Lee, Sue Kwock Kim, Walter Lew and Chang-rae Lee. These, together with the volume's gloss paper, art work and calligraphy, are set out within an evolving chronological frame, five chapters spanning Korean history in brief through to an American history of New Arrivals, sojourners and settlers, and Koreans and Korean Americans. Century of The Tiger does timely good service as a compendium of word and visual image, its selections engaging both mind and eye. Kim and Kang, eds. , Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings, makes for an apt follow-up, forty or so names brought together as a live current of contemporary literary work. Born, for the most part, in the 1970s, the contributors confirm a post-immigrant Korean America whether taken up or not with its own cultural hybridity. The span runs from Stephanie Uys's poetry of the Asian female body (one country's | landscape shifting into another) to Dennis Kim's poetry of childbirth (the yellow pages | of your skin), the inclusions each situated under the editors six headings of arrival, return, dwelling, crossing, descent and flight. Strengths inevitably differ, but the well-titled Echoes Upon Echoes offers proof certain of the wide, ongoing flow by which Korean American word and imagining continues to find its measure. Less consequential is Dorothy M. Hong's primly titled Tales From a Korean Maiden in America, a slender folder of stories and journalism often in flawed English and not a little reflective of her own Korean-Christian shock at American moral licence. Judith Oster's Crossing Culture: Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American Literature has a worthy enough aim, the overlap of two prime ethnic American literary traditions to do with migration, identity, community, inter-language and bi-culturism. The chosen texts are mainly of an autobiographical kind, factual and fictive, and span Anzia Yezierska to Philip Roth, Amy Tan to Frank Chin. Under related thematic headings such as Mirrors and Mirroring, Language and Self, and Family, and Education, Oster manages a number of shrewd explicatory and comparative readings. If, at times, there is a touch of the classroom manner in her tendency to put configurations of theme ahead of individual imaginative fashioning of the texts, the span-like the approach of the book is generously conceived. Huang, ed. , Asian American Short Story Writers: An A-To-Z Guide, does more solid expository service, fifty or so entries ranging from the Filipino American novelist Peter Bacho to the Chinese American poet John Yau. An appropriate short primary and critical bibliography accompanies each entry. A number of studies tangential to Asian American writing, but not to a cultural studies perspective, have come to hand. Although Gregory B. Lee's Chinas Unlimited: Making the

Imaginaries of China and Chineseness mainly addresses the way China has been figured in the politics and popular culture of the UKradio, newspapers, comedy, Liverpool as diasporic immigrant cityit offers a number of enlightening comparisons with the USA. Kim, Machida and Mizota, eds. , Fresh Talk Daring Gazes: Conversations on American Art, offers a run of intriguing, original and handsomely illustrated annotations from paintings, installations, cartoon work, photography and line drawing by current artists of US Asian descent. In Lee and Wong, eds. , Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace, Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong bring together thirteen interdisciplinary essays dealing in how internet technology has both attracted, and in turn imaged, Asian America, whether Vietnam as the first televized war, Oriental Asian women and sexuality, Filipino Catholics and US Hindus, or the persisting stereotype of Asian Americans as cyber-nerds. For Kandice Chuh in Imagine Otherwise: On Asian American Critique the issue is Asian American studies as a field, a discipline. What paradigms, whether social, literary, legal, or cultural, best apply? Has not the field been too readily fashioned in the image of Euro-American studies? If there is not a collective Asian American discourse, how best to disinter the understanding of the one heritage-specific and interior cultural identity from another? For Chuh the corrective pathway lies in the study of comparative difference, from community history to individual forms of gender, from creative and authorial subjectivity to the larger expressive politics of transnationalism. AmasJ (29:i[2003]) assigns its whole issue to Vietnamese Americans: Diaspora and Dimensions. The span includes migrancy, employment, gender, the