Dictionary Of Literary Biography Research Articles

Chinese Poets Since 1949 ed. by Christopher Lupke and Thomas Moran

Reviewed by: Chinese Poets Since 1949 ed. by Christopher Lupke and Thomas Moran Frederik Green Christopher Lupke and Thomas Moran, eds. Chinese Poets Since 1949. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 387. Detroit: Gale Cengage / Columbia, SC: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2021. 461 p. Few reference works have accompanied me as reliably throughout my career—first as a student, then as a scholar and teacher—as Gale's Dictionary of Literary Biographies (DLB) series. With the publication in 2007 of Chinese Fiction Writers from 1900-1949 and in 2013 of Chinese Fiction Writers from 1950-2000, the DLB series finally paid tribute to the rich legacy of twentieth-century Chinese literature. These are still the most comprehensive and authoritative bibliographical reference works on modern Chinese-language novelists, and Editor Thomas E. Moran must have known that he had set the bar high for any subsequent volume dedicated to modern Chinese literature. With the publication of DLB # 387 Chinese Poets Since 1949, Co-editors Christopher Lupke and Thomas E. Moran have clearly risen to the challenge. Encompassing some forty-five poets who have all contributed in significant ways to the flowering of Chinese-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth- and the first two decades of the twenty-first centuries, [End Page 147] the tome under review impresses with its sheer breadth as well as its academic rigor. Clocking in at 461 pages, Chinese Poets Since 1949 is a behemoth that, at first sight, displays all the usual characteristics of the DLB series. Besides the elegantly written and thoroughly researched bibliographical essays by forty international scholars, it features a general introduction by the two co-editors, a comprehensive checklist of Further Readings, and a cumulative index to the entire DLB series. In addition to the conventional qualities of such a reference work, Chinese Poets Since 1949, upon closer inspection, reveals a host of unexpected treasures. Accompanied by a photograph of the poet discussed, each entry further includes reproductions of a wide variety of documents, ranging from select book covers and dust jackets to handwritten manuscripts, such as pages from poems by Aku Wuwu (11) or Ling Yu (92). The entry for poet-painter Yan Li reproduces a painting by the artist (229), while the one for Lü De'an includes a photo of the mountain dwelling that the poet painstakingly built himself and which, according to Paul Manfredi, is "a kind of sweeping analogy for Lü's writing process writ large" (99). The general introduction further replicates covers from key literary journals such as Lanxing Shikan (Blue Star Poetry Journal) and Jintian (Today). These documents, painstakingly assembled from various archives across the world or made available courtesy of the authors or contributors, thus provide valuable additional clues to understanding the production, dissemination, consumption, and reception of Chinese-language poetry since the mid-twentieth century. Most users will probably treat Chinese Poets Since 1949 as a reference work to be consulted when researching one or more modern Chinese-language poets, and it excels beautifully at this function. Each essay begins with a complete list of the featured author's Chinese-language poetry books, editions and translations in English, and other relevant publications and concludes with a reference section. Sometimes in collections that incorporate a large number of contributors, the quality of entries varies greatly, but not in this case. All forty-five essays are solidly researched, well written, and complete in their presentation of bibliographical information. This consistently high academic quality throughout is the result of the two co-editors' feat of assembling a veritable who's who in the field of English-language [End Page 148] scholarship on modern Chinese language poetry. Based at universities in the US, Europe, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Australia, all are established scholars (and in most cases translators) of modern Chinese poetry, and many have been instrumental in introducing one or more of the authors discussed to readers in the West. While each entry exhibits great academic rigor and attention to detail, the approach contributors have taken in presenting their respective poets' biographies varies somewhat. All include at least some examples of poetry in translation to complement the theoretical and socio-historical contextualization of the given...

