Obscure Writer Research Articles

Joseph Cook's "Conversational Opinions of the Leaders of Secession"

Joseph Cook's "Conversational Opinions of the Leaders of Secession" Lindsay DiCuirci (bio) and Joseph Cook Notwithstanding the Atlantic's principal function as a vehicle for disseminating "the American idea," its passionately pro-North, anti-slavery, and Republican position more explicitly circulated "the Union idea" during the Civil War. According to M. A. deWolfe Howe, at the outbreak of war in 1861 the Atlantic's primary function was to supply "enlightenment and guidance of the public mind through that national crisis."1 While Howe's assessment employs the same rhetoric the Atlantic itself might have used, his emphasis on the periodical's expanding political vision is significant. James T. Fields, the Atlantic's war-time editor (1861–1871), began filling the pages of his magazine with less poetry and more politics, widening the Atlantic's topical and aesthetic range to include war prose from both established and obscure writers. Commercially speaking, the Atlantic was in competition with Harper's New Monthly Magazine, whose vast readership and prolific war coverage threatened to eclipse the Atlantic's grand purpose.2 Fields sought to maintain the "seriousness" of the publication while protecting its assets by publishing everything from sentimental abolitionist tales to highbrow "Emersonian" prose to useful notices on choosing firearms. In November 1862, the Atlantic printed an unusual piece by a young man named Joseph Cook. Cook had been a student at Yale in 1860 when he spent his holiday vacation in Washington D. C., hoping to interview Robert Toombs, R. M. T. Hunter, and Jefferson Davis—three key secessionist senators of Georgia, Virginia, and Mississippi, respectively. He went to their very doorsteps to ascertain "the real causes and origin of the Rebellion."3 What resulted from those 1860 interviews is "Conversational Opinions of the Leaders of Secession," printed without attribution and subtitled "A Monograph." Cook's "monograph" blends interview, narrative, and oratory in what ultimately [End Page 97] reads as an exposé on high treason in pre-war Washington and a call for political cohesion among the Northern readership. Though his essay fits somewhat uncomfortably in the generic categories of the literary periodical (it is a veritable medley of styles) and was never reprinted in the Atlantic or elsewhere, it is ideologically consistent with the magazine's Union perspective and its growing political authority. In fact, Cook's essay appears in an issue laden with war-related pieces, some more tangentially than others. The fourth piece in the issue, "The Development and Overthrow of the Russian Serf-System," by Professor A. D. White, celebrates the demise of an abusive system in a non-democratic country while presenting a thinly disguised commentary on the irony of an American democracy that supports the institution of slavery. Later in the issue, a short story appears entitled "Blind Tom" by "the author of 'Margret Howth'" (Rebecca Harding Davis). "Blind Tom" tells the story of a slave who is mentally challenged but becomes a piano virtuoso and stuns audiences across the South with his abilities and his "child-like" spirit. Echoing the theme of freeing those "caged" by slavery, Epes Sargent's poem "The Cabalistic Words" urges President Lincoln to speak "those saving words of power/[…] BE FREE!"4 Two pieces are dedicated specifically to President Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued on September 22, 1862. C. C. Hazewell's "The Hour and the Man" praises Lincoln's proclamation as the most significant American document since the Declaration of Independence, particularly if its principles stand the test of time. Immediately following "The Hour and the Man" is perhaps the most noteworthy among the war-related pieces in this issue, Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The President's Proclamation," the very last piece before the customary section of "Literary Notices." Even as he celebrates Lincoln's present triumph and looks forward to the mending of his country, Emerson also reiterates Cook's backward glance at the roots of Southern rebellion. He writes, "The war existed long before the cannonade of Sumter, and could not be postponed. […] war was in the minds and bones of the combatants, it was written on the iron leaf, and you might as easily dodge gravitation."5 Though both Emerson and Cook represent the...

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...

Romps with Ransom’s King: Fans, Collectors, Academics, and the M. P. Shiel Archives

