Cross-National Influence in Post-Unification Italy

The Mediterranean world has long had strong cultural links to Great Britain as well as to the United States. Through the analysis of artistic objects and critical writings that crystallise this encounter, the essays in this volume demonstrate the variety and complexity of the connections between two geographical zones and two or more cultures. Mediterranean cultures are shown to haunt American and British culture and artistic productions. The relation between British and American literature and art on the one hand, and Mediterranean arts on the other goes beyond the mere inscription of British and American culture in a Mediterranean tradition. British and American culture and art come out as unearthing a wide variety of Mediterranean artistic forms, renewing and transforming them. This collection shows how lively the encounter between the Mediterranean and the English-Speaking worlds still is. It highlights how much English as well as American culture and art owe today to the Mediterranean ones; how, mainly in the fields of literature and art, the two civilisations have never discontinued the dialogue they adumbrated centuries ago.

Reviewed by: Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870-1893 by Mark J. Noonan Anelise H. Shrout Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870-1893. By Mark J. Noonan. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010. 235 pp. $65.00. Mark Noonan's Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870-1893, chronicles the foundation, rise, and decline of Scribner's Monthly. The magazine was founded in 1870, renamed the Century in 1881, and "sailed into oblivion" in the early twentieth century. While other illustrated magazines—most notably Harpers and the Atlantic Monthly—might be more familiar to readers today, Noonan argues that Scribner's/Century was particularly emblematic of a late nineteenth-century American journalism characterized by writers', editors', and publishers' ongoing attempts to make "a better, newer America" through prose, poetry, history, and commentary (xix). In describing Scribner's/Century's attempts to make that America, Noonan also points to moments when the publication of remarkable writing overshadowed the magazine's espoused aims. Scholars of periodical studies, mass communication theory, and the American press will find Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine a useful and thought-provoking case study. Many will also be interested in Noonan's call for a holistic approach to periodical studies, which looks beyond individual writers and their works in order to take into account publications' entire bodies of work, and the ways in which editors, publishers, or literary conventions changed a periodical's character over time. As a result of this approach, Noonan's work intersects with historical processes that will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including American expansion, national memory, gender norms, and race. Although the title suggests that readers' experiences might be a central focus of this book, Noonan's main characters are actually the writers and editors who shaped Scribner's/Century's message. The book is divided both temporally and thematically. Two sections, "the Holland Era, 1870-1881" and "the Gilder Era, 1881-1909," suggest the overarching importance of editors to the magazine's development. According to Noonan, Scribner's founder and first editor, Josiah Gilbert Holland, saw the magazine as a vehicle to "market" American moral values and history. The passage of editorship to Richard Watson Gilder in 1881 was marked by stylistic shifts which corresponded to changes in American literature more broadly, including a decline in women's fiction and a rise in "serious fiction"; an increased emphasis on realism; and the rhetorical production of a cohesive American identity accompanied by the "whitewashing" of American memories of the Civil War. These themes structure parallel chapters within each section. [End Page 85] Noonan argues that Scribner's was particularly noteworthy for the role that female writers played in its early years. In chapter two, he credits Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Mapes Dodge, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Constance Fenimore Woolson with Scribner's initial success. Under Gilder, Noonan explains in Part II, the magazine saw a transition from the "alleged sentimentality of women's fiction" to "works written by men and for men" (90). Chapter four focuses on this shift, exemplified by the serialized publication of William Dean Howells's anti-sentimental A Modern Instance and Henry James's "famously antifeminist" The Bostonians (102). Chapter five complicates the transition by focusing on two authors—Burnett and John Hay—whose works seem to condone adultery and excessive violence, respectively. Ultimately, Gilder asked both Burnett and Hay to tone down the objectionable aspects of their work. In doing so, Noonan argues, Gilder solidified the magazine's project: to perpetuate middle class, genteel, white, and Victorian mores; and to prevent "coarse" or subversive material from circulating through the genteel press. Both Gilder and Holland also believed that Scribner's/Century should educate readers about American history and inculcate a genteel, cohesive American culture. In the 1870s, the magazine began to publish examples of "local color," focusing particularly on the South. The third chapter draws out a conflict between writers like Edward King, who effectively policed the boundaries of American culture by telling only the stories of white Americans, and those like George Washington Cable, who included the...

