Travel Sketches Research Articles

Russian tourists discover America

This article examines the diverse practices of crossing boundaries, tactics of translation, and experiences of multiple political and national attachments evident in texts resulting from Russo-American encounters during the 1860s and 1870s. The study focuses primarily on three talented and in their own time influential, yet today almost completely forgotten, writers: Eduard Tsimmerman (A Journey Around America in 1869–70), Grigorii Machtet (Travel Sketches) and Pavel Ogorodnikov (From New York to San Francisco and Back to Russia). The paper argues that these, as well as many other contemporary Russian authors’ travel narratives about America during this period of unprecedented reciprocal goodwill between the two countries, seek to establish common grounds and national similarities, while at the same time register both an appreciation of other forms of existence (understood as political, cultural, racial, or gender difference), and an insistence on national self-affirmation in the face of alterity. Thus, they allow for an examination of the emerging stereotypes of ‘true’ Russianness and Americanness, which were to regulate the Russo-American encounter in various forms of writing for the rest of the pre-Cold War history of cultural exchange between the two countries.

Fantasy Places and Fantasy Bodies: A Russian Israeli Writer in Search of her Spanish Body

We are willing to accept a Spaniard with the name Jaime [pronounced Haim in Russian], but grimace when pronouncing the word Haim. V. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, 1903 In his definition of Orientalism Edward Said explains how ‘textual attitudes’ informed and influenced European travel narratives, specifically those descriptions of the sexed body of the ethnic Other. This essay demonstrates how such ‘textual attitudes’ borrowed from the dominant culture inform the search for an exotic self in the travel sketches of contemporary Russian Israeli writer Dina Rubina, an Ashkenazi woman determined to reinvent herself as a new corporeal Sephardic self. This investigation will show that at the root of Rubina's search for an alternative body is the internalisation of the antisemitic stereotypes which inform the image of the Jewish body.

Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, and the 'Library for Reading' by Melissa Frazier (review)