HOUSING THE ARCHIVES OF SUCH NOTABLE LITERARY FIGURES as Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, and Oscar Wilde, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas is a Mecca for academic researchers from all over the world. At the same time, it is a Mecca for a very different kind of researcher attracted to a very different kind of archive. Take Alex, for example, a self-professed goth who describes his pilgrimage to the Ransom Center to view the Aleister Crowley archives in his blog, Alex's Journal. (1) Among his other interests cited on the user info page, Alex lists death metal, body piercing, drinking, comics hurting peoples brains [sic], debauchery, subdural haematomas, and weirding out weird people. The sheer eccentricity of the Ransom's collections--which include high literary, mass cultural, and even counter-cultural material--make it a place where a professor earnestly poring over a Joyce manuscript might rub shoulders with a like Alex who describes his research on Crowley as having fun and taking some cool notes. In other words, it is a place where the academic and the come face to face. The essay that follows discusses this confrontation between the academic and the in the archive--not in a literal way--but through the story of the archive of M. P. Shiel, an obscure writer of mystery, detective, horror, science fiction and other popular genres. His archives at the Ransom Center owe their existence entirely to a select few fans of Shiel--namely, a drunken bibliophile and a right-wing millionaire plastics manufacturer--figures who, like Alex, present a stark contrast to the earnest academics we normally associate with archives. In telling the story of this archive, the essay considers the differing discourses of the academic and the and how these discourses come into conflict when fans become implicated with archives, when fans engage in scholarship, and when the academic confronts the inside him- or herself. At the same time, it reveals how the Ransom Center became the kind of eclectic research institution that would consider creating archives devoted not only to renowned literary and cultural figures, but also to popular and mass cultural figures, from the more enduring and notorious of these--such as Crowley--to the most obscure and forgotten--such as Shiel. Academic, Fan, and Collector Discourse One of the reasons the image of the earnest Joyce scholar rubbing shoulders with the goth of Crowley in the Ransom Center is so amusing is that implicitly we recognize the stark contrast between the ethos of the academic and that of the fan. Before going on to discuss how the Shiel archives bring academics and fans into conflict, I will briefly summarize the discourses that define the academic and the fan. I will also describe the discourse of another figure central to the existence of archives, one who bears a close relationship to the fan--the collector. While academics, fans, and collectors may be broadly characterized as having in common a deep investment in culture, there are great differences in what Matt Hills calls the imagined subjectivities of these distinct groups or, the guiding discourses and ideals of they adopt (8). (2) Broadly speaking, academic culture is founded on Enlightenment principles which value reason over emotion, objectivity over subjectivity (Jensen 21, Frith 581). An academic would never, for example, describe his or her archival experience as taking cool notes, as Alex, the fan, does. Fans, who have a strong emotional engagement with and who express enthusiasm for their areas of interest, do not fare well under such a discourse. (3) The term fan itself, a term derived from the word fanatic, suggests a form of engagement with culture antithetical to that of the reasoning and objective academic. Fandom, as Joli Jensen, Lawrence Grossberg, Matt Hills, and others have argued, has tended to be pathologized by academics and this practice has served to uphold an elitist us/them dichotomy between forms of engagement with cultural life. …

Women Seeking Expression: France 1789-1914 (review)

This eclectic collection examines barriers women faced during the nineteenth century when seeking education, developing artistic talents, and contributing to genres and disciplines dominated by men. More significantly, the essays emphasize the innovations, original forms and perspectives that women developed in reaction to the restrictions presented by traditional gender roles, social expectations and the law. The time period covered and the wide range of women studied, famous as well as more obscure writers, theorists, artists, and activists, give a sense of the social, historical and political contexts, while the articles provide a glimpse of the varied perspectives in feminist criticism today.

Interpreting the Self: Two Hundred Years of American Autobiography

In this ambitious study, Diane explores the historical nature of self-narrative. Examining over 100 American autobiographers published in the last two centuries, she discusses not only well-known autobiographies such as Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie but also many obscure ones such as a traveling book peddler, a minstrel, a hotel proprietress, an itinerant preacher, a West Point cadet, and a hoopskirt wire manufacturer. draws on the colorful stories of these autobiographers to show how their historical epoch shapes their understandings of A refreshingly welcome approach to this intriguing topic. . . . [Bjorklund's] extensive and systematic approach to her source material is impressive and enriches our understanding of this essential subject. Virginia Quarterly Review Bjorklund studies both famous and obscure writers, and her clear prose style and copious quotations provide insight into the many aspects of the changing American self. Library Journal

The Art of Survival: The Translation of Walter Benjamin

The Art of Survival: The Translation of Walter Benjamin Betsy Flèche (bio) Walter Benjamin is experiencing a startling new life. The translation project at Harvard University Press intends to make Benjamin’s writings more accessible to English-speaking readers, while many scholars know Benjamin already. At least, they know his name, which seems to be everywhere. “The name Walter Benjamin resounds through contemporary literary and cultural criticism,” as a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education states. Benjamin has come to be identified with erudition and sophistication, but also with obscurity. It remains unclear to what purpose his name is invoked, or what his writings can be said to achieve. Among some theorists, it has become almost standard practice to mention Walter Benjamin, to show that one is thoroughly informed, and has left no stone unturned. Thus we hear a theorist referring to “the Benjaminian ear” in a paper for the general public on Freud, as though confident that everyone would (or perhaps would not) be familiar with the allusion. For Benjamin is known as an obscure writer, in at least two senses of the word: his works cannot be assimilated easily into the academy (as Freud’s are) and they are difficult to read. Some fifty years after his death, Benjamin’s literary figure comes to life. Is the indeterminacy of Benjamin’s literary identity the key to his survival? Benjamin’s name may appear, but his writings seem curiously difficult to categorize according to any recognizable discipline of literary and cultural scholarship. What scholarly discipline would have Benjamin as its subject? For his work can seem convoluted to an almost unreadable degree, requiring any reader who would know him to exert considerable effort and scrutiny. Its difficulty may suggest even to the rigorous English-speaking scholar, reading in translation, that Benjamin’s writing would be more comprehensible in the original German—especially if one did not know the language. In point of fact, knowledge of German does not simplify the matter [End Page 95] of reading Benjamin altogether, nor vouchsafe the comprehensibility of his writing, as his essay, “The Task of the Translator” makes clear. The Task of the Translator Translations, Benjamin insists from the outset, are not intended to enable the reader to comprehend a piece of writing. Instead, the translation is an object distinct from the original—even distinct from the translator—which survives by living away from the original (temporally, spatially, and linguistically). The object of Benjamin’s essay is to re-evaluate literary work away from authorship and originality, and away from polemical determinism (meaning, message, content). The original’s content, its author’s intention, its translator and the translator’s understanding of the original are not significant to the afterlife of the translation. Translation survives in a form unrelated to the original. “In a curious way,” Paul de Man writes, “translation canonizes its own version more than the original was canonical. . . . [Y]ou cannot, Benjamin says, translate the translation” (35). The translation takes on a life of its own. “Translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife,” writes Benjamin (“Task,” 71). Twice in the lines that follow, Benjamin mentions the “survival” of the translation over the original, but in typically cryptic terms. Zwar nicht aus seinem Leben so sehr den aus seinem “Überleben” Ist doch die Übersetzung später als das Original und bezeichnet sich doch bei den bedeutenden Werken, die da ihre erwählen Übersetzer niemals in Zeit alter ihrer Entstehung finden, das Stadium ihres Fortlebens. (51) Not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life. (71) Benjamin puts in quotation marks, as though to indicate a special use of the German, the verb used as noun—“Überleben,” which in its ordinary usage means to outlive. “Not so much from its life but as [the original] outlived, survived.” The sentence in the translation suggests that the original emanates a spirituality that the translation can plug into. Instead...

