American Tales Research Articles

“American Tales of Heroes and Villains”: Donald Trump’s Framing of Latinos During COVID-19 Times

Based on a qualitative analysis of Donald Trump’s speeches and public documents from 2020, this article examines the role of xenophobia in constructing oppositional divisions within Latino groups in the United States. Rather than pitting minority ethnic/racial groups against the White majority, xenophobia frames unauthorized populations against legal, albeit subordinated, ones. Five main Latino categories are identified in this study. First, the “illegal immigrant” is portrayed as the criminal border crosser that targets other Latinos—the latter embodied by the “Hispanic victim.” Next, is the “Hispanic border patrol” agent who safeguards the United States by actively detaining and expelling undocumented immigrants. Third, the “Hispanic supporter” is welcomed into the American Dream by ascribing to meritocratic values of hard work and family values. A final actor is represented by foreign allies (e.g., Mexico’s President) who crack down their own citizens to protect the United States border. Furthermore, this article discusses Trump’s xenophobic camouflage of race (and racism) by highlighting undocumented Latinos’ alleged immoral and criminal nature rather than their physical characteristics. Concomitant to this narrative is the conditional inclusion of a subset of Hispanics into the American dream. In the conclusions, the article compares the study findings with the results of the 2020 presidential election to shed light on the growth of Trump’s Latino base. This research piece ultimately provides a contribution to our understanding of the conceptual power of xenophobia in galvanizing divergent interests within racial and ethnic minorities, in this case Latinos in the United States.

Charles Godfrey Leland and His Magical Tales

Charles Godfrey Leland and His Magical Tales

ESSENCE OF OBJECTS IN LYMAN FRANK BAUM’S TALES

The article deals with the research on the essence of objects in children’s literature (on the book "American Tales" by L.F. Baum). The daily routine is skillfully combined with fairy-tale mood, it becomes possible due to the characters and the objects in these tales. The article describes the possible functions of objects in fiction, in particular, in a literary tale. The main attention is paid to the definition of functions performed by objects in the given fairy tales and the role of magic and magical objects in these works because the presence of magic objects in the text is one of the markers of fairy tales as a genre. Objects are defined as one of the important components of fairy tales. In addition to magical objects, fairy tales contain ordinary household items that perform the functions of various markers: create a background, describe the scene, characterize the characters of the epoch or place of action. An important role is played by the revival of objects, as well as the transformation of objects from ordinary to magical (a chest, book, pump, glass dog, and mannequin). Putting spells on objects is an important part of Baum's fairy tales. Revival is Baum’s favorite fairy-tale technique. In his works time, toys, mannequins, and stuffed birds come to life. This is done with the help of spells performed by wizards or gnomes. Objects in these tales serve as markers of his epoch. The author writes how and what the children played, focuses on the elements of interior design, the activities of the characters, as well as the fashion of that time. In most cases, such objects belong to the era of the author, without duplicating the folk tale tradition of magical objects. We conclude that the essence of objects in analyzed works is represented as follows: everyday objects that characterize the epoch, place of residence of the characters, daily habits; magical objects, the origin of which is not always known, and their magical power is often discovered by chance; objects that turn from ordinary to magical under the influence of magic. Thanks to the objects, a reader gets the opportunity to get additional characteristics of the characters, the idea of ​​the world where the characters exist, and the characters’ (in) ability to use certain things influence the plot of fairy tales.

