Fine Essay Research Articles

Prometeo: tragedia dell'ascolto by Luigi Nono

Reviewed by: Prometeo: tragedia dell'ascolto by Luigi Nono Martin Iddon Luigi Nono. Prometeo: tragedia dell'ascolto. Nuova edizione. Edited with notes on performance by André Richard. Milan: Ricordi, 2021. [ 2 volumes (1 score [xxi, 231 p.]; 1 commentary [ 513 p.]) Pub. no.: 139789. ISBN: 9788881920853. ISMN: 9790041397894. $490] The publication of this performing edition of Luigi Nono's Prometeo, tragedia dell'ascolto (Prometeo, a tragedy of listening) (1975–85) is unambiguously a cause for celebration. Despite the fact that Prometeo is arguably one of the finest pieces by one of the most prominent post-war composers, I suspect it is little enough known that a review of it ought also to try to provide some additional contexts in framing the value and significance. This useful and usable edition is accompanied by a rich and extensive—some two hundred pages in the English version of the trilingual text—set of notes on performing the piece, principally from the pen of André Richard. As Richard's foreword notes (p. 315), he had a major involvement with all performances of Prometeo, from its premiere in Venice in 1984 to, over thirty years later, its 2015 performance in Paris, "from preparing the Chorus and Vocal soloists to leading the Sound Direction, and since 1991 [he has] supervised the design of the sonic space for the many different performance venues, by planning the setup of the sound-emitting bodies and the live electronics" (p. 315). Richard was, too, able to draw on the experience and insights of working with Nono on performances of Prometeo until the composer's death in 1990, as well as with Hans Peter Haller, whose work at the Experimentalstudio in Freiburg was fundamental not only to Prometeo but to all of Nono's work with electronics from the early 1980s on. In a sense, this necessarily implies that the 'authorized version' of the text is André Richard's version of Nono's Prometeo, in a way which might be thought to detract from at least some of the resistance to performability which Prometeo seems to encode and might even be part of its character (Jonathan Impett, Routledge Handbook to Luigi Nono and Musical Thought [London: Routledge, 2019], 410). As Marco Mazzolini's note on the nature of the edition makes clear, much of the development of the piece was undertaken in a dynamic collaborative environment, captured in the score in a jargon understood to those in the group, but impenetrable from the outside. More, Nono intervened in the score, adapting and varying it in each performance he was involved with (pp. 317–18). Yet, in the face of a piece lasting two hours or so, for massive forces (four orchestral groups, six instrumental soloists, five vocal soloists, two actors, a twelve-voice choir, three glass bells—requiring two-to-three players—and live electronics, as well as two independent conductors), there could be no more expert guide. Indeed, it is probably not too much of a stretch to say that nobody else could have done it. Also included is a fine essay by Carola Nielinger-Vakil (pp. 330–50), a skilful abridgement of some eighty pages of commentary on Prometeo in her 2015 monograph (Carola Nielinger-Vakil, Luigi Nono: A Composer in Context [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015], principally drawn from pp. 237–316), transforming scholarly essay into an excellent guide for listening. It is probably worth confessing right at the outset that, though I am always interested in or intrigued by the music I write about, in the case of Luigi Nono, I am also, straightforwardly, a fan. My shelves contain, for instance, no fewer [End Page 442] than five recordings of his La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1988–89), alongside multiple other digital versions on my hard drive. Each one is remarkable in its own way, though the version I heard live—performed by Mieko Kanno with electronics provided by Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer—in a chilly St. Oswald's Church in Durham, during a northern English March when spring had assuredly not yet sprung was, I think, the first occasion on which I felt I truly 'got' the music of Nono's last period, music characterized...

Four Novels of 1939: Ambition and Redemption; Ethnicity and Race

Four Novels of 1939: Ambition and Redemption; Ethnicity and Race

A Professor of Roth in India

A Professor of Roth in India Gurumurthy Neelakantan (bio) My introduction to the fiction of philip roth began with the purchase of Goodbye, Columbus (1959) from a second-hand bookstore on the Kanpur campus of Indian Institute of Technology in the mid-eighties.1 I was then a graduate student pursuing research on the fiction of Saul Bellow. While Bellow's interviews and the secondary literature on his fiction gave a sketchy idea of the novelistic concerns of Roth, it was not until I read Roth's Goodbye, Columbus that I began to realize the author's compelling voice. Having finished my PhD in the late eighties and settling in a good academic career, my next few years saw me engage with the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Cynthia Ozick, Tillie Olsen, and Grace Paley. Sometimes it surprises me that I did not revert to Roth in that period, considering how entranced I was by Goodbye, Columbus. The impetus to pursue Roth's fiction did not return to me until the summer of 1992. During a visit to the Indian Institute of Technology Madras library, I was browsing through the pages of the latest issue of Modern Fiction Studies and chanced upon an essay on Roth's The Counterlife (1986) by Debra Shostak. A felicitously written and thoroughgoing postmodern analysis, Shostak's essay as much rekindled my interest in Roth as a desire to become a good scholar like herself. Rediscovering Roth through Shostak, I immediately bought The Counterlife, Deception (1990), The Ghost Writer (1979), and My Life as a Man (1974). For someone who loves the nineteenth-century realist writers, I was myself a bit surprised to be taken in by the various postmodern games that Roth plays in The Counterlife. I also realized that Roth is a postmodernist with a difference in that, for him, reality is neither a construction nor "real" enough. Subsequently, I located in an anthology edited by Malcolm Bradbury Roth's fine essay "Writing American Fiction" (1961), which argues this point with nuance, and it clarified my own thinking on the debates underpinning modernism and postmodernism. As part of my intellectual journey with Roth's fiction, I experienced a certain self-reflexive moment in March 2013. Attending the Roth@80 event in Newark, I participated in a symposium on "What we talk about when we talk about Philip Roth." Many of the American newspaper reporters who covered the event were curious to [End Page 91] know what drew me to the fiction of Roth in the first place and why I considered him at the time—as I do now—an important international novelist. That question really knocked me down. Giving me an opportunity to examine my own life, it helped me to assess where Roth fits into it. While I discovered Roth through Bellow, the fact remains that Roth's fiction has held a mirror to my own life experiences. Reading Roth's visceral and uncanny experiences of everyday life, I often find myself struggling against a normative cultural tradition much like his protagonists. If I'm fascinated by Bellow's take on life as a pilgrimage, I am more drawn to Roth's dramatization of the conflicts that assail the soul of the protagonist in his journey. In reading Roth, I have been able to understand my own conflicts as a Brahmin caught up in the riptides of modernity. Much like the Jewish tradition, the Brahmanical tradition privileges strict religious observances and a certain otherworldliness that eventually translates into insularity. Thus, my preoccupation with Roth's fiction has its genesis in a curious cultural story. While my connection with my tradition is coherent, it is no less characterized by ambivalence and irony much like Roth's stance towards his Jewish origins. In negotiating an identity in the interstices of a living tradition and an equally laudable modernity, I have learned to look for inspiration in Roth's novels that mine a Jewish male's identity negotiations in the New World. More than any other writer from the West or even from my own Indian literary traditions, Roth singularly speaks to me—often illuminating my beliefs...