Major figures of nineteenth-century Austrian literature

Davian, Donald G., ed. Major Figures of Nineteenth-Century Austrian Literature. Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1998. 572 pp. $59.95. This volume is the fifth installment of a planned seven-volume series dedicated to introducing major figures of nineteenth and twentieth-century Austrian literature to an English speaking audience. The first four volumes cover the twentieth century in reverse chronological order, spanning the contemporary era to the turn-of-the century. The fifth volume spans the entire spectrum of nineteenth century literary styles and movements, from late-Romanticism to Naturalism. The selection includes essays on prominent writers such as Adalbert Stiffer, Franz Grillparzer or Johann Nepomuk Nestroy as well as almost forgotten ones like Betty Paoli, Ferdinand Kirnberger or Caroline Pichler and even obscure writers such as Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall and Jakob Julius David. Missing from the volume are Maria von Ebner-Eschenbach, Peter Rosegger or Ferdinand von Saar who, for some reason, are figured in the volume on turn-of-the-century literature. The format of the work follows that of its predecessors. An introduction by the editor provides the historical and political background of the time period; the individual articles include bibliographies of primary works in German and their English translations as well as a selected bibliography of major secondary works in German and English. The particularly extensive introduction (128 pages) to this volume outlines the divergent political, economic and cultural developments in Austria and Germany. Despite some rather unorthodox interpretations of historical events, the introduction-with its emphasis on the outmoded, regressive form of government that shaped Austria in the nineteenth century-provides very useful background information that allows the reader to better understand and evaluate the cultural climate that brought about the literature of that era. While the question of national identity and literature figures prominently in the introduction, it is rarely raised in the individual essays. Most of the contributions offer detailed biographical information on the individual authors combined with a thematic discussion of their works. These essays constitute solid and useful introductions to the artists, which otherwise may not be available to an English-speaking audience. Unfortunately, the emphasis on biographical information in some contributions outweighs the literary analyses and leaves the reader with a very sketchy impression of the artistic merit of the author. …

AryanMundusand Sexual Inversion: Eliot's Edition ofNightwood

Despite its notorious sexual politics, Djuna Barnes'sNightwoodgained considerable literary respectability when T. S. Eliot endorsed the first American edition with his Introduction. The presiding dean of Modernist letters at Faber and Faber in London, Eliot could distinguish even obscure writers with a single stroke of his editorial pen. Though his decision to publish Djuna Barnes's wildly subversiveNightwoodsuggests that an antic disposition lurked beneath his studied propriety, he expurgated several of the manuscript's most transgressive episodes, thus diminishing the redemptive role of sexual inversion in the novel. Eliot admits in his Introduction that “it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole” (xi), but his editorial deletions indicate he overlooked the symbolic significance of inversion as the antithesis of Aryan essentialism in the manuscript. With uncanny prescience,Nightwoodforecasts the nightmare of Nazi genocide and gendercide, creating a Parisian underground of expatriate inverts in exile from the deadly cultural “hygiene” of fascism. Analysis of the deleted manuscript passages restores the full force of Barnes's antifascist polemic in which inversion ultimately wins the day.

Voices from Cemetery Hill: The Civil War Diary, Reports and Letters of Colonel William Henry Asbury Speer (1861-1864) by Allen Paul Speer (review)