classroom syllabusits inclusions and omissions, health issues, and generational change. Section V, Finding Voice, offers a short but vivid anthology of literary work: Isabelle Thuy Pelaud's analysis of Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala: A Two Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam[1999] as the Vietnamese American story most read in North America; the visual artist Viet Le's poem I Sleep in Your Old Bed; the memoirs of a Vietnamese Pennsylvanian resident like Brandy Lin Worral and the Houston-based chaplain Phc Luu; and Michelle Janette's greatly useful overview and bibliography of Vietnamese American literature from 1963 to 1994. AmasJ(29:iii[2003]) in kind tackles Korean America: population studies, Korean settlement in China and Japan, the Korean War and the US, and an excavatory analysis by Seiwoong Oh (AmasJ 29.iii[2003] 4355) of Philip Jaisoln Haisu's novella James [1921] as the likely first Korean American literary text. Oh makes a convincing argument for associating Haisu with the founding literary figure and generation of Younghill Kang. Although it contains no especially literary considerations the issue offers a wide-ranging overview of Asian American studies as an emergent, and anything but uncontentious, academic discipline in which a number of well-known scholars (among them the Amerasia Journal's long-time editor Russell C. Leong, Glenn K. Omatsu, Arif Dirlik, Yen le Espiritu and David Palumbo-Liu) speak both to the present state of play and to prospective next stages. In taking its title from Toms Rivera's classic episode When We Arrive in his bilingual ...Y no se lo trag la tierra / And the Earth Did Not Devour Him [1971], Jos F. Aranda Jr.s When We Arrive: A New Literary History of Mexican America proposes a renarration of American literary history from the vantage point of Chicano/a studies. The results are lively to a fault: identity issues as dramatized in literature from Lucha Corpi's Eulogy for a Brown Angel[1992] to the polemical texts of Richard Rodriguez and Gloria Anzalda; the dialectic of US multicultural and Anglo literary canon; the historic legacy of writers and scholars such as the nineteenth-century Mara Amparo Ruiz de Burton and early twentieth-century Amrico Paredes; and a run of at first unlikely comparisons, such as the Puritan Michael Wigglesworth with Lorna Dee Cervantes as Chicana contemporary. Aranda's point, throughout, is well

targeted: has there not been a huge and all too readily unregarded overlap in issues of community, dream, persecution or migrancy between Anglo and Hispanic literary-cultural traditions? Why, under US literary auspices, name the one tradition a mainstream and the other a minority? If American literature is indeed to be thought coeval, and inextricably multicultural, then appropriate taxonomies need to come into the reckoning: Aranda's account takes a bold, genuinely engaging step in that direction. Maria Antnia Oliver-Rotger , a Catalan scholar, takes her working cue in Battlegrounds and Crossroads: Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas from Gloria Anzalda's much circulated notion of borderlands: US literary terrain as one, despite conventional categories, sin fronteras. This leads directly into a full, closely annotated account of the writings of Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, Cherri Moraga and Helena Viramontes, with an emphasis within their work on the treatment of gender and power relations and what Oliver-Rotger, a little abstractly, terms the multiplicity of communal struggles and predicaments. Each writer, on this reading, is to be credited with an adversary stance, their authorship engaged in the rite of passage against patriarchal order. The upshot, it has to be said, is procedural, a somewhat dogged feminist-ideological and would-be postcolonial set of readings of real and imaginary borderlands as, hardly a surprise, not necessarily fixed or stable. The footfalls of a doctoral thesis lie within hearing. The sixteen contributors to Dick, ed. , A Poet's Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets, bring to bear a formidable line of Latino/a literary achievement: Miguel Algarn, Martn Espada, Sandra Mara Esteves, Victor Hernndez Cruz, Carolina Hospital and Carlos Medina (a joint interview), Demetria Martnez, Pat Mora, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Ricardo PauLlosa, Gustavo Prez Firmat, Leroy Quintana, Aleida Rodriguez, Luis Rodriguez, Benjamin Alire Senz and Virgil Surez. The editor's questioning nicely responds to each poet's career (as against the one template for all) to invoke