Open Form in American Poetry: Essays by Burton Hatlen. Ed. Bruce Holsapple. U of Maine P, 2021. 309 pp. plus seven color plates. ISBN 978-0-89101-131-6. $28.00.

<i>Open Form in American Poetry: Essays</i> by Burton Hatlen. Ed. Bruce Holsapple. U of Maine P, 2021. 309 pp. plus seven color plates. ISBN 978-0-89101-131-6. $28.00.

The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope, edited by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton, and Ortwin de Graef

Reviewed by: The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope ed. by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton, and Ortwin de Graef Deborah Denenholz Morse (bio) The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope, edited by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton, and Ortwin de Graef; pp. xii + 396. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $200.00. There are many fine essays in The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope, some of which I heard in earlier versions at the 2015 Trollope bicentenary in Leuven, Belgium. All of the contributors are accomplished Victorianists. However, unlike the volume's editors—Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton, and Ortwin de Graef—few of them are known primarily as Trollope scholars, although some—Helen Blythe, Sophie Gilmartin, and Lauren Goodlad, among others—have written brilliantly on Trollope for years. Few contributors have written a major study on Trollope; John McCourt is a luminous exception, with his essential book on Trollope and Ireland. This editorial choice is both a strength and a weakness of the volume—a strength with regard to the scope of inquiry and the [End Page 463] wonderful minds thinking about Trollope; a weakness because capacious knowledge of Trollope's fiction is requisite to full interpretation of his novels, as the great Trollopian James Kincaid once claimed. There is at times a related tendency not to acknowledge important scholarship on the very subject at hand that I fear will seem ungenerous to scholars steeped in Trollope. That said, there is a plethora of exciting scholarship here. Claire Jarvis's compelling "Almost Trollope" opens the volume's first section, "Style," arguing that Trollope's "hesitant" style, marked by his pervasive use of "almost," is intentional rather than a sign of haste. Trollope's "almostness," in which the narrator enters only partially into characters' minds, issues in a new realism in which there is both sympathy and separation between narrator and character (22). Patrick Fessenbecker is concerned with the intersection of narration and morality, as he plumbs Trollope's language in light of moral philosophy. There is much to admire in his readings of The Small House at Allington (1862) and The Claverings (1866), and in his determination "to treat Trollope as substantively engaging philosophical questions" (41). Gilmartin's "The Physiology of the Everyday" adds to her distinguished work on Trollope and the body. Gilmartin analyzes Trollope's mastery of free indirect discourse as it represents everyday sensory responses in novels from Framley Parsonage (1861) to The Way We Live Now (1875). Blythe's impressive essay centering on An Old Man's Love (1884) extends her work on Trollope's style in lesser-known works. Blythe argues that Trollope's allusions to his own earlier work and to Latin tags demonstrate his sophistication in interrogating Victorian historical and cultural as well as readerly expectation and experience. Eminent Trollopian Skilton reads An Autobiography (1883) as advice literature, interpreting Trollope's infamous accounting of monies earned as "a faithful servant's report to that Great Office in the sky" (89). Goodlad's original essay considers Trollope's novel chronicles in relation to contemporary serial television. Goodlad's previous innovative work enriches this consideration of transtemporal and transnational Trollope. Her erudite historical, critical, and theoretical contexts focus here on speculative financial conditions that encourage "Bigger Stories"—an infinitely expanding genre (107). Section 2, "Circulation," opens with distinguished Trollope editor Steve Amarnick's engaging critique of Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874) as revising the Dickensian Christmas genre in a dark Australian mode. Readers of An Autobiography and Trollope's letters will know of Trollope's Australian sheepfarmer son Fred's influence upon the character of Harry. John Bowen's brilliant essay focuses upon Elizabeth Bishop's dramatic monologue "From Trollope's Journal" (1965) and its relation to the travel book North America (1859), while also exploring Trollope's influence upon Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series (1951–75). The range of this essay—from Charles Darwin to Wilfred Owen—is impressive. Luca Caddia has written incisively on Trollope for many years. Here he trenchantly explores Trollope's interiority, using Philip Roth's term "counterlife" to consider twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that reference and critique Trollope's work (143). Caddia...