or fails, and this book does a good deal ofthe former and a bit ofthe latter . Selections from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, Earl Hamner's On Spencer's Mountain, and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are as powerful as they were in their original settings. But then again, they are engaging, at least in part, because we are familiar with those settings. Other selections are engaging because of their relative obscurity, coupled with the historical importance-ifnot the literary abilities —ofthe writers. It is intriguing to read the complaints ofthe King of France on his Shenandoah Valley holiday, to learn the ornithological expertise of Theodore Roosevelt, or to experience the way the war in Vietnam intruded on the mountain retreat of Washington journalist Charles Seib. Less engaging are selections from a handful ofwriters who, while rightly included (given the book's focus), have neither the intrinsic power to engage us as quickly as briefselections necessarily demand, nor the historical familiarity to make their works interesting despite a lack of literary merit. While all or many ofthese writers may be excellent in larger doses, the single thematic commonality-that they deal in some way with the region under study-is sometimes insufficient to maintain our sincere interest. But compensations abound. To begin, the descriptions of certain natural and human phenomena create continuities which interest us regardless ofwhether a particular writer fails to engage. Perceptions of the Natural Bridge, for example, develop a cumulative power, and the more the perspectives differ, the better. Too, certain political progressions , such as the creation of the Shenandoah National Forest, allow selections to become mutually enriching which might not have engaged us alone. And ifsome ofthe relatively obscure writers might just as well have remained obscure, the opposite is also true: we owe Branch and Philippon our thanks for rescuing from relative obscurity such superb pieces as Archibald Alexander's "The Sublime and the Beautiful," Havilah Babcock's "Hunting Bee Trees," and the selections from The Journal ofJohn Fontaine. In sum, despite the occasional lapse, this collection is a superb addition to the literature of the Appalachian region. And as a focused scholarly introduction to the nature writing of a region, it presents an excellent model and exercises it with exemplary rigor. -William Jolliff Speer, Allen Paul. Voices from Cemetery Hill: The Civil War Diary, Reports and Letters ofColonel William Henry Asbury Speer (1861-1864). Johnson City, Tennessee: Overmountain Press, 1997. 217 pages. Paperback $19.95. 70 Allen Speer ofLees-McRae College has compiled and edited a book here that is a monumental exercise in family history. Yet Dr. Speer's task is only partly done. When Speer's Aunt Nellie Dobbins died in 1980, a large family archive was left to him, and he has vigorously supplemented these family documents by drawing upon the Official Records ofthe War of the Rebellion, the Vance Papers, letters and diaries of family friends, broad reading in standard Civil War titles and North Carolina local history , research in the National Archives and local newspapers. Yet there are more stories to tell from this family stretching across the eight generations buried in the old Methodist cemetery on the Speer farm in central Yadkin County, North Carolina. Most of this volume involves the remarkably detailed diary, letters, and reports ofWilliam Henry Asbury Speer, which covers his Civil War experience between August 1861, when he enlisted in the Confederate service, and his death at Ream's Station, south ofPetersburg, on August 29, 1864. Together they follow Colonel Speer from the Battle of Hanover Court House (May 27, 1862), where he was captured; his incarcerations at Fort Columbus, in New York harbor, and Johnson's Island near Sandusky, Ohio; then his return to the Confederate army and action at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg. Civil War scholars will find important insights into the battles ofHanover Court House and Chancellorsville not found elsewhere. James I. Robertson has called these memoirs what a "family wartime chronicle should be." Colonel Asbury Speer was an able officer and died a hero of the Confederate cause. Yet he opposed secession and attacked slavery...

Romance et ethos populaire

Romance and popular ethos. In studying the life and work of Denise Roux, an obscure writer of popular romances, we tried to discover the relationship between a trajectory, a habitus and a field of literary possibilities ; to this end we mobilized principles of analysis more often used for legitimate producers and productions. From this point of view, Denise Roux's access to this disqualified area of the field of cultural production appears to be the product of an encounter between a (popular) ethos and the values found in this particular market, between her dispositions and the positions to be occupied. But first we needed to clarify the conditions of possibility for « taking the pen » that characterize agents from dominated classes disposing of few educational and cultural resources, and to demonstrate the existence of (relatively) diversified thematic and stylistic possibilities within a space normally regarded as uniform. In this space, Denise Roux published some one hundred poems and short stories. Some show a « humanitarian bent», which facilitated her access to specific forms of literary recognition and social circles. Her life as she tells it is inseparable from her working-class background, daughter and wife of working-class men, and from the internalization of, in part literary, models for representing this experience.

Power Relations, Technical Writing Theory, and Workplace Writing

Technical writing theory and research about communication in large organizations mostly ignore from-the-top control of rhetoric. The usual emphasis on an individual writer negotiating with a known audience and generally free to decide on matters of style, organization, and so on can hide the ways that power relations often silently control internal rhetoric. Conclusions are based on two case studies: In the later Middle Ages, professional letters had to conform to a rhetorical format that necessarily foregrounded unequal power relations. In a contemporary nuclear power station, similar power relations purposely obscure writer and audience while procedures dictate format and content.

Gerald Haslam by Gerald Locklin, and Helen Hunt Jackson by Rosemary Whitaker, and Richard Brautigan by Jay Boyer, and Ole Edvart Rölvaag by Ann Moseley, and Lanford Wilson by Mark Busby