SEER, Vol.87,No. 1,January 200g Reviews Frazier,Melissa. Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, andthe'Library forReading'. Stanford University Press,Stanford, CA, 2007.xi + 246pp. Notes.Index. $55.00. Osip Senkovskii(1800-58),whom Melissa Frazierplaces at the centreof thiswell-produced monograph on the Russianliterary worldin theage of NicholasI, has receivedrather little attention from literary historians. A Pole who studiedArabic and Turkishat the University of Vilnius,Senkovskii (ormoreaccurately Józef-Julian Sçkowski) travelled in theMiddleEast from 1819to 1822and thentookup concurrent postsas a translator intheRussian Ministry of ForeignAffairs and Professor of Oriental Languages at St Petersburg University. He also transformed himself fromPolishscholarinto Russianmanofletters. From1834he achievedconsiderable successas a journalist , havingbeeninvited bytheenterprising publisher and book-seller A. F. Smirdin toeditthejournalLibrary forReading whichinitsheyday, inthe1830s, attracted some5,000-7,000subscribers. A man ofgreaterudition, Senkovskii was on one level a conventional scholar,the authorof dictionaries and encyclopaedia entries and translator ofprimary sources.On another, literary andjournalistic, level,hewastheauthoroforiental travel sketches and articles and reviewson numerousscientific and practicalsubjects, fromgalvanism, homeopathy and railwaysto paper-making and bee-keeping, as well as a prolific commentator on Russianand foreign literatures. The encyclopaedic natureof theLibrary forReading, withitssectionson sciences,industry and agriculture as well as thoseon Russianand foreign literatures and literary criticism, reflected the Voltaireanspiritof the Enlightenment that had informed Senkovskii's education.At thesame time,Frazierclaims,hisrelationswithhis public and his assumption of variousflamboyant, fictitious authorial personae(forinstance, BaronBrambeus, Kritikzada, CO.O. . . .O!', 'ThreeLandowners from Tver", Tiutiun'dzhi-Oglu) locatehimfirmly in the Romanticage. Only in themid1840sdid he fadefromtheliterary scene, withdrawing fromactiveinvolvement in the productionof the Library for Reading and retiring fromhis post at St Petersburg University. He both exploited and suffered from hisorigin as a Pole inimperial Russia,putting his outsider status toconservative endsbutfailing tosecurethediplomatic career to whichhe mayhave aspired.He was muchreviled, notleastby Pushkin and Gogol',forhisallegedhypocrisy, plagiarism and lackofintegrity, and for hisrole in thecommercialization ofliterature, againstwhichwriters in the Romanticage often inveigh. Frazier'spurpose,however, is notto dwellnarrowly on thisnon-canonical figure but to place him in a verybroad culturalcontext.She is therefore concernedwith the professionalization of literary activity in the age of Nicholas,thedevelopment ofa literary marketplace, theenlargement ofthe reading public,and theappearanceofa provincial readership. She examines thecomplicated forms ofauthorship, spurious editing and collecting ofdocumentsthatwerepractised duringthisperiod.She explorestherelationships between writers, editors andreaders anddiscusses thefunctions ofthe'library' 338 SEER, 87, 2, APRIL 2OO9 (as thesiteof a collection, book-lending facility and 'engineof a would-be literary marketplace', as well as virtualspace in an encyclopaedic journal [p. 139]).Nor is thisbroadcontext exclusively Russian.Indeedifa criticism istobe madeofFrazier's monograph thenitisperhapsthatitoffers excessive detailon suchnon-Russian matters as thehistory oftheturn-of-the-century GermanRomanticsand theirorgantheAthenaeum, Friedrich Schlegel'srelations withhismistress Dorothea,Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, Frase fs Magazine forTownandCountry, thenarratorial personaeof Constant, RousseauandWalterScott,and Scott'santiquarianism and hisattitude tothe British Empire. Frazier'scentralconcernis withthenatureof RussianRomanticism, of whichshe sees Senkovskii and theLibrary forReading, despitethe marginal statusthatis usuallyaccordedthem,as 'extreme'manifestations (p. 202). If Romanticwriters created'slippery identities' and occupieda 'slippery space' (p. 179),thenSenkovskii, a Pole fromtheperiphery of the empireseeking influence at itscentre, pursuing an academiccareeras an Orientalist, and striving to attain'criticalomnipotence' (passim) by offering up 'pre-digested books'orready-made pleasures and thoughts (p. 121)through fabricated identities , was their typical representative. Frazier'sviewofRussianRomanticism is groundedin herbeliefthatRomanticism, paceitsown claimto yearnfor wholeness and authenticity, is a construction 'offragments and ever-shifting borders, a sortofdance aroundthemargins ofan apparently empty centre thatcan be eithera sublimelocusofpotentiality orjust that,empty'(p. 3). Russia,according tothisview,remains a 'blankspace' (p. 193)or 'empty vessel '(p. 202),itsborders influx'likethoseofitswriterand reader-inhabitants' (p. 201).To be sure,theRomanticquestfornationalidentity didfindexpressiontherein a prolonged debateaboutnarodnost' in itsburgeoning literature. Andyetin thelastanalysis Russiannationaldistinctiveness, paradoxicalas it mayseem,amounted toa 'uniquely Russianability toappropriate andabsorb' (p. 188)whatothershad produced,as indicatedby Russianwriters' 'highly self-conscious appropriation ofa Western Europeanliterature' (p. 3). Not every readerwillbe persuadedthatSenkovskii is indeeda quintessentialrepresentative ofRomanticism in itsRussiancontext and thattheLibrary forReading is Romanticism's quintessential organ.Nevertheless Frazierhas produceda thoughtful and lucidlywritten book (witha usefulindex,but unfortunately no bibliography). She makescopioususe oftheoretical writing and engagesindepthwithexisting scholarship abouttheconditions inwhich Russianwriters operatedin theage ofNicholasand moregenerally about contemporary Europeanwriters, readersand Romanticism. Department ofRussian Studies Derek Offord University ofBristol Andrew,Joe. Narrative, Spaceand Gender inRussianFiction: 1846-1goj. Studies in SlavicLiterature and Poetics,47. Rodopi,Amsterdam and...

From back number aesthetics to new expression: James Gibbons Huneker's New Cosmopolis

James Gibbons Huneker was an influential cultural critic in the decades around 1900. His idiosyncratic style has lead to his work being somewhat overlooked. This article relates Huneker's collection of New York travel sketches, New Cosmopolis (1915), to other examples of literary impressionism, and specifically to the work of J.K. Huysmans, Stephen Crane and Henry James. It then argues that New Cosmopolis moves beyond the aestheticism and detached analysis of the impressionistic literary sketch towards a more subjective, engaged form of city writing. This led Huneker to an urban aesthetic and to an embrace of cosmopolitanism comparable to the ideas celebrated in Paul Rosenfeld's Port of New York (1924). Rosenfeld argues that the writers and artists he profiles, including Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz and William Carlos Williams, represent a flowering of new expression in America. Huneker's relationship to these modern, progressive figures is, in part, attributable to his tendency towards spontaneous, idiosyncratic and highly subjective statements and his recognition of the visceral sensory experiences provided by New York's tango halls, movie theatres and Coney Island roller coasters.