Introduction to Andrea Levy's Selected Excerpts from The Adventures of Mrs Seacole

Introduction to Andrea Levy's Selected Excerpts from The Adventures of Mrs Seacole Michael Perfect (bio) In July 2012 Andrea Levy completed a screenplay based on Mary Seacole's 1857 autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. In addition to using Seacole's own text, Levy also drew on Jane Robinson's 2005 biography of her as well as a number of other resources. At the time of writing, Levy's screenplay has been neither televised nor optioned, although this may yet change. Like Seacole herself, Levy's screenplay is full of warmth, energy, and wit; it offers a lively and insightful portrait of a woman who has been voted the "greatest black Briton" (Taylor) but who nevertheless remains unknown to many British people. Indeed, like other projects that Levy worked on in her final years, The Adventures of Mrs Seacole sought to increase public awareness of and interest in neglected aspects of British-Caribbean history. Two excerpts from The Adventures of Mrs Seacole are reproduced below. The first is from the beginning of the screenplay. These opening scenes cover Seacole's arrival at the British military hospital at Scutari, near Istanbul, in 1855. Having applied at the War Office in London to join the nursing contingent famously led by Florence Nightingale, and having been rejected, Seacole has made her own way to the military hospital. At Scutari she encounters Nightingale, who receives Seacole frostily. The second excerpt features scenes from much later in Levy's screenplay. They find Seacole back in London, in 1856. Despite her enormously heroic exploits in the Crimea, Seacole faces obscurity and destitution—until, that is, she encounters some of the veterans who she nursed on the battlefields. As is clear from these excerpts, Levy's screenplay takes issue with Seacole being a frequently overlooked figure and, [End Page 293] in particular, one overshadowed by Nightingale—not just in the mid-nineteenth century but in the contemporary moment, too. Bill Mayblin and I have selected and edited these excerpts for posthumous publication. For a more detailed discussion of these excerpts in particular, the screenplay as a whole, and Levy's late unpublished work more generally, see my article in this special issue. Michael Perfect Michael Perfect is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. His research interests are in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and culture. His first book, Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism, was published with Palgrave in 2014, and his work has also appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Journal for Cultural Research, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and numerous edited collections. He has written for The Guardian's Higher Education Network and been interviewed on local and national radio. His second book, forthcoming with Manchester University Press, focuses on Andrea Levy. He was the first academic to carry out research on Levy's archive, and his ongoing work on the archive is supported by a BA/Leverhulme research grant. In addition to his work on Levy, he is currently developing a project that relates to screen adaptations of contemporary transnational novels. Works Cited Robinson, Jane. Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea. 2005. Constable and Robinson, 2006. Google Scholar Seacole, Mary. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. 1857. Edited by Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee, Falling Wall, 1984. Google Scholar Taylor, Matthew. "Nurse Is Greatest Black Briton." The Guardian, 10 Feb. 2004, theguardian.com/uk/2004/feb/10/britishidentity.artsandhumanities#:~:text=A%20little%2Dknown%20nurse%20who,voted%20the%20greatest%20black%20Briton. Accessed 14 June 2020. Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of Calgary

The Verbivocovisual Revolution: Anti-Literature, Affect, Politics, and World Literature in Augusto de Campos

Research Article| March 01 2020 The Verbivocovisual Revolution: Anti-Literature, Affect, Politics, and World Literature in Augusto de Campos Adam Joseph Shellhorse Adam Joseph Shellhorse Temple University, Philadelphia Adam Joseph Shellhorse (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is Associate Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Global Studies and Director of Latin American Studies at Temple University, where he serves as the advisor of the Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Program. His research examines modern and contemporary Latin American literature and poetics, visual culture, critical theory, and women’s writing, with particular emphasis on comparative Inter-American studies and the relationship between aesthetics, affect, and politics. He is the author of Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina (University of Pittsburgh Press, Illuminations, Cultural Formations of the Americas, 2017), which is currently being translated into Portuguese by Editora Perspectiva (Estudos Series) and into Spanish by Santiago Arcos Editor with anticipated publication dates of 2020. His recent work has or soon will appear in Luso-Brazilian Review, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Política Común, The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, and Dictionary of Literary Biography. He is currently working on a second book that examines the problem of affect, multimedia, and politics in Brazilian and Spanish American experimental writings. Shellhorse serves as co-chair of the Latin American Studies Association’s Brazilian Section. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2020) 20 (1): 147–184. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.20.1.0147 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Adam Joseph Shellhorse; The Verbivocovisual Revolution: Anti-Literature, Affect, Politics, and World Literature in Augusto de Campos. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 March 2020; 20 (1): 147–184. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.20.1.0147 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressCR: The New Centennial Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Michigan State University Board of Trustees Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Night Unto Night by Martha Collins

