Conclusion: Don DeLillo’s Literary Legacy

Hemiplegic migraine and stroke in Mary Shelley

Reviewed by: Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition, and: Literary Legacies, Folklore Foundations: Selfhood and Cultural Tradition in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature Kathy M'Closkey (bio) Simon J. Bronner . Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2002. 283 pp. Karen E. Beardslee . Literary Legacies, Folklore Foundations: Selfhood and Cultural Tradition in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. 202 pp. Simon Bronner's Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of an American Tradition incorporates seventeen essays that span over a century—from the Gilded Age to the present—by authors whose works engendered key debates on the role of the folk in creating nation-hood. The book begins with a lengthy introduction titled "In Search of the American Tradition," that provides crucial context to situate the articles he has chosen to illustrate or contest the dominant theme. Bronner's exceptional introduction comprises twenty-five per cent of the book and provides an appropriate framework that positions folklore studies and debates within a historical context and surveys the treatment of the subject by folk-and American-studies scholars. His essay is followed by a very useful section suggesting further reading on the role of folklore in the creation of an American tradition. This short chapter is divided into several categories that include a list of major American journals that feature the intellectual history of American folklore studies, pertinent encyclopaedias and dictionaries, sources that provide a general introduction to the subject, and intellectual and cultural histories of the topic. Bronner juxtaposes pairs of essays from the same period that reflect differing perspectives on how "folklore" should be defined, studied, and interpreted in explicating the formation of an American tradition. Each essay opens with his commentary situating the author's work within a broader context. Far from [End Page 135] reflecting a benign traditional past shared by rural communities, folklore—its concepts and purpose—has engendered heated discussion. The essays chosen by Bronner engage in debates on a number of issues, including the query: does America have any ballads (Lomax 1915)? In light of definitions drawn from English and Scottish contexts, the answer is "no." Yet, by describing the "authors" and locales of folksongs, the book expands the formal definitions drawn from European contexts to include songs sung by miners, lumberjacks, sailors and soldiers, field hands, cowboys, and factory workers that illustrate the rich diversity of American lore. Much of the research on folklore during the Gilded Age was a form of salvage ethnology. William Wells Newell (1889) organized the American Folklore Society in 1888 for the purpose of gathering the "fast-vanishing remains of folk-lore in America." The organization sponsored local chapters in ten American cities and in Montre´al, Quebec. Not surprisingly, one of the first groups to garner attention was made up of "American Negroes." Alice Mabel Bacon (1893–4), daughter of a white abolitionist, spearheaded the campaign at Hampton Institute to organize folklore study groups. She edited Southern Workman and encouraged African Americans to interpret their own past and future. However, Bacon perceived the collection of their lore as a means to measure their advancement from an undeveloped to a civilized state. Thus Bacon's essay and several others reveal contemporary attitudes, especially in relation to Natives and African Americans as living primitives reflecting lower stages of humanity long surpassed by European Americans. Two essays focus on women and folklore. Fanny Bergen, in an essay on quilts as "emblems of women's tradition"(1894), suggests that uniquely American quilts are equivalent to European tapestries. Like her contemporaries, who were apologists for the comparative recentness of American works, Bergen repositioned quilts within an art historical framework that typically expunged the local context of creation. During the Renaissance, tapestries were the only textiles that were referred to as "art" because they were designed by artists. All other textiles were perceived as "crafts." [End Page 136] Bergen was trying to elevate the status of quilts. However, in so doing she ignored important differences from tapestries. Quilts are far more intimate expressive forms because they link makers and their families to their local environments and histories...

This study delivers a comparative theoretical study between the Arabic Abbasid classic poet A-Waleed Al-Bohtory and the English poet William Wordsworth. This study relies on analytical and descriptive methods that focus on analyzing the theoretical concepts and studying them based on these two poets’ literary legacy. The significance of this study is to provide a comparative investigation between these Western and Eastern poets to find some mutual similarities and theoretical background of both, to help the researchers of the discipline in the future. Al-Bohtory and Wordsworth present imaginative, descriptive, analytical, rustic and simple poetic stanzas to simulate and enjoy their surrounding objects, for instance Nature. They depict nature as a place of tranquility, peace, and happiness at the end. They portray similar imaginative and descriptive images of Spring, pools, birds, animals, and forests. These two poets were influenced by other contemporary poets at their time as Coleridge and Abu-Tammam. These contemporary poets for Wordsworth and Al-Bohtory are like their poetic spark and inspiration.