British and American literary classics are very rich, and they are the bright pearls in the treasure house of world literature. British and American literary creations are produced under unique regional cultures. Different regional cultures have their own language characteristics and connotations. To understand the work deeply, they must have a deep understanding and understanding of their background culture. British and American literature is an important reflection of British and American culture. By analyzing the language characteristics of British and American literature, we can better understand the development characteristics of British and American culture and strengthen our understanding of the background and connotation of British and American culture. Next, this paper will analyze the linguistic characteristics of British and American literary works from a cross-cultural perspective to strengthen the understanding and cognition of British and American culture.

Reviewed by: Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s by George Hutchinson Amy Fehr George Hutchinson. Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s. Columbia UP, 2018. xvii + 439 pp. George Hutchinson focuses his wide-ranging survey of American literature and culture on the decade of the 1940s. Hutchinson concedes that the decade is an arbitrary temporal designation, but he nonetheless makes a compelling case for this periodization. Most contemporary scholarship devoted to the 1940s marks the war as a point of rupture, and Hutchinson's focus on the entirety of the 1940s—not only the post-1945 era—allows for new perspectives on how periodization affects our understanding of literature and culture. "We need new ways of thinking about cultural transformation" (12), Hutchinson argues, and his work to establish lines of continuity between the years of WWII and the post-war years allows for an understanding of "the role of habit, processes of incremental cultural change, and the recursive nature of experience and expression." Indeed, Hutchinson goes so far as to write that the decade has been "the black hole of American literary history" (2), and his work—Facing the Abyss—promises to redress this issue. In reframing the period of the 1940s, Hutchinson provides an expansive and impressive bibliography that features both canonical texts and works the author explicitly reclaims from the "black hole" of literary and historical criticism. Examining what he calls a "literary ecology" (12), Facing the Abyss reads literary texts alongside visual and cultural artifacts such as paintings, dustjackets, publishing histories, reviews, and letters. In focusing on the literary, Hutchinson claims, "the 1940s was the most intensely literary decade in American history, perhaps in war history" (16). His work on the publishing industry perhaps best supports this claim, as does his related research on the Armed Services Editions of contemporary novels in chapter 1. Chapter 4 is also notable for revitalizing wartime texts that have been ignored in previous scholarship, constituting one of the books most important contributions. It is a difficult task to provide a clear outline of the nine chapters in Facing the Abyss, which also features an introduction and an epilogue. This difficulty stems in part from the nature of Hutchinson's "literary ecology," as each chapter explores the intersection of "various themes and motifs" (12). Moreover, Hutchinson's organizational structure signals another of the author's more interesting interventions. The book's chapters are organized thematically, loosely structured around intersections between various texts. The result is a work that rejects any monolithic understandings of the period but [End Page 548] instead offers a portrait of an era that highlights representative lines of ideology and inquiry. As a result, each chapter offers a distinct thematic perspective without isolating its content from the rest of the project. Chapters include topics ranging from "Popular Culture and the Avant-Garde" to "Ecology and Culture," as indicated by their titles. Moreover, the resurgence of a text such as Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go throughout the work exemplifies Hutchinson's interest in recurrence, while also underscoring the intersectional nature of the various themes housed in each chapter. The organization of the project is admirable, especially given Hutchinson's interest in periodization and categorization, but it is not without its flaws. What is gained in flexibility and breadth is sometimes lost in clarity, especially given the decision to exclude subsections or breaks to organize the text. Among the numerous motifs uncovered in Facing the Abyss, perhaps the most fascinating is Hutchinson's study of the ideal of universality or "planetary humanism" (4), which was popular during a decade when the United States reckoned with the politics of a World War. Hutchinson defines the ideal of universal humanity against problematic Enlightenment concepts of man, explaining that "it is rather focused, in a more limited sense, on asserting a universal humanity, a potential for mutual understanding, and the ethical responsibility that persons have toward one another, regardless of race and nation" (214). Hutchinson recognizes that contemporary critics (including this reader) might be skeptical of such an ideal, given the common and problematic liberal usages of the term. As such, Hutchinson works...

