American Voices Research Articles

Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, and: Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa

Reviewed by: Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, and: Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa D. N. Deluna Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. ix + 258 pages. King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. xvi + 198 pages. The emergence over the past few decades of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Warrior Woman (1976), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), Hisaye Yamamoto’s newly appreciated “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” (1951), David Hwang’s Madame Butterfly (1989), Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club (1989), and Frank Chin’s epic Gunga Din Highway (1994) has helped establish a creditable Asian American presence in the world of contemporary letters. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong suggests that these literary benchmarks share structural affinities with the whole of twentieth-century Asian American literature, affinities that can ultimately be traced to collective experiences of Asians in white racist America. King-Kok Cheung claims that although multiculturalists have welcomed Asian American literary talents as pertinacious political voices of their communities, the subject of Asian Americans “speaking up” should be reassessed in light of Japanese and Chinese cultural norms that value reticence. Such a reassessment, Cheung argues, is carried out by Yamamoto, Kingston, and Kogawa—whose major works are the focus of Articulate Silences. Wong’s book is a welcome sequel to Elaine Kim’s pioneering book Asian American Literature (1982). Cheung’s takes scholarly discourse in the field to a new level of virtuosity and intellectual rigor. Wong aims to conjure a substantial and coherent Asian American literary tradition. As she states in her book’s introduction (entitled “Constructing an Asian American Textual Coalition”), such a tradition would be raised on the model of a political interest group and should function to ensure that Asian American voices are more generously accommodated within college humanities curricula. Reading Asian American Literature examines descriptions, images, and scenes from a wide variety of twentieth-century Asian American fiction and autobiography by such familiar figures as Tan, Chin, and Kingston, and by such lesser-known writers of differing generations and backgrounds as Pardee Lowe (Father and Glorious Descendant [1943]), Monica Sone (Nisei Daughter [1953]), the Pinovian Bienenido Santos, Bharati Mukherjee, and Hawaiian Darrell Lum. In this literary corpus, Wong claims [End Page 996] to find recurrent and distinctive versions of motifs that exist in tandem with the key themes of Necessity and Extravagance, defined as “contrasting modes of existence and operation, one contained, survival-driven and conservation-minded, the other attracted to freedom, excess, emotional expressiveness, and autotelism” (13). Separate chapters are devoted to fictive representations of food and eating, character doubles, mobility, and the artist. Wong’s commentaries on her select materials are typically brief, but richly detailed and consistently interesting. Especially stimulating is her discussion of the intense eating of uninviting food in Obasan and The Woman Warrior, which she reads as symbolic renditions of Asian American immigrants’ survival-obsessed determination to endure and even extract sustenance from hardships experienced in America. Her treatment of Frank Chin’s trademark heroizing representations of Chinese American males as roaming bandits, boxcar willies, and highway speedfreaks is also highly engaging. In these depictions Wong finds submerged images of disabled mobility and traces them to the history of white racist exclusions of Asian Americans from the practice and ethos of expansionistic land settlement in the Old West. While Wong’s exegetical skills are evident, her claim for a distinctive tradition in Asian American letters based on unique versions of familiar literary motifs is unconvincing. Her descriptions of “Asian American motifs” seem to encourage comparativist perspectives that she disallows. For example, her identification of the motif of the “big eating” of gross food and “quasi-cannibalism, (28–44),” might invite Americanists to recall familiar, parallel representations in the coeval work of Frank Norris and Stephen Crane: in Norris’ portrait of the violet-eating “Brute” and in his grotesque depiction of the wedding celebration dinner in McTeague, and in Crane’s poem “In the Desert,” which features that squatting, naked creature who, “heart in his hands,” “ate of it” and...