Research Article| January 01 2003 Literary Legacies and Critical Transformations: Teaching Creative Writing in the Public Urban University Nicole Cooley Nicole Cooley Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (1): 99–103. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-1-99 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nicole Cooley; Literary Legacies and Critical Transformations: Teaching Creative Writing in the Public Urban University. Pedagogy 1 January 2003; 3 (1): 99–103. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-1-99 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2003 Duke University Press2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The article analyzes the reception of A. I. Solzhenitsyn in Chinese translations and literary studies. The history of Solzhenitsyn’s texts and research on the Russian writer in the Chinese socio-political and cultural context is studied. It is noted that the perception of Solzhenitsyn in China was not exclusively a literary event, but was closely linked to the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s. It is established that the translation and study of Solzhenitsyn’s work in China was asynchronous: translations began in the 1960s, while research started in the mid-1980s. An analysis of the political-cultural background and ideological atmosphere during the translation and study of Solzhenitsyn’s work by Chinese scholars is conducted. The evolution of the perception of the writer’s personality and work is shown to have shifted from negative to positive, which is attributed to a change in literary criticism approach from vulgar sociological critique to artistic text critique. It is revealed that with the disappearance of ideological pressure, Chinese academic circles began to differentiate between Solzhenitsyn as a writer and Solzhenitsyn as a political figure. This division has contributed to a more adequate understanding of Solzhenitsyn and his literary legacy. Currently, Chinese scholars highly value Solzhenitsyn’s literary legacy and objectively and rationally relate to his political position and statements.

The paper reviews the monograph by L. Kulakevych, states the relevance of studies in the field of Ukrainian adventure literature of the first third of the 20th century. The review emphasizes that the monograph is devoted to a virtually unknown but powerful layer of Ukrainian adventure literature of the first third of the twentieth century. Some of the works studied in the monograph are only mentioned in the general reviews of the writers’ literary legacies while the other works remained unknown for the literary critics for almost a century. For instance, such works as «Opovidannia pro Sofochku y Dzhyma» (The Story of Sofochka and Jim) by D. Buzko, «Zaradynei» («For Her Sake») by I. Dniprovskyi, «Vurkahan» («Criminal») by Y. Miakota, «Viter z hir» («Wind from the Mountains») by S. Skliarenko, and «KniazBartsila» (Prince Bartsila) by O. Slisarenko. The importance of the monograph lies in the study of the works against the background of global cultural processes. The first section «The Nature of Genre in Adventure Literature: The Theoretical Aspect» pays special attention to the introduction of the contemporary Ukrainian literary processes into the global trends. In particular, it highlights the increased interest in adventure works, which, according to the literary critics of different countries, remained unnoticed due to colonial and gender discourses, demonstrating, to put it mildly, the «unattractive» side of European cultural expansion. This section also contains a detailed analysis of the existing definitions of «adventure» literature, the author of the monograph works on the disambiguation of the terms concerning «adventure» and providesmore clear and precise definitions. In the second chapter, L. Kulakevych analyzes the novels which, according to her, are the examples of the new genres in Ukrainian literature: frontier, western / eastern, robinsonade, roxolania. In the third section, the author studies the texts-representatives of the printed series, travelogue, and action genres. While analyzing the texts, L. Kulakevich points out the artistic components that serve as markers to attribute the texts to a certain genre. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the innovative quest of Ukrainian writers of the 20-30s of the 20th century, in particular, the development of the new genres in Ukrainian adventure discourse – noir novel, horror, detective, spy narrative, novel-quest. While substantiating the affiliation of the work to a particular genre, the researcher uses the theses of modern foreign experts in the field of literature and cinema to support her ideas. In the fifth chapter, L. Kulakevich investigates the texts, whichcontributedto the Ukrainian fiction with the new genres of chrono-travel, thriller, and alternative history. It is evident, that in the research of L. Kulakevych the Ukrainian adventure literature of the first third of the 20th century appears as an extraordinary and multidimensional phenomenon that synthesized the achievements of world culture and innovations of Ukrainian writers. In general, the monograph is highly praised for up to date factual basis, original approach to the analysis of literary works, and informative presentation.