The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature

What role did short fiction play in crafting stories of US nationhood? This lively question drives Lydia G. Fash's analysis of the sketch, the tale, and what she calls the beginnings of American literature. Fash's term “the culture of beginnings” describes the rewriting of puritan histories, revolutionary narratives, and other national origin stories for a white US reading public in the decades after the War of 1812. Fash argues that short fiction was an essential tool for fashioning US national identity, and her work demonstrates short fiction's influence on the mid-nineteenth century American novel.The term “short story” was not widely used until the late nineteenth century (6). Before then, short fiction circulated in a variety of interrelated genres, including the sketch and the tale. The tale, Fash shows, “evoke[s] temporal distance (a ‘once upon a time’),” focuses on plot, and is characteristically ambiguous (21). By contrast, the sketch “seeks to describe space more than time through the close examination of a single moment, landscape or idea” (21). Both genres make claims to authenticity, even as the tale sometimes includes seemingly supernatural elements. Together, these versatile forms helped construct narratives of American beginnings.Fash utilizes print history and textual analysis to structure her inquiry. Fash's first chapter, for example, contrasts the British and American publications of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book to solidify her argument about the distinctions between the sketch and the tale. Fash examines the relationship between Irving's “staid sketches predominantly about Britain” and his “lively American tales” (37). She argues that shifts in content and differences in the placement of sketches and tales across editions of The Sketch Book augmented its appeal for audiences on opposite sides of the Atlantic.This analysis of Irving hinges in part on the relationship between differing temporalities, juxtaposing the “calm pastness of the British sketches” with “dynamic” American tales devoted to rich plotting and serialization (49). Competing temporalities remain central throughout this study. In short fiction, the “negotiation between … temporal innovation and temporal linearity” demonstrates “calculated attempts to form readerly communities that could lay claim to national status” (10). In chapter two, for example, Fash argues that Sarah Josepha Hale's “Sketches of American Character” genders waiting as female and represents white feminized waiting as an integral act of national participation. Hale thus makes space for white women's patriotism by revaluing virtuous waiting.Fash's attention to another woman writer of short fiction, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, leads to one of her most intriguing material culture arguments, which focuses on the intimate registers of the holiday gift books that became popular in the 1820s. Holiday annuals were often given to female readers by fathers, uncles, husbands, and male lovers, implying tacit male approval for the narratives and ideologies they contained. These annuals were also designed to be personalized with the receiver's name and held close to the body, cradled in a hand or against one's chest. Sedgwick's popular gift book sketches “pulled female martyrs, old maids, and storytelling women into the patriotic mission of constituting the American people,” staging a cross-temporal community of women characters and embodied readers (112). Fash argues that these sketches imagined white women as part of the culture of beginnings through what she terms a “nonsynchronous synchronicity” that connects contemporary readers to historically disparate communities (86).As these chapters examine short fiction, they contribute to the scholarly revision of Benedict Anderson's argument that a shared sense of simultaneous time, facilitated by the novel and the newspaper, made the imagined community of the nation possible (9). Instead, the sketch and the tale show the ways readers negotiated local temporalities even as they invested in national narratives. Fash expands critical vocabularies for understanding national temporality to include Irving's double temporality, Hale's waiting and Sedgwick's nonsynchronous synchronicity. Her later chapters productively analyze the temporal innovations of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and William Wells Brown.Fash's archive consists almost entirely of white authors, who endeavor to produce a white fictive ethnicity for the United States (7). Brown's Clotel is the only work by a Black writer that gets significant treatment, as Fash explores the ways Brown “adopts the position of a sketch writer” to “expose the falsity of America as a white republic” (183, 186). This archive allows Fash to accomplish the goal of showing the ways prominent mid-nineteenth century American novels are indebted to short fiction and convincingly outlines the role of the sketch and the tale in producing narratives about white national origins. Still, I wonder how these texts interact with nineteenth-century short fiction that has different aims. A more robust conceptual examination of whiteness and genre would complement this volume's emphasis on print history and temporal structure while further clarifying the generic specificity of the sketch and the tale.

Text as a Game: Modern Strategies for Working with Texts in Future Teachers’ Training (on L. Frank Baum’s tales “American tales”)

The article deals with modern strategies for working with literature in the future teachers’ training process, especially in work with tales. Suggested technologies make it possible to move away from traditional text analysis, to offer interesting interpretations as well as to focus on details. A text comes to life as it receives new interpretations, and visual ones complement the verbal content. This strategy helps make the reading more stimulating. It helps unleash and develop students’ analytical and creative potential: interpret scientific texts, create a lapbook and scrapbook. The examples are discussed on the material of Baum’s tales, “American Tales”, which is a fascinating and original phenomenon of American literature for children, and it provides a considerable space for interpretation. These tales are bright, interesting, and funny and allows to suggest to play with text, details, characters. Such game is impossible without attentive reading and understanding the main ideas of the text. The authors of the given manuscript recommend the following methods of working with texts as calligrams, hero pyramid, mind mapping, six thinking hats by E. Bono, etc. As a result, students begin to read literature more carefully, pay attention to details and better memorize certain episodes. The success of applying holographic technologies in dealing with literature is proved. Thus, the following skills like reading, creative thinking, critical thinking, the ability to express thoughts have been developed as well as the fear of misinterpretation of texts has disappeared.