birth and upbringing, the role of Spanish alongside English, and the aims and effects of their respective bodies of poetry. The accompanying introduction, with its notation of the Chicano and the US Puerto Rican and Cuban literary spectrum, the photographs, and selective lists of publications, give an added particularity and cross-reference to a timely, and highly useful, volume. In his interview with Bruce Dick, Gustavo Prez Firmat speaks as a Cuban American author of life on the hyphen, a first-hand, lived US biculturism also reflected in his 1994 volume Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. It points directly to his new discursive work, again teasingly entitled, Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature. Firmat displays all his well-known agility as poet, novelist and critic in his ruminations on bilingualism, the difference between US English and Cuban Spanish literary traditions and, in a typical show of relish, the knots of language and sexuality. He brings an amply informed literary perspective to bear, from George Santayana to Richard Rodriguez, from Guillermo Cabrera Infante and the neglected Calvert Casey to the role of I Love Lucyin US Cuban cultural figurations. More personally he speaks of hearing Spanish as feminine, English as masculine; the challenging interplay of spoken and written idiom; and the use of English and Spanish as a nexus in his own poetry and fiction in the exploration of being Cuban in America. This is a wonderfully provocative foray into two American languages as cultural kin, and yet divided, and the cross-ply implications for a writer and critic born into, and happilyindeed, often exhilaratedlycalled to the making of literary texts from each. Aldama, ed. , Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works, does considerable service: the recovery, and compilation, of stories, poetry, lectures and reviews by the important Chicano author of The Rain God[1984] as a saga-novel of Tex-Mex dynasty and the matriarch Mama Chona. The creative work included reflects Islas's charged, mixed-fortune life, especially his early medical setbacks. The observations on Jos Antonio Villarreal, Oscar Zeta Acosta and

Rudolfo A. Anaya, as much as the creative work, retain their edge. As a Latino and gay author (he died of AIDS in 1991), Islas both offers a figure of contrast and comparison with John Rechy or Richard Rodriguez while, in his own literary right and for reasons this collection underscores, occupying a considerable status within the still larger spectrum of Chicano authorship and beyond. In The Politics of Blood: Miscegenation and Phobias of Contagion in Alejandro Morales's The Red Doll Plagues (Aztln28:i[2003] 3973), Miguel Lpez explores the tropes of blood, disease and mestizaje as ways of entering Morales 1992 novel. His assiduous reading yields good results: the novel's critique of how interracial blood relations and cultural hybridization have been shadowed in denigratory images of bodily infection. He emphasizes the differences of cultural perception in Morales portraits of Los Angeles and Mexico City, two major Latino cities for which mestizaje holds important, but revealingly contrasting, value. MELUS (28:ii[2003]) gives its whole issue to Haunted by History, multicultural writings in which memory, the past as its own ongoing imaginative present, has taken on new forms of literary and narrative imagining. In Representing History in Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife (MELUS28:ii[2003] 930), Bella Adams considers whether the sexual rape of Weili in the novel does, or does not, mirror the larger Japanese military rape of Nanking. Bryn Gribben, in The Mother That Won't Reflect Back: Situating Psychoanalysis in the Japanese Mother in No-No Boy (MELUS28:ii[2003] 3146), explores dislocation as shaping dynamic in John Okada's landmark novel, most centrally the impact of the breakdown and death of Mrs Yamada on her already greatly self-divided Nisei son Ichiro in his wartime protest at the internment of Japanese Americans. Erika T. Lin, in Mona on the Phone: The Performative Body and Racial Identity in Mona in the Promised Land (MELUS 28:ii[2003] 4757), gives lively exploration to the function of body imagery in Gish Jen's 1996 novel. Mona's own evolving body is seen as the interwoven site of cultural, religious and sexual signature. Brewster E. Fitz's Undermining Narrative Stereotypes in Simon Ortiz's "The Killing of a State Cop" (MELUS28:ii[2003] 10520) both compares Ortiz's story with its other incarnation in Leslie Marmon Silko's Tony's Story in Storyteller, and looks to