Reviewed by: Night Unto Night by Martha Collins Walter Holland (bio) Martha Collins. Night Unto Night. Milkweed Editions, 2018. Martha Collins' elegiac book Night Unto Night consists of six separate parts or what I might call cantos. Each canto is subtitled and spread over six separate months and years in Collins' life, from 2010 to 2015. Furthermore, each canto reflects the emotional landscape, domestic circumstances, and political upheavals of those discrete dates, and the entire work is further subdivided into a series of short numbered stanzas. At root of Collins' work is a remarkable blend of the pastoral lyric with the fragmentary narrative impulses of contemporary American poetry. Her style in this collection is strongly reminiscent of Dickinson, whose short hymnal lyrics embraced the "common meter" of her youthful church-going days and the lyric beauty of the biblical psalms, all grafted to an idiosyncratic vocabulary and syntax. Dickinson's poems dwelled heavily on themes of death and immortality. In simple measured lines Dickinson struggled with her faith or doubt thereof. She observed the natural world and its transcendent qualities and seemed to pit it against the smallness and brevity of her own existence. Collins merges her strong socio-political and ethical conscience with love of the lyric, exhibiting an inherently Keatsian vision throughout, one reflective of the transient beauty of the natural world. This lyricism is evident in just an excerpt from one section of the longer canto "Out of Doors": 21 Water pinks, blues, geesestretch, ducks stir, green heronrises, slow, up to the dock— at last month's great blue, wingsover me, in the water, came down, like the come-down Dove 22 Mourning dove in the morning,geese, gulls working all day— until sun, gold through silveredclouds, through rose, rests [End Page 202] for a moment, then slipsinto the slot between water and sky These two stanzas are parsed into tercets, couplets and monostich, but on the page we see how Collins plays with various line combinations and breaks up her stanza by nonconventional spacing. All the stanzas, however, conform to a uniform five, six or seven-line length. Besides these formal considerations, Collins uses a highly elevated aesthetic diction, one classically rooted in the contemplation of living nature. In this regard Wordsworth comes to mind, as well as Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin, and Jane Kenyon. I am also aware that Collins has done many fine translations of Vietnamese poetry into English and shares knowledge of Asian cultures. Perhaps this vivid attention to the natural world and the lyric is influenced by this work. The lovely imagistic distillation of haiku or the delicate scroll paintings of China illuminate her poems. Also palpable is Collins' tranquility and serenity with its turn toward philosophic and metaphysical inquiry, which reminded me of Wallace Stevens, a poet whom Collins greatly admired, especially in his exquisite poem "Sunday Morning." There is a danger, of course, in the use of so highly an aestheticized poetic vision, and in a style, which draws so heavily from the language of the King James Bible, from the psalms and the sacred texts; however, like Muriel Rukeyser, that great activist poet who addressed equality, feminism, social injustice and Judaism, Collins includes in her verse the troubling complexities of political injustice and social conflict, be it global warming, the inhumane treatment of immigrants, racial injustice in the struggle of Black Lives Matter, or the incessant brutality of prolonged American wars in the Middle East. Drone attacks, targeted carpet-bombing, and mounting civilian fatalities—these realities disturb and interrupt her lyrics. This was most evidenced in her "Drawn In" canto, written in Sienna, Italy, where comparisons are discerned between the high artistry of Siennese works and history and the turmoil of the present era. Alberta Turner wrote of Rukeyser in her Dictionary of Literary Biography that she was devoted to the personal as well as to the political in her poetry, as I believe Collins is. In the canto "Broken Open" Collins writes: 12 High above the herring hiding their silver, gulls circled, shrieked,laboring like, but not— our drones our extended hungers for the kill [End Page 203] 13 Planes named...

