Critical Anthology Research Articles

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theatre and Performance. Edited by Diana Taylor and Sarah J. Townsend. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Pp. xiii + 325. £80.95/$90 Hb; £35.95/$39.95 Pb. - Contemporary Latina/o Theatre: Wrighting Ethnicity. By Jon D. Rossini. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Pp. xii + 253. £33.95/$37.50 Pb.

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theatre and Performance. Edited by Diana Taylor and Sarah J. Townsend. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Pp. xiii + 325. £80.95/$90 Hb; £35.95/$39.95 Pb. - Contemporary Latina/o Theatre: Wrighting Ethnicity. By Jon D. Rossini. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Pp. xii + 253. £33.95/$37.50 Pb.

Modern Drama: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (review)

Reviewed by: Modern Drama: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies Piet Defraeye Martin Puchner , ed. Modern Drama: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 2008. 4 vols. $1,250.00 (Hb). Martin Puchner's four-volume, 1600-page anthology of dramatic criticism is an ambitious project that documents the ideological and theoretical origins of, and practical and critical responses to, modern drama. The collection combines, in his words, [End Page 128] [the] ample and highly opinionated writings of the modern dramatists themselves, the choices made by contemporary directors, the perspectives offered by early theorists and philosophers interested in the emerging canon of modern drama, the various methodological trends and fashions governing scholarship from the 1950s to the present, the changing theater landscape influencing the study of drama, and finally the institutional history of theater studies as a discipline. (16) Starting with Richard Wagner's ardent "The Art-Work of the Future," in which the composer pleads for an "all-faculty" kind of art, and ending with Alan Ackerman's dispassionate reflection on the hermeneutic potential of the close-reading of theatre, Puchner covers 120 years of criticism with a wealth of original material, structured chronologically and thematically. Just about every single essay in the first two volumes is required reading for any serious graduate student of theatre, whether of theory or practice. These introductory volumes contain standard texts, including selections from August Strindberg, Adolphe Appia, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Georg Lukács, but they also provide access to more uncommon sources like Kurt Schwitters's Merz manifesto and T.S. Eliot's thorough reflection on poetic drama. They also offer fresh looks at old themes, such as Toril Moi's fundamental reassessment and reframing of Ibsen's role as a modernist figure. Volume three brings together a divergent collection of recent critical approaches to historical modernist practice, be it through the lens of gender criticism (Judith Stephens, J. Ellen Gainor), gay studies (Laurence Senelick), postcolonial studies (Sandra Richards, David Krasner, Elin Diamond), cultural theory (Shannon Jackson, David Savran), or performance analysis (Christopher Balme, Julie Stone Peters). Critical responses to the practice of acting and design complement the volume nicely. The fourth volume is rather unique for any collection of theatre theory, as it juxtaposes philosophical approaches and theories of aesthetics with performance theory and criticism. Elinor Fuchs's essay on "theatricalist anti-theatricalism" (111) and Erika Fisher-Lichte's commentary on the avant-garde's antitextuality are certainly among the central essays in this volume, as they focus on the crucial question of the performance's textual dependency. Puchner has included two of his own contributions, which deal with the topic of textuality and antitheatricality. Essays by Francis Ferguson, Herbert Lindenberger, Jacques Derrida, Ackerman, Savran, and Julia Kristeva give further prominence to the focus on antitheatricality. Since Bernard Dukore's Dramatic Theory and Criticism (1974) and Avant Garde Drama (1969, with Daniel Gerould) have been out of print, sourcing [End Page 129] reading material for graduate courses on the subject has become challenging. Gerould's Theatre/Theory/Theatre (2000) filled a void, but Puchner's focus on modernism, as well as the scope of his sources, provides an unrivalled resource for reference, reading, and study. Quite a few of the primary articles from Dukore's two collections reappear here (Wagner, Émile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, Maurice Maeterlinck, Lukács, Stanislaw Witkiewicz) and are thus made again available. Some of these (like Maeterlinck's reflections on modern drama) could have done with an updated or new translation. At the same time, however, the inclusion of often difficult-to-access translated sources is precisely what makes the compilation so valuable. The forty-page extract from Peter Szondi's Theory of the Modern Drama is a case in point. An intelligent reflection on the emergence of epic theatre as a logical response to problems of realism and naturalism (essentialized in the paralysis of mimesis), the source is rarely included in critical anthologies. Puchner's introductions are lucid and to the point. While avoiding polemics and simplifications, he engages the reader in the critical process of understanding the stakes of theory while at the same time allowing us a hint of his...

Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology by Jesper Aagaard Petersen

Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology by Jesper Aagaard Petersen

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (review)

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (review)

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (review)

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (review)

Romantic Hellenism, sculpture and Rome

Sculpture retains its freshness for twenty centuries: The Apollo & the Venus are as they were. But books are perhaps the only productions of man coeval with the human race. Sophocles and Shakespear...

The Art of Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: The Art of Fiction Stephen Arata (bio) Henry James , "The Art of Fiction" (1884) Consult just about any anthology of modern literary criticism and you are likely to find Henry James's "The Art of Fiction" somewhere on the premises. This 1884 essay—I am not going out on a limb here—is the best-known theoretical statement on the novel published in Victorian England. Together with a handful of other essays and, more pyrotechnically, the 1907-09 prefaces to the New York edition of his works, "The Art of Fiction" established James's posthumous reputation as the foremost narrative theorist of his era. For Anglo-American critics in the middle decades of the twentieth century, that reputation was decisively shaped by Percy Lubbock and R.P. Blackmur. Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921) and Blackmur's introductory essay to The Art of the Novel (1934) celebrate James for shaking the novel—theory and practice alike—out of its cozy Victorian slumber and charging it with modern sophistication and rigour. For the New Critics who read him by way of Lubbock and Blackmur, it was James's mastery of technique and his attention to novelistic form that separated his achievement from those loose, baggy monsters casually turned out by his immediate forebears. It was likewise, in this view, James's conception of his art as a sacred office that helped deliver narrative fiction from the banal moralism and misguided social activism characteristic of the Victorian novel. Such views have not worn well, and few would now argue either that Victorian novelists were unsophisticated in the practice of their craft or that James's own novels conform more than intermittently to New Critical standards. (Then again, neither would James.) If "The Art of Fiction" no longer seems the proto-Modernist manifesto it once was taken for, it nevertheless remains essential reading for literary critics. Its interest is not merely antiquarian, either. At this historical remove, what is most striking about the essay is the continuing relevance of the case it makes for the activity of criticism itself. In terms that are still recognizable, "The Art of Fiction" validates what we do. If some of James's evaluative criteria seem less compelling than they once did, his impassioned defence of the importance—as well as the pleasure—of criticism retains its freshness. This is not always the case with Matthew Arnold, whose apologies for criticism often sound, well, apologetic, as if Arnold were disappointed with the world for getting itself into such a state that criticism had become necessary and disappointed with himself for giving in to the critical impulse. It is doubtful that Arnold ever believed, as James did, that to exercise our critical faculties is to "enjoy one of the most charming of pleasures" (50). "The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle," James avers a few pages earlier, "but the theory too is interesting" (45). The occasional [End Page 53] dilettantishness of his phrasing should not obscure the serious, indeed crucial, benefits James attributes to acts of responsible criticism. He does not, as Oscar Wilde would a half-decade later, go so far as to say that criticism is on par with the other creative arts, but he does insist that the arts are immeasurably enriched by creative criticism. It seems clear that James was moved to write "The Art of Fiction" primarily in the hope of getting a discussion going. He is less concerned, that is, to insist on the validity of his own critical methodology (though he does so insist) than to open a space for critical debate. Throughout the 1880s, James continually presents himself as a critic in search of someone to talk with. Later commentators have pointed out that the critical landscape was not quite so arid as James made it out to be. There is some truth to their claim, but only some, as anyone who has spent much time reading Victorian periodical literature dating from prior to 1890 will probably attest. Much more common are sentiments such as those expressed by Walter Besant in the lecture to which James's essay was a direct response. "I, for one...