The theme of a woman's right to self-fulfillment was the literary legacy that Stuart Phelps left at her death to her eight-year-old daughter who was later to be known by her mother's name. Both mother and daughter were popular authors of nineteenth-century New England, but the narrow and ambivalent feminism suggested in the works of the mother (1815-1852) was embraced and eventually enhanced in selected works by the daughter (1844-1911). One of the clear marks of the daughter's broader feminism is her unqualified belief in right to achievement and fulfillment. In their attention to needs and rights the Phelpses were reacting against the feudal view of women' typical of their community, Andover, Massachusetts.1 Both were daughters of faculty members of the Andover Theological Seminary which had been founded in 1808 to preserve the Calvinist orthodoxy of a patriarchal Congregational clergy.2 Both attended Abbot Academy, itself founded to train future wives of Andover graduates to be apt critics of their husbands' sermons. Instead, as authors, both Phelpses became critics of the lives of New England ministers' wives and daughters.3 Although their lives overlapped for only eight years, the mother's life and work was to become material for the daughter's novels, novels more insistently expansive and critical of women's sphere than were her mother's. Of her mother's influence the daughter observed in her 1896 autobiography, eight years of age a child cannot be expected to know her mother intimately, and is hard for me always to distinguish between the effect produced upon me by her literary success as I have since understood it, and [the effect] left by her own truly extraordinary personality upon the annals of the nursery (Chapters, p. 11). The mother seemed to the daughter a being of power and importance in the (Chapters, p. 14), and with such an example it was as natural for her daughter to write as to breathe (Chapters, p. 12). The first identifiable publication of the mother was in 1851, the last occurred posthumously in 1853.4 At best, then, her public career lasted three years. Unlike her daughter, she concealed her identity behind the pseudonym H. Trusta, an anagram of Stuart. In 1891 the younger Phelps wrote of her mother: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was well past thirty before either the home or the world found out that she was destined to be anything other than the homekeeper, but genius was in her, and would out.... A wife, a mother, a housekeeper, a hostess, in delicate health, on an academic salary, undertakes a deadly load when she starts upon a literary career. She lifted to her frail shoulders, and she fell beneath it.,5 In fact the mother had suffered intermittent illness from the age of sixteen when she completed formal schooling. Her daughter attributed this onset of illness at the end of schooling to the resulting cessation of stimulation, a view similar to the present

Mashkhur-Zhusup Kopeev, a prominent Kazakh scholar, poet, and ethnographer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, made significant contributions to the development of Kazakh national consciousness through his literary works. This study examines the features of national consciousness in Kopeev's poetry, highlighting his role as an innovator of the Kazakh literary genre and his introduction of new ideas. The research emphasizes the importance of considering the socio-historical factors of the epoch reflected in Kopeev's lyrics and understanding the peculiarities of everyday life,culture, traditions, and national perception of the ethnos in conjunction with the poet's creative reincarnation. The stylistic originality, ideological and artistic features, and philosophical, moral, and aesthetic aspects of Kopeev's poetry are explored, along with the origins and traces of Kazakh folklore and Zhyrau poetry's influence on his work. Kopeev's handwritten legacy, including genealogies, epics, zhyrau, dastans, and historical songs, is valuable for its historical authenticity and genealogical style. His works reflect a deep understanding of justice, freedom, and faith, addressing the social realities of his time and the impact of Russian colonial influence on Kazakh life and culture. Kopeev's literary legacy encompasses a wide range of topics, including national spirit, heroism, identity, and the pursuit of independence, which continue to resonate with modern Kazakh youth. This study aims to fill the knowledge gap by examining the relationship between Kopeev's poetry and Kazakh national consciousness, providing a comprehensive understanding of his literary legacy's impact on Kazakh identity.

