Place In Fiction Research Articles

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction; Ordering the Facade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing; Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961; Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction; Ordering the Facade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing; Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961; Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy

On the Dark Side: Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" and Valenzuela's "La palabra asesino"

Conrad’s famous “The Secret Sharer” and the short story “La palabra asesino” [“The Word ‘Killer’” in its English translation] by the Argentine Luisa Valenzuela both concern psychological self-exploration and selfdiscovery, through contact with a killer, a situation which challenges conventional moral standards. It is suggested that a comparison between the two stories may throw reciprocal light on both of them. In each story an act or acts of murder becomes a trigger which sets off a train of psychological events, somewhat different in the two cases. Discussion of the differences highlights the authors' priorities and the significance they attach to the darker side of the human personality. Both stories are highly ambiguous; but the ambiguity serves a different purpose in each case. Conrad is concerned with psychological doubling; Valenzuela with exploration of aspects of the human personality which in turn may be related to aspects of Argentina's collective personality as it expressed itself during the “Dirty War.” An examination of the different forces in play in the two stories improves our understanding of both. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol32/iss1/10 On the Dark Side: Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” and Valenzuela’s “La palabra asesino” Donald L. Shaw University of Virginia most outstanding feature of Spanish American fiction in the second half of the twentieth century was the emergence of the “Boom” writers, headed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. With the Boom, Spanish American fiction can be said to have come of age and to have taken its place in mainstream Western fiction, capturing a huge international audience. Since the Boom the most striking fact related to Spanish American fiction has been the emergence of a galaxy of women novelists and short story writers (the Boom group were all men) among whom the Argentine Luisa Valenzuela occupies a prominent if not a leading position, equidistant from the extreme reader-friendliness of Isabel Allende on the one hand, and the equally extreme experimentalism of her fellow Chilean Diamela Eltit on the other. Early in her career, Valenzuela seemed set to move in the latter direction, with El gato eficaz (1972), written (significantly) at the Writing School of the University of Iowa where several other major Spanish American writers of her generation honed their skills, and Cola de lagartija (1983). Both of these are very difficult and demanding novels in contrast to the much more accessible short stories of Cambio de armas (1982) which include “La palabra asesino,” translated as “The Word ‘Killer’” in Other Weapons (1985). In what follows I look comparatively at this very accomplished story and Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910) with which it has features in common. It is not suggested that Valenzuela knew Conrad’s novella, though the possibility cannot be discounted. Valenzuela was steeped in the writings of Borges, who was undoubtedly Spanish America’s leading Conrad fan and may 1 Shaw: On the Dark Side: Conrad's The Secret Sharer and Valenzuela's Published by New Prairie Press

Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives by Robert Thacker

B o o k R e v i e w s Alice M unro: W riting Her Lives. By Robert Thacker. Toronto: Douglas Gibson/McClelland and Stewart, 2005. 603 pages, Can$39.99. Reviewed by D oug Werden West Texas A&M University, Canyon Robert Thacker’s biography of Alice Munro is the manifestation of a passion for Munro’s stories that captivated Thacker for more than thirty years. In read­ ing the book, it becomes difficult to determine what is most impressive: the fact that Thacker undertook the challenge of producing the biography of a living author or that he wrote such a thoroughly researched and beautiful account of her life as to give us what will surely become the authoritative literary biog­ raphy of Munro. As exemplified in the best biographies, Thacker’s gracious prose moves between archival sources and interviews so well that you are left appreciating the depth of research as well as the craft. Because Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, has explored the personal side of her mother in the memoir Lives ofMothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Anne Langton. INTERIOR OF JO H N 'S HOUSE [LOOKING SOUTH], 1837. Graphite on cream wove paper. 18cm x 23.5 cm. Archives of Ontario. b o o k R e v ie w s 4 3 7 Munro (2001), Thacker focuses on Munro’s writing and publishing life, relying on the author’s archived papers, her correspondence, and local newspapers. In particular, he includes important information about the writers who encour­ aged her, agents who guided her, and editors who shaped her books. Although he read early drafts of many stories to prepare the biography, Thacker does not burden the reader with details of revision but summarizes key author/editor interchanges in order to illuminate the ways these conversations impacted Munro’s work. Given that his focus is on her professional life, Thacker resists the temptation to research or speculate about her private decisions. He briefly mentions Munro’s marital problems and fights at home but does not examine them closely. When he discusses her divorce in 1973, he does so in order to explain her motivation for moving from Victoria, British Columbia, to south­ ern Ontario, focusing on her relationship to place rather than to her husband. As many know, Munro spent twenty-three years (1949-1973) living in Vancouver and Victoria, where she published her first two books as well as many of her short stories. Thacker suggests place matters deeply to Munro and informs much of her prose. She says of her short fiction, “When I first started writing, setting meant more to me than people. This was really what I was writ­ ing about. ... I was just overwhelmed by a place” (158). Thacker’s attention to geography reveals her effort to consciously construct fictional places, resulting in settings that rival William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County in their depth and complexity and bring rural and small-town Ontario to life. Munro is often quoted as saying that in her fiction “there is always a start­ ing point in reality” (529). However, Thacker avoids heavy-handed biographi­ cal interpretations, preferring to suggest possibilities and explore potential influences. He does not offer authoritative readings as much as provide scholars with new contexts for rereading Munro’s stories. The biography celebrates the intersection of Munro’s life and writings without making tired claims of reading her life through her fiction or reading her fiction through her life. While Thacker’s biography is intended for scholars exploring the nuances of her work, it is so well written that the non-scholar can easily gain insight into Munro’s work. A t a time when the short story gamers less and less of the public’s attention, Thacker’s work reminds us of the importance of the genre in defining who we are and how we live and the contribition Munro has made to both sides of the border and beyond. ...

Gossip; Gift and Commodity in Francis Coventry’s History of Pompey the Little; or; The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1751)

Francis Coventry’s History of Pompey the Little represents one of the better known examples of today otherwise neglected eighteenth-century English novels of non human-characters. By pointing at thus far unacknowledged dimensions of the text; the article challenges the established reading of the book as put forward by Liz Bellamy in the theory of the ‘novels of circulation’. According to Bellamy; the peregrinating animals and objects of these narratives represent circulating commodities and thus symbolize alienated commercial society. Demonstrating that Pompey the lapdog rather functions as a gift and a gossip; this essay offers an alternative interpretation which opens up a different perspective on Coventry’s representation of society. Following from this; the paper aims at situating Pompey the Little’ within broader socio-cultural context of eighteenth-century England; as well as reflects on its place in fiction of the period. As such it advocates socio-historical approaches to literature.

San Sombrèro

Although fictional places have certainly been the hallmark of great literature (William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Benet), a recent travel guide to the fictional land of 'San Sombrèro' shows that their manifestation in popular culture can be questionable. A Bergsonian reading (Laughter, 1900) of the guide's attempt to pair humour with contrived exoticism yields more discomfort than laughs.

中国现当代小说中的故乡构建初探 (Literary Nativism, the Native Place and Modern Chinese Fiction)

Although the importance of the native place in Chinese life is beyond dispute and it has been a significant preoccupation of Chinese authors throughout history, literary representations of the native place still remain to be studied systematically. This paper attempts to examine the construction of the native place in modern Chinese fiction and its role in literary representations of China. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the native place in Chinese literature remained an abstract notion without specific geographical locations and the narrative focus was on the ‘native-place sentiment’ (Bryna Goodman 1995). It is a modern phenomenon that the native place appears as a local cultural space with ethnographic details and is closely related to the need for narrating China, although it can still be abstract and symbolic. The construction of the native place is crucial in the project of national narration for modern Chinese fiction, as it is often created as the nation’s cultural origin and authentication. However, the relationship between the native place and national representation in Chinese fiction is paradoxical, because, on the one hand the native place necessarily differs in origin, and on the other hand, many Chinese authors are devoted to China as a cultural totality. This paper will focus on the paradoxical relationship between the authors’ nativist aspirations to create distinctive local cultural identities and their commitment to the abstract idea of a single Chinese nation.
 