The Spike Lee Reader (review)

Reviewed by: The Spike Lee Reader Deborah Elizabeth Whaley The Spike Lee Reader. Edited by Paula Massood. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2008. Few American film directors can make claims to working primarily as an auteur, that is, as the author, artist, and director of a film, but this term applies to Spike Lee's career in film and the cinema. In his early career, Lee authored, directed, and acted in approximately one film every one-to-two years since his directorial debut She's Gotta Have It in 1986. A graduate of New York University film school, the industry and moviegoers know Lee for his provocative narratives about African American culture and life. A few critical anthologies exist on the director's work, and Lee has co-authored, with Village Voice writer Lisa Jones, production-oriented books published simultaneously with his earlier films. However, as Lee's film repertoire grows, there remains much to say about the meanings and impact of his body of work. Paula Massood's The Spike Lee Reader accomplishes this task. The Spike Lee Reader includes new and several well-known pieces previously published about Lee's work. The previously published pieces work seamlessly with the newer additions. These pieces provide a foundation to remind readers of the discourse established in response to the first decade of his career concerning representations of gender, sexuality, and class. The remainder of the edited collection includes analyses of Lee's more recent films that are lesser examined in critical scholarship. Essays on Lee's documentary work Four Little Girls (1997) and lesser acknowledged films such as the basketball film He Got Game (1998), the half-thriller half-comedy Summer of Sam [End Page 252] (1999), the minstrel parody Bamboozled (2000), and the refreshingly complex bank heist adventure Inside Man (2006), for example, present interdisciplinary methods for looking at Lee's cinematic and narrative accomplishments. Authors in this anthology draw from music, performance, television, material culture, and literature to address a broad range of issues concerning Lee's work, including film as an aspect of historical discourse, racial performance, and audience reception. In her overall assessment of Lee's work over the past three decades, Massood situates Spike Lee as a director who creates "textual systems employing … allusion, and homage [which] explore[s] the shared national trauma of racism and its continuing social, economic, and political affects" (xxiii). It is this characterization of Lee's work as being relevant in terms of representational politics and race relations that has come to define the canon of his work for audiences and critics. The collection begins with feminist interpretations of films She's Gotta Have It, School Daze (1988), and Do The Right Thing (1989), by cultural critics bell hooks, Michelle Wallace, and Wahneema Lubiano, respectively. The latter writings gave birth to some of the most quoted and critical ideas about Lee's work. hooks' presents the persuasive argument that She's Gotta Have It does not constitute a feminist narrative because the lead protagonist does not own her sexuality. Wallace exposes Lee's pattern to use Black female humiliation as plot resolution. Lubiano includes a keen observation concerning Lee's rigid and essentialist Black cultural politics in Do The Right Thing and School Daze. Taken together, hooks, Wallace, and Lubiano remind readers of the representative fallout from Lee's quest to rebuild the image of African American life on screen through a masculinist and neo-nationalist lens. Anna Everett in "Spike, Don't Mess Malcolm Up," recognizes this problem in the film Malcolm X (1992), where she notes that the various stages of X's life are depicted with visual complexity and nuance in the film, while Black women remain couched within a troubling discourse of inadequacy. Comparatively, Craig S. Watkins' "Reel Men," which focuses on Lee's Get On the Bus, illustrates the director's ability to attend to the diversity of gender representation when Lee is representing African American men. Get On the Bus, which is a fictional depiction of a group of diverse Black men who decide to attend the historic Million Man March, was a box office failure, but its mixture of documentary style filmmaking and stylized...

Book Reviews

MankindVolume 6, Issue 11 p. 601-613 Book Reviews First published: June 1968 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1835-9310.1968.tb00338.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed in this article: The Many Faces of Primitive Art: A Critical Anthology. By Douglas Fraser The Administration of the White Australia Policy. By A. C. Palfreeman The Territorial Imperative. By Robert Ardrey Collection of Specimens for Radiocarbon Dating and Interpretation of Results. By H. A. Landform Studies From Australia and New Guinea. Edited by J. N. Jennings and J. A. Mabbutt New Roads To Yesterday. Edited by Joseph R. Caldwell An Introduction to Human Geography. By J. H. G. Lebon Archaeology: An Illustrated Introduction. By Liam de Paor The Discovery of Egypt. By Leslie Greener. Cassell Masada. By Yigael Yadin. Weidenfeld and Nicolson Industrial Archaeology: An Introduction. By Kenneth Hudson Classical Greece. By C. M. Bowra. Time Inc. Archaeology of the Point St George Site, and Tolowa Prehistory. By Richard A The Prehistoric Animal Ecology and Ethno-zoology of the Upper Great Lakes Region. By Charles Edward Cleland Southern Africa. By Brian Fagan. Thames and Hudson Late Woodland Cultures of Southeastern Michigan. By James E. Fitting Australian Aboriginal Stone Implements. By F. D. McCarthy Ethnographic Atlas. By George Peter Murdock Glossa. A Journal of Linguistics Mathinna's People. By Nan Chauncey Volume6, Issue11June 1968Pages 601-613 RelatedInformation