Beardslee, Karen E. 2001. Literary Legacies, Folklore Foundations: Selfhood and Cultural Tradition in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. $27.00 hc. xxiv + 202 pp. Cartwright, Keith. 2002. Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. $36.00 hc. 270 pp. Karen E. Beardslee's Literary Legacies, Folklore Foundations: Selfhood and Cultural Tradition in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature and Keith Cartwright's Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales offer provocative research and insight into the cultural influences that have shaped the literature of the United States of America. In their respective volumes, Beardslee and Cartwright examine the roles folk art and vernacular narrative [End Page 203] strategy play in various literary texts, Beardslee showing the ways that folk practices such as quilting and storytelling shape fictional works from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, Cartwright discussing the creolized nature of the United States and the extent to which African culture, speech, and narrative inundate its literature. These books both offer information and insight that will likely prove foundational in future examinations of the rich and variegated cultural bedrock of writing in the United States. In this, her first book, Beardslee blends scholarly and pedagogical concerns as she presents an innovative approach to thinking about and teaching literature, that of exploring the ways folk culture connects texts to other texts and to students' lives. Her argument is that people achieve self-awareness and self-consolidation by means of connecting with a folk community. This thesis results from her own past difficulties with selfhood when various pressures caused her to lose her sense of rootedness and selfhood, which she regained by reconnecting with her father's storytelling, a folk practice that restored her identity and grounded her professionally and personally. Beardslee cites "search for self" as a universal problem and identifies it as an important connecting point for college students trying to find themselves in their new surroundings and budding adulthood. Beardslee therefore approaches her teaching of literature by stressing "search for self" as a way for students to understand the relation between literature and their lives. Observing that students often cannot relate to older texts, Beardslee shows how this theme appears and functions in both old and new works and thereby forms a constant in literature that students can understand and see as relevant to their own experiences. And so, in her book Beardslee pairs nineteenth-century with twentieth-century texts to show the common thread of folk culture and its ability to facilitate one's reconnection with self and the past. Beardslee allots one chapter for each of her pairings; though related by the book's overarching theme and by some intertextual connections, each chapter stands alone as an essay on their respective works. Her first chapter, "With This Needle . . . : Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing and Whitney Otto's How to Make an American Quilt," is by far the most developed, materially based, and provocative, and it introduces and argues her thesis capably: that the folk arts of spinning, needlework, and quilting enable women to find themselves. When the protagonist in Stowe's novel loses her lover and finds no solace in religion, she turns to the practice of spinning to regain happiness and self-fulfillment; the main character in Otto's novel learns of life, love, and marriage from the advice and patch-worked stories of a quilting community that she joins. The significantly shorter second chapter, "Everybody Loves a Good Story: Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman and David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident," successfully shows how rejection [End Page 204] of capitalistic and scientific methods of recording history in favor of the folk method of historization—story-telling—brings Uncle Julius, of Chesnutt's novel, the ability to draw his white landowners into his culture. It brings John, of Bradley's novel, into a full and positive understanding and acceptance of himself and...

This study presents a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Langston Hughes' poems "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Theme for English B" based on Fairclough's three models. The analysis examines how Hughes employs rhetorical strategies in his poems to convey his message and explore power dynamics and societal structures. In "Theme for English B," first-person narration and conversational tone, such as "I hear you," emphasize the speaker's individuality and shared humanity, challenging racial divisions. It explores American history and tradition by linking cultural identity to a shared legacy. "Theme for English B" offers a perspective on cultural identity by examining the conflicts between conformity and individuality. Both poems depict the societal ambiance of respective periods by exploring themes such as strife and the quest for recognition. The analysis of Hughes’ poetic language reveals the underlying power dynamics, ideologies, and social phenomena within the sociocultural context of the Harlem Renaissance. The study delves into how Hughes' use of imagery, repetition, and historical allusions articulates the complexities of cultural identity. Furthermore, it highlights the pivotal role of poetry in shaping dialogues on race, empowerment, and belonging. Ultimately, this research underscores Hughes' literary legacy, offering valuable insights into the enduring impact of his work on cultural identity and social justice.

Phong Nguyen’s The Adventures of Joe Harper revisits America in the Reconstruction era through the eponymous narrator-protagonist, who is a marginal character from Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. One of the most recent spin-offs of Huckleberry Finn, it is an interesting Asian American project to appropriate Twain’s American epic while refusing to be reduced to and defined by the author’s racial identity. Nguyen overlays the saga of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer with an Asian American presence and experiences but his investment in Asian American experiences is not only on account of his identity as Asian American but also by virtue of his inheritance of Twain’s literary legacy. The significance of Joe Harper is both in its association with Huckleberry Finn and in its inheritance and development of Twain’s literary legacy overall, including an interrogation of the Chinese question and the dismantling of Chinese stereotypes in American literature. Introducing a memorable Asian American character, Lee, and embedding his history in Twainesque postbellum America, Nguyen considers the theme of racialized mobility, Asian American similarity, and the desexualization of Asian masculinity. The characterizations of Joe and Lee are to be compared with Twain’s famous characters, and the larger context of American literature is also to be brought to bear on the consideration of Lee and Joe’s journey and their interracial homosocial bond. Joe Harper features interesting twists of Twain’s plots and characters, showing the ways in which Nguyen inherits and revises Twain’s original tale, by way of the contemporary American imagination.