Interrogating the “Nation” in Contemporary Indian Dance in India and the Diaspora

Nationalism is a problematic concept since it includes and excludes certain groups on different grounds as it suits the State. India excludes marginalized indigenous, Adivasi tribal population and many in the neglected Northeastern region of the sub-continent from the privileges of citizenship. I discuss such exclusions via performances in the genre of Contemporary Indian dance, by providing a brief overview of this style, its origins, techniques and idioms. A pioneering dancer-choreographer of Contemporary Indian Dance, Astad Deboo’s solo, group and collaborative work spanning 50 years, is note-worthy for his choreography with marginalized Manipuri drum-dancers and martial artists in Rhythm Divine I, and Rhythm Divine II: The River Runs Deep. Deboo’s signature style – abstract, meditative and infused uniquely with emotion” is imbibed by the Manipuri dancers. This essay also explores violence perpetrated by the Indian State against poor, tribal Indians as performed in Contemporary Indian Dance by diaspora-based Aparna Sindhoor/Anil Natyaveda’s Navarasa Dance Theater Company in works such as River Rites, showcasing struggles for water rights; A Story and a Song concerned with environmentalism using Indian and Native American folk tales. In Sindhoor’s words, Navarasa’s choreography delves into social justice issues? such as violence against women, environmental degradation, [and] human rights?

A Comparative Study of Saraiki Animal Tales with the American Animal Tales

Recently, the researchers and scholars have developed a tradition of reviving past and fostering nationalism among the speakers through their past/history. Saraiki civilization has also its both tangible and intangible assets like other oldest rural civilizations of the world. There at international level, a lot of work has been done in the field of folktales so far as their classification according to their types structures and functions. In Pakistan, no significant work has been done. The study is aimed to compare the Saraiki animal tales with the American animal tales through the American model developed by Uther in 2004 popularly known as Aarne-Thompson-Uther model. The current study is the comparative structural analysis of the Saraiki folktales. The Saraiki folktales were collected through participant observation, observation and interviews. The study was conducted in the rural areas of Southern Punjab, Pakistan. The multistage approach was applied to collect the folktales from the research area on the principle of probability sampling through the informants from the study area. The researcher for this purpose used the purposive sampling technique to select the informants of his study Saraiki folktales. The researcher selected 09 animal tales were compared to the plots recorded in an international American Arne-Thompson-Uther (2004) model generally known as the ATU and traced similarities of plots between the Saraiki folktales and internationally recorded American animal tales. The Saraiki oral tradition may be collected and classified for the preservation of cultural heritage and for further research in this field.

The Spectrum of the Eyes and Its Transatlantic Travels

Based on the idea that the eyes are among the most vulnerable parts of the body and that the threat of losing them is a source of anxiety and fear, this essay discusses Hoffman’s famous tale «The Sandman». It also analyzes the Hoffmanian influence in two Spanish American tales from different times: the short story «Lina’s Eyes», published by the Peruvian Clemente Palma in 1901, and the novel «Blood in the Eye» by Chilean writer Lina Meruane, the first edition of which was published in 2012. A review of the Freudian concept of uncanny (das Unheimliche) and of interpretations of Hoffman’s text based on said concept is also made in parallel.

KARACHAY-BALKAR AND AMERICAN TALES AS A MEAN OF PUPILS ECOLOGICAL UPBRINGING

High ecological culture among students is among the priorities of the modern Russian secondary school education. Offering the solution of this actual problem, the author refers to the educational potential of a fairy tale – the ancient folklore genre, originally written for children. Emotional closeness to the children’s mind of fairy-tale material increases its educational effectiveness. In this article as a didactic material 4 Karachay-Balkar and 2 American tales are selected, ideological and thematic center of which is a gentle, reasonable relationship to the objects of nature. The coincidence of motifs in two different systems of ethnic cultures (American and North Caucasus) indicates the generality of human culture, the universality of moral and ethical values that do not depend on geographical factors. The philosophical idea, which is emphasized both in Karachay-Balkar and American tales is mutually beneficial altruistic relationships of nature to man, and man to nature. This idea is vividly expressed in the tales of the American poem “The Song of Hiawatha” and Karachay-Balkar fairy tale “Three Brothers”. As our analysis showed, many tales are constructed in the form of text warning. In such tales, the central character stands offender of a ban, showing undue version of man’s relationship to nature. Judging by the finals of such tales, the offender shall be punished by nature, and his immoral act responds disaster for all mankind. The article deals with such tales, warnings as “The Price of Water”, “About a girl who became the wife of Thunder,” “Son of the Morning Star.” With the appropriate methodological design all these tales may be applied in the system of secondary school as a means of environmental education of students and successfully serve to didactic purposes.