Ordinary Germans, Slavery, and the U.S. Civil WarWalter Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Susan Carter Vogel, Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote HomeFriedrich Gerstäcker and Irene S. Di Maio, Gerstäcker's Louisiana: Fiction and Travel Sketches from Antebellum Times through Reconstruction

Previous articleNext article No AccessEssay ReviewsOrdinary Germans, Slavery, and the U.S. Civil War Walter Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Susan Carter Vogel, Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home Friedrich Gerstäcker and Irene S. Di Maio, Gerstäcker's Louisiana: Fiction and Travel Sketches from Antebellum Times through ReconstructionKenneth BarkinKenneth Barkin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 93, Number 1Winter 2008 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JAAHv93n1p70 Views: 6Total views on this site Copyright ASALHPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Gerstäcker's Louisiana: Fiction and Travel Sketches from Antebellum Times through Reconstruction

Gerstäcker's Louisiana: Fiction and Travel Sketches from Antebellum Times through Reconstruction

Joyce on the Threshold (review)

Reviewed by: Joyce on the Threshold Anne L. Cavender (bio) Joyce on the Threshold edited by Anne Fogarty and Timothy MartinGainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. 299 pp. $65.00. This wide-ranging volume brings together fourteen essays selected by Anne Fogarty and Timothy Martin, co-chairs of the academic program of the 2000 International James Joyce Symposium. As Martin notes in his introductory essay, the collection seeks to capture one impulse of that Symposium: to "provoke reflection about . . . moments of transition and about the nature of borders, margins, and boundaries" in the study of Joyce (4). Martin's essay briefly introduces each essay and frames the collection by offering various ways that the threshold theme can be understood, including "our sense of adventure" in reading Joyce, Joyce's "radical commitment to innovation," and the "feeling of liminality" and "unusual power of the many peripheral figures" in Joyce's writing (1, 2). The book is organized into four parts, each approaching the threshold theme from a slightly different angle. Part I, "Joyce's Marginalia," offers a smorgasbord of theoretical approaches and textual concerns. [End Page 595] Karen R. Lawrence uses Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Michel de Certeau, and theories of nostalgia in crafting a "multivalenced" approach to Joyce's "rhetoric of walking" in Ulysses (21). Reed Way Dasenbrock outlines Giordano Bruno's "insufficiently appreciated influence on Joyce," arguing that his contributions to cosmology and astronomy offered Joyce a means to transform and critique the "intellectual orthodoxy" of Aristotle and Dante (28, 37). Dasenbrock effectively deploys Bruno's cosmological theories to unpack Bloom's depiction as a comet at the end of the "Ithaca" episode of Ulysses. Mary Lowe-Evans analyzes the characters Freddy Malins and Aunt Julia in "The Dead," drawing on M. M. Bakhtin's theories of carnival and the grotesque, "Mary Russo's modification of those theories," and "insights taken from various histories of Christian folly" (45). Finally, Heyward Ehrlich makes the case for the importance of Joyce's interest in the occult, specifically kabbalah, thanks largely to W. B. Yeats's influence. Part II, "In the Shadow of the English: Joyce as an Irish Writer," is the strongest, most cohesive section in the collection, since all four essays share an interest in Irish cultural politics and history. Andrew Gibson and John Nash evaluate Joyce's oppositional engagement with the English literary tradition in the "Oxen of the Sun" and "Scylla and Charybdis" episodes of Ulysses, respectively. Gibson focuses on the "politics of the anthology . . . in the period between 1880 and 1920" (91), arguing that Joyce's practice in "Oxen" is "neither parody nor pastiche," but "adulteration" (101) and "contamination" (103) via paradox, anachronism, and "a gleeful celebration of ersatz" (102) among other strategies. Nash writes on "Joyce's relationship to the institutionalization of the study of English, in England and Ireland" (110), reading the "Scylla and Charybdis" National Library scene as one of Joyce's challenges to the development of English literature as an academic discipline and the formation of an English literary canon. Like Gibson, Nash foregrounds the term "contamination" to describe Joyce's dissenting literary practice (126). Brian G. Caraher's essay adds further nuance to Joyce's stance vis-à-vis Irish cultural politics through an analysis of the author's 1912 Galway travel sketches celebrating Ireland's "industry, internationalism, and multiculturalism" (132), which were published in the Triestine newspaper Il Piccolo della Serra. In the fourth selection, P. J. Mathews challenges "the caricature of the [Irish] Revival as a period of antimodern traditionalism and backward-looking nostalgia for ancient Ireland that still holds sway over Irish literary and cultural studies" (152), drawing fascinating links between the Revival's agricultural cooperative movement and the stories Joyce published in the Irish Homestead. One simple improvement to this otherwise excellent section would be to place Nash's essay before Gibson's, since Nash provides a concise general [End Page 596] overview of the development of English literary studies in Ireland and useful context for figures such as Ernest Dowden and John Eglinton with whom not all readers may be familiar, background information that Gibson's essay takes for granted. After the coherence of Part II, the widely...