how Ortiz circles his version in ambiguity to undermine any all too customary Indian Killer stereotype. Teresa Derrickson's "Cold/Hot, English/Spanish": The Puerto Rican Divide in Judith Ortiz Cofer's Silent Dancing (MELUS28:ii[2003] 12137) sets out, with considerable acuity, the bicultural perspective of Ortiz's autobiography. She explores each of several kinds of border in play, the two languages, the motherdaughter relationship, and the islandmainland dialectic as contained within the text's single yet always elusively plural narrative self. To good effect she quotes Cofer's own pronouncement: There is not just one reality to being a Puerto Rican writer. Interviews with the Chicana poet Pat Mora (MELUS28:ii[2003] 139 50), the Cuban American writer Beatriz Rivera (MELUS28:ii[2003] 15162), and the essayist Richard Rodriguez as public intellectual (MELUS 28:ii[2003] 16577), who observes that my sexual coming out was parallel to my writing career, add human weight and interest to this MELUS issue. Multicultural critique can look to a number of new publications. Fludernik, ed. , Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments, operates across a broad front: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the USA. Inclusions look to British and American Jewish diaspora writing (Ursula Zeller, Bryan Cheyette and Beate Neumeier), Feroza Jussawalla in a lively piece on cultural rights and the USMexican border, Vera Alexander on M.G. Vassanji's No New Land [1991] as a novel of Afro-Indian passage from Kenya to Canada; Ulfied Reichardt on the role and visibility of diaspora memory in the poetry of Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite and Linton Kwesi Johnson; and, of great

relevance to a Europe obliged to understand its own cultural postcoloniality, Sandra Hesterman on German-Turkish diaspora in the writings of Zafer enocak and Feridun Zaimo lu. Blank, ed. , Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America, 19002000, seeks to make up for the usual omissions, the oversights or deliberate exclusions, in any number of US cultural histories. In an inspired series of entrieswriting to photography, politics to science, film to dance, and with a due emphasis on the contributions to the American national narrative of women, migrants, dissidents and artists of every stripeit supplies a necessary reference volume. Appropriate recognition is given to each and all of the voices that make up the US's multicultural tradition, whether white-ethnic, African American, Native, Asian American or Latino/a, which are set within an informative and unfolding timeline of both US and world events. The entries, drawn from recognized expertise, come over succinctly and to the point, helped not a little by the user-friendly overall layout. A. Robert Lee's Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions, an American Book Award Winner from the Before Columbus Foundation, offers a species of compte rendu of US multicultural fiction. Using fiction in the inclusive sense of Jorge Luis Borges's ficciones, and from an opening prospectus of America and the Multicultural Word: Legacies, Maps, Vistas, Theory, its ten chapters situate authorship and texts within a context of US history, politics, popular culture, visual and media activity, and, of necessity, the debates about pluralism in ethnicity, region, gender and language. The book opens with a re-estimation of Ralph Ellison, Scott Momaday, Rudolfo Anaya and Maxine Hong Kingston as landmark names, explores a broad swath of multicultural autobiography as its own kind of fiction, and analyses and contextualizes each of the four relevant traditions (African American, Native, Latino/a and Asian American). The ensuing coverage takes close bearings on the imagining of comparative sites (Indian Country, Black City, Borderland and the like); on literary fictions which explore island America as both literal and figural geography from Hawaii to Cuba; on the postmodern turn in multicultural fiction in Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor, Ana Castillo, Maxine Hong Kingston and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; and on the construction and ideological and literary implications of American fictions of whiteness. Naturally enough the fond author, the present reviewer, hopes it will become a standard critique.

Books Reviewed
Top 1. Poetry 2. Fiction 1900-1945 3. Fiction since 1945 4. Drama 5. Native, Asian American,... Books Reviewed

Ahearn, Barry, ed. The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky. WesleyanUP. [2003] pp. xxiv +576. 44.50 ($65), ISBN 0 8195 6490 7.