Fannin’ Flies and Tellin’ Lies: Black Runaways and American Tales of Life in British Canada before the Civil War

Fannin’ Flies and Tellin’ Lies examines the many falsehoods told by slaveholders in the American South to prevent enslaved Blacks from running away to British Canada throughout the antebellum. Blacks were wrongly instructed on Canada including fabrications ranging from the Monarch would demand half of their earnings to rice was the only crop that could be grown in the British colony. At times the lies were totally inaccurate and humorous; on occasion they were half-truths or white lies, but indefinitely these falsehoods, instead of misinforming Blacks, suggested to them the benefits of Canada. Blacks deconstructed and reacted to lies by concealing their desire to defile the institution of slavery by flight to Canada and turned the art of lying into a tool of insurrection and a means of greater liberation.

Picturing the World: Informational Picture Books for Children by Kathleen T. Isaacs, and: Multicultural Storytime Magic by Kathy Macmillan (review)

Reviewed by: Picturing the World: Informational Picture Books for Children by Kathleen T. Isaacs, and: Multicultural Storytime Magic by Kathy Macmillan Kate Quealy-Gainer Isaacs, Kathleen T. Picturing the World: Informational Picture Books for Children. ALA, 2013. 206p. ISBN 978-0-8389-1126-6 $50.00 Defining an informational picture book as one that is intended to convey factual information through a marriage of text and illustrations, Isaacs provides a selection of 250 nonfiction/informational titles published within the last five years specifically aimed at children ages three to ten. A brief introductory chapter examines the traditional definitions of nonfiction and picture books and how such definitions work and sometimes do not work within the world of information books, citing particularly tricky categories such as narrative nonfiction and collections of poetry dealing with factual subjects. The entries for the selected titles include complete bibliographic information, age-level guidance, and notes on any awards won. Useful in both school and public libraries, this is a focused, valuable resource. Title, author/illustrator, and subject indices are included. KQG Macmillan, Kathy. Multicultural Storytime Magic; by Kathy MacMillan and Christine Kirker. ALA, 2012. 241p. ISBN 978-0-8389-1142-6 $47.00 MacMillan and Kirker provide a series of storytime activities that emphasize diversity in American society, diversity in the world, and diversity in abilities. Focused on incorporating multiculturalism into the everyday experience of children, the authors arrange book recommendations, fingerplays, flannel boards, and crafts around forty-four kid-friendly topics, including “ABC Time,” “Family,” and “Food.” Folktales and legends are drawn from a wide range of sources, including Native American tales and stories from China and Japan, while the fingerplays and crafts incorporate elements that can be used with children of varying abilities. The appendix includes culture notes and an index of entries by culture. KQG [End Page 359] Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress (review)

American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress Cristina Bacchilega (bio) American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress. Edited by Carl Lindahl . Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003. Two vols. 729 pp. As Peggy A. Bulger announces in the foreword, this is "a major contemporary publication that draws upon the spoken word traditions found in the Archive of Folk Culture. Here you will find Jack tales as told by traditional storyteller Ray Hicks; stories from the South as collected by John and Alan Lomax; as well as tall tales, jokes, children's stories, and personal experience narratives from contemporary American life" (xvi). In these two precious volumes, Carl Lindahl, Martha Gano Houston Research Professor of English at the University of Houston, presents 215 tales transcribed from sound recordings in the American Folklife Center and the Archive of Folk Culture of the Library of Congress. Each story in the collection is numbered and presented with information about the teller, the recorder, and the performance; the oldest recordings are from the 1930s, the most recent ones date from 2001. The first volume includes thirty-two tales told by the celebrated storytellers from the Hicks-Harmon family of southern Appalachia, Samuel Harmon, Maud Long, and Ray Hicks; fifty-three tales by five other American storytellers follow grouped under the headings "Sara Cleveland: Irish American Tales from Brant Lake, New York"; "J. D. Suggs: Itinerant Master"; "Joshua Alley: Down-East Tales from Jonesport, Maine"; "Will 'Gillie' Filchrist: Tales of Injustice in the Urban South"; and "Jane Muncy Fugate: [End Page 105] Healing Tales for a Mountain Child and Troubled Adults." The second volume includes twenty-eight tales collected by John Lomax (1867–1948) and his son Alan Lomax (1915–2002); twenty legends, twelve tall tales, thirty-two jokes, and fourteen stories for children; twenty stories concerning experiences from American history ranging from Native American tales and accounts of "Slavery Days and the Civil War" to "Struggles with Nature and Neighbors" and "Dust Bowl Tales" about massively destructive dust storms in the 1930s; and four "Folktales in the Making: The September 11 Project." The organization of the stories clearly reflects Lindahl's ambitious and complex vision of the project, which he explains in his introductory chapters. His approach, especially in the first volume, is "storyteller-centered"; his focus is on representatively American storytelling traditions; his scope is oral tales only; his transcription methodology favors readability and consistency, and seeks to resist condescension. Accessible and informative, the chapter "American Folktales: Their Stuff and Styles" articulates a definition of the folktale that Lindahl acknowledges is both narrow—"a folktale is shared by a 'folk,' a narrative community" orally and not in print, and performed by "community artists" who, on the basis of "shared values and esthetics," are recognized within their communities to be "master narrators"—and expanded to include "any traditional tale," whether it be fictional or based on beliefs, history, or personal experience. I would not be alone in finding this to be a rather unorthodox, even shaky, definition and in resisting its generalized use, but within this book and in combination with an emphasis on the storytellers' lives, it allows Lindahl to avoid creating "a skewed impression" of the storytellers' repertoires and to appreciate more fully the relationship of stories to the tellers' experiences. Moving from "personal style" to "generic and cultural styles," the chapter then outlines distinctively American features of these "folktales." For instance, Lindahl asserts that the American märchen proper is not well known but was definitely popular in Appalachia; the American hero receives less magic help than the European; the giant is the most common opponent in American tales of magic, while the dragon is extremely rare; and marriage is not as commonly part of the happy ending formula. About the jokes in the collection, Lindahl warns us that they "will seem foreign to most modern American readers," since they were "learned" by tellers over a century ago and collected in the first half of the twentieth century. Other interesting observations are made about tall tales, legends, and personal narratives, but the discussion of magic tales and jokes stands out as offering fresh insight into what...

