Wellesley College Research Articles

Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania, by Sarah Justina Eyerly

Book Review| April 01 2022 Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania, by Sarah Justina Eyerly Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania, by Sarah JustinaEyerly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. xvi, 269 pp. With companion website Moravian Soundscapes by SarahEyerly, MarkSciuchetti, and AndyNathan, https://moraviansoundscapes.music.fsu.edu/ Stephen A. Marini Stephen A. Marini STEPHEN A. MARINI is Elisabeth Luce Moore Professor of Christian Studies and Professor of Religion in America and Ethics at Wellesley College. He is also the founder and singing master of Norumbega Harmony, a choral ensemble specializing in early American psalmody and the repertoire of the Southern singing-school tunebook The Sacred Harp (1844). His most recent book is The Cashaway Psalmody: Transatlantic Religion and Music in Colonial Carolina (University of Illinois Press, 2020), which has been awarded the Lloyd Hibbert Endowment by the American Musicological Society. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2022) 75 (1): 200–209. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.1.200 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stephen A. Marini; Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania, by Sarah Justina Eyerly. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2022; 75 (1): 200–209. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.1.200 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search The Moravians of colonial Pennsylvania are enjoying renewed attention today from scholars with diverse interests. The Moravians’ rapid rise, communal institutions, controversial devotional and sexual practices, and sudden financial crisis during the mid-eighteenth century have been explored in important recent studies by Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Katherine Carté Engel, and Paul Peucker, among others.1 Now Sarah Justina Eyerly offers a sweeping new interpretation of their rich music culture and distinctive sound environments in Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania. Founded by Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf of Saxony (1700–1760), the Moravians, or Herrnhut Community of Brothers (Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine), brought together a group of Hussite exiles from Bohemia with followers of the count’s own vision of Lutheran Pietism. In 1722, Zinzendorf welcomed the remnant of the Unity of the Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), Jan Hus’s fifteenth-century religious reform movement, to Herrnhut, a town on his... You do not currently have access to this content.

Revolutionary love

Revolutionary love Liseli A. Fitzpatrick (bio) you said loveis revolutionaryso youcaptured myheart in yourfist transportedme around themoon released mein open space andsaid star, love is emancipatory! [End Page 159] Liseli A. Fitzpatrick Liseli A. Fitzpatrick is a Trinidadian poet and professor of African cosmologies and sacred ontologies in the Africana studies department at Wellesley College. Her penchant for poetry is driven by her deep-rooted desire to effect emancipatory change in the cocreation of an equitable, just, and breathable world. Love, ancestral reverence, embodied wisdom, nature, and liberation are central themes in her work. She can be reached at lfitzpa3@wellesley.edu. Copyright © 2022 Liseli A. Fitzpatrick

Contributors

Contributors

Paris 2440/3020: Excavating Daniel Arsham’s Fictional Archaeology

April 01 2022 Paris 2440/3020: Excavating Daniel Arsham’s Fictional Archaeology J. Cabelle Ahn J. Cabelle Ahn J. Cabelle Ahn is a seventh-year PhD Candidate in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation is titled, “Multiple Exposures: Drawing Exhibitions in Eighteenth-century France.” She received her masters from the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Bard Graduate Center, and her research has been funded by the Lee Whittinghill Samuelson Fellowship at Harvard, the Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellowship at the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Chandler-Ott Fellowship at Wellesley College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information J. Cabelle Ahn J. Cabelle Ahn is a seventh-year PhD Candidate in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation is titled, “Multiple Exposures: Drawing Exhibitions in Eighteenth-century France.” She received her masters from the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Bard Graduate Center, and her research has been funded by the Lee Whittinghill Samuelson Fellowship at Harvard, the Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellowship at the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Chandler-Ott Fellowship at Wellesley College. Online Issn: 2572-7338 Print Issn: 1091-711X © 2022 J. Cabelle Ahn2022J. Cabelle Ahn Thresholds (2022) (50): 143–159. https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00754 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share MailTo Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation J. Cabelle Ahn; Paris 2440/3020: Excavating Daniel Arsham’s Fictional Archaeology. Thresholds 2022; (50): 143–159. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00754 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThresholds Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2022 J. Cabelle Ahn2022J. Cabelle Ahn Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors': A New History of the Shakespearean Text by Molly G. Yarn