156 Western American Literature and Their Fathers’ God. While the conventional interpretations emphasize Peder’s revolt as the theme of both novels, Simonson rightly urges that Beret’s religious questioning, mirroring Rolvaag’s own, makes her the center instead. Prairies Within points the way to a still broader study that could expose the religious roots beneath all of Rolvaag’swork. ARTHUR G. HUSEBOE Augustana College Gerald Haslam. By Gerald Locklin. (Boise State University Western Writers Series #77,1987. 51 pages, $2.95.) Helen Hunt Jackson. By Rosemary Whitaker. (Boise State University Western Writers Series #78, 1987. 50 pages, $2.95.) Richard Brautigan. By Jay Boyer. (Boise State University Western Writers Series #79,1987. 52 pages, $2.95.) Ole Edvart Rolvaag. ByAnn Moseley. (Boise State University Western Writers Series #80, 1987. 53 pages, $2.95.) Lanford Wilson. By Mark Busby. (Boise StateUniversityWestern Writers Series #81, 1987. 52 pages, $2.95.) For the last fourteen years, WayneChatterton andJames Maguire have steadily expanded the Western Writers Series. Its fifty-page pamphlets have become widely recognized across the western region as concise, reliable, and inexpensive sources of information. Not infrequently, the series is the single dependable collection of scholarship that can be found in bookstores and libraries of outlying neighborhoods. And in a couple of instances, the series offers the best coverage that can be had on up-and-coming or obscure writers. Although the prescriptive format of the series does not always comfortably accommodate the diversity of the writers, its synopses of their lives, short analyses of their works and short critical overviews generally prove to be serv­ iceable. Of the five pamphlets that the series brought out last year, Mark Busby’s on Lanford Wilson is the best. Perhaps because Busby has written for the series before (WWS #58, Preston Jones), he has learned how to get around some of its constraints. For instance, he wisely focuses his biographical sketch on those periods when Wilson was writing and producing his plays. Likewise, Busby strengthens his brief readings of Wilson’s plays with generous comparisons to familiar pieces of drama. Furthermore, the study is one of the few that gives more than a passing nod to contemporary literary theory. Readers will appre­ ciate Busby’s generally unobtrusive style, while those with advanced training in literature will also quite likely feel that they have picked up a powerful study. A model of what can be done with a series pamphlet, this one reads like a newly Reviews 157 surfaced road on which you’re surprised to find yourself farther along after an hour than you thought you’d be. Ann Moseley’s study of Ole Edvart Rolvaag is another credit to the series. Besides being well-written, this pamphlet pushes back the horizons that are typically thought to be western. Too often geographical lines define westerners. But Moseley proceeds with the understanding that Rolvaag’s westward-facing stance, more than his base in Minnesota or his Norwegian subject matter, made him a significant western writer. Moseley’s study moves back and forth between two fundamental elements of Rolvaag’sfiction: first, the value that he put on his Old World origins and his attempt to preserve his heritage through writing about it; and second, the conflicts that immigrants ran into as they came west. The result is at once an exploration of a distinctive American writer and an implicit call to broaden the perspective of western studies. Gerald Locklin faced a somewhat more complex problem in his organiza­ tion of Gerald Haslam’s work. Haslam writes short stories, lots of them. Seem­ ingly, Locklin’s decision to treat each of Haslam’s stories should have resulted in a choppy study. But that isn’t the case. While there are many divisions in Locklin’s handling of his subject, his writing has sufficient coherence, since he has consolidated Haslam’s lesser works and delved into those that have made his career. Locklin also takes a liberty with the three-part format of the series that seems well-advised. He does not gather the scholarship on Haslam at the end of the pamphlet but works it into the analyses of the stories to which it pertains. Quite...

Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950 (review)

Reviewed by: Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950 John R. Reed Brian Stableford . Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950. New York: St. Martin's, 1985. 372 pp. $29.95. Brian Stableford tries to achieve three things in Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950: to distinguish scientific romance as a separate narrative mode, to survey the history of this subgenre, and to examine its themes and methods. Scientific romance, he says, is characteristically British, being concerned with intellectual speculation through the fanciful projection of scientific possibilities. By contrast, science fiction is characteristically American, being concerned with adventure and technological marvels. Stableford avoids a clear-cut definition of scientific romance but describes it as "a story which is built around something glimpsed through a window of possibility from which scientific discovery has drawn back the curtain." The product of a period when faith in progress was being questioned, it is nonetheless both playful and serious. Some of its major subjects are those generally associated with science fiction—utopian (or dystopian), evolutionary, and eschatological fantasies; imaginary voyages; and future wars, a subject to which Stableford devotes particular attention. The book consists of three major parts: the first treats writers and themes before the great War, the second writers and themes between the Wars, the third the twilight of scientific romance after World War Two. Because Stableford has confined himself to a limited group of writers over a limited time span, he can afford to be more detailed than historians of the more broadly defined science [End Page 373] fiction. His summaries of works by George Griffith, H. G. Wells, M. P. Shiel, Arthur Conan Doyle, S. Fowler Wright, and Olaf Stapledon are generous, as are his accounts of less prominent writers. This expansiveness allows Stableford to point out innovative manipulations of common themes, indicate some outright borrowings between writers, and call attention to interesting minor writers, though, as Brian Aldiss wrote in his Times Literary Supplement review of this book, "we are rarely persuaded" of the merits of these obscure writers. Stableford reviews some interesting subjects—the development of the Sargasso Sea story following William Hope Hodgson's "From the Tideless Sea," the mutation of Wellsian themes in a writer like John Gloag, and so forth; but his delivery of them and his summaries of writers' careers are so flat that much of their inherent excitement is lost. The book is a splendid source of information, generally very trustworthy as far as I can judge (though Stableford mistakenly refers to the Eloi of Wells's The Time Machine as "fearless"), but it lacks the zest that makes the writings it studies so attractive. This is all the more strange in that Stableford himself is quite a capable author of science fiction. Some of the most intriguing passages of this book deal with the sociology of literature rather than with literary history or criticism. For example, Stableford points out the importance of publishers' decisions to encourage speculative fiction; C. Arthur Pearson, whose Pearson's Magazine was the outlet for some of the important early stories by Griffith, Wells, and others, is a major example. Again, Stableford notes that Penguin, which captured most of the British paperback market through its ability to acquire scarce paper during World War Two, helped to discourage publication of scientific romance in England at a time when science fiction was blossoming in the States, thanks to the increasingly commonplace pulps and the incipient paperback outlets. He calls attention to the large number of authors writing scientific romances whose fathers were clergymen, an apparently surprising fact until one realizes how many fathers of educated sons were clergymen in the later years of the nineteenth century in England. Stableford succeeds in establishing the subcategory of scientific romance, but by his own admission the works included in it are not always easy to separate from what others have been content to call science fiction. He also succeeds in providing a clear account of the numerous writers whose works fall into his category, and he traces extensively some of their familiar themes. The book, then, is a useful and welcome addition to criticism in its field. It is a pity, therefore, that it is...