The Risks and Rewards of Teaching Race

10. Kriste Lindenmeyer, Using Online Resources to Re-center the U.S. History Survey: Women's History as a Case Study, Journal of American History (March 2003), 1483-1494. 11. 12. Andrew Cayton, Imagining Southwest Ohio, American Studies Conference, Miami University, March 21, 2003. 13. Susan Hazen-Hammond, Spider Woman's Web: Traditional Native American Tales About Women's Power (New York, 1999), 17-18.

Wildfire: A Reader

Review: Wildfire: A Reader By Alianor True (Ed.) Reviewed by Mary Sue Rose Sheldon Jackson College, Alaska, USA Alianor True (Ed.). Wildfire: A Reader. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001. 248 pp. ISBN 1-55963-907-5 (paperback) US$17.95. Recycled, acid-free paper. The questions rage on. Set fires? Fight fires? Let fires burn without intervention? Scientists and environmentalists have been arguing for years about wildfire management. Editor Alianor True, nature writer and firefighter, has gathered an informative and extremely readable collection of essays and book segments on wildfire. Drawing from 24 sources, True brings together thinking on wildfire, beginning with fire tales from the voices of Native Americans up to modern voices experiencing the severe fire season of 2000 in the United States. Thinking about wildfire management continues to evolve and this book captures the evolution. It is organized around shifts in thinking on wildfire management. Because both ancient and modern fires play a defining role in history, writers throughout the ages have attempted to convey the power, beauty, terror, and changes wrought by fire. All of these aspects are captured by the selections. Part I: Big Country, Big Fires includes, in addition to Native American tales, excerpts by Meriwether Lewis, Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Mark Twain, and Stephen J. Pyne. Part II: Of Fire and Landscape covers the time period from the mid-1920s through the mid-1980s when the way Americans related to the environment changed radically. The wilderness was no longer considered untamable. Dams, pesticides, and widespread fire suppression were the norm. Economic values prevailed. Writings included in this middle section of the book are by Aldo Leopold, Norman Maclean, Margaret Millar, Roger Caras, Edward Abbey, and Ed Engle. Illustrative of the power captured by True is an excerpt chosen from Panther by Roger Caras. The fire, only minutes old, had already consumed millions of lives, billions upon billions, really if the insects were included. Small pools had been sucked dry in seconds as the fire passed overhead. With a sizzling, snapping sound, water vanished and the mud curled and cracked and turned ash-gray. Birds rising late from grassy hides were snatched up by the heat and smashed to the ground, where they kicked convulsively for a second or