Aldama, Frederick Luis, ed. Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works. Arte Pblico. [2003] pp. xli +246. $16.95, ISBN 1 5588 5368 5. Andreach, Robert J. Drawing Upon the Past: Classical Theatre in the Contemporary American Theatre. Lang. [2003] pp. 236. $64.95, ISBN 0 8204 6356 6.

Aranda Jr., Jos F. When We Arrive: A New Literary History of Mexican America. UArizP. [2003] pp. xxvii +256. $40, ISBN 0 8165 2141 7. Anthony., Arthur. Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrelsfrom Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe. ? [] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Bauer, Mark. This Composite Voice: The Role of W.B. Yeats in James Merrill's Poetry. Routledge. [2003] pp. xviii +272. 60, ISBN 0 4159 6637 X. edvol5The Cambridge History of American Literature Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. Poetry and Criticism, 19001950. CUP. [2003] pp. viii +624. 75 ($130), ISBN 0 5213 0109 2. Bidart, Frank and Gewanter, , eds. Robert Lowell: Collected Poems. FS&G. [2003] pp. xviii +1,186. $45, ISBN 0 3741 2617 8. Black, Cheryl. The Women of Provincetown, 19151922. UAlaP. [2003] pp. 245. $29.95, ISBN 0 8173 1112 2. Blank, Carla, ed. Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America, 19002000. Three Rivers Press. [2003] pp. xiv +479. $18, ISBN 0 6098 0784 6. Blatanis, Konstantinos. Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama. AUP. [2003] pp. 195. $39.50, ISBN 0 8386 4008 7. Breinig, Helmbrecht, ed. Imaginary (Re-)Locations: Tradition, Modernity, and the Market in Contemporary Native American Literature and Culture. Stauffenburg. [2003] pp. 297. 39, ISBN 3 8605 7747 6. Bruccoli, Matthew J. and Baughman, Judith S., eds. Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald. UMP. [2003] pp. 133. pb $18, ISBN 1 5780 6605 0. Chuh, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique. DukeUP. [2003] pp. xii +215. $19.95, ISBN 0 8223 3140 3. Cole, Jean Lee. The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity. RutgersUP. [2003] pp. xiii +224. $24, ISBN 0 8135 3087 3. Cole, Merrill. The Other Orpheus: A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality. Routledge. [2003] pp. xii +186. 50, ISBN 0 4159 6705 8. Cook, Barbara J., ed. From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan. UPColorado. [2003] pp. x+198. pb 13.99 ($19.95), ISBN 0 8708 1738 8. Ian D., Copestake, ed. American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. ? [2003] pp. pp.?. ?, ISBN?. David, Cowart. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. ? [2002] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Crespy, David A. Off-Off Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theater. Back Stage. [2003] pp. 192. pb $19.95, ISBN 0 8230 8832 4.

Delville, Michel and Pagnoulle, Christine, eds. Sound As Sense: Contemporary US Poetry &/In Music. Lang. [2003] pp. 196. pb 16, ISBN 0 8204 6610 7. Dick, Bruce Allen, ed. A Poet's Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets. UArizP. [2003] pp. 230. $17.95, ISBN 0 8165 2276 6. Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy. LAm. [2003] pp. 972. $40, ISBN 1 9310 8231 6. Duncan, Patti. Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech. UIowaP. [2003] pp. xvi +274. $34.95, ISBN 0 8774 5856 1. Dussere, Erik. Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morrison and the Economics of Slavery. Routledge. [2003] pp. 161. $69.95, ISBN 0 4159 4298 5. Falck, Colin. American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century: The Poetry that Matters. Ashgate. [2003] pp. xiv +254. 47.50 ($79.95), ISBN 0 7546 3424 8. bFrez Kuri, Jos, ed. Brion Gysin: Tuning In To the Multimedia Age. T&H/Edmonton Art Gallery. [2003] pp. 240. 