Constance Fenimore Woolson: selected stories & travel narratives

American writer and world traveler Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840 1894) was author of more than fifty short stories, four novels, a novella, and numerous poems and travel essays. During her lifetime, she achieved both popular and critical success, but much of her work is no longer available. This volume, as the first anthology to collect representative samples of her stories, travel sketches, poems, and correspondence, represents a major advance toward re-establishing her place in nineteenth-century literature and letters. As these pieces demonstrate, Woolson offered keen observations on the issues she cared most deeply about, namely the cultural and political transformation of the United States in the wake of the Civil War, the status of women writers and artists in the nineteenth century, and the growing implications of nationalism and imperialism. Woolson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and began her career writing regional travel stories about the closing of the American frontier in the old Northwest Territories (now known as the Great Lakes region). During the Civil War, she worked for a variety of Union causes and in 1873 moved to St. Augustine, Florida. Traveling throughout the South, she wrote stories and travel narratives that highlighted the wholesale changes facing Americans after the Civil War. In 1879, Woolson left the United States for Europe. There, she engaged her passion for nature and exercised her gift for social satire. In her European writings, she deplored the Americans slavish devotion to the ubiquitous guidebooks of the nineteenth century, and she chose instead to spend long periods of time in one place in order to better learn about it. Throughout her time in Europe (including visits to North Africa), Woolson often commented that she could not describe landscapes, only experience them. By the time of her death in Venice at age fifty-three, she had become convinced that the colonial agendas of the United States and Europe would transform landscapes and peoples in far-reaching and ultimately dangerous ways. This collection features selections from each of the three distinct periods of Woolson s career and includes a chronology of her life and travels. Focusing primarily on Woolson s short stories, editors Victoria Brehm and Sharon L. Dean also include a representative letter, poem, and travel sketch for each section. Victoria Brehm is associate professor of English at Grand Valley State University. She is editor of three anthologies, including A Fully Accredited Ocean: Essays on the Great Lakes and Sweetwater, Storms, and Spirits: Stories of the Great Lakes. Sharon L. Dean is professor of English at Rivier College and is author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound and Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton: Perspectives on Landscape and Art.

"Look on this picture, and on this": Framing Shakespeare in William Wells Brown's The Escape

"Look on this picture, and on this": Framing Shakespeare in William Wells Brown's The Escape Keith M. Botelho "With me, socially, politically, morally, character is everything—color, nothing.The negro is noless a man,becausehe is black; theAnglo-American is no more a man, because he is white." —Senator Francis Gillette of Connecticut, in a speech at the Senate, 23 February 1855 In his 1854 travel sketch The American Fugitive in Europe, WiUiam WeUs Brown recounts his many excursions to the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition while in London. In his wonder at this "great international gathering," Brown states, "It is strange, indeed, to see so many nations assembled and represented on one spot of British ground. In short, it is one great theatre, with thousands ofperformers, each playing his own part."1 This gathering undoubtedly occupied Brown's thoughts when he returned to the United States. In 1856, Brown began to read his first drama to New England audiences, entitled Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone, and in 1857, he began to read to various antislavery audiences what would become the first published drama by an African American, The Escape; orA Leapfor Freedom.2 Not coincidently , after returning from five years in Europe, where, according to William Edward Farrison, Brown had read and seen a considerable amount of drama, including many Shakespearean plays,3 and with the vision of the theater and performers he witnessed at the Crystal Palace firmly in his mind, Brown came to write,perform,and publish a dramatic work. An engaging antislavery orator and lecturer, and writer of the first novelbyanAfricanAmerican (Clotel, 1853),Brown returned to the United States knowing, as did Shakespeare's Hamlet, "The play's the thing." 187 188Comparative Drama In fact, William Wells Brown included a potent quotation from Hamlet—"Look on this picture,and on this"—as an epigraph on the title page of The Escape, published in June, 1858.4 Brown filled a cultural niche in producing an original drama,and Shakespeare and the dramatic genre served as powerful vehicles through which Brown could contribute to the advancement ofAfrican-American literary activism. Brown's play emerged from within two Shakespearean traditions, one of white cultural appropriation and the other ofblack cultural appropriation. He engaged and contested the burlesque,parody,and minstrelsyofthe white stage and used Shakespeare in ways similar to those ofhis black predecessors both onstage in its various forms and in print. Brown tapped into the notions of moral and social elevation and utility adopted by black writers before him who protested slaverythrough such forms as speeches, lectures,debates,newspaper pieces,travel accounts,autobiographies, and slave narratives. Brown performed against the institution of slavery by staging a drama of protest, displaying his oppositional politics through performance of both black and white in the great antislavery theater of the North.5 And, with Brown's appropriation of drama as his form of resistance, Shakespeare's specter inevitablylurks.6 I. Antebellum Shakespearean Specters The performance and publication of The Escape are situated within the growing cultural tumult ofthe 1850s. In May of 1854, three months before Brown returned from his five years in Europe, Congress approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which legalized white voting residents to determine whether to admit their territory as a slave or free state; racial violence escalated as a result. In 1857, while Brown was publicly performing both Experience and The Escape, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford that African Americans could not become U.S. citizens and in turn had no constitutional rights. A year following the publication of The Escape, John Brown led a failed raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry,Virginia. The Escape, then, was written , performed, and published amid these national battles regarding the institution ofslavery. ForWiUiamWeUs Brown,drama becomes a national genre ofresistance and opposition that he hoped to offer as a supplement to the forms ofprotest that dominated the cultural landscape. Keith M. Botelho189 Furthermore, WiUiam Wells Brown's performance and publication of The Escape emerged from a moment when blackface minstrelsy had just reached the peak ofits popularity, the years 1846 to 1854.7 In...