Jack and the Signifying Machines

Jack and the Signifying Machines______ David Crandall I hope there's an animal out there nobody's everfound. And I hope nobodyfinds it. — Wendell Berry, quoting his daughter1 Undecideable Questions Let's talk about Jack. Little old Jack: cute Jack, backward Jack, JungJack , Disney-Jack, Chase-Jack, Jack the unbeliever, Jack the lovable sociopath. That little terror of the mountains. A number of questions spring to mind. These are familiar: Who is he? What is the real, authentic essence ofJack? What do we mean when we say "authentic," and who says it? What constitutes "creativity" in folk traditions? Where does Jack gofrom here? Does he need to be rescued? From whom? And so forth. One of the problems with these questions is that they are, in the form they are posed, undecideable. The answer depends on what you want from the answer. Aperforming folk-teller, a tenured scholar from North Carolina, an untenured one from California, a collector at the Smithsonian or a filmmaker may all give different answers. Would we like it if the answers were all the same? Further, an answer arrived at in one discipline will always be redundant with the assumptions and goals of that discipline. Whoever preaches, preaches to the choir. Different preachers, different choirs. Jack himself would roll his eyes and head for the road—which is, after all, where the action is. "Where the action is" is, I believe, a great place to start. Because the point I want to make is that the story of Jack is best understood as a pragmatics of Jack: whether they're archetypal, Freudian, German or Scots, one quality the tales have in common is that they've been around for a long while, and they've been around for a reason. There's something useful in the tradition; it does something, or even a whole set of things. Of course, Jack can be taken and used for things—that's been proven: a number of careers can attest to that. But that's notwhat I mean. 1 Farming: A Hand Book (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971). 29 The tales do things, a number of things. Now you Jungians may be nodding your heads, but I'm sorry, you'll have to get your own grant (or better, read Joyce Hancock's Jungian treatment of a Jack tale in this journal). I'm talking about the tradition as a body of indirect discourse, its interaction with various regimes ofsigns, its capacity for lines offlight. In other words, I'm interested in its existence as a rhizome. That cluster of jargon brings me to my major source for this discussion, other than the tales themselves and associated background material.3 In the aftermath of the 1968 revolutionary movements in Europe, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychiatrist Felix Guattari wrote A Thousand Plateaus.11 It is part of a larger work, Capitalism and Schizophreniaf that undertakes to create a new descriptive language, a pragmatics that matches the complexity of interlocking systems— physical, cultural, political, economic—which produce the reality we live in. It's a maddeningbook—reading it canbe like forcing your head through a shrub—but the insight it offers is worth the scrapes. First, we should look at some terms Deleuze and Guattari have coined in creating their new language. Rhizome The central image in Deleuze and Guattari's book is the rhizome. G? botany, this term refers to underground, root-like lateral stems that can sprout either leaves or roots. Deleuze and Guattari generalize this term to refer to a complex structure of rhizome-like, polyvalent connections, and more generally still to the sort of network botanical rhizomes give rise to. Another coinage is the adjective rhizomatic to 2 "'Raglif Jaglif Teetartlif Pole/ A Folk Myth," AH vol. 15 no. 2 (Spring 1987): 27-45. 3 One source I found especially helpful is William Bernard McCarthy's Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 4 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 5 A Thousand Plateaus is the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The...

Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and their Tellers. Edited by William Bernard McCarthy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. 290 pp. Hardbound, $45.00; Softbound, $16.95.

Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and their Tellers. Edited by William Bernard McCarthy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. 290 pp. Hardbound, $45.00; Softbound, $16.95.

The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic (review)