29.95 ($44.95), ISBN 0 5002 8438 5. Ferguson, Suzanne, ed. Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co. UTennP. [2003] pp. xxxii +336. $38, ISBN 1 5723 3229 8. Fesmire, Julia A., ed. Beth Henley: A Casebook. Routledge. [2002] pp. 173. $95.95, ISBN 0 8153 3878 3. Firmat, Gustavo Prez. Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature. Palgrave. [2003] pp. 195. $26.95, ISBN 1 4039 6288 X. Fludernik, Monika, ed. Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments. Rodopi. [2003] pp. xxxviii +391. $65 ( 50), ISBN 9 0420 0906 3. Fortuny, Kim. Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel. UPColorado. [2003] pp. xiv +122. $45, ISBN 0 8708 1741 8. Foster, Jenny Ryun, Stewart, Frank, Fenkl, Heinz Insu, eds. Century of the Tiger: One Hundred Years of Korean Culture in America, 19032003. UHawaiiP. [2003] pp. 256. $24.95, ISBN 0 8248 2644 2. Kimberly A., Freeman. Love, American Style: Divorce and the American Novel, 18811976. [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Gayles, Gloria Wade, ed. Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks. UPMissip. [2003] pp. xx +168. hb $46, ISBN 1 5780 6574 7, pb $18 ISBN 1 5780 6575 5. Nancy, Gerber. Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction. ? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Gewirtz, Arthur and Kolb, James J., eds. Experimenters, Rebels, and Disparate Voices: The Theatre of the 1920s Celebrates American Diversity. Praeger. [2003] pp. xvii +196. $59.85, ISBN 0 3133 2466 2.

Michael T., Gilmore. Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture. ? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Goodman, Susan. Civil Wars: American Novelists and Manners 18801940. JHUP. [2003] pp. xvii +198. 28.50, ISBN 0 8018 6824 6. bGraulich, Melody and Tatum, Stephen, eds. Reading The Virginian in the New West. UNebP. [2003] pp. 300. $39.95, ISBN 0 8032 7104 2. Hamblin, Robert W. and Abadie, Ann J., eds. Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century. UMP. [2003] pp. 177. $45, ISBN 1 5780 6513 5. Sean, Hemingway, ed. Hemingway on Hunting. Scribner. [2003] pp. 344. (hb) 296 (pb). hb $27.50 , ISBN 0 7432 4326 9, pb $14 ISBN 0 7432 2529 5. Sean, Hemingway, ed. Hemingway on War. Scribner. [2003] pp. 344. $27.50, ISBN 0 7432 4326 9.. Henderson, Christine Dunn, ed. Seers and Judges: American Literature as Political Philosophy. Lexington. [2002] pp. xvi +170. 50, ISBN 0 7391 0319 9. Herr, Christopher J. Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre. Praeger. [2003] pp. 177. $49.95, ISBN 0 3133 1594 9. Hill, Errol G. and Hatch, James V. A History of African American Theatre. CUP. [2003] pp. 608. $130, ISBN 0 5216 2443 6. Hoeveler, Diane Long and Heller, Tamar, eds. Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions. MLA. [2003] pp. xiv +310. pb 18.50, ISBN 0 8735 2907 3. Holloway, Brian. Interpreting The Legacy: John Neilhardt and Black Elk Speaks. UPColorado. [2003] pp. 220. $27.95, ISBN 0 8708 1679 9. Dorothy M., Hong. Tales From a Korean Maiden in America. iUniverse. [2003] pp. viii +55.. $8.99, ISBN 0 5952 8390 X. Houchin, John H. Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century. CUP. [2003] pp. 332. $75, ISBN 0 5218 1819 2. Guiyou, Huang,, ed. Asian American Short Story Writers: An A-to-Z Guide. Greenwood. [2003] pp. xxxii +358. $61.50, ISBN 0 3132 29 5. Huk, Romana. Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. WesleyanUP. [2003] pp. xii +412. hb $70, ISBN 0 8195 6539 3, pb $24.95 ISBN 0 8195 6540 7. Jeffs, William Patrick. Feminism, Manhood, and Homosexuality: Intersections in Psychoanalysis and American Poetry. Lang. [2003] pp. 172. 38 ($57.95), ISBN 0 8204 1999 0.