In Gabriel Rossetti and Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence, John Holmes recently discussed shaping influence of The House of Life (1870, 1881) on a wide range of authors, Christina Rossetti and Rupert Brooke to scarcely known Theo Marzials, George Barlow, and Rosa Newmarch. Augusta Webster, to whose posthumously published sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1895) Holmes devotes a brief section, sticks out as neither a familiar face nor a complete stranger. (1) When Webster's oeuvre was rediscovered in 1990s, critical interest initially focused on controversial female speakers of her dramatic monologues (Portraits, 1870): an infanticidal mother in Medea in Athens, a genteel prostitute in A Castaway, a bewitching temptress in Circe. The thematically much more conventional Mother and Daughter, by contrast, has been slow to make its way into scholarly publications. Dorothy Mermin was probably first to note that it extends emotional range of sonnet sequence beyond its traditional amatory concerns. (2) Angela Leighton and Alison Chapman also addressed sequence briefly in their surveys of Victorian poetry, and Florence Boos discussed it in more detail in her contribution to a study of Rossettis' literary legacy. (3) Despite pioneering insights she offers into works of several virtually unstudied late nineteenth-century female sonnet writers, Boos persistently refers to Webster's sequence as Mother and Child, thus inadvertently betraying just how unfamiliar most critics still are with work. To figure Rossetti's influence on Webster, Holmes and Boos both adopt metaphor of literary kinship. Boos quite conspicuously presents Webster, Mathilde Blind, Amy Levy, Olive Custance, Rosa Newmarch, and Michael Field in title of her essay as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetic daughters. Holmes's discussion of late Victorian women poets follows a chapter devoted to the sons of Gabriel, suggesting that women he goes on to consider belong to female lineage of Rossetti's poetic offspring. The adoption of genealogical vocabulary seems most apposite in this context since, as Harold Bloom has pointed out, from sons of Homer to sons of Ben Jonson, poetic influence [has] been described as a filial relationship. (4) Yet, by taking Rossetti's literary parentage for granted, Boos and Holmes create major critical blind spots. While they meticulously scan Mother and Daughter for Rossettian approaches to life, and death, profusion of references to birth, childhood, and maternity in The House of Life, which, in case of Webster, constitutes such an obvious point of comparison, remains largely undisclosed. In addition, although figuring of literary influence in terms of son- or daughter-ship may accord with distinct predilection that Rossetti, like so many of his predecessors and colleagues, had for trope, it does not necessarily do justice to Webster and her sequence. Most crucially, it obscures possibility of reading Mother and Daughter as a cogent critique of alienation of fundamentally female experiences, such as birth and motherhood, and of female body in general for use as metaphors of male creativity. Gabriel Rossetti's plan to compose The House of Life sprang Willowwood, a series of four sonnets that boldly rewrite Ovid's myth of Narcissus. The group heads all early drafts and manuscript versions of sequence, and was first published in 1869 in Fortnightly Review as sonnets 1 through 4 out of sixteen sonnets On Life, Love, and Death before taking its final position at heart of 1870 and 1881 printed editions. Critics have variously described it as addressing problem about love and hope of its fulfilment, recording the obsessive nature of desire for unity and fact that desire becomes even more obsessive after separation, and most recently, exploring homoerotic potential of Rossetti's vision of love, but it was probably William Michael Rossetti who best captured scope of Willowwood when he claimed that it is all about the pangs of severance. …

Haiti’s Literary Legacies unpacks the theoretical, historical, and political resonance of the Haitian revolution across a multiplicity of European and American Romanticisms, including Haitian, British, French, and German traditions. Often referred to as the only successful slave uprising in history, the Haitian revolution at once fulfilled and surpassed Enlightenment conceptions of freedom and universality in ways that were crucial to global Romanticism, and yet these effects are only beginning to be studied by scholars and historians of Romanticism. This volume works at the intersection of Romantic and Caribbean studies to outline the myriad ways that the politicized literature of Romantic period engages the revolution in Haiti. Demonstrating the centrality of the Haitian revolution to the larger configuration of transnational Romantic writing, this collection articulates a literary legacy that speaks to our contemporary moment and our ongoing attempts to come to terms with the political, historical, and ecological genealogies of the