 Furthermore, both the native place and national narration are intricately associated with the tendency of literary nativism, i.e. the belief and the practice that literary writing should focus on constructing the native place and that the narrative style should continue and develop the indigenous narrative traditions. In other words, poetics is part of the politics in the configuration of the native place. The initial questions I shall try to answer include: How is the native place viewed and configured in modern Chinese fiction? What kinds of local stories are generated as national tales and what is the role of the native place in such narratives? Why do writers ‘write local but think national’? Why do national myths in Chinese regional literatures compete to identify with the central nation-state?

From Herria to Hirria : Locating Dialogue in Julio Medem's La pelota vasca

Nathan Richardson is Asso ciate Professor of Spanish at Bowling Green State University. His book Post modern Paletos explores the representation and production of rural/urban relationships in contempo rary Spanish culture. He has published numerous articles on peninsular nar rative and film. His book, Different Spains: Imagin ing Place and Space in Spanish Fiction and Film, is forthcoming. Spanish Basque director Julio Mederns first feature-length work, 1992 s Vacas, explicitly addressed questions of Basque identity. Vacas traced the interactions of two Basque families from the trenches of the third Carlist uprising to the forest skirmishes of the Spanish Civil War. In 2003, Mederns sixth film and first documentary, La pelota vasca, brought the director back to Basque issues and Basque lands, where he interviewed hundreds of politicians, academics, and victims on the subject of the current Basque conflict. Mederns explicit return to Basque issues in La pelota vasca invites audiences to return to the films that La pelota and Vacas bookend?encouraging them to see La ardilla roja, Tierra, and Los amantes del ctrculo polar as part of an ongoing five-film dialogue on Basque identity.1 The regular references to Basque places, events, and people; the repetition of actors in similar roles both within and among the films; and other common motifs to the five suggest that Mederns interest in the Basque question is constant. Vacas and La pelota vasca are only the most explicit works in a Basque-focused whole; the palindrome vacaslvasca works itself out, so to speak, over the course of the five features.

Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History (review)