Letter to a Husband

Letter to a Husband Reetika Vazirani (bio) Fifth day past the full moon you ended fourteen years with Rama in the forest. I took the children to another house. It seemed useless to wait for a shadow that falls on the road at five but doesn’t come in. You wore your oldest sandals. Are they broken now? One night the ones you left I put out at the temple. Various men must be wearing them— I don’t even know who they are. As for the city, the courtesans prepare annually for your arrival. They do not think of my position. Like you, they never felt the taut skin of this native land burdened by so much waiting; and all along, your brother kept a seat for you at Nandigram, white umbrella of the state. Therefore our eldest, Govindas, will not assume your tasks until council reconvenes. I am teaching at the school near Palika Bazaar, so crowded has it become, but I have seen all five children through and decided to stay on; and with their classmates also gone, new enrollments every year, it is less well-known I am your wife. Lately the students confuse me with Memsahib Arvinda; she has taken up teaching, too old to entertain— you remember her?— favored by all your brothers who kept her house on the western compound near the mali’s house. I knew everything but didn’t say. Sometimes I see her across the maidan in her white sari. One day I will approach her. I have lost only you. How many must be gone from her! So I give this letter to the son of your harness-keeper who still speaks as if you are coming through the gate. And when you receive this, go to her: at dusk, she waits in the clearing where the same mali plants too many marigolds because the champak trees never took root. mali (Hindi): gardener maidan (Hindi): field Works by Reetika Vazirani • Letter to a Husband • Reading the Poem About the Yew Tree Reetika Vazirani Reetika Vazirani is a recipient of a 1994 “Discovery”/The Nation award. Her poems have appeared in various periodicals, including Agni, The American Voice, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review and The Nation. In 1990, her poems first began appearing in Callaloo. Copyright © 1995 Charles H. Rowell

Desperate Times

Reading the Poem About the Yew Tree Reetika Vazirani (bio) Reading the poem about the yew tree, I realize I do not recall the trees of my youth, the particular leafy shapes and blooming seasons and their moist odors in the heat. I could look them up in a tree guide and mend the holes in my memory— but then it would not be my memory, it would be the guide’s. All I remember today is the rapid chatter of tea-colored women, their plump arms, fingers reaching out to pinch us when we were small; lips passing hushed remarks about others in the town, like branches shifting in the wind. The grownups talked as if they hadn’t heard any local news but had to inquire after rumors. You mean to say she is tolerating that scoundrel Gopal? (though they’d all been to the wedding). And their voices always verged on anticipation, as if waiting for a great event to unfold— a heavy rain to cool the grass or the breeze with some news. But they were indoors perpetually expecting another guest to arrive, so that when the somebody appeared they would congratulate the guest in unison: See that, we were just speaking of you,you will live long. Now, planning a trip to my homeplace, I’m told our friends are gone, have moved or passed away. But I imagine the same kinds of trees are growing now as then, and they will be expecting me when I arrive. Works by Reetika Vazirani • Letter to a Husband • Reading the Poem About the Yew Tree Reetika Vazirani Reetika Vazirani is a recipient of a 1994 ‘Discovery’/The Nation award. Her poems have appeared in various periodicals, including Agni, The American Voice, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review and The Nation. In 1990, her poems first began appearing in Callaloo. Copyright © 1995 Charles H. Rowell

Towards the Poetization of the "Field of Manners"

In awarding 1993 Nobel Prize for literature African American novelist Toni Morrison, Swedish Academy called Morrison literary artist of first rank whose work is unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at same time rich variation. The Academy statement then applauded Morrison's linguistic achievement by proclaiming that writer delves into language itself, a language she wants liberate from fetters of race. As Paul Gray correctly observes, Academy made an honorable choice Morrison, but for at least one wrong reason. Her purpose, Gray notes, is the blackness of her characters and bestow them an abstract that can understand. It is, instead, insist upon particular racial identities of her fictional people - black women and men under stresses peculiar them and their station U.S. - and to break through limitations and prejudices of those lucky enough read her fiction (Gray 87). Indeed, what is so problematic about Swedish Academy's statement is that search for abstract universalities only justifies, but also necessitates, what British scholar Raymond Williams calls of essential. Williams posits that traditional notion of typicality literature is in effect a rendering of 'universals,' those characteristics which purport be permanently important elements of human nature and human condition (101). The problem with upholding traditional definition of typicality, Williams suggests, is that, instead of looking at social and historical reality as a dynamic process, people, seeking out permanent elements of human social situation, gravitate toward not only recognition of essential but through this recognition . . . its desirability and inevitability (102). African American feminist scholar Mae G. Henderson sees problem of the rhetoric of universality be as cultural as it is political. Rather than canonizing any voice, including African American voice, Henderson would prefer the privileging of difference, or multiplicity of 'interested readings,' order resist the totalizing character of much theory and criticism - readings that can enter into dialogic relationship with other 'interested readings' - past and present. Henderson remains concerned that the rhetoric of . . . has excluded gender, race, and class perspectives from dominant literary-critical discourse as well as socio-political centers of power, and she observes that the reduction of multiplicity undifferentiated sameness . . . has empowered white feminists speak for all women, black men speak for all blacks, and white males speak for everyone (156).(2) Indeed, contrary what is suggested Swedish Academy's statement about Toni Morrison's achievement with language, best writings African American literature are those that use languages that transcend African American experience, but those which are inspired by what Morrison calls huge silences literature, things that had never been articulated, printed or imagined (M. Brown 6A). The best writings African American literature challenge cultural, political, and social configuration of literary voice America with their insistence on celebrating African American cultural heritage. As Morrison once told a reporter from New York Times, My world did shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.(3) To understand ethos of contemporary African American literature is, therefore, reappropriate our understanding of dialectical relationship between specificity and and between marginality and centralization; appreciate contemporary African American writers' accomplishments is understand importance for African Americans achieve what Houston A. Baker, Jr. …

Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation.

Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation.

Neon Pow-Wow: New Native American Voices of the Southwest ed. by Anna Lee Walters

376 WesternAmerican Literature tude of place or mind. Some came to Idaho specifically to be hermits, to isolate themselves from the entrapments of civilization: law and order, diet, domestic­ ity. Some, like Wheelbarrow Annie, found seclusion to be a great and good companion and wed it for better or for worse. Through research and byhaving a good ear for story, Conley captures these persons as legend and as character. His journalistic-styled essays tell the tales and refine the facts. He has recorded more than “Hermits, Solitaires, and Individualists.”He has fleshed out a time, an atmosphere, when the quirky, selfreliant person trusted that distance and seclusion go hand-in-hand. A notion much proved by Beaver Dick, Buckskin Bill, The Hermit ofImpassable Canyon, The Ridgerunner, and Dugout Dick. A notion unattested by the Wildhorse Cowgirl and Free Press Frances; yet, a notion too soon in its dotage for the Outback Outlaw, Claude Dallas, who murdered two Idaho Fish and Game Officers in 1981. For Dallas, the Wild West wasn’t over. At the heart of Idaho Loners is what every reader might expect and want: these strange and sometimes unruly individuals have left or are leaving their mark on Idaho and the imagination of Idahoans. There is an undercurrent throughout that suggests the familiaritywith which Idahoans relate their knowl­ edge of these peculiar folks who live, principally, in Idaho’s Outback. This is a book about characterand characters. Each coot conjured up is unique of mind and spirit: Cougar Dave, The Cove Recluse, even the good All-American former spy—The Poet. And to help the reader settle in and believe the truth, there are pictures and map. The pictures are specific, life-giving images of the characters, often with their remote locale as backdrop. The map is less specific, just enough to jumpstart a curious reader stranded along a dirt road. Idaho Loners: Hermits, Solitaires, and Individualists is a handsome book, informative, and well worth reading. WILLIAM STUDEBAKER CollegeofSouthern Idaho Neon Pow-Wow: New Native American Voices of the Southwest. Edited by Anna Lee Walters. (Flagstaff: Northland Publishing, 1993. 131 pages, $12.95.) This anthology groups the works of twenty-three writers from New Mexico and Arizona and was inspired bythe tremendous success ofthe 1992 “Returning the Gift” conference that brought together hundreds of Native American writers. The selections in this anthology focus on the importance of storytelling as the principle agent for the survival of the Native American culture. The first selection is a prose poem by Della Frank (Navajo) which begins with these words of affirmation, “I am that which is: A Navajo Person” and Reviews 377 proceeds to define what it means to be Navajo. The poem presents one of the most important themes in Native American literature today, namely the search for a sense of identity. Indeed, all the poems and stories included in this anthology form a kaleidoscope that strives to define the Native American culture through its traditions as well as through the somber reality of life for Native Americans today. Several selections stand out in this anthology. Carlson Vicenti’s story “Hitching,” set in Colorado, presents a demoralizing vignette of urban life, plagued by pollution, destruction, and intolerance. Also disturbing is the story “Neon Pow-Wow” which has inspired the titled of the anthology and which points to the destructive effects of alcoholism on Native Americans. Esther G. Belin’s prose poem “Blues-Ing on the Brown Vibe” features the traditional Southwestern trickster figure Coyote making his way through what the poet calls “navajoland.” Lorenzo Boca’s “Ten Rounds” offers a visual as well as a spiritual experience. The poem is composed of ten lines; each line is written in a circle and provides an insight into Native American world views. Many stories retell traditional myths or legends such as “WhyThere Are Blackberries Around Cedar Trees.”Vee F. Browne’s “How To Be A Southwest Indigenous Writer” is an inspiring and humorous essay that offers a parody ofthe traditional image of the writer to which is added a generous pinch of Indian humor. For the past twenty-five years, writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, Louise Erdrich...

Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation.

Journal Article Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation. Ed. by C. Peter Ripley, Roy E. Finkenbine, Michael F. Hembree, and Donald Yacovone. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. xxvi, 306 pp. Cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-8078-2072-5. Paper, $10.95, ISBN 0-80784404-7.) Get access Janet Harrison Shannon Janet Harrison Shannon Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81, Issue 3, December 1994, Pages 1314–1315, https://doi.org/10.2307/2081528 Published: 01 December 1994

Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation.

Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation.

Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African American Voices.

Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African American Voices.

Satire in Colonial Spanish America: Turning the New World Upside down

Satire, the use of criticism cloaked in wit, has been employed since classical times to challenge the established order of society. In colonial Spanish America during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, many writers used satire to resist Spanish-imposed social and literary forms and find an authentic Latin American voice. This study explores the work of eight satirists of the colonial period and shows how their literary innovations had a formative influence on the development of the modern Latin American novel, essay, and autobiography. The writers studied here include Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Juan del Valle y Caviedes, Cristobal de Llerena, and Eugenio Espejo. Johnson chronicles how they used satire to challenge the New World as Utopia myth propagated by Spanish authorities and criticize the Catholic church for its role in fulfilling imperialistic designs. She also shows how their marginalized status as Creoles without the rights and privileges of their Spanish heritage made them effective satirists. From their writings, she asserts, emerges the first self-awareness and national consciousness of Spanish America.

Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices.

Published in 1884, Huckleberry Finn has become one of the msot widely taught novels in curricula. But where did it come from, and what it so distinctive? Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. In Was Huck Black? Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics, literary theory, and folklore to shed new light on the role African-American voices played in the genesis of Huckleberry Finn. Given that book's importance in culture, her analysis illuminates, as well, how African-American voices have shaped our sense of what is distinctively American about literature. literary historians have told a largely segregated story: white writers come from white literary ancestors, black writers from black ones. The truth is more complicated and more interesting. While African-American culture shaped Huckleberry Finn, that novel, in turn, helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century. As Ralph Ellison commented in an interview with Fishkin, Twain made it possible for many of us to find our own voices. Was Huck Black? dramatizes the crucial role of black voices in Twain's art, and takes the first steps beyond traditional cultural boundaries to unveil an literary heritage that is infinitely richer and more complex than we had thoguht.

American Pictures: Constructing and Considering Images of the Past

In 1844, in an essay entitled The Poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented, We have yet no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of incomparable material, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Calling for the creation of a unique American vision, Emerson challenged his readers to focus on, our logrolling, stumps and their politics, fisheries, Negroes, and Indians, boasts, and repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas..... Seeing the wealth of these American materials would, Emerson believed, lead to the development of a new language of symbols and canon of images. But, he warned, while America is a poem in eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.' Emerson's call is now thought to have been answered most effectively by Walt Whitman. In his poem Song of Myself, Whitman was able to absorb the new nation's many movements into a distinctly American voice. This powerful chord of individualism, however, obscures the work of other creative souls trying to fashion an image of America: novelists, journalists, historians,

Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation

Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation

Witness for freedom: African American voices on race, slavery, and emancipation

Witness for freedom: African American voices on race, slavery, and emancipation

Writing Nature: Silko and Native Americans as Nature Writers

Historians such as William Cronon (Changes Land, 1983) and Wilbur R. Jacobs (Indians as Ecologists, 1980); ecologists such as Stewart L. Udall (The Quiet Crisis, 1963); and religion scholars such as Christopher Vecsey (American Indian Environmental Religions, 1980) and Vine Deloria, Jr. (God is Red, 1973) argue that Americans respect and revere land, environment, and human interrelatedness to that environment ways foreign to European immigrants. Since Pleistocene, ecological farming and hunting practices of many groups of Americans supported their millions of people for thousands of years without endangering land or land's animal and vegetable species.(1) What these historians and other scholars are discovering about ecologically-minded Americans seems not only to be evident religions, myths, and farming and hunting practices, but also seems to be reflected their literature. Indeed, Americans -- along with such European Americans as Thoreau, Muir, Krutch, Leopold, Abbey, and Dillard -- contribute to genre of American nature writing. Although he does not anthologize any American writers his collection of American nature writing, Thomas Lyon does acknowledge importance of such writers: in American mythic narrative there is a strong sense of power of nature, particularly dignity and respectability, literal sense, of animals (Lyon, This xv). In Norton Book of Nature Writing (1990), editors Robert Finch and John Elder also note importance of American voice, and their anthology includes pieces by N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko. With this exception, insofar as any such generalization is valid, Americans are land's unheralded nature writers. What is a nature writer, after all, if not one who sees environment as a scientist but who describes as a humanist? According to Lyon, best nature writing has [a basic rightness of gestalt], and has also rehability of science (Nature Essay 221). Joseph Wood Krutch suggests that nature writers keep an account of their with natural world; whether engineers, surveyors, naturalists, adventurers, or journalists, nature writers are concerned with 'knowledge about' only insofar as helps define or color that experience (xiii). Genre does not matter. Nature writing is writing about nature. For these writers, reality is quite as likely as fantasy to provide powerful aesthetic and emotional experiences (Krutch xiii). Besides scientific knowledge (astronomy and ecology, for example), a knowledge of nature is evident literature that transcends conventional Western scientific thought. In Native American Attitudes to Environment Momaday calls this knowledge or understanding of natural world reciprocal appropriation, by which he means that human beings invest themselves in landscape, and at same time incorporate landscape into [their] own most fundamental experience (80). Momaday's example is a story of an expectant father who refuses to hunt deer -- even though he and his family are hungry. As man explains, it is inappropriate that I should take just now when I am expecting gift of life (82). Comparison of American Indian literature with its contemporary Euro-American counterpart reveals startling contrast between two approaches to nonhuman world. The European attitude can be traced easily from domination motif of Old Testament to colonial writers such as Winthrop, Bradford, Gookin, Rowlandson, and Mather. As Cecelia Tichi points out, Puritans New England used biblical authority to justify land appropriation and development (1-36). Even among nature writers there exists a dramatic difference between American and Euro-American approaches. Thomas Lyon points out, for example, that for the Indian, as has often been noted, there was no wilderness here, sense of a dichotomous term opposed to 'civilization' (Lyon, This xv). …

Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery and Emancipation

Encompassing a broad range of African American voices, from Frederick Douglass to anonymous fugitive slaves, this collection collects eighty-nine exceptional documents that represent the best of the five-volume Black Abolitionist Papers . In these compelling texts African Americans tell their own stories of the struggle to end slavery and claim their rights as American citizens, of the battle against colonization and the back to Africa movement, and of their troubled relationship with the federal government.

“Hello, Central?” Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems by Michèle Martin