Since the school year 2017/2018, for the first time, teachers that had successfully completed a structured course on teaching Italian as a foreign or second language have been included in the Italian public school staff. This moment is very important. In fact, for a long time the Italian public school had not had in its staff the highly qualified professionalism useful to face problems linked to learning Italian as a second language. Until the recruitment of A23 teachers, teachers identified as such, as per the February 2016 Decree of the President of the Italian Republic, the Italian school had attempted to face this situation by doing its best with the resource and the professionalism available. On the one hand, teachers not trained to deal with the foreign students had to do it; on the other, when skilled and trained teachers were required, they were recruited from specific calls outside the teacher’s school staff. This paper addresses the investigation of the major steps that led to the inclusion in the Italian public school staff of people qualified to teach Lingua italiana per discenti di lingua straniera. The paper will also investigate the role and professionalism of A23 teachers in the Italian school. These reflections are based on data collected by a survey carried out during the school year 2018/2019, February to April 2019. Conducted by a self-administered online questionnaire entitled A23: Chi? Come? Dove? Quando? Perche?, it involved 76 A23 teachers.

In her article, Holy Fools, Secular Saints, and Illiterate Saviors in American Literature and Popular Culture, Dana Heller identifies and analyzes characteristics of the holy fool figure in American literature and culture. Heller defines the holy fool, or divine idiot, as a figure central to U.S. myths of nation. One encounters such figures in American literature as well as in American folklore, popular culture, and mass media. In American culture, the Divine Idiot is a hybrid form which grows out of the crossings of numerous literary and historical currents, both secular and non-secular. This unwieldy hybridity -the fact that Divine Idiots in American literature resonate across so many historical, national, cultural, and ethnic boundaries while retaining some loose correspondence with earlier Christian prototypes -has rendered them difficult to locate. However, this identification -or unveiling -is a crucial part of an idiot's social function and performance. In her analysis, Heller discusses writings by Flannery O'Connor, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, and films such as The Green Mile and Forrest Gump, in an effort to define divine idiocy in American culture as a means of addressing historical contradictions in American society. Dana Heller, Holy Fools, Secular Saints, and Illiterate Saviors in American Literature and Popular Culture” page 2 of 15 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 5.3 (2003):