The Boredom and Futility of War in Patrick White’s Fiction

This article investigates the representation of war in terms of uselessness and waste in the fiction of Patrick White, with a particular emphasis on the short story “After Alep”, written in 1945 when the writer was enrolled in the RAF as an Intelligence Officer. By analysing the story in the light of White’s approach to the war as to “the most horrifying and wasteful period” of his life (Marr 1992: 493), the article attempts to demonstrate how the narrative devices used by White contribute to demythologize the rhetoric of the war and of war heroes in a way that may be instrumental in conveying a message of peace out of the ultimate sense of futility transmitted by any war . DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-28 Bibliography Ackland, Michael. 2002. Patrick White. Selina Samuels ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography , vol. 260, Australian Writers, 1915-1950. Detroit: Gale, 400-416. Bennett, Bruce. 2010. The Secret Life of Spies and Novelists: Herbert Dyce Murphy and Patrick White. Antonella Riem Natale & Angelo Righetti eds. Drops of Light Coalescing. Studies for Maria Teresa Bindella . Udine: Forum, 123-131. Flynn, Christine & Paul Brennan eds. 1989. Patrick White Speaks . Sydney: Primavera Press Karalis, Vrasids. 2008. Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris . Blackheath (NSW): Brandl & Schlesinger. Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country . Cambridge: CUP. Marr, David. 1992. Patrick White. A Life . Sydney: Vintage. Marr, David ed. 1996. Patrick White. Letters . Sydney: Vintage. McKernan, Susan. 1989. A Question of Commitment . Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Rhoden, Clare. 2012. Ruins or Foundations: Great War Literature in the Australian Curriculum. JASAL , 12, 1: 1-11. Rooney, Brigid. 2010. Public Recluse: Patrick White’s Literary-Political Returns. Elizabeth McMahon & Brigitta Olubas eds. Remembering Patrick White. Contemporary Critical Essays . Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 3-18. White, Patrick. 1945. After Alep. Jack Aistrop & Reginald Moore eds. Bugle Blast. An Anthology from the Services . London: Allen & Unwin, 147-155. White, Patrick. 1957. Voss . London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. White, Patrick. 1958 [1948]. The Aunt ’ s Story . London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. White, Patrick. 1961. Riders in the Chariot . London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. White, Patrick. 1962 [1941]. The Living and the Dead . London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. White, Patrick. 1970. The Vivisector. London: Jonathan Cape. White, Patrick. 1979. The Twyborn Affair . London: Jonathan Cape. White, Patrick. 1982. Flaws in the Glass. A Self-Portrait . New York: The Viking Press. White, Patrick. 2012 [1939]. Happy Valley . London: Jonathan Cape. White, Patrick. 2012. The Hanging Garden . London: Jonathan Cape

Twenty-First-Century Canadian Writers : Volume 334 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (review)

Twenty-First-Century Canadian Writers : Volume 334 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (review)

The Trouble With Elinor Glyn: Hollywood, Three Weeks And The British Board Of Film Censors