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 597 “Hello, Central?” Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems. By Michèle Martin. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. Pp. xi + 219; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95. “Hello, Central?” is a useful addition to the small but growing research literature on the social history of telephony, a significant subset of which concerns the role of gender. Like Carolyn Marvin (When Old Technologies Were New, 1989) and Lana Rakow (Gender on the Line, 1991), Michèle Martin is intrigued by the affinity between women and the telephone and makes that the core of her book. In particular, focusing on the Bell Company’s Montreal system between 1878 and 1920, Martin argues that women helped shape telephony. They did so both as operators and as callers. Drawing on memoirs and other documents, Martin describes the history of telephone operators. Brought in to replace unruly boys, young women initially provided personal service that compensated customers for the inconveniences of the balky technical service. As the equipment improved, Bell constrained and made impersonal the operators’ role. The company taught the young women to give up tbeir working-class tones and to develop a bourgeois voice, one which “disarms anger, repels insolence” (p. 94). Time was money, so the company trained operators to speak quickly—rolling r’s took too long—and gave them specific, short phrases to use. Operators’ private use of the telephone, to chat with one another or customers, was severely restrained. Nevertheless, Martin argues, operators found ways to resist, to gossip, to eavesdrop. In the early years, Bell managers disdained women customers and the social calls they made. But women persisted in using the technol­ ogy to sustain friendships and family ties. Martin suggests that, among other reasons for their favoring the telephone, calling allowed Victorian women to “visit” without getting dressed up in those hor­ rendous clothes (p. 151). The telephone companies eventually sur­ rendered to the customers, she argues. Bell managers recognized, and finally even marketed, the telephone as a “psychological support against loneliness, stress, and fatigue” (p. 149). The practice and sell­ ing of telephone sociability was therefore created by women. “Hello, Central?” also describes, by way of background, the history to 1920 of Canadian telephony. Martin recounts the development of the hardware, especially noting efforts to maintain privacy during calls; Bell’s no-holds-barred fights against competitors; tfie coming of regulation; and so on. The treatment of the general history is thinner and less persuasive than the gender material. She often returns to the unremarkable conclusions that the Bell Company was trying to make money (instead of providing a public good) and that, because of its cost, telephone service was largely a privilege of the privileged classes. (For example, “Bell made its decision to open an exchange not 598 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE according to the needs of the majority, but rather with a view to ‘seejing] a fair margin of profit’ ” [p. 31].) Martin presents a variety of materials—industry journals, letters, news clippings, ads, and so on—from the ample and well-organized archives of Bell Canada. Unfortunately, she often accepts at face value the claims that these sources, usuallyjournalists and industry officials, made—for example, that telephone calling “tamed” loud American voices (p. 96), that calling provided more intimate conversations (p. 158), and that novelty uses of the telephone, like listening to concerts, were widespread. Martin reserves her skepticism only for statements in the industry press or the general press (not always separable in actuality) that were derogatory of women or the working class. Also, the historical sequence of evidence occasionally does not match that of her argument. For example, Martin’s claim that a concern for the privacy of calls only emerged over the years is undercut by a journalistic complaint dated 1877 (p. 143). Despite these objections, the essential elements of Martin’s story ring true. And she has done the emerging field of telephone history a service in marshaling evidence about the early, gendered culture of telephony. Claude S. Fischer Dr. Fischer is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His book, America Calling: A...

Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms

This is a revised and expanded edition of poems by the renowned nineteenth-century Charleston writer and historian. This twentieth anniversary edition of Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms, edited by James Everett Kibler, makes available once again the distinctive poetry of one of South Carolina's foremost men of letters as introduced and annotated by a distinguished scholar of Simms and his poetry. William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) has long held the attention of scholars and general readers alike for his numerous volumes of Southern history and literature, but his poetry - which he considered the truest measure of his literary achievement - has remained largely on the periphery of Simms studies. In 1990 Kibler published the first edition of this volume to make widely available nearly two hundred of the most sophisticated examples of Simms's extant poetry - signed and unsigned, published and unpublished. These poems reveal Simms to be deeply concerned with faith, family, nature, tradition, his native Charleston, and a vision of Southern culture that, while conservative, is more broadly defined than formerly recognized. Simms' mastery of poetic forms is evident as he moves effortlessly from ballads and odes to sonnets and epigrams. His spontaneous lyrics seem modern in their vivid conveyance of emotions, a characteristic rarely matched by his contemporaries, and the rich historical imagination at work in other verses further distinguishes him. This revised edition is augmented with fifteen new poems as well as a new introduction by Kibler reflecting on the past two decades of Simms scholarship. The volume is a clarion call for renewed appreciation of a once forgotten poet now on the cusp of reinstatement as a major American voice.

Harpers Ferry:An Examination of the Theory of “Objective Conflict” in the Plays of Barrie Stavis

Barrie Stavis is not your run of the mill playwright. Some consider him the only playwright today writing serious plays embodying a social, political and historical awareness. And yet, respected as he is by those who have come in contact with his work, he remains something of a forgotten artist, unknown to the public, even theater-goers. As Arthur H. Ballet says in his remarks on Stavis in Contemporary Dramatists, He is a 'pro.' Methodical, organized, enthusiastic, and almost pristinely professional as he is, there is a double irony in the fact that he has never really had a hit on Broadway.' Of course, a Broadway hit is not the only way to establish a successful career as a playwright. There is, however, a discrepancy between Stavis' lack of impact on the general theater-going public and the respect that his work receives from a number of thoughtful critics. This is particularly noteworthy in light of Ballet's assertion that, To non-Americans ... Stavis represents the clearest and 'most' American voice of the time. As perhaps is still true of O'Neill, Stavis seems most American to those who are least American, and he seems most 'universal' to his American audiences.2

American Voices: Five Contemporary Playwrights in Essays and Interviews by Esther Harriott (review)

American Voices: Five Contemporary Playwrights in Essays and Interviews by Esther Harriott (review)