BOOK REVIEWS 467 eyes and wounds; attaching frogs’ legs to his deltoid muscle; suffocating in mines to test the effect of gases on plants; crushing mosquitoes to measure the impact of the venom on his pierced skin. In return he enjoyed the epiphany of being folded into vegetable and animal geographies, like Park with his moss, or Gulliver with his horses. This is not providentialism, nor Linnaean taxonomy. Nor is it empiricism, since the body and even the identity of the experimenting subject is an instrumental part of the experi­ ment, and it is not vitalism, animism, or Brunonian irritability. It appears to be an experience at once more extensive and more particularly intimate than we are generally capable of appreciating. Among the Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge stand out as exceptional exemplars in this re­ gard. When he put his ear to the Keswick road straining to hear the first sounds of the cart bringing the newspaper and then, in the ecstasy of frus­ trated expectation, fixed his dazzled eye on the night sky, Wordsworth was experimenting with the physiology of starlight and the geography of the sublime. Thompson has written part of the history of how suffering leads to a sentimental knowledge ofnonhuman life, but in the end he is too hos­ pitable to the sheer egoists: the ones who suffered only for fun. Jonathan Lamb Vanderbilt University Charles J. Rzepka. Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, His­ tory, and Culture: Inventions and Interventions. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. 287. $99.95. As many of us no doubt have mentioned to our students, the diversity of thought that existed before the mid-nineteenth-century differentiation of disciplines was a significant reason for the vitality of intellectual produc­ tion in the Romantic era. Cutting-edge science informed by microscopes and electricity experiments coexisted with Shelley’s idealism and abstrac­ tion; philology, linguistics, and religion were all part of Coleridge’s meta­ physical stew; and the many different and often unrelated research and speculations that filled the pages of contemporary periodicals were both destined for and emanated from a motley intellectual arena that included amateurs as well as what would be recognized today as specialists or profes­ sionals. A similarly exhilarating mix of topics appears in Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture: Inventions and Interven­ tions, a new volume that reprints some of Charles Rzepka’s best essays of the past twenty years. In articles ranging from the Romantic canon to Poe, Freud, Elizabeth Bishop, Charlie Chan and the Wizard of Oz, Inventions SiR, 51 (Fall 2012) 468 BOOK REVIEWS and Interventions annals a scholarly career equally as distinguished for its eclecticism as for its accomplishment. One of the obvious pleasures of such a volume is the chance to track Rzepka’s most important critical contributions, such as the recurring dis­ cussion of gifts and transactional relationships (featured in three articles on Wordsworth and De Quincey) that would culminate in Rzepka’s illluminating Sacramental Commodities. The diversity of the topics also signals the interest in detection and crime narratives that have extended Rzepka’s work beyond the geographical and temporal borders of British Romanti­ cism, and which seem to lead his current interests (the three most recent essays are those on Poe, Charlie Chan, and Godwin). Indeed, in its astute synthesis of genre criticism, regional history, and Asian American studies, Rzepka’s essay on Charlie Chan is particularly impressive. The essay, a re­ visionary interpretation which rejects orientalist charges for the much ma­ ligned character and instead argues for his generic and historical sig­ nificance at a time when strictures against Asian immigration were extreme, anticipates Yunte Huang’s much celebrated current book (Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous ivith American History) by several years. Thus, while the topics of some of the later essays may at first seem surprising for Romantic scholars, one thing that the volume’s collection helps reveal is the close connection between space, place, identity, and power that has always driven Rzepka’s scholar­ ship, and how his Romantic training shaped these more current interests. However, to suggest that the merits of Inventions and...

Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature is a multidisciplinary exploration of the ways that African American ohoto musicuminstrelsy, ragtime, jazz, and especially bluesuemerged into the American cultural mainstream in the nineteenth century and ultii??mately dominated American music and literature from 1920 to 1929. Exploring the deep and enduring relationship between music and literature, Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature examines the diverse ways in which African American ohoto music ini??fluenced American cultureuparticularly literatureuin early twentieth century America. Steven C. Tracy provides a history of the fusion of Afrii??can and European elements that formed African American ohoto music, and considers how terms like ragtime, jazz, and blues developed their own particular meanings for American music and society. He draws from the fields of literature, literary criticism, cultural anthropology, American studies, and folklore to demonstrate how blues as a musical and poetic form has been a critical influence on American literature. Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature begins by highlighting instances in which American writers, including Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Gertrude Stein, use African American culi??ture and music in their work, and then characterizes the social context of the Jazz Age, discussing how African American music reflected the wild abandon of the time. Tracy focuses on how a variety of schools of early twentieth century writers, from modernists to members of the Harlem Renaissance to dramatists and more, used their connections with ohoto music to give their own work meaning. TracyAEs extensive and detailed understanding of how African American ohoto music operates has produced a fresh and original perspective on its influence on mainstream American literature and culture. An experienced blues musician himself, Tracy draws on his performance background to offer an added dimension to his analysis. Where ani??other blues scholar might only analyse blues language, Tracy shows how the language is actually performed. Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature is the first book to offer such a refreshingly broad interdisciplinary vision of the influence of African American ohoto music on American literature. It is an essential addition to the library of serious scholars of American and African American literature and culture and blues aficionados alike.