The article deals with one of the oldest manuscripts containing a significant part of the theological chapters of Kallistos Angelikoudes, one of the most important hesychast authors of the late Byzantine period. Codex Vatopedinus gr. 610 was written in the late 14th c. It contains a great amount of quotations excerpted from Patristic literature. In the second part of the codex, one can find the chapters of Kallistos Angelikoudes; these 92 chapters were retrieved from a greater collection containing now about 200 chapters. The article discusses the content of the Vatopedi manuscript, pointing out to the use of many Patristic fragments included there in different works by Kallistos Angelikoudes. This may shed light on the origin and purpose of the manuscript. A further study of the history of the text of these chapters allows us to assess the place of the Vatopedi codex in the manuscript tradition of Kallistos Angelikoudes’ literary legacy. The Church Slavonic translation of this collection of Angelikoudes’ chapters made by Paisius Velichkovsky in the 1770—1790s reproduces many peculiarities of the Greek text contained in the Vatopedi manuscript and was presumably based on a copy of that codex.

Reviewed by: Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers by Daniel Moran Jordan Rowan Fannin Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers. By Daniel Moran. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. ix, 253. $39.95. ISBN 978-9-8203-4954-1.) In Creating Flannery O'Connor, Daniel Moran early offers the nuance of his book's subject: not O'Connor's literary reputation—why she matters—but the creation of her reputation, or how she mattered and to whom (p. 9). Admittedly, the scope of this investigation is ambitious, for Moran does not confine himself to O'Connor's oeuvre in its inspiration and creation; rather, he endeavors to seat O'Connor's cultural and literary legacy within a complex matrix of how the "author's work, personality, and even image are marketed, packaged, presented, adapted, and received" (p. 2). O'Connor's reputation, he reminds, can be understood not simply as a phenomenon resulting from her talent alone but also "as the result of a network of events, chance occurrences, personal relationships, media adaptations, cultural [End Page 371] institutions, and websites" (p. 8). Moran is most deft at articulating this matrix as a trajectory. Throughout the work, he assembles "the history of [O'Connor's] critical reception and literary identity" (p. 3) in such a way that we might cast our gaze forward and backward at once. We muse with Moran over the diverse factors that created (and continue to create) O'Connor's literary legacy, while observing how that legacy shapes our assumptions as we read O'Connor's past artistic accomplishments in the present. Through a dexterous mining of vast and diverse sources, Moran demonstrates his caveat-cum-thesis that O'Connor's place in the American literary pantheon was not a fait accompli. He begins by pairing her fiction with its critical reception. Here Wise Blood stands as prime exemplar, as its first two releases—ten years apart—allow open space wherein Moran tussles with sources ranging from critical reviews to cover designs. Later chapters expand this open space further still, illuminating the growth of "the increasingly widening lens through which O'Connor's fiction was being viewed" (p. 100). Along the way, Moran details the subtle ironies of her literary ascendency, noting with some satisfaction when critics posthumously praise O'Connor for the very things they castigated her for during her lifetime. Moran commands an extraordinary volume of critical reviews, spanning a remarkable historical scope. What impresses the reader even more is his selection of sources beyond the literary critical establishment. To tell his creation narrative, he includes, alongside the published criticism, interviews and letters to the editor, press releases and publication notices, personal correspondence and perm requests, thank-you notes and fan mail, award speeches and civic proclamations, actor interviews and film trailers. The work on Robert Giroux's editorial advocacy in chapter 4 is an especially valuable contribution, allowing the reader to see how the marketing, perming, reprinting, anthologizing, and even posthumous publication of O'Connor was a consciously curated literary legacy. Further, his exploration of the radical democratization of criticism in online forums and "social reading sites" (p. 164) breaks new ground in O'Connor studies. Though the content of O'Connor's Catholic faith is not probed in great detail (readers eager for this treatment can find excellent works by Ralph C. Wood, Susan Srigley, Paul Elie, and Farrell O'Gorman, among others), Moran devotes the entirety of chapter 2 to detailing how her audience (readers as well as critics) became capable of understanding its significance. Moran thus weighs in on the critical divide over the relationship between O'Connor's (more explicitly theological) nonfiction writings to her fiction in a new way through his portrait of O'Connor as an incontrovertibly "Catholic writer," whether or not her faith may be taken as the interpretive key to the meaning of her work. Throughout this handsome monograph Moran charts a course, giving us "signposts" (p. 49) to mark not only the evolving understanding of O'Connor's genius but also the active "building of her literary reputation" (p. 43). Happily, he also minds the places...