Reviewed by: Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History Olivia Murphy Jillian Heydt-Stevenson , Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. x + 275. £40 hardback. 1 4039 6410 6. Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions, which addresses a range of issues and offers several new and persuasive readings of Jane Austen's novels, is nevertheless most significant for successfully exploding the persistent cliché that there is no sex in Jane Austen. 'Prostitution and pornography, sodomy and syphilis' are some of the subjects Heydt-Stevenson sets out to recover from centuries of criticism hampered by fond images of a 'dear Aunt Jane' who is allowed to be gently and innocently humorous, but never bawdy, outrageous or grotesque. This work of recovering the earthier aspects of Austen's fiction should enrich our reading of the novels by making her less-polite language – her hints, winks and nudges – transparent. As useful and entertaining as this project of recovery is, it is Heydt-Stevenson's skilful articulation of Austen's technique of juxtaposition and comparison (the 'unbecoming conjunctions' of the title), which could be claimed as the book's most important contribution to Austen scholarship. Austen's strategic use of doubling and contrasting in her novels has been noted by many critics, and indeed for a long time it routinely informed analyses of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions moves beyond these critical commonplaces to investigate the novels' incessant shadowing – of Elizabeth Bennet by her sister Lydia and by Charlotte Lucas; of Fanny Priceby Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park; of Persuasion's Mrs. Smith by Mrs. Clay – as a kind of structural double entendre, whose more troubling, secondary meaning has been overlooked by a determinedly naïve, protectively censorial readership. Through the prism of the unbecoming conjunction (a phrase lifted from Persuasion's disconcerting examination of the grieving Mrs. Musgrove's 'fat sighings') Heydt-Stevenson sets out to explore three interconnected subjects: various kinds of fashionable consumption in Austen's novels; their emphasis on physicality and the relationship between mind and body; and the novels' bawdy content and suppressed sexuality. The book's study of fashionable consumption demonstrates the utility of careful historicizing in recovering meaning from the seeming minutiae of Austen's novels. The usefulness of this approach is most apparent in Heydt-Stevenson's discussion of objects such as portraits in miniature, filigree work and hair jewellery, which for Austen's contemporaries were charged with emotional, political and social significance. While at times this examination of numerous disparate forms of conspicuous Regency-era consumption seem to be somewhat tangential to the book's central argument, it is nevertheless interesting in its own right, and provides an illuminating historical gloss on Austen's novelistic representations of her consuming society. Of the various kinds of fashionable consumption the book touches on, hair jewellery (that is, rings and brooches decorated with woven human hair) stands out as most successfully intertwining the book's concerns with the body and its place in Austen's fiction. As Heydt-Stevenson argues, for Austen's contemporaries hair jewellery was a popular sentimental commodity. Those manufacturing the jewellery (ostensibly out of hair provided for them by their customers) capitalized on the vogue for demonstrations of sensibility, but also aroused anxieties in consumers about the provenance of the hair in their jewellery: substitutions were presumably easy to effect and almost impossible to trace. Heydt-Stevenson analyses the function of hair jewellery in Sense and Sensibility, where the hair in Edward Ferrars's ring is at different times assumed to have come from the heads of three different women. Like the novel's frequent use of mistaken identities and substitutions (particularly of lovers), hair jewellery was at once highly emotionally charged, and symbolic of the fact that – like the market for goods – the marriage market was essentially impersonal. Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions next seeksto recover the 'bodies' of characters within Austen's fiction, particularly the responsive bodies of her heroines and anti-heroines. This strategy of feminist criticism comes rather late to studies of Austen, who has been generally considered an author unusually reticent about her...

Will the Real Black Middle Class Please Stand Up?

Long before Bill Cosby publicly picked on the vulnerable and before neocons began portraying themselves as the sole proponents of personal responsibility among African Americans, diversity of thought, action, and experience ruled the day in the fictional place called black America. Class has been one of the more consequential forces contributing to dissimilarity within African American communities. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction

The Best Years of Our Lives and the Cincinnati Story

Boone City, the fictional place to which three World War II veterans return in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), could be Anytown, USA. There are fancy apartment buildings, modest homes on quiet ...

Postsouthern and (Increasingly) Post-Agrarian

artyn Bone's engaging book The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction will be essential reading for scholars interested in the idea of the and is also highly recommended for readers examining postmodernity more broadly. The term postsouthern designates work that questions traditional shibboleths of the region's literature; as Bone demonstrates in the introductory section of this book, conventional southern critical narratives centrally feature a special sense of place. But since the Agrarianswho pledged resistance against a material American industrial ideal'-this concept of place has remained, in Bone's terms, rather airy (28), comprising little more than an interest in rural, natural, or seemingly static spaces. Concerned that this focus on image and style has displaced important socioeconomic changes, Bone returns to the more specific goals of the Agrarians as articulated in the mid-1930s; their political and economic program promoted agricultural real property-as exemplified in subsistence farming-and resisted capitalist land speculation and development (Bone 14). To challenge the Agrarian sense of place, then, is to recognize the influence of an emblematically postmodern