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements Thanks are due to the British Academy for financial support; and to the National Archives, the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California, the University of Reading and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine for access to archival documents. Notes Notes 1 Elinor Glyn, Four Complete Novels (London, George Newnes Ltd, 1931), 41. The book was first published in 1907 by Duckworth & Co. 2 Ibid., 67. 3 Ibid., 49. 4 Ibid., 57. 5 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1977). 6 Eric Thompson, Elinor Glyn, in: George M. Johnson (ed.) Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 153 (Detroit, MI, Gale Research Inc., 1995), 94, 96. 7 The Great Moment (Famous Players–Lasky, 1920); Beyond the Rocks (Famous Players-Lasky, 1921); Six Hours (MGM, 1923); Three Weeks (MGM, 1923); His Hour (MGM, 1924); Man and Maid (MGM, 1925); Love's Blindness (MGM, 1925); The Only Thing (MGM, 1926); Ritzy (Paramount, 1927); It (Paramount, 1928); Red Hair (Paramount, 1928). 8 Alice M Williamson, Alice in Movieland (London, A M Philpot Ltd, 1927), 239; Film Weekly, 7 October 1929, p. 3. 9 Anne Morey, Elinor Glyn as Hollywood labourer, Film History, 18(2) (2006), 110–118. 10 Meredith Etherington-Smith and Jeremy Pilcher, The ‘It’ Girls (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1986), 239; Williamson, Alice in Movieland, 232. 11 Anthony Glyn, Elinor Glyn: a biography (London, Hutchinson, 1955), 280. 12 Made by the Reliable Feature Film Corporation, under the direction of Perry N Vekroff, and released in 1915. 13 Descriptions of the film are based on the continuity screenplay by Carey Wilson, dated 15 August 1923, Elinor Glyn Archive (MS4059), Box 9A, University of Reading (hereafter EG Archive). This and other versions of Wilson's screenplay are also lodged in the MGM collection in the Doheny Library, University of Southern California (hereafter USC/MGM). To date, it has not been possible to locate a print of the film. The record suggests that the screenplay was ghosted by Carey Wilson, though Glyn seems to have received sole screen credit. 14 Christian Metz, Story/discourse (a note on two kinds of voyeurism), in: Psychoanalysis and Cinema: the imaginary signifier (London, MacMillan, 1982). 15 Variety, 2 April 1924. 16 Carey Wilson, Three Weeks, continuity screenplay, 15 August 1923, EG Archive. 17 The records of Glyn's agent indicate that the picture had gone into profit by 1925: EG Archive, Box 32. 18 Annette Kuhn, British Board of Film Censors/Classification, in: Derek Jones (ed.) Censorship: a world encyclopedia (London, Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001). 19 Home Office HO158/23, National Archives, London (hereafter NA/HO): The Censorship of Cinematograph Films, 6 July 1923. 20 British Board of Film Censors, Annual Report, 1923, 9. 21 NA/HO45/11382, Home Office memo, 24 May 1923. 22 Ibid., minute by S. W. Harris, 27 June 1923. 23 Stopes mounted a vigorous press campaign and also wrote to the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association and to cinema licensing authorities, threatening legal action if her name were to be removed from publicity. Contemporary Medical Archives Centre, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London: PP/MCS/F.12 Film: Married Love/Maisie's Marriage. 24 NA/HO45/20045, Three Weeks, 1924, Home Office memo, 12 February 1924. 25 Ibid., BBFC letter to Home Office, 20 March 1924. 26 Ibid., Home Office minute, 27 March 1924. 27 In the USA, the film was passed by the National Board of Review: USC/MGM, Final title sheets for Three Weeks, 1924. 28 Marie Stopes, Married Love (11th edn, 1923), 130. 29 Ibid., 85. 30 David Robinson, Hollywood in the Twenties (London, Zwemmer, 1968), 36.

On the Question of Modernism and the "Authentic"

Vincent Sherry is Professor of english at Washington University in Saint Louis. his publications include The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill (1987), Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993), James Joyce; ULYSSES (1995, 2d ed. 2004), and The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003). he has edited the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (2005) and several volumes on post-Second World War British and Irish Poets for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1984, 1985). he is currently writing the Blackwell biography of ezra Pound and a book-length study of english Modernism and pan-european Decadence. On the Question of Modernism and the “Authentic”

The House of Boni and Liveright, 1917–1933: A Documntary Volume. (Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 288.). Charles Egleston