Touring the Metropolis: The Shifting Subjects of Dickens's London Sketches

ABSTRACT In his London sketches Dickens engages in a kind of local tourism where he invites the reader to accompany him to unfamiliar but near locations. These tours or visits focus on ignored or suppressed groups of the city's population. Taking bearings from contemporaries such as Thackeray or George Sala, the essay explores the strategies Dickens used to convey the alienation and rapid changes of urban life, and considers the self-consciousness he frequently wove into his sketches over the implications of his exercises in observation. ********** By the early nineteenth century the city sketch had firmly established itself as a literary genre at times combining social observation with antiquarian interests. Thus, in 'The South-Sea House' (collected in Elia (1823)), Charles Lamb invites his reader to turn aside for a moment from the commercial urgencies of city business to contemplate the 'melancholy looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice' of a bygone era. (1) Or in his Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819-20), Washington Irving proposes Westminster Abbey as a site for meditating on the transience of life which his other sketches point up. His melancholy perception of how all things pass is offset by his delight when he discovers surviving traces from earlier periods and, as we might expect from the sketch genre, this delight is expressed in visual terms. 'The Boar's Head Tavern' is playfully sub-titled 'A Shakspearian Research' [sic] but actually describes Irving's exploration of The Masons' Arms where he contemplates 'with enraptured gaze' the antique objects displayed by the landlady. (2) Lamb expressed his enjoyment of the metropolis as an 'accumulation of sights--endless sights', and in a famous letter to Wordsworth of 1801 describes London itself as a 'pantomime and a masquerade'. (3) In the streets themselves it would have been difficult for the stroller to avoid the solicitations of beggars and others. To avoid this possibility Pierce Egan opens his Life in London (1821-23) with the following analogy guaranteed to reassure the reader: 'The author [...] has chosen for his readers a Camera Obscura View of London, not only for its safety, but because it is so snug, and also possessing the invaluable advantages of SEEING and not being seen' (emphases in original). (4) As Deborah Epstein Nord has pointed out, Egan's method constantly suppresses the social implications of episodes in his concern to supply the insulated reader/spectator with sights to be consumed. (5) Like Lamb, Dickens encoded his perceptions of city life as an ongoing and varied performance. Looking back on a time in his childhood when he got lost in London, Dickens diverts the potential disturbance of the episode into his younger self's relish for the urban spectacle: 'I wandered about the City, like a child in a dream, staring at the British merchants, and inspired by a mighty faith in the marvellousness of everything'. (6) These lines establish the credentials of the mature urban reporter Dickens had become by 1853 but give no indication of how Dickens might have shared Engels's appalled perception of the atomization of Victorian London, whose packed inhabitants seemed totally estranged from each other. Dickens's allusions to spectacle constantly shade into references to the theatre that, J. Hillis Miller has shown, expose the 'unwittingly imitative' nature of characters' behaviour and reveal it as theatre and pretence. (7) In other words, there is already a self-fictionalizing process at work in Dickens's subjects. As early as Sketches by Boz (first series 1836, second series 1837), Dickens had begun to construct a complex perspective for his reportage, striking a balance between the miscellaneous implications of the term 'sketch' and his social concerns. (8) When Thackeray was considering a series of travel sketches for Punch the editor advised him not to go abroad because the 'British public like to see representations of what they have seen before'. …