The postsouthern sense of place in contemporary fiction

The postsouthern sense of place in contemporary fiction

Place in American fiction: excursions and explorations

Introduction: A Golden Ball of Thread by George Core Thoughts an Fictional Places by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. II Excursions Places We Have Come From, Places We Have Been by George Garrett The Delta by Charles East One Writer's Sense of Place by Elizabeth Spencer Place in My Fiction by Martha Hall Imagination in My Place by Wendell Berry III Explorations 1: Place in Modern Southern Fiction Faulkner's Wilderness by H. L. Weatherby Place in Katherme Anne Porter's Miranda Stories by William Pratt Place in Robert Penn Warren's Life and Work by Joseph Blotner The Outside of the Inside: The Vision of Time and Place in Eudora Welty by Lewis P. Simpson Eudora Welty's Sense of Place by Denis Donoghue IV Explorations 2: Place in Modern Fiction outside the South St. Paul Boy by Scott Donaldson Purgatory in the Midwest: The White Martyrdom of Urban Roche by Robert Benson Wallace Stegner's Lyrical Realism by Thomas Bontly Early Updike Wandering in the Fields of the Lord by Pat C. Hoy II V Explorations 3: The Achievement of Walter Sullivan Places and Spaces in the Fiction of Walter Sullivan by Martha E. Cook Walter Sullivan: A Profile by George Core VI Winter in the Mountains (a poem) by David Middleton

Cosmographical glasses: geographic discourse, gender, and Elizabethan fiction

In Cosmographical Glasses Constance Relihan examines the ways in which sixteenth-century English texts - traveler's reports, ethnographic studies, and geographic guides - provide the foundation for how fictional prose of the period envisions the locations in which its tales are set. Relihan suggests that this nonfictional discourse becomes central to how the fictional prose of the period imagines cultural identity, fictional purpose, and gender identity. Places and cultures were defined in opposition to each other in early modern romances. In the examples in Cosmographical Glasses, writers attempt to define the spaces of their texts in an effort to identify what it means to be male, English, and Elizabethan. Through these texts, Relihan considers the various ways in which fictional pieces seize the spirit of ethnographic and geographic texts, as well as the ways in which historically identifiable and overtly fictional places were used to complicate representations of utopian fantasies. A number of prose romances and novella collections and their use of historical and geographical facts are analyzed in order to explore the associations between the genre, the discourses of colonialism, and the construction of gender. These texts become glasses that reflect and refract the social and cultural realities of early modern England. Those interested in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, the history of the novel, and the influence of travel literature on fictional texts will appreciate Cosmographical Glasses.

Place and space in modern fiction

Wesley A. Kort mines and organizes the contribution of six modern English writers to our understanding of human relations to places and the moral and spiritual importance of these relations. Hardy, Conrad, Forster, Graham Green, Golding, and Spark deploy fictions depicting the deficient attitudes toward place and space that are characteristic of modern culture, and they narrate more positive alternatives. Kort illuminates and develops the spatial theory implicit in their work and sets it in the context of contemporary theories of human-place relations and spatiality. Emphasizing the force and significance of place and location in narrative discourse, Kort counters the assumption that modern writers responded to the traumatic dislocations of modernity by creating fictions that are somehow outside the history of those dislocations. He also takes account of an important shift in cultural studies from the language of time and history to the language of place and space, a shift that helps distinguish the modern period from the late-modern and postmodern periods. At the same time, he avoids the vague characteristics of spatial language in cultural studies.

Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (review)