Hebrew, once regarded as a “classical language,” exerts enormous shaping power on British and American poetry, politics, and culture from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. It prompts the greatest innovations in post-Renaissance English verse, developments in aesthetics, including the sublime, fruitful arguments in politics, and vital strands of British and American thought that cannot be accounted for otherwise. This shaping power—related to but not the same as the influence of biblical translations regarded as literature—has received only sporadic attention. Hebrew as the other classic has not obtained its rightful place in studies of literature in English, nor in Anglo-American literate culture. This essay explores the other classic in: British and American colleges and universities; Puritan Hebraists; concepts of the sublime; the seminal criticism of Robert Lowth; the work of Dennis, Watts, Smart, Macpherson, Merrick, Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Longfellow, and Lazarus; in myths of national origin and identification; in Coleridge, De Quincey, Thoreau, Melville, Arnold, and J. L. Lowes; as well as in an appreciation of the stylistic and moral strengths of Hebrew Scripture. It explores why study of Hebrew declined. The essay challenges the exclusion of Hebrew, upon which all discussion of “classical languages” and their reception by the romantics has been based. The presence of Hebrew as the other classic enlarges and redefines the nature of classical influences on the romantic era.

THE NATIONAL AND THE TRANSNATIONAL, 1945-1980: MASCULINITIES IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE BETWEEN WORLD WAR II AND THATCHER/REAGAN (JUNE 9-11, 2010, DRESDEN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, GERMANY) If current trends in popular entertainment are anything to go by, it seems that gender concepts of 1950s and 60s culture are currently heading for comeback. Successful TV series like Mad Men have been focusing on renegotiations of masculinity after the Second World War and its epitome, the man in the gray flannel suit/' to cite the title of Sloan Wilson's novel and subsequent film adaptation. Even then, a normative masculinity functioned on screen to mask the social differences that stratified U.S. society (Cohan, 1997, p. x), and the narrative constructions of masculinity have been indicative of this dialectic ever since: norma tivity on the one hand, challenging concepts and the notion of pluralism on the other. The shadow of the man in the gray flannel suit was also one of the major themes to provide food for thought during an international workshop on masculinities that took place in Dresden in June, 2010. Organized by Professor Stefan Horlacher (Dresden), the workshop Between the National and the Transnational, 1945-1980 was part of the ongoing research project Towards Comparative Masculinity by Professors Stefan Horlacher and Kevin Floyd (Kent State), sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Kent State University. Dedicated to in-depth analyses of national masculinities in British and American literature and culture, the project seeks an understanding of the larger context for the emergence of more plural, culturally differentiated, and ultimately transnational masculinities. The analytic methods employed show both diversity and commonality, with regard to redefinitions of Britishness and Americanness as well as masculine identities. At the heart of nationhood and gendered identity lies, we believe, the notion of narrative, crucial in conceptualizations of both rubrics, given that masculinity, like femininity, is fictional construction (Murphy, 1994, p. 1). In this workshop designed to facilitate conversation about the impact of globalization, migration, subaltern subjects, and social mechanisms on different narrative forms, literary scholars from three different continents met in Dresden to discuss changing notions of masculinity as reflected in postwar British and American literature and culture, with the explicit goal of providing comparative analyses and exchanging perspectives on gender-oriented interpretations of texts, plays, films, and photographs. After the welcome address by THOMAS KUHN, Dean of Studies of the Faculty of Linguistics, Literary Studies and Cultural Studies at Dresden, representatives of the two cooperating universities shared their perspectives on the transatlantic framework and the aim of the workshop. Thus, Ronald J. Corthell (Kent State) stressed the importance of transatlantic cooperations as opportunities for comparative studies. According to Corthell, the Humboldt Partnership is treading on new territory, not only as far as the regular exchange between Dresden and Kent State is concerned, but also with regard to transcultural dialogue on masculinities and interdisciplinary work, outside of the monolithic, one-sided framework of traditional scholarship. It was up to STEFAN HORLACHER (Dresden) to provide the Theoretical and Cultural Framework for such comparative approach toward Masculinity Studies (see also Horlacher, 2006). Horlacher not only pointed out the social necessity of such discipline in light of the perceived crisis of manhood, but also highlighted the importance of literary studies, that is, their potential to question seemingly immovable, essentialist models. By locating masculinity at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, works of literature (to give but one example) become accessible as parts of the symbolic order where culture reflects on itself. …