Review: Drawn from the Source: The Travel Sketches of Louis I. Kahn

Review: Drawn from the Source: The Travel Sketches of Louis I. Kahn

Bibliography of Theses and Dissertations Pertaining to Southern Appalachia: 1912-1991 (review)

it's suicide to stay there." Covington is a writer in search of stories to tell. This is what Salvation on Sand Mountain is about: Covington's story. This book is not useful as a study of serpent handlers or of religion in Appalachia. The people and their beliefs are presented stereotypically. We are reminded of supposedly outdated clothing, poverty, and the toothless. Covington's imagination and writing skill transform even the most basic facts. The Porters' pleasant brick house gets transformed into a bricked-over double-wide trailer. (It is not; I have been to this house). Covington is unlikely to be back on Sand Mountain. He teaches creative writing (not journalism) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham . He is truly a talented writer who used his considerable creative skills to transform more than the Porters' brick home. His story robbed those on Sand Mountain of the fair opportunity to have their own story told in any approximation to historical or descriptive adequacy . In a passionate and tearfully troubled reaction to Covington's book from the wife of the serpent handler Covington most befriended, we have the other more truthful side of the critical acclaim many have heaped upon Covington's book: "He betrayed our trust; he just wanted to tell a story." —Ralph W. Hood, Jr. Dexter Collett. Bibliography of Theses and Dissertations Pertaining to Southern Appalachia: 1912-1991. Berea, Kentucky: Appalachian Imprints , 1994. 136 pages. $29.95. If literature (drama, fiction, nonfiction, oral literature, and poetry) is a mirror of culture, then literary criticism is a study of the quality of the mirror. Among the forms of criticism are theses and dissertations which we require graduate students to write and then, all too often, put on the shelf and forget. Not Dexter Collett. In Bibliography of Theses and Dissertations Pertaining to Southern Appalachia: 1912-1991, he reminds us ofa significant number of critical and scholarly studies on Appalachian literature and folklore, 1185 to be exact, produced in the colleges and universities in the region and outside it. Obviously this has been a huge effort by Collett and a valuable one. Anyone with any involvement in Appalachian studies should own a copy of this book. For graduate faculty in the region who direct theses or dissertations on a regular basis, it is indispensable. While Bibliography is primarily a listing, no little achievement in itself since Collett actually held in hand every entry mentioned, a thirty-page 56 foreword and structure facilitate ready use. The six major divisions are (1) Early Narrative and Travel Sketches, (2) General Studies, (3) Individual Authors, (4) Creative Writing, (5) Folklore, and (6) Drama, Theater, and Film. If my arithmetic is correct, there are 266 studies of folklore on a wide range of topics such as English and Scottish ballads, musical instruments, folk tales, folk speech and dialect, arts and crafts, superstitions, and children's folk games. A breakdown of studies according to theme in the folklore section might have been helpful, but students of folklore and language will still be grateful for this abundant material in its present form. Many of the theses clearly involve primary research; for example, "Mary A. Gannaway, 'The Singing Games of the Cumberland Mountains in Tennessee,' Master's Thesis, George Peabody College, 1935." Several of the studies have been published, such as the 1941 Ph.D. Columbia University dissertation, "Phonetics of Great Smoky Mountain Speech," by Joseph Sargent Hall, but most have not, which is no intended criticism of their value. Several of the titles are compelling such as the M.A. thesis by Robin L. Geller done at the University of North Carolina in 1974, "Feuding in Appalachia and the Middle East: A Comparative Analysis." Of the ninety-three general studies, Collett pays special attention (and tribute) to dissertations on Appalachian literature by (1) Laurie Leslie Banner, University of North Carolina, 1984, (2) Carvel Collins, University of Chicago, 1944, (3) Isabella D. Harris, Duke University, 1948, (4) Danny Miller, University of Cincinnati, 1985, (5) Barbara S. Kirkpatrick, University of Maryland, 1974, (6) H. R. Stoneback, Vanderbilt University, 1970, and of course Cratis Williams, New York University, 1961. A listing of other useful sources appears in "Works...