Teaching William Morris, edited by Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

Reviewed by: Teaching William Morris ed. by Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller Carolyn Lesjak (bio) Teaching William Morris, edited by Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; pp. ix + 308. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2019, $105.00, $99.50 paper. Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller's edited collection Teaching William Morris makes good on just about everything it promises, which is no small feat given the range and diversity of Morris's interests and artistic endeavors. The collection aims to provide the "connective tissue" missing from so many approaches to teaching Morris that focus on a part rather than the whole of his work (3). As its title makes clear, this is a book about teaching Morris, and it offers a rich set of essays that cover multiple sites of teaching—from university extension programs in the early twentieth century, to the Hull-House Labor Museum in Chicago and workshops at the Kelmscott House Museum in Hammersmith for school-aged children, to undergraduate and graduate courses at a variety of postsecondary institutions—and multiple paths and modes for introducing students to Morris and capturing the expansiveness of his career. The collection is organized into five broad categories that are meant less to divide up the areas within which Morris worked than to give shape to his "multivarious complexity," and it covers an impressive amount of ground (2). Sections on "Pasts and Presents," "Political Contexts," "Literature," "Art and Design," and "Digital Humanities" touch on Morris's Icelandic sagas; political speeches and writings from The Commonweal (1885–94); poetry; wallpaper designs, tapestries, and other artisanal crafts; architecture; his founding of "the firm" (222); his relationship to the fine arts movement; his utopian novels News from Nowhere (1890) and A Dream of John Ball (1888); and his unorthodox translation of the Odyssey (1887). The list itself says it all in terms of what "multivarious" means when it comes to Morris. Matching this range are the various responses to and forms of engagement with Morris, be it writing a young adult novel about him, as John Plotz discusses; creating the first ever William Morris blog, followed by YouTube videos and Twitter threads, a digital project of Tony Pickney's; looking at how Morris was taught to tenement dwellers in Chicago around 1900, as Elizabeth Helsinger does; or thinking about how he can best be taught today in an era defined by increasing specialization and alienated forms of labor, intellectual and otherwise—in short, the very things at the heart of Morris's critique of his own society. Against these present tendencies, Martinek and Miller's collection hopes to keep in play the "threads of interconnections that pass between and among [the essays]" both within and across the sections of the volume (4). In this brief review, I cannot hope to do justice to all the fine essays brought together here. Instead, I will focus on a number of key themes, challenges, and innovative pedagogical approaches that emerge across the collection. A central question addressed in many of the essays is how we might get current students interested in Morris at all, a considerable task. Deanna Kreisel begins her essay on News from Nowhere by bluntly stating that "literary utopias are boring," and that Morris's is no exception, as her [End Page 459] undergraduate students made clear in no uncertain terms (161). Given this shared experience, many of the essays helpfully describe different attempts to pique students' interest in Morris. KellyAnn Fitzpatrick invites students to read Morris's medievalism against J. R. R. Tolkien in order to see how "various manifestations of medievalism have made their way into contemporary fantasy" (70). David Latham focuses on five key transformations that Morris envisions—some of which seemed far-fetched during Morris's day but have now come to pass—in order to illustrate the power of the utopian ideal and to prompt students to think about where we "find our inspiration for thinking, for living, for improving the world" (116). As he concludes, "If we can change the weather, and our health and our height, then we may answer 'yes, surely,' we can find time to consider a different kind of...

George C. Marshall and the Early Cold War: Policy, Politics, and Society

Much has been written about General of the Army George C. Marshall, one of the most significant and respected Americans of the twentieth century. Winston Churchill declared him the “true organizer of victory” as U.S. army chief of staff during World War II, and he will always be a model for military officers (p. 241). William A. Taylor has compiled a volume of fine essays on Marshall's equally distinguished postwar career, which included perhaps his most well-known contribution to his nation and the world—the European Recovery Program (Erp), which bears his name, the Marshall Plan. Numerous authors have produced an important body of literature on Marshall, including the award-winning Marshall biographer Mark A. Stoler, who penned the foreword for this anthology. Taylor's introduction and conclusion and the nine original essays rely heavily on the extensive secondary literature, but collectively they provide contemporary students of military leadership and national...

Early Modern Spectatorship: Interpreting English Culture 1500–1780. Ed. Ronald Huebert and David McNeil.

<i>Early Modern Spectatorship: Interpreting English Culture 1500–1780</i>. Ed. Ronald Huebert and David McNeil.

Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland, edited by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran

Reviewed by: Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland ed. by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran Amy E. Martin (bio) Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland, edited by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran; pp. xxxiii + 293. Hamden, CT and Cork: Quinnipiac University Press, 2018, $29.00. Since the 1990s, there has been a veritable explosion of scholarly studies of the Great Famine in Ireland (An Gorta Mór in the Irish language) approaching the catastrophe and ensuing trauma from a variety of disciplinary frameworks. What began as a largely historiographical project—to recuperate and to document the human losses due to food scarcity and starvation between 1845 and 1852 and to develop arguments about its causes—has expanded to many fields and to the consideration and analysis of numerous archives. However, as Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran, the editors of Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland, rightly contend, children's experiences of the Irish Famine, their subsequent emigration, and their central place in contemporaneous and later literary and cultural representations of the Great Famine have received scant attention in the scholarly works of the last three decades. That absence is striking on its own. It is all the more so when we bear in mind developments in childhood studies in Ireland and recent urgent attention to infants and children propelled by inquiries into the Magdalene Laundries, Irish child homes, and other church-run institutions in which abuse and high infant and child mortality occurred. These contexts make this volume an especially important contribution to our understanding of the Great Famine itself and the ways in which this cataclysm dramatically changed the cultural, social, linguistic, religious, and demographic landscape of Ireland and the Irish diaspora to the present. This volume is multidisciplinary in unexpected and exciting ways, but it opens with a series of primarily historical essays that establish the experiences and fate of children during the Famine, in particular the many who ended up in workhouses established by [End Page 572] the Irish Poor Law of 1838. While there is some unnecessary overlap in these contributions, they do an excellent job of setting the stage for the remainder of the collection. In particular, the juxtaposition of Kinealy's reading of firsthand accounts of the suffering of children with the more quantitative and bureaucratic-focused work of Moran and Simon Gallaher provides a rich and multifaceted foundation for what follows. In a fine essay on children abandoned in workhouses for the two decades after the Famine, Gallaher posits workhouses as sites of biopolitical experimentation concerning the management and containment of parentless children. Another crucial intervention of this essay, and of several others in this collection, is the extension of a timeline of famine inquiry, arguing that the immediate impact, trauma, and multiple "scars" of the Famine continued into the 1850s and 60s and well beyond (52). This first section is rounded out by Jonny Geber's fascinating essay on how bioarcheology—the study of bones found at mass graves—can illuminate childhood physiological experiences of the Famine in ways that other methodologies cannot. Taken together, these opening contributions reveal the contours and the extremity of the physical and psychological suffering of children during the Famine in Ireland. The remaining essays in the volume are organized into two sections. The first focuses on children who immigrated to Canada as a result of the Famine. The specificity of this section is quite different from the other two in its concentration on one very particular instance in the history of famine emigration. At the same time, the cluster of essays functions as a kind of case study that elucidates the experiences of children who traveled across the Atlantic in coffin ships. Together and individually, these contributions provide a rich historiographical picture of the often harrowing lives of the Irish Famine orphans who were resettled in Eastern Canada as well as a vivid account of the institutions that managed them and determined their fates. These essays also provide larger insights beyond the specific context of Irish children who ended up in Quebec and New Brunswick. For example, Mark McGowan offers a transformative analysis of the ways that...

The Great Vanishing Act: Blood Quantum and the Future of Native Nations ed. by Kathleen Ratteree and Norbert Hill Jr

Reviewed by: The Great Vanishing Act: Blood Quantum and the Future of Native Nations ed. by Kathleen Ratteree and Norbert Hill Jr James W. Oberly The Great Vanishing Act: Blood Quantum and the Future of Native Nations. Edited by Kathleen Ratteree and Norbert Hill Jr. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2017. xviii + 349 pp. Illustrations. $21.95 paper. The trust and enrollment committee of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin (OTIW) has organized this anthology by mainly Native writers and artists. Editor Kathleen Ratteree works for the OTIW committee, and her coeditor, Norbert Hill Jr., works as OTIW director of education. The editors begin their preface with the statement that “Blood Quantum imposed from within and without has shaped Native identity and has been the primary determinant of deciding ‘Who is an Indian’ [original italics] for more than a century.” The imposition from without came from federal officials making decisions about who was a tribal member, based on some fraction of descent. The imposition from within comes, since 1934, from tribal constitutions under the authority of the Indian Reorganization Act, by which tribes determine their members, also based on some fraction of descent. The two forces act in tandem today when the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs issues certificate of degree of Indian blood (CDIB) cards to individuals who qualify for tribal membership under ordinances determined by tribes. With more than 560 federally recognized tribes, there is variation in the ways that tribes decide their membership criteria. The editors chose the title of this anthology to indicate that any reliance on CDIB will doom tribes to disappear, because a child born to a tribal member and a non-Native has only half the CBID as the Native parent. A few generations of this practice and federally recognized tribes will have no members, hence the title, The Great Vanishing Act. The editors have organized the anthology in four parts: cultural representations of blood quantum; the history of blood quantum as a standard for tribal membership; the mechanics of counting blood quantum today, including DNA tests; and alternatives to CDIB/ blood quantum thresholds for determining tribal membership. The first section, “Cultural Metaphor,” includes a blog post from Adrienne Keene, “Love in the Time of Blood Quantum,” which recounts the pressure on Native women to marry and have children with other tribal members so as to preserve membership for the next generation. Essays by Richard Hill, Leslie Logan, and Olivia Hoeft recount how different tribes understood family relations in a more complicated way than mere lineal descent. This section of the anthology also includes playwright Reed Bobroff ’s script for a stage production of Fraction of Love. The next section, on history, begins with a 2001 essay by Suzan Shown Harjo making the point that blood quantum and CDIB came from a specific time in US history, the allotment period, and can thus be abandoned. In a fine essay, “Bleeding Out: Histories and Legacies of ‘Indian Blood,’” historian Doug Kiel sets forth an outline of how and when blood quantum measures appeared in federal Indian policy. He points especially to one of the legislative authors of the Indian Reorganization Act, Senator Burton Wheeler, as someone who thought federal policy should be directed to making the “Indian problem” vanish through high blood quantum standards. Julia Coates has an especially thoughtful essay on how Cherokee Nation voters decided in 2007 that they wanted to amend their constitution in a way that included the word “blood,” not so much as a way to discriminate against African American descendants of the Cherokee freedmen, but rather because the tribal members simply “did not know who the descendants of the freedmen were.” She finds community solidarity, not racism, was the reason to include an “Indian blood” standard for how a tribe identified itself in the 21st century. The third section of the anthology features an important essay by Kim TallBear on how lineal descent, without an arbitrary fraction as the basis for tribal membership, continues the allotment-era idea of blood quantum. She closes her essay with a provocative call for tribes to move away from the concepts of “nation” and “citizen.” TallBear’s essay is followed by...

Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

<i>Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594</i>. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

IV. Pastor Aeternus at 150

Kristin Colberg's fine essay in the December 2019 issue of Horizons clearly lays out the social, historical, and theological context for Pastor Aeternus. The year 1870 was a tumultuous, difficult, even dangerous, time for the Roman Catholic Church as it dealt with rationalism, challenges to secular as well as religious authority, new scientific ideas, and the loss of its own political power. When I have taught historical survey courses, I always stress the significance of context, and Pastor Aeternus is no exception. I also ask my students, when reading about controversial issues, to ask the question: “What is each position trying to protect?” Clearly, Pastor Aeternus is trying to protect the church's independence from secular powers, from perceived errors, and from forces of disunity both in society and in the church itself.

Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History ed. by Robert M. S. McDonald

Reviewed by: Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History ed. by Robert M. S. McDonald Edith Gelles Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History. Edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. Foreword by Jon Meacham. Afterword by Gordon S. Wood. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xxxii, 311. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4291-9.) The word Lives in this title may be interpreted in several ways, as shown in this marvelous new collection of essays, finely edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. The essays originated at a 2012 conference at Monticello to commemorate Peter S. Onuf, one of this generation’s master historians of Thomas Jefferson. Each of the other master historians featured in this volume examines the biographical interpretations of a particular era during the nearly two centuries since the third president’s death in 1826, excluding the present generation of Jefferson biographers. Interest in the third president has not flagged since his death; the mythologizing of Jefferson has been of industrial proportions. That is one way to read the titular “Lives.” Another way is that, with each generation, the perception of Jefferson’s character has shifted, reflecting the biographer’s own times. As Jon Meacham writes in the foreword, “there is no such thing as a totally objective life. Biographies . . . often belong to the ages in which they were written no matter how hard some historians may try It can be no other” (p. x). Finally, reading Lives in its verb form, it is clear that Jefferson still baffles biographers, and the challenge to define him continues. R. B. Bernstein, in his fine essay on Dumas Malone, quotes Hermione Lee that biography is “‘a mixed, unstable genre, whose rules keep coming undone [and] the only rule that holds good is that there is no such thing as a definitive biography’” (p. 220). In the end, it is fair to say that the essayists agree with Joseph J. Ellis’s incisive 1997 portrait of Jefferson as the “American Sphinx,” an icon that remains a puzzle. Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History is divided into three sections, reflecting the chronology of the biographies. Part 1, “Memory,” begins with a reflection on Jefferson’s own failed efforts to write a memoir, which is followed by a series of essays about the biographers who either knew Jefferson or knew people who were familiar with the paterfamilias. This group includes an adulatory great-granddaughter, Sarah N. Randolph, who, as the late Jan Ellen Lewis points out, emphasized Jefferson’s dislike of public life and claimed he “entered politics only out of ‘a lurking desire to leave to his children the honor’” (p. 87). Not all of the early authors were so romantic [End Page 449] or self-serving in their works. They emphasized Jefferson’s public life and his public service while suppressing his personal life, a slant that, in the period between the early nineteenth century and the Civil War, meant allowing scant attention to slavery, to Jefferson’s absence from public service during the Revolutionary War, and yes, to the scandalous story of his relationship with Sally Hemings. This rumor circulated after 1802, when the journalist James Callender published a reference to Jefferson’s so-called illicit affair. None of these essayists can get away from the subject of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, perhaps a telling reflection of the current generation’s contextual focus. The conclusive evidence surfaced in 1998 when the scientific certainty of DNA confirmed the paternity of Hemings’s children. Earlier historians, like Henry S. Randall, whom Andrew Burstein insightfully analyzes along with James Parton, attributed paternity to Jefferson’s nephews, the notorious reprobates, the Carr brothers. Burstein’s Randall “showcased [Jefferson] as the most well-rounded, refined, and resilient of the founders”; “Randall’s work served as justification for all future monuments to the Jefferson whose ‘spirit-stirring pen’ enshrined a world-transformative humanism” (p. 63). Parton’s 1872–1873 biography echoed that sentiment: “‘If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right’” (pp. 77–78). In a transitional essay to the second part, Richard...

Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi. Volume 3: Essays on America’s Civil War by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott

Reviewed by: Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi. Volume 3: Essays on America’s Civil War by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott Matthew M. Stith Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi. Volume 3: Essays on America’s Civil War. Edited by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott. Foreword by Daniel E. Sutherland. The Western Theater in the Civil War. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2019. Pp. xxiv, 374. $64.95, ISBN 978-1-62190-454-0.) Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott have produced a third and final volume in their excellent series on Confederate generalship in the trans-Mississippi theater. The first two volumes—published in 2013 and 2015 and spearheaded by the late Arthur W. Bergeron—explore the lives of a host of Confederate generals who have collectively attracted as much criticism from some modern historians as they did from their contemporaries. Some of this critique was quite warranted indeed, but at the heart of these volumes lies a more nuanced and careful appraisal. Among the greatest strengths of all three volumes of Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi is how rebel commanders on the western edge of the Confederate South are carefully placed in proper situational and political contexts. This latest installment reflects the strengths of the first two volumes splendidly by bringing eight fine essays about both well-known and obscure generals who plied their trade west of the Mississippi River. Taken as a whole, these volumes serve as yet more evidence that underscores the reality that the trans-Mississippi West, though on the geographical edge of the Confederacy, fits squarely and deservedly in the center of Civil War historiography. The volume’s first contributions examine the motivations and careers of two examples of inept Confederate leadership west of the Mississippi River. First, General Earl Van Dorn was among the most maligned commanders of the war, [End Page 485] especially in the trans-Mississippi theater. His wartime career path from capable administrator and effective cavalry commander in 1861 to dismal performer as army commander in 1862 reflects the complexity inherent in even the most troubled commands. Ultimately, however, Joseph G. Dawson III shows that Van Dorn’s loss at the battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862, coupled by other failures, relegates the commander into the “lower one-quarter” of Confederate generals in the Confederate South (p. 25). Much like Van Dorn, General Hamilton Prioleau Bee earned an exceedingly poor reputation due to command ineptitude, albeit on a less publicized stage. As Richard H. Holloway makes clear, Bee’s poor performance in the Red River campaign—namely, his panic and retreat at Monett’s Ferry—stained his wartime career and sentenced him to years of postwar fighting to mend his status. In sharp contrast to Van Dorn and Bee, General James Fleming Fagan, as Stuart W. Sanders contends, was among the finest Confederate generals in the trans-Mississippi. Sanders’s essay helps clarify and revive Fagan’s leadership ability. Sanders places Fagan’s missteps at Pilot Knob, Missouri, and Marks’ Mills, Arkansas, during the war—and his Republican scalawagery after it—in context of his otherwise solid leadership. Jeffery S. Prushankin similarly gives General Edmund Kirby Smith his proper due. Prushankin illuminates the corrosive nature of command politics in the trans-Mississippi by the second half of the war by examining the high hopes and ultimate despondency of one of the more promising Confederate generals. Kirby Smith’s Trans-Mississippi Department was falling to pieces by 1863. Indeed, Prushankin makes clear, the “constant demands of politicians and the carping of his subordinates,” atop gloomy prospects against the enemy, proved too much for Kirby Smith to handle and reflected the complications inherent in the Confederate command structure west of the Mississippi (p. 116). Holloway’s second essay provides a look into the stymied career of William Robertson Boggs and his actions in Louisiana. Boggs had a great deal of potential and an impressive resume before 1861, but, as Holloway shows, the general was attached to Kirby Smith’s staff and never saw significant direct leadership until the very end of the war in Louisiana. Thomas Green had a quite different career. Curtis Milbourn...