Ecriture Feminine as Metaphor

W hy study the texts of an obscure nineteenth-century writer like Claire Demar? Loosely associated with the Parisian women who in 1832 organized the first modem feminist movement, Demar was a marginal even among these marginals. Alone among the writers of her period, she publicly and unambiguously theorized women's right to sexual desire and pleasure. Although her lack of education and her immersion in an exalted romantic/religious discourse give her writing a certain opacity for contemporary readers, it also brings to scholars who have read her an uncanny sense of recognition.' Her modernity seems all the more uncanny in that multi-faceted resemblances affiliate this sexually radical Saint-Simonian feminist with contemporary French practitioners of ecriture feminine,2 of whom the most noted is Hel ne Cixous.

American Audio Prose Library

358 Western American Literature writing, values, and character, for the woman’s voice has seldom been attended to by those describing our “collective” fantasies and “universal” theories. We may find eventually that the dichotomies are not so rigid as they appear during this necessary stage of exploration of women’s lives. It would be hard to claim that the generally obscure writers Kolodny discusses directly affected the female literary tradition, though their fantasies and attitudes were no doubt transmitted through women’s culture. If these women’s texts “offered comforting and familiar image systems that could serve as templates for the organization of experience,” what was lost when they were lost? Why did the female fantasies never “attain the status of cul­ tural myth”? This is a subject for another book. For now, Kolodny has demonstrated that the male texts do not tell the whole story of the imaginative response to the West, to the American landscape; the frontier dream needs to be revised. It is time—past time—for everyone to encounter both traditions, to listen to women’s desires “to announce their presence and imprint their dreams” in the West. The Land Before Her—imaginative, fully researched and documented, stylishly written—provides the opportunity. MELODY GRAULICH University of New Hampshire American Audio Prose Library. Columbia, Missouri. MM III 0583-R. N. Scott Momaday reads two poems and from The Names. American Audio Prose Library. MM III 0583. N. Scott Momaday Interview. American Audio Prose Library. N III 0982-R. John Nichols reads from two novels. American Audio Prose Library. NI II 0982. John Nichols Interview. American Audio Prose Library. WT III 0683-R. Frank Waters reads from The Man Who Killed the Deer. American Audio Prose Library. WT III 0683. Frank Waters Interview. Any opportunity to hear writers like N. Scott Momaday, John Nichols, and Frank Waters read from their works and discuss them is a worthwhile opportunity. And in this respect these American Audio Prose Library cas­ settes discourage criticism. Authors of such distinction as these, with such prominent voicings in their own novels and poetry, always tease readers into wondring just what the “real” authorial voice sounds like behind the many voicesheard in the reader’s imaginary ear when reading. This is especially true of N. Scott Momaday, who, like Dickens, does so many voices and does them so well and so impor­ tantly in his works The Way to Rainy Mountain and House Made of Dawn. Momaday’s actual voice is deep and resonant and powerful, and much like one might imagine. John Nichols sounds very much a product of the 1960s— Reviews 359 complete with the idioms of that era which have now been accepted into a language which is so dynamic that 60s talk seems quaintly out of fashion— leaving Nichols, one guesses, sounding more mellow and middle-aged and “compromised” than even he would like to admit. Frank Waters sounds all the wiser through the years which make their presence and his age known in raspings, and catches of breath;coughs and frequent pauses and breaks. One hundred years from now, ten years from now, these cassettes will be all the more valuable, not just for what they say but for how they say it. In listening to all of them in sequence, the interviewer’s voice becomes too prominent, too, alas, intrusive: a nuisance. All three writers are patient with this or that kind of mispronunciation, this or that inane question, this or that attempt in the name of the “project” to make them more “accessible,” more “understood.” We can’t help wishing for more tapes like the Nichols interview, where he takes over almost completely and the interviewer fades away. When they read their works these writers are at their best—except for Nichols who is in one big off-to-the-fire hurry to finish. His discussion of his political conversion, of politics and art is wonderful stuff, however. Waters is great in his prophecies for the future and in his discussion of myth and science. And Momaday is pure music, an utterly beautiful, perfect voice for the myths and narratives and the tellings we hear. So, these cassettes...