Metaphor and Metonymy, Color and Space, in Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia

Structurally, the coordinate title Sea and Sardinia suggests metonymy and synecdoche. As Lawrence remarks at the outset of a later of travel sketches: says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town.... All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of his exercise book (Mornings 3). through selection and combination, one moment can stand for many and one place for a country or ethos. What Lawrence called Spirit of Place is born of a momentary interaction between the writer's perspective powers, shaped his experience, and external geography. In this encounter the strange and the familiar throw each other into relief; the traveler looks inward as well as outward and compares the scene before him with remembered scenes. stimulus of unfamiliar landscapes can activate the deepest desires, dreams, and values (cf. Tracy 2-3). Mark Schorer affirms, is probably no other writer in literary history whose works responded so immediately to his geographical environment as Lawrence, and certainly there is no other modern writer to whose imagination `place' made such a direct and intense appeal (282). In his review of H. M. Tomlinson's Gifts of Fortune, Lawrence proclaims: We travel, perhaps, with a secret and absurd hope of setting foot on the Hesperides.... One gradually gets a new vision of the world, if one goes through the disillusion absolutely. It is a world where all things are alive (Phoenix 343, 345). To Lawrence, the quest for the Hesperides gave way to the challenge of self-discovery. traveler brings his perceptual habits and expectations with him, but his vision is renewed new scenes. Sea and Sardinia fully exploits Lawrence's volatile, hypersensitive temperament. suppose one carries one's own self wherever one goes, he writes. But one undergoes a metamorphosis also (Letters III: 353). self, scenes in memory or geological strata, is many-layered. Aware of his own changeable responses, Lawrence acknowledges that Italy has given me back I know not what of myself, but a very, very great deal. She has found for me so much that was lost: a restored Osiris. But, he adds, apart from the great rediscovery backwards . . . there is a move forwards. There are unknown, unworked lands where the salt has not lost its savour (Sea 131). Such primordial landscapes include the Sardinian moors. Lawrence considered Sea and Sardinia an exact and real travel book: no stunt, rather a marvel of veracity, and pretty vivid as a flash-light travel book (Letters IV: 27, 35, 58-59). reality and vividness of the writing are based on immediate perception; Lawrence relives his travels in the act of writing them. We are always in the smithy, says Anthony Burgess, watching the verbal hammering (110). Burgess, who finds Sea and Sardinia by far the best introduction to [Lawrence's] oeuvre, adds: The sharpness of Lawrence's eye is incredible. flexible prose combined with sharp observation in loosely articulated structures suggests a writer on holiday from more strenuous tasks. Metonymy dominates in travel writings, where direct visual experience precedes commentary and reflection. there are frequent shifts from metonymy to metaphor (Jakobson) and from thing-in-itself to things as geographical,, psychological, or cultural signs. Objects juxtaposed in space on the combinative axis of perception (metonymy) fuse with projections on the substitutive axis of imagination (metaphor). Lawrence's visual representation is so vivid that Sea and Sardinia can be seen in spatial terms, unrolling the journey, or like a highly colored Oriental processional scroll, crowded, brilliant, clearly drawn, largely objectified and curiously detached (Weiner 233). form is mimetic but the vision is open to continuous transmutation. Lawrence launches Sea and Sardinia with a list of items to be packed. …

Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (review)

Book Reviews 97 world ... and the second in the power of Creative Consciousness." Indeed, she believes that James himself estabUshed such a bridge, that at times the concrete perceptions of the early style appear in and fuse with the abstractions of the later style. Such appears to me to be the main thrust of MacDonald's critique. But there is other information and profitable reading in the volume, including a summary of the tradition of the grand tour, a discussion of Hawthorne's and Howells's writing of Italy and of James's animadversions upon their limitations, a detailed analysis of three of James's Italian tales, and, quite aside from the question of early versus late style, perceptive analyses of a number of the travel sketches in Italian Hours. Donald E. Stanford Louisiana State University Jonathan Freedman. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1990. xxx + 305 pp. $29.50. The main argument of this important and innovative book is that the very oppositions and assumptions that mark James's response to aestheticism helped him "transform the volatile and unstable example of aestheticism in England into that more austere form of aestheticism we call modernism" (xvii). Its further contention is that, though British aestheticism was not appreciated by modernism, its "full range, depth, and audaciousness comes into view" when it is approached "through the perspective we might broadly label 'postmodern'" (xviii). Both propositions are sound. The first was often suggested, if not fully explored, by former Jamesian critics. Freedman does a much more thorough and sophisticated job, bringing new literary theories to bear on his subject, rescuing British aestheticism from effacement, and placing its antinomies well at the center of the cultural movement that marked the transition to our century. His approach is, however, more belabored than his predecessors', and I wish to address myself to this question at once, to clear the way for better things. First, Freedman's thesis is too insistently reiterated, as if he had to convince himself of its soundness. Second, it is often couched in language that savors too much (to my taste, at least) of contemporary critical jargon. Third, the connection of aestheticism with literary professionalism and commodity culture, which is again much insisted upon, seems more symptomatic of a will to political correctness than an established fact. Freedman shows traces of a divided mind—always a good sign in a critic —though he seems needlessly apologetic about it "I have not fully made the turn toward a wholly historicized vision, preferring instead to let my no-doubt-retrograde nostalgia for the literary coexist, however tensely, with the very analysis that would undo it" (xxviii). I hope he is tongue-in-cheek; or is it the kind of lip service that is required by current trends in academia? A debasement of "the literary" goes totally against the skill, the sensitivity, and the expertise exhibited in this book. And can one really believe in "high-cultural art as a prime mechanism of social control" (xxix)? Prime mechanism? Surely politicians, statesmen, and even artists know better. As often in such cases, the theoretical preface is less valuable than the development and unfolding of the critical argument. Freedman is right in stressing the importance of British aestheticism and its contradictions—a balanced system of the organic and the artificial, emphasizing at once time as flux and the beauty of the captured moment, the solipsistic self and the union with the Other, purity of experience and high fashion—for American culture and for James 98 The Henry James Review himself. The distinction between the aestheticism of Ruskin and Morris, with its emphasis on social, moral, and transcendent values, on one side, and that of Pater and Wilde, with its immanent social critique, on the other, works cogently in that context. The line of Ruskin found its development in such American intellectuals as Charles Ehot Norton, V. W. Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Jane Adams, but generated more impatience than sympathy in James, who was cold to the Pre-Raphaeutes, the art-for-art school of fiction, and "decadents" such as Baudelaire and Swinburne. I am not totally convinced that the Venetian...