Previous articleNext article No AccessSHORT REVIEWSThe House of Boni and Liveright, 1917–1933: A Documntary Volume. (Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 288.). Charles Egleston Jay SatterfieldJay Satterfield Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 99, Number 1MARCH 2005 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.99.1.24295863 Views: 1Total views on this site COPYRIGHT © 2005 THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Necrology: Leon Uris (1924-2003)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 666–671 Necrology Leon Uris (1924–2003) STEPHEN J . W HITFIELD MOST FAMOUS FOR Exodus, the American novelist Leon Uris died in 2003, at the age of seventy-eight. Though he wrote nearly two dozen other books, including other novels on Jewish themes, such as Mila 18 (1961) and The Haj (1984), Uris’s reputation rests on the 1958 ‘‘novel of Israel’’ that ranked first on the New York Times bestseller list for nineteen straight weeks and remained near the top of the list for over a year. The hardcover edition has never gone out of print, and by 1965 the Bantam paperback edition had sold more than five million copies. American mass taste has occasionally found a place for propaganda novels. But the most influential of these works addressed domestic problems , such as the moral horror of slavery (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), the ugliness of urban working conditions (The Jungle), or the plight of migrant farmers (The Grapes of Wrath). Exodus was remarkable, and not only because it is set abroad. The book was published in an era when American Jewish interest in Israel was slight and the levels of philanthropy and tourism were, by later standards, low,1 and when ethnicity was muted or disdained as an embarrassing vestige of the receding immigrant past. There was no precedent—before or after—for an American novelist to produce a Zionist epic that would create a publishing sensation. The year that Doubleday released Exodus, former prime minister David Ben-Gurion asserted , ‘‘As a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.’’2 Uris, who claimed to have flunked English three times before he dropped out of a Baltimore high school to join the U.S. Marines, was not the sort of writer who stirred the admiration of literary critics; and Jewish scholarship has paid very little attention to his work. For example, a 1. David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York, 1986), 184. 2. Quoted in Edwin McDowell, ‘‘Exodus in Samizdat: Still Popular and Still Subversive,’’ New York Times Book Review, April 26, 1987, 13. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. LEON URIS (1924–2003)—WHITFIELD 667 standard work like the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers (1984) provides entries on obscure writers like Bruno Lessing and Roberta Silman, but not on Leon Uris. Not that this reference volume slights middle-brow writers. There are biographical and critical essays on Edna Ferber, Gerald Green, Ben Hecht, and Laura Z. Hobson. Even writers who distanced themselves fully from the Jewish community (like Tillie Olsen) are profiled. Or take Jewish-American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia (1992), which omits Leon Uris entirely but is sufficiently encyclopedic to refer to Aaron Rubin and Joe Stein, for example. (They happen to have been gag writers for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, so the volume cannot be charged with bias against mass culture.) The spleen that Uris sometimes emitted in interviews against intellectuals does not therefore seem unwarranted. The implication of literary scholar Arnold Band’s assertion, during a 1989 conference, that Exodus ‘‘is certainly a major document in modern Jewish history’’ has rarely been pursued. Only essays by Henry Gonshak and Rachel Weissbrod come to mind—and neither author, rightly, cares to make a case in terms of strictly literary merit. For Gonshak, Ari Ben Canaan is significant as the anti-shlemiel, as the alternative archetype of the fighting Jew. According to Weissbrod, that Exodus is not critically esteemed owes to Uris’s refusal to see black and white as gray. His rigid good versus evil paradigm collided with the ambiguity that is a fundamental tenet of modernism.3 A Nobel laureate who went to Jerusalem and back a decade after Uris had gone there has formulated the problem that fiction like Exodus bequeaths . Perhaps ‘‘the survivors of Hitler’s terror in Europe and Israel will benefit more from good publicity than from realistic representation...

The Shortest Path to the Truth: Indirection in Fazil' Iskander

This essay was completed by Marina Kanevskaya a few weeks before her tragic death at the age of forty-seven. She was hit by a truck on a dark street of Missoula, Montana, where she lived and worked as professor of Russian at the State University. Marina's life was full of rapid turns, but a passion for Russian literature was the true engine that supplied her with joy and ardour despite all the odds of two emigrations, changes of career, job searches, etc. She emigrated from the USSR to Israel at the age of twenty-five; eight years later she moved to the United States. There she continued her lifelong studies of Russian literature at the University of In? diana, where she defended her dissertation on Dostoevskii's Pushkin speech in 1992. The focus on Dostoevskii remained in her monograph The Cruel Critic: N. K. Mikhailovsky's Criticism on Dostoevsky, published by Edwin Mellen Press in 2001. In this book she did not only restore the politi? cal and literary circumstances of Mikhailovskii's 'war' against Dostoevskii, but also argued that this famous opponent of Dostoevskii, in his vindications, actually foreshadowed Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and polyphony of Dostoevskii's novel. What Mikhailovskii was blaming Dostoevskii for, Bakhtin put into the foundation of his new aesthetics. The paradoxality of thought and the ability to discover something new in the texts well read and the road well walked distinguished Marina's approach to literature. No wonder that she could not limit herself to nineteenth-century works. Among the subjects of her numerous essays, published both in English and in Russian, are Nabokov and Evgenii Popov, Nikolai Erdman and Nikolai Antsiferov, the conceptualists and the 'new Russians'. FaziF Iskander was one of Marina's latest interests. She was commissioned to write a biograph? ical article on him for The Dictionary of Literary Biography (expected to be published in 2004), but got involved more than the biographical sketch required. That was her nature?she could not work otherwise. She met Iskander in Moscow, interviewed him, and wrote two articles incorporating her observations on his poetics that did not fit into the strict format of the Dictionary. It is one of these that is printed below. I believe Marina offers a completely new approach to this writer, who was traditionally treated as a social satirist, as for example in Natal'ia Ivanova's 1990 book on him, Smekh protiv strakha ('Laughter vs. Fear'). Marina rediscovers Iskander as a daring modernist investigating the limits of the language and manifesta? tions of logos through focusing on gestures, the expressivity of animals, and children's pre-intellectual reasoning. One can hear Marina's vivid voice, her temper, and her irony in this work, belonging to the vast list of first-rate texts written by her during her unbearably short life. Mark Lipovetsky