When It Rains: Papago and Pima Poetry by Ofelia Zepeda

368 Western American Literature critical assessment is more often than not about one page in length. Living writers were invited to submit a short statement, and some have done so. Twentieth-Century Western Writers is, then, a source book on writers of “westerns,” some of them major novelists who get no more space than begin­ ning or obscure writers. No one is going to check every detail in a book of this size, but in general the biographical data are correct, even to some little-known facts. A few errors, such as allowing Forrester Blake to live on, are inevitable, partly because there must have been a gap of several years between the gather­ ing of information and the publication date. Perhaps the weakest part of the format is the “Critical Studies” notation, missing from most writers and inade­ quate for the others. The selection of writers included in this book, we are told by the editor, was based on the recommendations of R. Jeff Banks, Richard Etulain, Leslie Fiedler, James Folsom, Thomas Lyon, C. L. Sonnichsen, and Jon Tuska. These gentlemen managed to come up with an even 100 writers unknown to me. They also skipped a few who are listed in A Bibliographical Guide to the study of Western American Literature. Sonnichsen, who, if anyone, has looked into all 312 writers, provides an excellent Preface to the book in which he tackles the problems of definition of “West” and “western,” emphasizes the great variety of fiction that can in some way be called “western,” and discusses the formula and the myth as well. This essay must be consulted by anyone wishing to pursue further the “western” genre. Twentieth-Century Western Writers is both an enlightening and an entertaining tour through an American genre. For sheer information it is invaluable; for literary evaluations it should be taken with a grain of salt. JOHN R. MILTON University of South Dakota When It Rains: Papago and Pima Poetry. By Ofelia Zepeda. (Tucson: Uni­ versity of Arizona Press, 1982. 82 pages, $8.95.) The emphasis of this collection of contemporary Papago and Pima poetry falls upon its tribal sources as an expression of developing interest in the ances­ tral language and the production of a Native American literature. The poems in this attractively printed volume are all short lyrics in English with the Papago original on the facing page. One can only applaud the enterprise that encourages writers to extend their language into new poetic forms. Unfortu­ nately, the work suffers from the problem poetry in translation often presents: it seems flat and not interesting as poetry. On my way to Albuquerque I see many beautiful desert scenes, Mountains, rivers, cliffs and trees. Reviews 369 All were gleaming in their unique ways. How grateful I felt to Mother Earth. Typically an expression of feeling, this small lyric is not meant to be analyzed to death. It is illustrative, however, of the translation problem. A shift in tense aside, the reader is told about the feeling rather than shown it. The desert scenes may be “beautiful,” but we have no evocative descriptions of the “mountains, rivers, cliffs and trees” that make them so. We are told they “were gleaming in their unique ways,” but neither “gleaming” nor “unique” help us visualize these qualities. The poem is really about “gratefulness,” a delight­ ful feeling, certainly, but not one that can be shared by a reader without the necessary “objective correlatives,” the gleaming specifics of this landscape. What we know is that a narrator felt “grateful,” and that is all. Part of the problem is that this is specifically Papago and Pima poetry, its specialness derived from its native roots. But many of the poems could have been written by any poet anywhere. My Grandmother My grandmother isold But she knows how to make baskets She makes baskets all day, When she finishes a lot, she sells them With the money she buys groceries In this way my grandmother never goes hungry. If few of us have grandmothers who make baskets, the generality of descrip­ tion here smooths out the attractiveness of this particular grandmother. What kind of baskets does she make? What are their...

Twentieth-Century Western Writers ed. by James Vinson

Reviews 367 humanly sustaining values. So, if you ignore the phantasmagoric cover, you will be rewarded with an intelligent and forceful analysis of an American writer who deserves serious attention. CAROLYN JOHNSTON Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida Twentieth-Century Western Writers. Edited by James Vinson. (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1982. 941 pages, $75.00.) The tabulation, classification, and assessment of writers is moving rapidly westward, perhaps indicating that at last the literature of the western twothirds of the United States has come of age. A Bibliographical Guide to Midwestern Literature (1981, with information up to 1977) began the literary trek west with subject bibliographies — Literature and Language, History and Society, Personal Narratives, Chicago, and soon — and then proceeded to approximately 120 author bibliographies, with these in turn followed by brief references to 100 additional authors. Contributors to the volume num­ bered 100. Books of this kind invite statistics. The first of three recent books dealing with western writers, as opposed to midwestern — A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Western American Literature (1982) — begins with a listing of bibliographies, anthologies, general works, and special topics, and then pro­ vides “works on” for 388 writers. As might be suspected, there is an overlap­ ping between the two guides, midwestern and western, because regional boundaries are indistinct and arguable. The next two books are similar in format but quite different in coverage. Fifty Western Writers (1982) includes for each of the selected writers a brief biography, a discussion of major themes, a survey of criticism, and a bibliog­ raphy. Some of the contributors preface their material with a more personal note. There are fifty contributors for the fifty writers, a meaningful condition in that the reader senses a serious interest by each contributor in his single subject. Not so with Twentieth-Century Western Writers, an immense book of over 900 pages with information on 312 writers supplied by 74 contributors. Many of the essays on formula-ridden novelists (only fiction writers are included in this book) are by “scholars” whose chief interests are the detective story and science fiction — followers of the formula. Almost as many essays, however, were written by scholars well known to members of the Western Literature Association. The variety of approaches means unevenness in the critical comments: some of the contributions are weak, some unnecessarily argumentative, some highly informative, and a few offer fresh and worthwhile interpretations. A short biographical note for each of the writers is followed by a list of publications divided into “western” and “other” when appropriate. The 368 Western American Literature critical assessment is more often than not about one page in length. Living writers were invited to submit a short statement, and some have done so. Twentieth-Century Western Writers is, then, a source book on writers of “westerns,” some of them major novelists who get no more space than begin­ ning or obscure writers. No one is going to check every detail in a book of this size, but in general the biographical data are correct, even to some little-known facts. A few errors, such as allowing Forrester Blake to live on, are inevitable, partly because there must have been a gap of several years between the gather­ ing of information and the publication date. Perhaps the weakest part of the format is the “Critical Studies” notation, missing from most writers and inade­ quate for the others. The selection of writers included in this book, we are told by the editor, was based on the recommendations of R. Jeff Banks, Richard Etulain, Leslie Fiedler, James Folsom, Thomas Lyon, C. L. Sonnichsen, and Jon Tuska. These gentlemen managed to come up with an even 100 writers unknown to me. They also skipped a few who are listed in A Bibliographical Guide to the study of Western American Literature. Sonnichsen, who, if anyone, has looked into all 312 writers, provides an excellent Preface to the book in which he tackles the problems of definition of “West” and “western,” emphasizes the great variety of fiction that can in some way be called “western,” and discusses the formula and the myth as well. This essay must be consulted by anyone wishing to pursue further...