Focusing on texts written between 1880 and 1930, Mary McAleer Balkun explores the concept of the 'counterfeit', both in terms of material goods and invented identities, and the ways that the acquisition of objects came to define individuals in American culture and literature. Counterfeiting is, in one sense, about the creation of something that appears authentic - an invented self, a museum display, a forged work of art. But the counterfeit can also be a means by which the authentic is measured, thereby creating our conception of the true or real. When counterfeiting is applied to individual identities, it fosters fluidity in social boundaries and the games of social climbing and passing that have come to be representative of American culture: the Horatio Alger story, the con man or huckster, the social climber, the ethnically ambiguous. Balkun provides new readings of traditional texts such as The Great Gatsby, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The House of Mirth, as well as readings of less-studied texts, such as Walt Whitman's Specimen Days and Nella Larsen's Passing. In each of these texts, Balkun locates the presence of manufactured identities and counterfeit figures, demonstrating that where authenticity and consumerism intersect, the self becomes but another commodity to be promoted, sold, and eventually consumed.

Book Review| September 01 2007 Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value; At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930; Literature of Place: Dwelling on the Land before Earth Day 1970; Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture: Modernity, Dissidence, Innovation Stephanie Foote Stephanie Foote Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (3): 615–618. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-026 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stephanie Foote; Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value; At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930; Literature of Place: Dwelling on the Land before Earth Day 1970; Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture: Modernity, Dissidence, Innovation. American Literature 1 September 2007; 79 (3): 615–618. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-026 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 JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) can lead Italian high school students to improve their English as a Foreign Language speaking skills. The trigger for this research comes from my EFL teaching experiences at Italian schools, where the syllabi employed tend to neglect the training of speaking skills and focus mainly on grammar translation and English literature instructions. The stimulus for this investigation comes also from articles on the effectiveness of using CLIL for the improvement of FL speaking performance and Lexis extension that I read before writing this article in order to have a broader view of this topic. The literature review describes in detail theoretical issues with regard to the advantages of using CLIL methodology in the classroom over traditional approaches and how this technique helps FL students to facilitate speaking difficulties. It also makes reference to a few key findings from previous research. This study was conducted in Italy, and the data gathering processes consist mainly of qualitative, semi-structured interviews with five participants (three EFL learners and two experienced teachers of English as a foreign language), interview transcripts, and content analysis techniques that I used to examine and interpret the collected data. Findings indicate that not only can content and language integrated learning represent an improvement of the common EFL teaching methods and help learners enhance their speaking abilities, but it can also stimulate their motivation to study English and lower learners’ levels of anxiety, which is commonly associated with their concern about making mistakes or being assessed.

To learn a language, we must have a deep understanding of the culture represented by the language, and the most representative form of culture is literature; therefore, in order to learn English, we must strengthen the study of British and American literature. Through the study of British and American literature, we can deeply understand the characteristics of British and American culture, so as to deeply grasp the cultural characteristics of English, and then improve the ability to use English accurately and skillfully. This paper mainly discusses how to carry out the teaching of the course of British and American literature, with the purpose of effectively improving the teaching effect of the course of British and American literature.