Australian Literary Lives

Webby presents a detailed analysis of the first two Australian volumes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Book Review: Dictionary of Literary Biography 264: Italian Prose Writers, 1900–1945

Book Review: Dictionary of Literary Biography 264: Italian Prose Writers, 1900–1945

Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 198: Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol: Prose (review)

Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 198: Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol: Prose (review)

Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 198: Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol: Prose

Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 198: Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol: Prose

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain.WOMEN'S POETRY, LATE ROMANTIC TO LATE VICTORIAN: GENDER AND GENRE, 1830-1900. and Edited by William B. Thesing.VICTORIAN WOMEN POETS (DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY: VOLUME 199).

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain.<b>WOMEN'S POETRY, LATE ROMANTIC TO LATE VICTORIAN: GENDER AND GENRE, 1830-1900</b>. and Edited by William B. Thesing.<b>VICTORIAN WOMEN POETS (DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY: VOLUME 199)</b>.

Selected Stories by A. F. s&gt; Veltman James J. Gebhard (review)

3I8 SEER, 79, 2, 200I Pechorin,it isvaluableto knowwhatDostoevskii,Solov'evand othersthought, but we no longer need to seek to refute, or even demolish them. It is extraordinaryto read suchremarksas 'Solv'ev(i 90i) is even more categorical andjudgemental andprovidesthe followingmoralizingcomment on Lermontov 's tragic fate' (p. I97, n. 2). Elsewherewe read that 'No less a figurethan Wilhelm Kiukhel'beker,the well-known writer and Decembrist was himself fooled by Grushnitskyas a characterand Marlinskyas a writer' (p. I4,)' while Marlinsky himself is the subject of what might be called a character assassination, during which he receives the grotesquely anachronistic appellation , 'the "Teflon Decembrist"'! More recent critics, including those still alive, do not receive much better treatment. Bakhtin, who does not feature centrally in Golstein's thinking, is accorded this curt dismissal: 'This scholarly dogma owes much to the carnivalesque utopia of Bakhtin, and was further developed by scholars in search of some kind of alternative to the hierarchical and oppressive systems they found objectionable' (p. 62). Lotman is similarly belaboured, while a quotation from Gary Rosenshield is followed by the dismissive one-line paragraph: 'Nothing could be further from the truth' (P. 12I). In addition to this, there are significant gaps in his reading. Susan Layton's important book on the literary Caucasus is missing, while West European scholarship is especially lacking: Wolf Schmid and Age Hansen Love have written very important work on Pechorin, but Golstein ignores this, as well as some of Robert Reid's contributions. Recent critical theory is coinspicuous by its absence. In particular, no-one who had absorbed the insights of femininism could have made some of these assessments of Pechorin. All of this is a great pity. Vladimir Golstein has done Lermontov studies a favour in pursuing his researches along some unusual paths. Sadly, what he has discovered there is rather overshadowed by some of this book's more egregious faults. SchoolofLanguages JOE ANDREW heele l niversitv Veltman, A. F. Selected Stories.Translated with an introduction by James J. Gebhard. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, I 998. I 90 pp. Notes. $59.95; $1 7.95. READERS or reviewers not intimately familiar with the oeuvresof Aleksandr Fomich Vel'tman (i800-70) are likely to scurry to the reference books to refresh their memory of the literary career of this idiosyncratic stylist. Here they will be reminded, for instance by Victor Terras, that 'Veltman, next to Bestuzhev[-Marlinskii], was the most popular prose writer of the I830s and continued as a leading writer through the I840s', whereupon 'his fame [- . .1 quickly faded'; Sterne and Jean Paul are seen as his models: A Histop ofRussian Literature(New Haven and London, 1991, p. 248). Useful survey essays may be located byJohn Goodliffe (Reference GuidetoRussianLiterature, London I 998) and Brian J. Horowitz (DictionaryofLiterary Biography, vol. I98, RussianLiterature in theAge of Pushkinand Gogol. Prose,Detroit, I998). There have been at least four American dissertations on Vel'tman but little in the way of specialist REVIEWS 3I9 publications. In biographical terms, in addition to being a prose writer and poet, he was an army officer, assistant-directorthen director of the Kremlin Armoury(succeedingin thispost the olderhistoricalnovelistM. N. Zagoskin), and a noted antiquarian.The words most commonly attachedto his writings would seem to be 'prolific','readable','playful'and 'punning'.He is generally associated with Russian romanticism (at least, until his late period of the I86os)and his main themes (andgeneric inclinations)includehistory,folkore, fantasyand travel.His principalromanticfeaturewould seemto be the mixing of styles and this, together with his verbal dexterity and wide variation in register,no doubt makeshim difficultto translate. Earlier separate publication of two of the works included here apart, Vel'tman now makes his debut in English in a collection of five stories. Its listing in the Northwestern 'Studiesin Russian Literatureand Theory' series may seem slightly incongruous - particularly since the accompanying apparatus, while adequate, is not over-generous. The stories here provided may perhaps best be described as curiosities of minor interest, rather than wvorks of obvious fundamental significance, and they are presented in what approximates,to thisreaderatleast,to a descendingorderof quality.'Erotida' is a provincial military and society tale, with a bizarre...

