232 Reviews chapter on missionary writing in Australia is on Lancelot Threlkeld, another liminal figure,who attacked the degeneracy of the white settler community, specifically in its sexual exploitation of Aboriginal people, and championed the rights ofthe indigenous people to survive. The writer approaches the missionaries almost as an ethnographer might, so unfamiliar do their practices seem. Readers, without access to their archival texts, have to decode the writer's attitudes in order to position themselves in relation to missionary activities, as when she critiques the missionary antipathy to Polynesian infanticide: As some missionaries almost suggest, Polynesian infanticide really acted to control population growth and to maintain social stability?but such conclusions are literally unspeakable in missionary texts' (p. 162). There is no indication of the doctrinal and theological perspective of the missionaries, only of their social preoccupations; did they not, forinstance, publish hymns and tracts? Repeated references to the Victorian 'nuclear family' are puzzling, given the size of the average Victorian family,and the Anglican Church is categorized as not being Protestant. None the less, the argument about mutual imbrication is persuasively sustained in this well-researched and infor? mative book. University of Stirling Angela Smith Paternalism Incorporated: Fables ofAmerican Fatherhood, 1865-1940. By David Leverenz . Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. 2003. x + 254 pp. $39-95; ?23.95- ISBN 0-8014-4167-6. In his firstbook since the influential Manhood and theAmerican Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), David Leverenz continues to address the ways gender roles alter in the face of shifting economic and social conditions and the liter? ary strategies used by authors to represent and negotiate these conditions. As the title suggests, Leverenz is here concerned with the way writers responded to the corporate transformation of the United States' economy between the Civil War and the Second World War. More particularly, he seeks to recover the complex trajectory of paternal? ism, a concept which has, he suggests, come to signify'an outmoded management style that treats adults as children' and in turn is treated as 'a bad thing; end of story' (p. 1). Leverenz's approach is to see paternalism instead as a discourse that does cultural work at those points where the expansion of corporate business and its bureaucratic imperatives threatens traditional patterns of social relations but offers,by way of compensation , the promise of upward mobility, often formarginalized social groups. Ac? cording to Leverenz, 'from 1865 to the 1920s, white middle-class Americans encountered a modern version of a Contact Period [...]. Surging into the workplace, many African Americans, immigrants, and women dreamed of rising to respectability, and some achieved it' (p. 5). In some cases paternalism supported such dreams of mobility and at other times itbattled to maintain existing class, race, and gender hierarchies. Pa? ternalism, then, is the often contradictory switching-point at which a whole variety of anxieties and ambitions connected to structural economic shiftsmanifest themselves. This is an inventive reconceptualization of paternalism and what it allows Leverenz to do is revisit many of the gendered fictions of the late nineteenth and early twenti? eth centuries with a fresh critical perspective. To clarify his argument, he identifies two key recurring narrative themes: stories of the daddy's girl and the daddy's boy. The figure of the daddy's girl?and the daddy here may or may not be biological? Leverenz reads as a character who is infantilized and sexualized in a paternalistic relationship so as to be made less threatening than the upwardly mobile New Woman who no longer finds comfort in spirituality or marriage. Thus Carrie Meeber, both MLR, 101.1,2006 233 Hurstwood's girl and the girl of the male audiences who adore her, represents the two contradictory messages of the paternalism: ' "Take care of me" and "I can take care of myself, thank you"' (p. 84). It is Dreiser's positioning of Carrie at the border of these two contradictory messages, according to Leverenz, that 'makes gentlemen spectators feel powerful, and powerfully aroused' (p. 84). The story of the daddy's boy is typically a story of mentoring a young man to business success. But, in order to counterbalance the economic, the mentor...