306 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:2 history and anthropology. But, in the short run, Darnton's sensitivity as a reader of culture would be complemented by a similar talent that had mastered the rhetorical and narrative strategies of early modem novelists. The result could be the ideal book: an historically and culturally sophisticated analysis of the whole circuit of communication, from the collection of rags for paper to the refinement of linguistic and rhetorical techniques that produced books that made the times tremble. Ronald C. Rosbottom Amherst College Bill Christopherson. 77ie Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. xi + 208pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-8203-1530-3. The title of this book alludes to a scene in Brown's Arthur Mervyn, in which the hero, searching an empty house in plague-stricken Philadelphia, catches sight in a mirror of a human figure with "a tawny skin, a form grotesquely misproportioned, brawny as Hercules " (p. 105), which strikes him on the temple, knocking him senseless. For Bill Christopherson, this image suggests Brown's overriding concern as an author of "American tales" portraying "the condition of our country." In his four Gothic novels written between 1798 and 1800, Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly, Brown seeks to alert his readers to the "grotesque self (p. 108) which lies beneath the new American republic's enlightened self-image. His purpose, however, is less to frighten than to awaken: his fiction offers a testing-ground for "psychological, philosophical, moral, and sociopolitical dilemmas central to turn-of-the-century America" (p. ix). Christopherson 's study provides a salutary corrective to early twentieth-century criticism, which focused almost exclusively on the psychological symbolism of Brown's novels. Building on more recent, historically oriented essays by Larzer Ziff, William Hedges, Robert S. Levine, Edwin S. Fussell, and others, Christopherson's book is a work of synthesis and consolidation rather than of major innovation. Nevertheless, it is to be welcomed as the first full-length study of Brown as a writer persistently engaged with national and political concerns. Before examining the American character of Brown's fiction, Christopherson devotes his first chapter to characterizing America itself, rightly emphasizing the political turbulence which formed the background to Brown's career as a novelist. Taking as his starting-point the familiar view of early America as a "culture of contradictions," he provides a detailed account of a nation undergoing revolutionary changes on all fronts: economic, social, and religious, as well as political and philosophical. The chief index to the American national temperament in the 1790s, however, was the reaction to the French Revolution. The changed perception of events in France from embodying high ideals to instituting atrocities led to a crisis in American national identity and a sharp polarization of political views. According to Christopherson, Brown's Gothic novels , written in this period of "bipartisan conflict" (p. 12), are post-revolutionary fictions concerned with the dangers of freedom, individualism, rationalism, and self-assertion. In a further preliminary chapter, entitled 'Toward an American Romance," Christopherson introduces Brown's fictional method and style. He singles out two aspects of the author's comments on the art of novel-writing, his interest in different forms of national literature, and his emphasis on the necessary interplay of history and romance. REVIEWS 307 Through a discussion of Brown's first and last published works of fiction, the short, serialized pieces The Man at Home (1798) and Memoirs ofCarwin, the Biloquist (1803-5), he shows that the interaction between historical themes and fictional concerns is a constant preoccupation throughout Brown's œuvre. It is odd, however, to find no mention here of Brown's major theoretical statement on fiction, "Walstein's School of History," in which he presents a critique of tiie autobiographical narrative in terms that bear directly on his own formal experiments. The absence of any sense of Brown's sceptical use of the first-person narrative makes Christopherson's remarks on fictional technique the weakest part of this study. Its strength lies in its trenchant argument for the inseparability of public and private concerns. The story is one of a shift from...

Awful Disclosures: Women's Evidence in the Escaped Nun's Tale

Popular American tales of women's escapes from Roman Catholic convents were important manifestations of the virulent anti-Catholicism of the 1830s and 1850s. These stories also reveal how questions of evidence were imbricated with the woman question in nineteenth-century American culture. “Fictional” and “nonfictional” versions of these narratives attempt to prove their veracity, using a common standard of evidence and shared methods of authentication, documentation, and corroboration—including a reliance on their Protestant audience's reading history. Yet the multiple voices and forms and the visual, as well as verbal, rhetoric that the telling of the escaped nun's story entails work to destabilize feminine spiritual, religious, and moral authority. The escaped nun's intertextual story expresses and contains a cultural anxiety about young Protestant women and their influence in the remaking of American Protestant religious practices.

Jack in two worlds: contemporary North American tales and their tellers

The known to all of us from and the Beanstalk is the hero of a cycle of tales brought to this country from the British Isles. Jack in Two Worlds is a unique collection that brings together eight of these stories as transcribed from actual performances by tellers and eight interpretive essays by leading folktale scholars. The two worlds in the book's title refer to the Jack tales' popularity first among traditional Appalachian taletellers and now among storytelling revivalists. The tellers included in this volume represent both worlds. Unlike previous collections of Jack tales, in which the stories were heavily revised and rewritten, the tales in this volume have been transcribed verbatim and are presented in a format that preserves much of the oral quality of the taletellers' craft. The result is a body of richly nuanced tales that can be read with pleasure both by scholars who are studying the Jack tale tradition and by general readers who love a good story. The taletellers are Stewart Cameron, Donald Davis, Ray Hicks, Bonelyn Lugg Kyofski, Maud Long, Frank Proffitt, Jr., Leonard Roberts, and Marshall Ward. The essayists are Bill Ellis, Carl Lindahl, William Bernard McCarthy, W. F. H. Nicolaisen, Cheryl Oxford, Joseph Daniel Sobol, Kay Stone, Ruth Stotter, and Kenneth A. Thigpen.