286Jenckes, Norma, ed. New Readings in American Drama: Something's Happening Here. Lang. [2002] pb $29.95, ISBN 0 8204 5589 X. Jerz, Dennis G. Technology in American Drama, 19201950: Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine. Greenwood. [2003] pp. 167. $61.95, ISBN 0 3133 2172 8. Kara, Keeling, MacCabe, Colin, West, Cornel, eds. Racist Traces and Other Writings: European Pedigrees/African Contagions by James A. Snead. . Palgrave. [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Kim, Elaine H. and Laura Hyun, Yi Kang, eds. Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings. Asian American Writers's Workshop/TempleUP. [2003] pp. 296. $19.95, ISBN 1 8898 7613 5. Kim, Elaine H., Margo, Machida, Sharon, Mizota, eds. Fresh Talk Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art. UCalP. [2003] pp. xxiii +210. 26.95, ISBN 0 5202 3535 5. Kim, Joon-Wan. Out of the Western Box: Towards a Multicultural Poetics in the Poetry of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson. Lang. [2003] pp. xvi +264. 46, ISBN 0 8204 3768 9. Knight, Denise D. and Davis, Cynthia J., eds. Approaches to Teaching Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper and Herland. MLA. [2003] pp. xvii +198. pb 18.50, ISBN 0 8735 2901 4. Lee, A. Robert. Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a Asian American Fictions. EdinUP. [2003] pp. x+307. 19.95, ISBN 0 7486 1227 0. Also UMP: hb $50 ISBN 1 5780 6644 1, pb $20 ISBN 1 5780 6645 X. Lee, Gregory B. Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness. Routledge/UHawaiiP. [2003] pp. xi +121. 61, ISBN 0 8248 2680 9. Lee, Rachel C. and Sau-ling Cynthia, Wong, eds. Asian America. Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace. Routledge. [2003] pp. xxxv +316. 16.99, ISBN 0 4159 6560 8. Lewis, Nathaniel. Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship. ? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Lyons, Greg, ed. Literature of the American West: A Cultural Approach. ? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Madsen, Deborah L., ed. Beyond the Borders: American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory. ? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Mann, Bruce J., ed. Edward Albee: A Casebook. Routledge. [2003] pp. xiii +150. $114.95, ISBN 0 8153 3165 7. Manzanas, Ana Mara and Benito, Jess, eds. Intercultural Mediations: Hybridity and Mimesis in American Literatures. LitVerlag. [2003] pp. 224. 29.50, ISBN 3 8258 6738 2.

McConachie, Bruce. American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 19471962. UIowaP. [2003] pp. xiv +347. $49.95, ISBN 0 8774 5862 6. Nayar, Rana. Edward Albee: Towards a Typology of Relationships. Prestige. [2003] pp. 256. $33.30, ISBN 8 1755 1140 0. Newlin, Keith, ed. A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia. Greenwood. [2003] pp. 431. $99.95, ISBN 0 3133 1680 5. Oakley, Helen. The Recontextualisation of William Faulkner in Latin American Fiction and Cultur. Mellen. [2003] pp. 223. $109.95, ISBN 0 7734 7013 1. Olivier-Rotger, Maria Antnia. Battlegrounds and Crossroads: Social and Imaginary Space in Writing by Chicanas. Rodopi. [2003] pp. 408. $104. 80, ISBN 9 0201 196 3. Olster, Stacey. The Trash Phenomenon: Contemporary Literature, Popular Culture and the Making of the American Century. .? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Oster, Judith. Crossing Cultures: Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American Literature. UMissP. [2003] pp. xi +283. $47.50, ISBN 0 8262 1486 X. Palmer, Christopher. Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern. .? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Papke, Mary E., ed. Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism. UTennP. [2003] pp. xiv +416. $42, ISBN 1 5723 3223 9. Parker, Robert Dale. The Invention of Native American Literature. CornUP. [2003] pp. xi +244. $19.95, ISBN 0 8014 4067 X. Pennell, Melissa McFarland. Student Companion to Edith Wharton. Greenwood. [2003] pp. xiii +186. 22.99, ISBN 0 3133 1715 1. Perry, Carolyn and Mary Louise, Weaks. The History of Southern Women's Literature. LSUP. [2002] pp. xvii +689. 37.50, ISBN 0 8071 2753 1. Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture and Literature in America. ? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Porter, Laurin. Orphans Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote. LSUP. [2003] pp. 233. hb 38.50, ISBN 0 8071 2845 7, pb 17.50 ISBN 0 8071 2879 1. Pulitano, Elvira. Towards A Native American Critical Theory. UNebP. [2003] pp. xii +233. $50, ISBN 0 8032 3737 5. Rader, Dean and Janice, Gould, eds. Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. UArizP. [2003] pp. x+295. $24.95, ISBN 0 8165 2349 5. Reynolds, Guy, ed. Willa Cather: Critical Assessments. Helm. [2003] pp. xix +2,039. 375, ISBN 1 8734 0338 0.