“Poem is What?” Poetic Inquiry in Qualitative Social Science Research

This paper articulates the findings of a two-year Canadian federally-funded postdoctoral study — Poetic inquiry in qualitative research: A critical survey — on the use of poetry in social science qualitative research practices. Based on a 1000+ page annotated bibliography gathered into a critical anthology as the data for this project, the discoveries emerged that are expressed below. The bibliography consists solely of poems included in over 230 studies found for this multidisciplinary project, supported by abstracts and brief contextual notes. Selection criteria for included studies were peer-reviewed journal contributions only, bracketing out anything that had appeared in book form, in ‘Poet's Corners’, and also excluding poems appearing in theses or dissertations. Some of these excluded poems are cited in a separate Appendix. These criteria were made simply to limit the scope of the study to a manageable scale. Most of this poetically-informed scholarship has appeared in the past decade, although some entries date as far back as the 1970's and 80's. Conclusions are that poetic inquiry most often addresses topics with clear affective dimensions, and can be distinguished between participant-based and self-study foci, with occasional examples of theoretical studies. Participant-based studies generally draw on the literary tradition of found poetry to represent participant data. Self-studies may address more philosophical, phenomenological and/or poststucturalist opportunities that present themselves through the use of poetry in social science contexts.

Riefenstahl screened: an anthology of new criticism

Riefenstahl screened: an anthology of new criticism

Stages of conflict: a critical anthology of Latin American theater and performance

Stages of conflict: a critical anthology of Latin American theater and performance

The Novel (in Theory)

AbstractIn a moment in which many critics are speaking of a new formalism, the recent appearance of three major anthologies of new and classic novel criticism bespeaks an unprecedented upsurge of interest in once‐unfashionable questions of genre. And though these new books leave it unclear whether the novel is in fact a genre, they show that novel theory is: a genre defined at its core by an orientation toward totality. This essay examines the image of the canon of novel theory that emerges from Michael McKeon's Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach and Dorothy J. Hale's, The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900–2000 before moving to a longer consideration of Franco Moretti's massive two‐volume collection The Novel. The essay explores how the conclusions of the ambitious founding texts of Western novel theory (by writers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács, in particular) are revisited and revised in Moretti's collection, with its vast historical reach and its collection of materials from a large number of languages. These anthologies, despite their differences, suggest that the novel (as it is portrayed in novel theory at least) remains the paradigmatic form of modernity – and that novel criticism remains a crucial critical name for the ambition to come to grips with the contours of an increasingly globalized cultural scene.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Some Questions in Hume's Aesthetics

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Some Questions in Hume's Aesthetics

Notes on Contributors

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/156852909X422827 Religion and the Arts 13 (2009) 289–290 brill.nl/rart RELIGION and the ARTS Notes on Contributors June-Ann Greeley is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University. She is primarily a medievalist with special interest in medieval “crux” cultures and religious expression. She is Director of the Center for Catholic Th ought, Ethics and Culture (SHU). Her articles have been pub- lished in Magistra and the Journal of Medieval Latin . She is working on two books, one on women theologians/spiritual teachers of medieval Christi- anity, and a critical anthology of Carolingian

The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry by Suzanne W. Churchill