A Coyote Reader ed. by William Bright

Reviews 71 order, Boyer shows that Reed not onlyuses the black heritage to help America find its bearings again but also celebrates the vitality and similarities of all Americans. Like Reed, however, Boyer seems tentative. Why must we endure Reed on Christian failings and Christian intelligence? Christianity has no mo­ nopoly on either violence or smart weapons, as the Middle East proves daily. Deplorable too are Boyer’s210 (count 'em) manneristic contractions; example, “it’sthis desire . . . that’s . . .central.”Reed’sstyle’sbetter. So’s Peter Wild’s, though he’s also contraction-addicted. Wild’s Ann Zwinger, though—“though”being one ofhis favoritewords—iseminently read­ able, informative, and ofvalue to traditionalists. Wild sketches his subject’slife, offers an essaywhich isa bit preachy and too lengthy (at 20% ofhis total text) on the nature essay genre, and then moves to “Zwinger’s Solution” and “Zwinger’s Books.”Her solution is to write old-fashioned nature books and in them to combine descriptions ofnatural localeswith personal anecdotal bits— all with painterly detail, self-deprecation, humor, irony, and “uncanniness.” Wild shows that in her books Zwinger “strikes an admirable blend of the amiable and the informative,”as she records her canyon hikes, river trips, and Bajajaunts, and depicts seasonal changes in her beloved Colorado. The de­ tailed discussion of Windin theRock: TheCanyonlandsofSoutheastern Utah(1988), with which Wild closes, demonstrates that Zwinger can “re-create her impres­ sions ofthe trip [down Honaker Trail] and reenact on the page the restorative powers she feels in nature.”Wild’s sophisticated, poetic prose can be as admi­ rable as that ofhis subject. ROBERT L. GALE University ofPittsburgh A Coyote Reader. Edited by William Bright. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 202 pages, $30.00/$13.00.) A CoyoteReaderis a solid piece ofwork throughout, a good introduction to Old Man Coyote of Native American legend. The preface draws essential distinctions between European “animal stories” and the “personages with names like Frog (or) Coyote” who appear in native American tales; this is followed by a brief but essential discussion of translation. Then come three general chapters on, respectively, tricksters, Coyotein European literature, and Coyote’smythic background. Each ofthe followingfourteen chapters explores one of Coyote’s many aspects, and each ends with a brief but informative discussion of the relationship (or lack thereof) between the actual biological animal and Old Man Coyote. Chapters include: thewanderer, theworld-shaper, the glutton, the loser, the oudaw, the pragmatist, the survivor. In addition to traditional narratives (many freshly retranslated as narrative poems), the text 72 WesternAmerican Literature includes fine contemporary narrative poems by Leslie Silko, Peter Blue Cloud, Simon Ortiz and WendyRose, aswell as byGarySnyder, DavidWagoner,Jarold Ramsey and Dell Hymes, among others. Bright’s own discussions are supple­ mented byessaysor excerptsfrom Snyder, Ramsey, and PeterCoyote. The book concludes with an excellent bibliography. Bright’s preface makes it clear that he stands firmly with those who have “proposed ‘ethnopoetic translations’ which present the texts as a form of ‘measured verse’and which recognize the lineas a basic unit.”Of the generally acknowledged leaders of this school, Bright prefers (and practices) the more “poetic”versions ofDell Hymes overwhat one might call the “verse drama”of Dennis Tedlock; none of Tedlock’s versions appear here, while Hymes is represented by both translations and original verse. Similarly, contemporary author Leslie Silko’spoetry isincluded, but such fine prose as “Coyote Holds A Full House In His Hands”isabsent. Bright doesn’t simply neglect prose versions. He praises faintly Jarold Ramsey’s Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature ofthe Oregon Country as “the best ofthe prose translations ofCoyote stories despite the tendency ofprose to lose much ofthe feelofNativeAmerican originals”and suggests (in afootnote) thatBarryLopez’sGivingBirthtoThunder, SleepingwithHisDaughter: CoyoteBuilds North America is “to be avoided” for its lack of “stated provenance” and the “extreme license” with which its narratives are retold. Thus, while A Coyote Readeroffers a fine exploration ofCoyote’smany incarnations, Bright’sdistrust ofprose keeps him from offering a fully representative selection of contempo­ rary approaches to Coyote narratives, whether original or in translation. Nonetheless, A CoyoteReaderjoins the smallgroup ofessential Coyote books on my shelf (where it may sit uneasily, given Bright’s opinion of some of the others on...