How Nineteenth-Century American Literature got its Nerve Back Donald E. Pease (bio) The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Justine Murison, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, gen. ed. Ross Posnock. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 215. $90.00 cloth. The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature was published in Ross Posnock’s Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture series at Cambridge University Press. Unlike the other contributors to this series, Justine Murison situates her work at the cusp of a recent neuroscientific turn embraced by a new generation of scholar-critics intent on supplementing rather than replacing psychoanalytic interpretive paradigms. Murison stakes the interpretive politics of Politics of Anxiety on the revival of a nineteenth-century discourse of nervous physiology that prefigured psychoanalysis. After locating the historical origins of the neurocognitive turn in nineteenth-century understandings of nervous physiology, Murison demonstrates how this pre-Freudian discourse challenges prevailing assumptions about psychology and affect in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary scholarship. Rather than restricting her project to this biopolitical turn, however, Murison mines the nineteenth-century scientific archive to proliferate historical angles from which to approach nineteenth-century American literature. According to Murison, the nineteenth-century precursors of the neuroscientific turn shared with their descendants the desire to find evidence-based perspectives from which to explain the anxious, nervous artifacts called literary texts. [End Page 139] The Politics of Anxiety engages complexly with the discourse of nervous physiology to show how it structured nineteenth-century narratives of national history and social life. Murison specifically explains how American authors and readers responded to questions about heredity, self-possession, freedom, sexual desire, and biological determinism by exploring pre-Freudian explanations of the nervous system. In the nineteenth century, the nervous body replaced the previous model of the relation between mind and body as regulated by the fluid exchange of the humors. As the repository of antebellum American culture’s basic psychosomatic assumptions, the discourse of nervous physiology exerted widespread physical, as well as metaphysical, influence. The nervous system it described was believed to govern the body and the body politic by exposing both to environmental vicissitudes. Perceived as a system of dynamic interaction with its environment that demanded constant physiological adjustments, nineteenth-century American society was understood to be nervous because it was fraught with the power to change, yet utterly dependent upon an anxious body politic. Nineteenth-century American culture was an era of somatic ethics and nervous politics. Somatic nervousness supplied nineteenth-century artists, politicians, social scientists, historians, reformers, and physicians with a lens to inspect the physiological imperatives structuring moral, spiritual, and political struggles. These imperatives could not be explained as biologically determined because the aberrant physiology of the nervous system resisted such universalizing claims. Although the discourse of nervous physiology endowed soma with anxious significance, the precise workings of the nervous system remained a mystery to scientists and physicians, as well as their patients. This lack of certitude facilitated discourses about the nervous system that were expressive of diverse, even contradictory, explanations and opinions. Confusion surrounding the nervous physiology and the lack of agreed-upon criteria for the certification of physicians made it difficult to distinguish scientifically verifiable medical practices from pseudoscience and sheer quackery. Unlicensed until the 1870s, the field of medicine included “irregular” practitioners—homeopaths, Grahamites, phrenologists, botanical Thomsonians, mesmerists, table tappers, hydropaths, and spiritualist mediums. Physiological terms for the nerves—which included “sympathy,” “animal electricity,” “the nervous fluid,” and the “odylic principle”—became truly ubiquitous only when they entered the idiom popularized within newspapers, journals, fictional tales, and novels. [End Page 140] In The Politics of Anxiety, Murison reads across an archive spanning literature, medicine, politics, and popular culture to show how the notion of the nervous self assumed hegemony by finding its way into Putnam’s and The Democratic Review and United States Magazine, theological debates about spirit bodies, phrenology, homeopathic medicine pamphlets, mesmeric procedures, abolitionist and domestic ideologies, gothic tales, political satires, city mystery novels, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, spiritualists’ rationales for prescribing water cures, calisthenic manuals, how-to-books in electrical psychology, animal magnetism instruction, fictional accounts of phantom...