The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England ed. by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole

Reviewed by: The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England ed. by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole Lieke Stelling (bio) The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England Edited by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole Cambridge University Press, 2018. xvi + 304 pp. $99.99 hardcover. This volume marks a compelling new step in the analysis of the early modern English literary exploration of religion. The body of research on religious themes in early modern literature, and notably in Shakespeare, is vast, but, as this collection of fine essays demonstrates, far from exhaustive. If the majority of studies have concerned themselves with questions as to which parts of scripture were being alluded to in the literary culture of the Protestant Reformation, this volume considers how literary works were interested not so much in citing as in examining specific problems of interpreting the Bible, which were at the core of the Reformation. Thus, one of the threads that runs through the chapters is the deceptive understanding of literal and figurative interpretation as antithetical. In addition, the contributions discuss, through a Shakespearean lens, the wider social, theological and textual ramifications of biblical hermeneutics in relation to other important sites and forms of interpretation, including sermons and sermonizing, translation, topography and material aspects of the Bible. The first chapter, by Bruce Gordon, lays the groundwork for the volume by offering an extensive discussion of biblical production, translation, scholarship and dissemination in the age of Shakespeare. He does so by carefully tracing continental debates on and developments in approaches to translation from the languages of the Bible into Latin and vernacular tongues, and relating these issues to the production and use of Bibles in England, notably the Geneva and Bishop’s Bible. Aaron T. Pratt, remaining [End Page 210] on the topic of translation, zooms in on the question of which versions of Protestant Bibles Shakespeare and his contemporaries consumed, making the paradoxical and intriguing observation that translation is in fact less, and paratext more helpful in answering this question than is often assumed. Jay Zysk opens a new section that consists of four chapters and is dedicated to “Reformation reading practices in the theater” (49). Focusing on Measure for Measure, Zysk addresses Angelo’s mentioning of “chewing God’s name” in relation to John 6 and to the heated controversy around the issue of tran-substantiation (51). Zysk shows how the play presents the distinction between the literal and figurative reading of the Eucharist as far from clear-cut, and, more importantly, as far from trivial, but a matter of life and death. Kristen Poole, in the subsequent chapter on Hamlet, further elaborates on the issue of early modern Protestant “literalism” (71) and expounds the linguistic and theological significance of amphibology and the pun. She notes that aspects of a great deal of Hamlet’s puns bear similarities to structures of Protestant allegory in contemporary sermons. In addition, she shows that the figure of Hamlet personifies an early modern conception of the self that was shaped by the Bible in terms of its textual content as well as its material form. Beatrice Groves sheds fresh light on the moment of Henry IV’s decease in the so-called Jerusalem chamber, and his ironic observation that he always thought he would die in the Holy Land. She convincingly explains that this moment, when read in a context in which England was often typologically interpreted as the Holy Land, is closer to fulfillment than is often admitted. Tom Bishop, in the final chapter of this section, turns to the slippery concepts of “reading” (103) and “studying” (105) scripture, from the fruitful vantage point of the speech of the imprisoned Richard of Bordeaux (and former King Richard II) in Pomfret Castle. Section three, on the interplay between biblical forms and other genres, is opened by Adrian Streete’s insightful contribution about the interrelationships between classical Roman Stoic and biblical understandings of lamentation. These are brought together, Streete shows, in Shakespeare’s most gruesome play—Titus Andronicus—and inform the tensions within the identities of the tragedy’s lamenting protagonists. Hannibal Hamlin problematizes biblical allusions in Pericles (and, to a...