Reviewed by: The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry by Suzanne W. Churchill Anthony Flinn The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. Suzanne W. Churchill. Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. 304 pp. $130 (cloth). After twenty years of admonishing the modernist canon for its masculist premises, we must all be relieved to learn that the battle is finally won. The publication of Bonnie Kime Scott's two volume critical anthology Gender and Modernism in the spring of 2008, for instance, makes clear that critical consensus has moved from argument to precept that the prevailing modernism privileges the masculist consciousness. As a result, after so many years of a formulaic and pietistic critical pursuit of "transgression," driven by "interrogation" to "clear a space for" a marginalized presence, we find ourselves nearly shed of that once fruitful and now decayed line of reasoning. Suzanne Churchill's recent book on Others shows how far we have come, from a posturing vexation to a renewed exploratory sense of issues in gender construction. Her book is valuable as both a fresh study of form in American modernist poetry and an introduction to a key period of development in the work of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Mina Loy. Churchill describes a time, a milieu, and a rich set of personalities, and she dishes up lavish close readings of poems appearing in Others. This little magazine, published from 1915 to 1919, was a venue—a "space"—for experiments in free verse and re-constructions [End Page 202] of identity. The magazine's motto—"The old expressions are always with us, and there are always Others" —deftly pushes the notion not of demolition or revolution but of a separate realm where the new formal opportunities afforded by free verse could be explored. Expressive surprise in line breaks, lower-case lettering, deliberate use of white space, numbered verse paragraphs suggesting Cubist perspectives that dislodged the fixed reading eye, and other similar innovations allowed these poets to explore different constructions of mind, gender, and sexual/social relationships. Countering earlier views of modernist verse as expressive of enclosed and solipsistic minds, Churchill argues that the poems are essentially social, self-examining negotiations with others. For Churchill, the prevailing conceit is architectural: spaces tend to be either open or enclosed, expressing degrees of intimacy, invasiveness, and privacy. The term "Renovation" in the subtitle is therefore especially adroit: her treatment of spatial situation describes new expressions of relative autonomy and therefore reconstructions of gender in an atmosphere of renewal. Her method, particularly with her chapters on Williams, Moore, and Loy, is strongly formalist, a set of detailed studies of the workings of poems published in Others. The first chapter provides the conceptual framing of social/architectural spaces, and the second elaborates on this framing, placing it in the context of Others—its evolution, editorial personalities, and situation in a period of what Churchill nicely calls "gender unrest" (23). The third chapter, looking inside Others's publishing history, explores ways the architectural language of space and identity dismantles the sense of gender as a cultural assignment, reimagining it as derived from the interior. The fourth chapter characterizes Williams's Others's experimentation not as use and abuse of female-as-ground, but as exploratory, self-mocking, and hapless collisions of his male creative inquiries with the elusive, unmasterable female ground. She concludes, rightly, I think, that though Williams clings to gender essentialism, he is an exhibitionist, not sharing or directing our gaze so much as making himself the occasionally ridiculous object of it. The fifth chapter, on Marianne Moore's contributions to Others, likewise sidesteps certain critical orthodoxies. Churchill finds in Moore's apparently detached voice an engagement with her readers in an ongoing "conversation" of multiple perspectives. The interplay of these perspectives resists both closure and the determinacy of gender identification. The final chapter, on Mina Loy, after a certain restless ambivalence, rightly concludes that her "poetry of dislodging" the self from fixed social and gender patterns marks a resistance to the "critical paradigms" of modernism itself (222). But there are necessary quibbles with even such a valuable book as this one. First, Churchill...

Michael Chabon's Unhomely Pulp

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The essay continues to hold a central place within the recent history of feminist literary studies. The edition I cite here is from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Among numerous accounts of this transition, David Harvey's analysis stands out for its especially clear discussion of the psychic and sociological dimensions of Fordism. See The Condition of Postmodernity, 121–40. I have also drawn here from Alan Trachtenberg's The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, cited below. Gallagher writes: “The phrase “white slaves,” which recurred frequently in Cobbett's widely read social criticism, formed a part of his legacy to later writers. Decades after the controversies over the slave trade and colonial slavery had been settled, Victorian social critics continued to use the phrase” (8). See also Carens. On the significance of the term “white slave” in the American context, see Roediger's chapter “White Slaves, Wage Slaves, and Free White Labor” (65–87). On “slaving” see 144–45. This passage was taken as the epigraph for another landmark of feminist theory: Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen's 1997 anthology Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. In using the term “abandonment” to think through the critical problems posed by postmodernism, Chow is drawing from Andrew Ross's work in his 1991 collection Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism. Additional informationNotes on contributorsGordon BigelowGordon Bigelow teaches courses on the English Romantic and Victorian periods and on the literature and culture of modern Ireland. He joined the department of English at Rhodes in 1998, after earning a Ph.D. at the university of California, Santa Cruz. His essays have appeared in publications on English literature and Irish history, and his current research project focuses on the connections between literature and economic thought in the nineteenth century.