Sauer, David K. and Janice A., Sauer. David Mamet: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Praeger. [2003] pp. 382. $75, ISBN 0 3133 1836 0. Savran, David. A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater. UMichP. [2003] pp. xii +234. hb $55, ISBN 0 4720 9836 5, pb $22.95 ISBN 0 4720 6836 9. Schulman, Grace, ed. The Poems of Marianne Moore. Viking. [2003] pp. xxx +450. $40, ISBN 0 6700 3198 4. Sieburth, Richard, ed. The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound. ND. [2003] pp. xliv +162. pb $13.95, ISBN 0 8112 1558 X. Sieburth, Richard, ed. Poems and Translations by Ezra Pound. LAm. [2003] pp. xxiv +1370. $45, ISBN 1 9310 8241 3. Singley, Carol, J., ed. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth: A Casebook. OUP. [2003] pp. viii +337. 37.99, ISBN 0 1951 5602 1. Singley, Carol J., ed. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. OUP. [2003] pp. x+302. pb 12.99, ISBN 0 1951 3591 1. Smith, Evans Lansing. The Myth of the Descent to the Underworld in Postmodern Literature. ? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. ?Strehle, Susan and Mary Paniccia, Carden, eds. Doubled Plots: Romance and History. ? [2003] ?, ISBN?. Sultanik, Aaron. Inventing Orders: An Essay and Critique on 20th Century American Literature (19502000). .? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Taylor, Clare L. Women, Writing, and Fetishism 18901950: Female Cross-Gendering. .? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Thompson, Graham. Male Sexuality Under Surveillance: The Office in American Literature. ? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Wadden, Paul. The Rhetoric of Self in Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich: Doubling and the Holotropic Urge. Lang. [2003] pp. x+162. 38, ISBN 0 8204 6241 1. Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: A Casebook. OUP. [2002] pp. 189. $59.24, ISBN 0 1951 4573 9. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: A Reference Guide. Greenwood. [2003] pp. 172. $55, ISBN 0 3133 1702 X. Waid, Candace, ed. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. NCE. Norton. [2003] pp. xx +523. pb 8.99, ISBN 0 3939 6794 8. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ed. The Pedagogical Wallpaper: Teaching Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-paper. Lang. [2003] pp. viii +162. 18, ISBN 0 8204 6305 1. Welty, Eudora. On William Faulkner. UMP. [2003] pp. 96. $25, ISBN 1 5780 6570 4.

Wesley, Marilyn C. Violent Adventure: Contemporary Fiction by American Men. ? [2003] pp. ?. ?, ISBN?. Wetmore Jr., Kevin J. Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre. McFarland. [2003] pp. 262. pb $35, ISBN 0 7864 1545 2. Witham, Barry B. The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study. CUP. [2003] pp. 190. $70, ISBN 0 5318 2259 9. Woolland, Brian, ed. Jonsonians: Living Traditions. Ashgate. [2003] pp. 246. 47.50, ISBN 0 7546 0610 4.