Reviewed by: Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses Richard Brown Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses. Andrew Gibson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 306. $80.00 (cloth). Andrew Gibson's is easily one of the most serious of academic books to have appeared on Joyce in recent years. It is densely researched, full of ideas, and well embedded in current academic questions, and is sure to become a familiar point of reference in future debates as well as a standard to which subsequent researchers will have to aspire. There's a good deal more packed into it than can be represented comfortably in a short review. The author's abilities as a chapter-by-chapter reader of Ulysses, as a fluent narrative theoretician and as an impressively informed cultural historian are not at all in doubt; moreover they merge impressively here as in relatively few other books on Joyce. Gibson reads Joyce's work attentively and scrupulously, contextualizes it precisely (while still provocatively), and theorizes it more subtly than is usually the case in Joyce criticism. There's an especially responsible focus on the Irish historico-political contexts that are contemporary with the setting of Ulysses. Gibson revisits the dustier shelves of Joyce's wide-ranging and substantial literary interests so that, remarkably, Ulysses seems at once more Irish and also in a way more English, more political and yet more intellectual, than it has ever seemed before. What Gibson takes (to my mind rather conventionally) to be the demons of contemporary criticism—liberalism and cosmopolitanism—he sternly rebukes. His own work on "Nausicaa" and "Penelope" notwithstanding, he treats many of the recent advances in contemporary cultural and gender studies somewhat disparagingly as "a bit of sex and street life" (23). The book couldn't be accused of ignoring Joyce's lightness or his humor. On the contrary it repeatedly defines much in Joyce's literary practice as a kind of subversive Irish political humor. This Gibson extrapolates in part from H. P. Kelly's book Irish Bulls and Puns, which, as he presents it, we may no longer be able to dismiss or even enjoy as a bit of harmless fun. Rather Gibson sees both it and Joyce through the preternaturally resonant Nietzschean concept of ressentiment . It goes without saying that this is an impressive and suggestive combination of the funny and the deeply serious. However, there may be a danger in essentializing Joyce and Irish literature as fundamentally vengeful in intent; to do so threatens to lock them both into an Oedipal paradigm that may ultimately entrap as much as liberate. I suppose it is a tribute to this [End Page 837] book to say that I was tempted to quote a couple of examples of Kelly's funnier "bulls" here but, after reading Gibson, it was harder to see them in any other than this complex Nietzschean light. This isn't primarily a book about Joyce's place in the modernist literary picture, neither is it a book about the local political contexts of those places where Joyce wrote Ulysses. It's much more concerned with the represented world of Ulyssesand with the actual cultural micro-politics of the fictional place where that book is set. According to this kind of approach, Joyce didn't leave Dublin at all, in his imagination, but worked at Irish nation-building through Ulysses just as his contemporaries were doing through nationalist debate and insurrection and subsequent political work. Both things (literature and politics), Gibson quite rightly suggests, may be understood as types of "creation" (97). Consequently, for Gibson, Joyce's portrait of his native city is not fixed in late Victorian sepia, but is better understood (in the manner of Enda Duffy et als) in terms of the coincidental congruence of the dates of the book's eventual publication for Joyce's birthday and the declaration of the Irish Free State. The cost of this approach is that Zurich doesn't get a mention, Paris appears only as the place which Stephen recalls having visited in "Proteus," and Trieste is merely a place where Joyce happened to be writing journalism while...

Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and Drama

Rita Dove is one of the premier American poets. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and US poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, Dove appeals to a broad public by means of readings, stage productions, and the media. Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and Drama represents the first monographic investigation of this major African American author's writing. The book examines the linguistic devices through which Rita Dove shapes her transcultural spaces and places, understood as a fusion of cultural backgrounds that provide 'a home in art'. Crossing Color explores not only the vast range of Dove's thematic and formal means, but also her interest in crossing boundaries, be they geographical, racial, religious, or marked by class, gender or genre.

How Including Prior Knowledge As a Subject Variable May Change Outcomes of Learning Research

Prior knowledge has a marked effect on learning outcomes. Researchers typically rely on a number of methodologies to control for that factor in learning research, including the use of fictional stimuli and domain-novice subjects. The experiments reported here demonstrate that such methodological controls may be insufficient. In Experiment 1, students read texts about fictional places and events. In Experiment 2, novice students in a cognition course were asked to read several advanced texts. In both experiments, prior knowledge accounted for a large portion of the subjects’ posttest performance. The data demonstrate that methodological approaches intended to control for prior knowledge may be insufficient to prevent that variable from influencing learning outcomes. Thus researchers are urged to include measures of prior knowledge in their analyses.

Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and Drama by Therese Steffen (review)

Robinson, Richard Powers, Emily Prager,and Alison Lurie all springto mind. Not nearly enough work is being done on this strandof contemporarywriting;Varvogli is an honourable exception to the rule. UNIVERSITY OFNOTTINGHAM JUDIENEWMAN Crossing Color: Transcultural SpaceandPlacein RitaDove'sPoetry, Fiction,andDrama.By THERESE STEFFEN.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 200I. Xiii + 239 PP. ?26.50. ISBN:0-I9-513440-0. In this much needed firstfull-lengthstudyof Rita Dove's work, Therese Steffenhas done a marvellousjob in respondingto and presentingin a scholarlyway the diversity and creative range of one of America'sforemost contemporaryliterarytalents. As a poet, Dove has become a high-profilename in Americanculturewith a weekly column on poetry in the Washington Post,and Steffen's reading is enhanced with reference to the many interviews, readings, and media appearances that Dove has given, particularly during her tenure as Poet Laureate from I993 to I995. The book concludes with a transcriptof Steffen'sown extended interviewwith Dove, a valuable addition to the record. Dove's determination not to be typecast as a black writer, or a black woman writerwas an unusual and individualstand at the time in which she began writing in the I97os. This refusal to be corralledwithin the Black Arts Movement is one of the transculturalcrossings that Steffen explores, arguing that Dove is one of the initiators of the 'trend toward a mainstream pluriculturalnational identity' (p. 9). Her Pulitzerprize-winningpoem, Thomas andBeulah(1987),loosely based on the lives of her grandparents,was notable in expressing how the black migration from the rural south to the industrializednorth in the early years of the twentieth century was bound up in the American Dream, that this historyis part of American history. Dove mainstreamed the narrative without losing anything of its specific human particularity. Perhaps the most significant and surprisingcrossing has been to Europe. Like HenryJames before her, Dove has entered into the complex fate of the Europeanized American. Crossingthe Atlantic, as she frequentlydoes, by ocean liner, it is a passage that has given her, in Steffen's phrase, 'artistic enspacement' (p. 28). Steffen is particularlyinsightfulon the poetry based on Dove's German experience (Dove was a postgraduate student in Germany, and she subsequently married a German writer).The exploration of the affinitieswith Rilke, the 'pluralityof connotations' (p. 94) that groupsof poems with a German topographyaccrue, is excellentlydone. It is indeed notjust Europeanbut internationalground in a more culturallyexpansive , and at times more conflicted, sense thanJames's that Dove's poetry invokes. Her historicaland geographicallocales cross from medieval Siena to Montgomery, Alabama, from Tel Aviv toJerusalem, biblical and modern. Steffen has sought a flexible composite theoretical approach that encompasses Dove's cultural crossings, a combination of European and African-American perspectives.She draws, interalia,on Gaston Bachelard's ThePoetics of Space(trans. by MariaJolas (Boston:Beacon Press, I994)),a text Dove herselfdescribesas imaginatively fruitful in The Poet's World(Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1995), and linksthis conceptualfieldwith the linguisticworkof African-Americantheorists Robinson, Richard Powers, Emily Prager,and Alison Lurie all springto mind. Not nearly enough work is being done on this strandof contemporarywriting;Varvogli is an honourable exception to the rule. UNIVERSITY OFNOTTINGHAM JUDIENEWMAN Crossing Color: Transcultural SpaceandPlacein RitaDove'sPoetry, Fiction,andDrama.By THERESE STEFFEN.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 200I. Xiii + 239 PP. ?26.50. ISBN:0-I9-513440-0. In this much needed firstfull-lengthstudyof Rita Dove's work, Therese Steffenhas done a marvellousjob in respondingto and presentingin a scholarlyway the diversity and creative range of one of America'sforemost contemporaryliterarytalents. As a poet, Dove has become a high-profilename in Americanculturewith a weekly column on poetry in the Washington Post,and Steffen's reading is enhanced with reference to the many interviews, readings, and media appearances that Dove has given, particularly during her tenure as Poet Laureate from I993 to I995. The book concludes with a transcriptof Steffen'sown extended interviewwith Dove, a valuable addition to the record. Dove's determination not to be typecast as a black writer, or a black woman writerwas an unusual and individualstand at the time in which she began writing in the I97os. This refusal to be corralledwithin the Black Arts Movement is one of the transculturalcrossings that Steffen explores, arguing that...