Found and Lost: The Politics of Modernist Recovery

Found and Lost:The Politics of Modernist Recovery Jane Garrity Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections Scott Bonnie Kime , ed. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. xviii + 872. $95.00 (cloth); $40.00 (paper). When Bonnie Kime Scott's ground-breaking anthology, The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, was first published in 1990, I was a graduate student at Berkeley writing a dissertation on primarily noncanonical British women modernists. At the time, those of us who were working in Anglo-American modernist and feminist studies were delighted to encounter this wide-ranging anthology, which sought to illustrate not only how modernism was unconsciously gendered masculine, but how previously marginalized and neglected women writers were actually central proponents and practitioners of modernism. None of my seminars in graduate school exposed me to writers such as Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, or Katherine Mansfield, but Scott's anthology legitimized my interest in noncanonical writing and invited me to pursue the kind of recovery work that had been spearheaded by critics such as Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own, 1977), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979), and Shari Benstock (Women of the Left Bank, 1986). Today, the project of recovering lost women writers is no longer in vogue as it once was, but Scott's new anthology sees itself as part of this earlier tradition at the same time as it seeks to break new ground by highlighting its engagement with recent concerns in modernist studies: transnationalist feminism, global travel, emigration, queer theory, scientific discourse, technology, visual and material culture. While the impact of The Gender of Modernism is incontestable, the conceptual limits of that collection—privileging gender at the expense of other categories of identity, such as race, ethnicity, class, nation, and sexuality; focusing primarily on white women and exclusively on white men—are directly addressed by Scott in her ambitious and well presented introduction to Gender in Modernism, which is conceived as both a sequel and a corrective to the first now-classic [End Page 803] volume. The trade-off between the laudable conceptual re-evaluations of the new anthology and the first book is the loss of a focus on recovery work, a phenomenon that Gender in Modernism makes tacit gestures toward but ultimately moves beyond. One result of this shift in emphasis is a more muted and neutralized understanding of the first anthology's feminist argument that the "politics and aesthetics of gender may lie at the heart of a comprehensive understanding of early twentieth-century literature."1 The significance of the tiny pronoun difference in each volume's title—Gender of Modernism, versus GenderinModernism—cannot be overstated; in the first anthology, a now dated "gendered reading of modernism" was privileged, whereas in the new anthology references to gender are couched within a larger, interdisciplinary conversation about selfhood that is inseparable from the "complex intersections" signaled by the new collection's subtitle.2 The first book incorporated five primary male writers; the new anthology has nearly thirty, many working cooperatively with women. Just as gender is no longer isolated from other constituents of identity, both the categories of nationality and periodization are expanded in Gender in Modernism. Where the first volume limited itself to British and American texts published roughly between 1910 and 1940, the second anthology incorporates work from India, Africa, and Ireland, in an attempt to give voice to the "missing era," 1880–1910, when women were entering the public sphere as suffragists and socialists. The volume's commitment to "new geographies," interdisciplinarity, and its incorporation of cutting-edge theoretical work on the overlooked transnational and racial dimensions of modernist texts situates the book at the forefront of a new wave of scholarship in modernist studies that seeks to show how the study of modernity—defined at one point as the examination of "patterns of material consumption, technological inventions, and medical interventions" (13)—can do more for the re-evaluation of literature than the traditional focus on periodization and stylistic designation. Gender in Modernism places greater emphasis on the cultural and historical underpinnings of literature and rigorously seeks to displace Eurocentric notions of what modernism...

Print, Prosthesis, (Im)Personation: Morrison's Jazz and the Limits of Literary History