"These Sad but Glorious Days": Dispatches from Europe, 1846-1850.

Margaret Fuller-journalist, critic, radical feminist, and political activist-was a foreign correspondent for the New-York Tribune from 1846-50. engrossing book provides the first complete edition of dispatches from England, France, and Italy, which began as engaging travel sketches but soon turned into moving and dramatic eyewitness accounts of the most widespread revolutionary upheaval within modern history. Fuller's letters are extraordinarily good. They will be of interest to scholars of American literature and history, women's studies, and European literature and history.-Joel Myerson, University of South Carolina This collection of thirty-seven dispatches written for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune presents an opportunity to view [Fuller] as a developing personality, burning off heaps of silliness and taking on something like character-even splendor-as she finds herself caught up in the brief, calamitous life of the Roman Republic during the European uprisings of the late 1840s. -Thomas Mallon, New Criterion Recommended for the power of own writing, for its capacity to convey the emotional idealism of liberal America as well as liberal Italy, not to mention the amusement she as well as her readers derive from observing the sight-seer 'abroad.'-Agatha Ramm, International History Review This welcome edition has made more accessible the works of an important figure in American literary history.-Sylvia Neely, Journal of the Early Republic

Hawthorne's American Travel Sketches

Hawthorne's American Travel Sketches

Hawthorne's American Travel Sketches

Hawthorne's American Travel Sketches

Hawthorne's American travel sketches

Hawthorne's American travel sketches

THE SUBVERTED GAZE: HAWTHORNE, HOWELLS, JAMES AND THE DISCOURSE OF TRAVEL

The stereotype is the word repeated without any magic, any enthusiasm, as though it were natural, as though by some miracle this recurring word were adequate on each occasion. . . . Nietzsche has observed that "truth" is only the solidification of old metaphors. So in this regard the stereotype is the present path of "truth, " the palpable feature which shifts the invented ornament to the canonical, constraining form of the signified. 1 Roland Barthes We need a critical theory of guidebooks.2 Paul Fussell I American representations of European travel in the latter half of the nineteenth century reveal a problematic tension between pleasure and anxiety. While the inscription of travel originates in the pleasures of visual engagement with an old and richly suggestive culture, the descriptive focus on "place" is often disrupted or postponed by a dilatory articulation of generic constraints which preclude a prompt, original or accurate rendering of the object of the touristic gaze. Traditionally, the travel sketch has been regarded as a leisurely, amateurish mode of discourse intended to "involve the mind in the eye's delights," and which "served as a critical exercise that activated and sharpened the discriminating eye."3 While Thomas A. Pauly correctly insists that the literary sketch privileges "a calculated incompleteness" and "a tentative mode of perception," critical inquiry into this complex genre needs to go further in examining travel writers' anxious awareness of the limits of, and obstacles to, representation.4

NANSHIN‐RON: ITS TURNING POINT IN WORLD WAR I

<i>NANSHIN‐RON:</i> ITS TURNING POINT IN WORLD WAR I