Feeling Time: Duration, the Novel, and Eighteenth-Century Sensibility by Amit S. Yahav

MLR, .,   translations. Another useful, informative essay by Mario Dorigatti brings out the significance of Antonio Panizzi’s nineteenth-century edition, the first to combine Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato and its sequel, Ariosto’s poem. Two outstanding essays, well argued, precisely focused, and fully in control of their materials, are Tobias Gregory’s ‘Milton and Ariosto’ and Tim Carter’s discussion of ‘Ariosto on the th-Century Opera Stage’, with particular attention to Handel. Carter’s ‘Lessons in Madness’ shows in consistently interesting detail ‘how the Orlando Furioso was read over three centuries’ as well as illustrating some of the problems of turning a poem into ‘mimetic drama’ (pp. , ). Gregory’s essay is one of the few in the volume that treats its materials analytically, giving a sense of what Ariosto is like as a poet and showing how Milton both resembles and differs from Ariosto in passages indebted to the earlier author. Two other valuable essays, Andrew Hiscock on Ariosto ‘among the Elizabethans’ (p. ) and Susan Oliver on Walter Scott and Orlando furioso, are stimulating and informative, without fully realizing the potential of their materials. Hiscock provides ample evidence to demonstrate how widely Ariosto’s poem was known during the Elizabethan period, a treasure trove for anyone who wants to know how the poem is echoed or reflected in English plays, poems, madrigals, and the visual arts during this period. But the essay resembles a catalogue of details, in which the treatment of a single Dutch tapestry maker is roughly as long as the treatment of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. One surprising omission in the volume is that there is no essay on Spenser and Ariosto, no attempt to give detailed consideration to the poet most significantly influenced by the Italian. Oliver’s essay is full of interesting quotations from Scott to show that ‘Ariosto was his favourite poet’, instrumental from an early age ‘in directing the turn of my imagination to the chivalrous and romantic in poetry and prose’ (pp. –). But though the chapter argues that the influence of Ariosto is pervasive in Scott’s poems as well as in the Waverley novels, there could be more detail on how Scott’s method of narrative draws on the characteristic entrelacement of Orlando furioso in ‘connecting the branches of [the] story’ (p. , quoted by Jossa). Jossa’s fine essay shows how Ariosto turns up in surprising places in works by British writers—for example, David Lodge’s comic novel Small World. U  L W C Feeling Time: Duration, the Novel, and Eighteenth-Century Sensibility. By A S. Y. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. .  pp. $.;£. ISBN ––––. Amit S. Yahav’s Feeling Time tackles a problem that has absorbed eighteenthcentury authors and contemporary dorm-room philosophers alike: does time exist; and if so, how do we know whether it is the same for everyone? A conventional understanding of Enlightenment approaches to time holds that it was in this period—with the increased accessibility of clocks and watches, the rise of recurrent publications such as newspapers and periodicals, and the eventual introduction of  Reviews factory routines—that a modern sense of linear, external time took hold. However, Yahav shows how a variety of writers focused on duration as a personal, embodied experience that was simultaneously shared, given that (they theorized) humans possessed innate capacities of rhythm, pulse, and language that created patterns of temporal experience. As she writes, ‘these eighteenth-century discussions identify felt duration as the crux of aesthetic pleasure and judgment, experiences described more as patterned durational activities than as static states’ (p. ). Focusing in particular on how this version of temporality interacts with novel writing and reading, Yahav identifies a ‘sensibility chronotope’ within which ‘what we do, how we feel, and who we are, are all questions that have everything to do with the temporality of our existence, and the temporality of our existence has everything to do with the way our experiences are composed into sensible patterns’ (p. ). Novels provide space for ‘off-the-clock’ leisure reading, offering ‘pauses for alternative duration’ (p. ). In this way, Yahav’s exploration of modes of qualitative duration contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about the...

Civility and Civil Courage

Prompted by Emily Chamlee-Wright’s fine essay “Self-censorship and Associational Life in the Liberal Academy” (the symposium lead essay), I present a scheme that focuses on something that might not seem to fit Emily’s focus on self-censorship. But after presenting my scheme I will suggest that it does. My scheme focuses on the wrestling we engage in to alter the composite character of the communities we belong to. It turns out that one of the dimensions of dissimilitude within the community, a dimension to some extent beyond politics, is liberal arts affirmation versus solidaric political affirmation.

Chaucer and the Subversion of Form ed. by Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld

Reviewed by: Chaucer and the Subversion of Form ed. by Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld Taylor Cowdery Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, eds. Chaucer and the Subversion of Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. ix, 224. $99.99. At least since E. Talbot Donaldson's "Chaucer the Pilgrim," the image of Chaucer most familiar to scholars has been that of a poet whose task [End Page 395] is "to build" from "incongruous and inharmonious parts" an "inseparable whole which is infinitely greater than its parts" (Speaking of Chaucer, 11–12). This Chaucer is a master of speech-modes, literary character, and narrative emplotment, and he uses every one of his formal tricks to produce a series of convincing verbal portraits of medieval life as it was lived. This collection of essays revisits Donaldson's New Critical approach to Chaucer, but turns the approach on its head. Where Donaldson and his many followers saw formal unity in the poet's works—or at least, in the Chaucer they knew and loved best—the essays in Rosenfeld and Prendergast's collection focus instead, as their editors put it, "on the failures of form: the resistance to poetic terminology, to formal consolation, to formal interpretation, beauty, and even to literariness itself" (9). For these writers, Chaucer is a poet not of mastery, but of subversion—a poet who sees form as a "site of challenge" (3), as an opportunity to defy, rather than fulfill, the reader's expectations of unity, congruency, and order. With this orientation, Chaucer and the Subversion of Form joins Robert Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok's recent The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form in pushing back against the focus on congruent and harmonious forms in earlier New Formalist criticism. Five years ago, formally minded medievalists looked for the outlines of a well-wrought urn in the literature they studied. In these essays, when they read for form, they look for the ordered chaos of a Rauschenberg combine—for a combination, as Prendergast and Rosenfeld put it, of "formal ambitiousness and inchoateness" that "situate the work in its specific cultural context and yet allow it to reach beyond" (6). The chapters in this volume are divided into three groups of three. The first group, "The Failures of Form," reads Chaucer's forms against the literary techniques and philosophical ideas that these forms suggest but do not endorse. Jenni Nuttall's fine essay "Many a Lay and Many a Thing" argues that the poet's invocations of technical terms for poetry—including "lenvoy," "songe," "dytee," "ryme," "cadence," "compleynt," "lay," and "ballade"—are metacritical sites where he "pose[s] questions to himself and his readers" (22) about the activity and intentions of his verse. Ultimately, Nuttall suggests that Chaucer uses these terms not to identify the forms his poetry employs, but to signal just how much his forms differ from, and even resist, the norms of the poetry of his time. In "Chaucer's Aesthetic Resources," Jennifer Jahner explores the role that literary form has in trying, and invariably failing, to bridge the gap between the forms of things an sich and the embodiment of [End Page 396] these forms in the particulars that we perceive. Focusing on Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.III.21—which joins a Latin copy of Boethius's Consolation, the Boece, and "The Former Age" and "Fortune" together— Jahner argues that, in contrast to Boethius and, later, Kant, Chaucer does not believe that, by grasping form, we can apprehend universal things. Instead, like Adorno, Chaucer demonstrates that our attempts to grasp form are invariably conditioned by history, and so any attempt to perceive form will be imperfect and full of "longing and uncertainty" (53). In the last essay of this cluster, Eleanor Johnson also argues that Chaucer rejects the idea that poetry is a window onto things as they really are. Her chapter, "Against Order," argues that literature, both medieval and modern, "challenge[s] the idea that linear causality is a stable hermeneutic" (61); moreover, criticism that "fetishiz[es] causality" (62) actually occludes the complex relationship that exists between people and events in literature. Johnson tests this thesis against three texts...