David McDowell: Forgotten man of letters

In the fall of 1957, with the financial backing of his partner Ivan Obolensky, David McDowell released the first book list of McDowell, Obolensky, Inc. It was a small but auspicious debut: two of the six titles released that season garnered extensive critical and commercial success. Andrew Lytle's The Velvet Horn and James Agee's A Death in the Family were both nominated for the National Book Award, and Agee's novel won the Pulitzer Prize; both were bestsellers. Although McDowell would leave the firm in 1960, during the three years of his collaboration with Obolensky, he published several other notable titles to great critical acclaim. Yet, today McDowell is a nearly forgotten figure in American publishing. In spite of the remarkable success of his tenure as editor-in-chief, his contribution to American letters is commemorated only by a short entry on the firm in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, James Laughlin's comments on him in Remembering Williams Carlos Williams, one interview about his connection to Agee, and the scattered obituaries which appeared at his death in 1985. This article attempts to augment the scant record of McDowell's career, beginning with a biographical sketch of McDowell and then moving into an examination of his correspondence with author Andrew Lytle from his papers on deposit at Vanderbilt University. While McDowell appears to have had troubled relationships with other publishers, what emerges from the lengthy McDowell-Lytle correspondence is the portrait of an exemplary relationship between editor and author—and a record of McDowell's commitment to the written word.

Reviews

Reviews Get access M. T. Hester , (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 121, Seventeenth-Century British Nondramatic Poets, First Series . Pp. xxiii + 414 . Detroit and London : Gale Research , 1992 . MICHAEL G. BRENNAN MICHAEL G. BRENNAN University of Leeds Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 41, Issue 2, June 1994, Pages 246–247, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/41-2-246 Published: 01 June 1994

Rose, J. and Anderson, P. eds., &lt;italic&gt;Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. cxii, Brtitish Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965&lt;/italic&gt;

Journal Article Rose, J. and Anderson, P. eds., Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. cxii, Brtitish Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965 Get access J. Rose and P. Anderson, (eds), Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. exii, Brtitish Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965 Pp. xi + 420Detroil and London: Gale Research 1991. $108.00 David Finkelstein David Finkelstein University of Edinburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 40, Issue 1, March 1993, Pages 124–125, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/40.1.124-a Published: 01 March 1993