[W]riting is handicapped. For 30 years now, since Dexter Fisher and Robert Stepto's groundbreaking Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1978), much talk and a great deal more text have been devoted to the recovery and theorizing of a discrete black literary tradition more than two centuries old. Anticipated by the early work of Houston Baker's 1969 Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture, a work composed in the light of the New Critical orthodoxy then prevailing at Yale where Baker was teaching,1 Fisher and Stepto's Afro-American Literature, a critical anthology evolving out of a 1977 MLA/NEH seminar on African-American literature, laid the very foundations for the scholarly popularization of African-American literary studies, inside of which two generations of black critics were, unlike most before us, formally trained (Fisher and Stepto vii).2 To be sure, Fisher and Stepto's volume was path-breaking. In its dedication to the project of reconstructing what Stepto criticized as the “lockstep of stale critical and pedagogical ideas, … tattered hand-me-downs from [other] disciplines,” Afro-American Literature recovered African-American literature from its realist utility to historians and social scientists to more intentionally pursue “what is literary (as opposed to sociological, ideological, etc) in Afro-American written art” (1). In his chapter, “Teaching Afro-American Literature: Survey or Tradition,” Stepto bemoaned the state of African-American literary criticism in the 1970s, charging that while African-American literature had been widely put to teaching history and the social sciences, in the aftermath of the social movements of the previous two decades, African-American literary studies had gotten by with precious little attention paid to “Afro-American language, literature and,”—let me emphasize—“literacy” (9).

Trauma and transformation: the political progress of John Bunyan

Vera Camden (ed.), Trauma and Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan, Stanford, Ca., Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. xiii + 185, hb. $55.00, ISBN: 978-0-8047-5785-0.Twenty years ago, around the tercentenary of John Bunyan's death, two books - N. H. Keeble's landmark critical anthology and Christopher Hill's biographical study - heralded a renaissance of scholarly interest in the tinker-author. This attention has matured in myriad ways since 1988, with significant recent scholarship - Isabel Hofmeyr's 'transnational history' of The Pilgrim's Progress, and the essays collected by W. R. Owens and Stuart Sim on the theme of Reception, Appropriation, Recollection - evincing unprecedented historical, methodological, and theoretical sophistication. Vera Camden's new anthology sets tough new standards for Bunyan scholarship in particular, and for intellectual collaboration in general. Both individually and collectively, the contributions to Trauma and Transformation reveal a network of cultural 'fault lines' that run far beyond the nonconformist frameworks that remain a staple of Bunyan studies. They initiate a timely reassessment of Bunyan's career and its place within early-modern literary history.Trauma and Transformation originates in unique circumstances. Most of the essays began life as papers delivered to a 2001 conference of the International John Bunyan Society, held in the United States just weeks after the 9/11 bombings. This grim coincidence could have encouraged a sentimental slant. In Camden's organisational and editorial hands, it lends poignancy and heightened cultural relevance to the theme of religious difference and, indeed, to the spirit of collective intellectual endeavour: 'it seems uncanny', Camden writes in her introduction, 'how our ongoing crisis appears to have been adumbrated in the cultural cataclysms of Bunyan's England'.The volume is anchored in the premise that the decapitation of Charles I caused a fundamental rupture in the national sensibility. It is also predicated on a chronological coincidence which, again, is much more than an easy motif. Camden notes that the milestones defining Bunyan's adulthood - his coming of age, and his death - fell respectively within the years of two national rites of passage: the regicide of 1649, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This neat observation leads to a more subtle and pressing one: followers, readers, and researchers of Bunyan have focused almost exclusively on the Restoration phase of his career (1660-85). These dates bound not only the bulk of Bunyan's literary career, but also the defining period of nonconformity - the time of the 'great persecution'. Imprisoned at the Restoration for refusing to go through the motions of Anglican cooperation, Bunyan has inevitably been contained, to broader and narrower degrees, within the framework of dissent. These essays point out, cumulatively, some obvious facts that have not been stated before: that Bunyan lived through violent constitutional upheaval long before, and a few years after, the Restoration; that the personal and the political are seldom differentiated into black and white; and that Bunyan's silence over overtly political events does not mean he was not affected by them. Probing between the lines of Bunyan's writings, and of his documented biography, they open up significant new perspectives which suggest that the strict-nonconformist Bunyan of popular and scholarly familiarity is known partially and reductively.Following Camden's lucid introduction, Peter L. Rudnytsky controversially identifies T. S. Eliot's theory of 'dissociation of sensibility' as 'the single most seminal contribution to English literary history of the twentieth century'. He argues for the psychoanalytic notion of a 'primal crime' - the transgression, or fall, or 'epistemological rupture' caused, he states, by the decapitation of Charles I; the consequence of this fissure is a traumatised self-consciousness which suffuses the works of authors such as Milton and Marvell. …