The Writer and His Publisher: Max Frisch's Relationship with Peter Suhrkamp

Max Frisch and Peter Suhrkamp met on 25 August 1947 at the world premiere of a Carl Zuckmayer play. 1 While Frisch was still a relatively obscure writer, Suhrkamp was already highly respected in German publishing circles. Frisch had been unable to convince his own publisher, Atlantis Verlag, to bring out his Tagebuch, 1946-49. Suhrkamp, who was not even Frisch's publisher, exhibited a genuine personal interest in Frisch and his work. In an interview with me Frisch stated: `Er ist nicht gekommen sofort mit einem Angebot: Kommen Sie in den Verlag. Sondern ... er hat mir sein Interesse angezeigt. Das hat mir ... geschmeichelt. Das hat mir sehr gefallen. Und erst nach und nach hat er den Wunsch halb gesprochen oder die Frage ob ich nicht von meinem Verlag weggehen wollte.' 2 Shortly after their initial meeting Frisch decided to work with Suhrkamp. During the ensuing twelve years an exceptional relationship developed, prompting the two men to exchange hundreds of letters and to visit one another as frequently as Suhrkamp's health and Frisch's schedule would permit. The Frisch-Suhrkamp correspondence provides a good deal of biographical information about Frisch's attitude towards his literary career, about the revision of particular texts, and about the means by which a talented publisher assisted one of his writers. 3

John Rae and the Problems of Economic Development

The problems of development confronting the newly emerging countries have kindled an interest in the writings of early political economists, especially those of the Classical period, in hopes of finding ideas which may be still relevant today. However, ignored to a great extent have been the works of many relatively obscure writers who primarily discussed the causes of wealth (i.e., economic progress). They have remained relatively unknown because their views were not in accord with the dominant ideas of their time, they refrained from giving space to practical or contemporary discussion, or they failed to develop a comprehensive or refined theory. In many cases, their major work(s) were modified or rediscovered by others who were interested in re? defining traditional concepts or who were searching for answers to new problems as old ones receded or became unpopular. A major example of these circumstances was John Rae's (1786-1873) New Principles of Political Economy (1834) which remained relatively unknown until the 1950's except for the abortive attempt by C. W. Mixter in 1905 to resuscitate it from obscurity.1 At first glance, Rae's major treatise appears only to be an attack against the classical (Smithian) view that there was a natural harmony between the interests of individuals and states, and that national wealth could only be increased by the accumulation of private wealth. Instead, Rae's lucid and original ideas on capital accumulation and invention, and how the government helped to stimulate economic development in newly emerging countries, such as Canada and the United States in the early nineteenth century, far transcends his assigned role in the history of economic thought as a nationalist critic of Smithian economics.2 Also Rae's historical descriptive empiricism of the different levels of wealth in various countries showed the importance of social and political forces for accelerating development. He believed these forces were endogenous to any system and were espe? cially important in a newly emerging capitalist economy, or what Rostow has referred to as the take-off into sustained economic growth. The purpose of this article is to discuss the major strands of Rae's theory of economic development and to note whenever possible the rele 97

The Alcoholism of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Alcoholism is unevenly distributed among, groups. More men than women are alcoholic, more Irishmen than Jews, more bartenders than bishops. The group, however, with possibly a higher rate of alcoholism than any other consists of famous American writers. Whether, as Hemingway said, most good writers are alcoholic is uncertain, but apparently a large number are. Of the seven Americans who were awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, four, according to their biographers, were alcoholics and a fifth drank heavily. If we compile a list of wellknown American writers of the past century, quite possibly one third to one half could be considered alcoholic. How to explain the high rate of alcoholism among authors? Is the association purely chance? Do writers drink because of the nature of their work or the life they lead? Do bad or obscure writers become alcoholic as often as famous writers? (Perhaps fame itself leads to