Theorising Criminalisation through the Modalities Approach: A Critical Appreciation

New scholarly paradigms in the study of criminal law come along rather rarely. Despite extensive published work on this core topic in the educational curriculum and intellectual programme of the legal academy in most countries, the basic conceptual tools which inform its exposition and analysis in mainstream scholarship have remained relatively stable over the last half century. Moreover, they have not evolved in proportion to the development of the field at large. Valuable attention to rethinking the conceptual parameters of the field has come from contextual, historical, feminist or otherwise critical scholarship (Ashworth 1991; Farmer 2016; Fletcher 1978; Loughnan 2012; Naffine 2009; Norrie 2014; Wells and Quick 2010); and—as the contributors to this fine essay note—from site-specific areas of criminalisation. But, the conceptual basis for theorisation remains a pressing concern. This is particularly so given the recognition, in much of the most innovative recent scholarship, that the field of criminal law cannot be fully understood independent of the dynamics of criminalisation conceived as a broad social practice. This development is giving a new spin to the longstanding focus in theoretically informed criminal law scholarship on the question of responsibility (Ashworth forthcoming; Ashworth and Zedner 2014; Duff et al. 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014; Farmer 2016; Horder 1992; Lacey 2016; McSherry, Norrie and Bronitt 2009; Norrie 2016; Ramsay 2012).

Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West ed. by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack

Reviewed by: Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West ed. by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack Albert S. Broussard Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West. Edited by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 424. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Two decades have passed since Quintard Taylor published In Search of the Racial Frontier (1998), the most comprehensive history yet written of African Americans in the western states and territories from the Spanish era to the 1990s. Taylor's meticulous scholarship stimulated a wave of new studies in western black history, including biographies, community studies, institutional histories, and anthologies. Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West, edited by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack, continues this resurgence of scholarship by offering thirteen essays and two oral interviews that examine the varied people, places, and institutions of the black West and the ceaseless quest for equality that black westerners waged to achieve full citizenship. Although the essays in this ambitious anthology lack a strong unifying thesis, almost every contributor views the West as a land of promise, where African Americans had the potential to improve their lives and to shape their futures. Students of Texas and western history will find rich material on African American community building and racial activism in such diverse areas as Spokane, Washington, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Boley, Oklahoma, and Fort Hood and Houston, Texas, although on occasion they may have already encountered the material. The strongest essay in the collection, Bernadette Pruitt's "'Beautiful People': Community Formation in Houston, 1900–1941," is drawn from Pruitt's excellent book, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900–1941 (Texas A&M University Press, 2013). Similarly, Emily Lutenski's fine essay, "The New Negro Frontier: Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and African American Modernism in the West," was published previously in West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands (University Press of Kansas, 2015). Still, readers will discover fresh material regarding how African Americans throughout the twentieth century confronted the American West, including in New Mexico and the territories of Alaska and Hawaii, where relatively small African American populations also demanded racial equality. Some of the most original contributions in this volume pertain to entertainment and the arts. Jeanelle Hope, for example, explores the relationship between African American and Asian women through poetry in the San Francisco Bay Area, an alliance that few scholars have examined, and one that we know virtually nothing about in other western cities. Gabriela Jiménez's essay, "'Something 2 Dance 2': Electro-hop in 1980s Los Angeles and Its Afrofuturist Link," examines the creative nature of African [End Page 219] American dance in Los Angeles by focusing on a genre of electronic music and dance that appeared there between 1983 and 1988. Like hip hop, which appeared on the East Coast and gradually entered the mainstream of both African American and American music generally, electro-hop also appealed largely to young, marginalized African American, Afro Latino, and Latino youth. It was also wildly popular in Europe, particularly Germany. Although many of the essays in this collection have appeared in print previously, readers will still find much to celebrate. Ruffin and Mack, for example, have given ample attention to the role of gender and sexuality in the twentieth-century West. In his excellent essay, "Black Women in Spokane: Emerging from the Shadows of Jim and Jane Crow," Mack traces the activism of African American middle-class women in Spokane, Washington, such as Bertha Cravens, who used local community organizations and the local branch of the NAACP to fight racial discrimination and to gain important concessions for Spokane's small black population. Similarly, Kevin Leonard's essay, "Containing 'Pervasion': African-Americans and Same-Sex Desire in Cold War Los Angeles," provides a compelling view of how black editors in post-World War II Los Angeles perceived homosexuality in the black community. Readers will also benefit from the extensive bibliographic essay as well as the brief biographical sketches and vignettes of significant events in western history...