Reviewed by: Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors': A New History of the Shakespearean Text by Molly G. Yarn Paul Salzman Yarn, Molly G., Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors': A New History of the Shakespearean Text, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021; hardback; pp. 352; R.R.P. £29.99; ISBN 9781316518359. Early modern literary studies are experiencing an especially fruitful period, despite attacks on the humanities, and dire working conditions (or no work) for young and aspiring academics. Molly Yarn's new book is an excellent example of the kind of new, historicist, theoretically inflected research that makes this field so exciting at the moment. In this witty and thoroughly researched revaluation, Yarn offers a telling riposte to an unfortunate remark by Gary Taylor, an editor of Shakespeare's works (admittedly in 1988): 'Women may read Shakespeare, but men edit him. So, it has been from the beginning, and so it remains' (p. 15). Well, no, neither 'from the beginning' nor now, and Yarn offers some sixty-nine examples from 1800 to 1950. Those examples fit into two basic categories: the majority are women most of us, even those of us interested in the history of editing, have never heard of; the second group, in some respects the most interesting, are those who are quite well known, but have been treated as unworthy or even risible. Perhaps the most interesting example of this is Henrietta Bowdler, whose expurgated edition (later expanded by her husband Thomas) is notorious, and the idea of bowdlerization has taken on the stigma of censorship and mockery of Victorian prudishness. But Yarn places Henrietta Bowdler's edition within the tradition of what she calls domestic editions, which played an important role in [End Page 178] the increasing democratization of access to Shakespeare. At the same time, Yarn is able to counter the extraordinary misogyny implicit, and often explicit, within the fraternity of male editors, and their policing of editorial legitimacy/respectability. Yarn has an unerring ability to anticipate issues with the scope of this book, offering an illuminating, albeit brief, admission that women edited many early modern authors other than Shakespeare. In the case of this particular study, though, the focus on Shakespeare, so often an absurd process of the separation of a single author from his rich literary and cultural context, is justified because the book is an intervention into a field dominated by the editing of Shakespeare. One of the most interesting and original aspects of Yarn's study is her examination of the selected area of student editions of Shakespeare. Of course, not only women edited student editions, but Yarn's meticulous scholarship has unearthed some especially interesting examples where women took a highly original approach to this field. For example, Katherine Lee Bates was a significant poet, and Professor and later Head of English at Wellesley College. Bates edited The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and As You Like It for a student Shakespeare series. Not only did Bates prepare a thorough, collated text, but she trialled a system of textual notes which not only set out differences between quarto and folio texts but offered questions for students to consider in relation to possible editorial choices, often after setting out two different readings, and asking 'Which is better?'. Yarn reproduces a page from Bates's notes to Merchant illustrating this innovative approach to pedagogy and Shakespeare editing. Through her careful examination of a large range of student editions, Yarn is able to break down the dichotomy between the prestigious scholarly edition, and the utilitarian student edition. This runs parallel to recasting the (past) dominant paradigm of the male authoritative edition, which was previously undermined by the 'un-editing' move in the 1990s exemplified by Leah Marcus's Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton (Routledge, 1996). But here, Yarn is using a finely-honed historicist perspective to reshape our sense of how editions are created, and what their influence has been. Yarn also offers a perceptive and again revisionist account of New Bibliography through a feminist lens. Once again, while there have been a considerable number of critical accounts of New Bibliography in recent years, Yarn brings to the table her focus...

A Semantic Analysis of Phrasal Verbs Produced by Hillary Clinton in The Commencement Speech

The aim of this research is to analyse a semantic analysis of phrasal verbs produced by Hillary Clinton in her commencement speech. The writer focused on the implied meanings and the phrasal verbs used by Hillary Clinton during her speech at Wellesley College in 2017. In this analysis, the writer used a qualitative descriptive method and a library research technique to collect the data. In analysing the implied meanings of phrasal verbs, the writer applied Geoffrey Leech’s theory. According to the result, the writer found that there were 10 or 25% phrasal verbs with conceptual meaning, 4 or 10% phrasal verbs with connotative meaning, 16 or 39% phrasal verbs with affective meaning, 7 or 17% phrasal verbs with social meaning, and 3 or 9% with thematic meaning. Therefore, the most dominant meaning in phrasal verbs produced by Hillary Clinton was affective meaning. Meanwhile, in analysing the phrasal verbs, the writer used the theory from Larsen-Freeman and Celce-Murcia. There were three types of phrasal verbs categorized into literal phrasal verbs, aspectual phrasal verbs, and idiomatic phrasal verbs. It can be concluded that there were 17 or 42% literal phrasal verbs, 10 or 25% aspectual phrasal verbs, and 13 or 33% idiomatic phrasal verbs. Thus, the most frequent type of phrasal verbs used during the speech were literal phrasal verbs.

First Author Spotlight

First Author Spotlight

A fully integrated undergraduate introductory biology and chemistry course with a community-based focus I: Vision, design, implementation, and development.

We describe a first-semester, integrated, introductory biology and chemistry course for undergraduates at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA, USA. Our vision was to create a supportive learning community in which students could comfortably make connections between scientific disciplines as they learned necessary content for subsequent courses, further developed problem solving, communication, and laboratory skills, and meaningfully connected with other students and with faculty during their first semester in college. Through highlighting five guiding principles that are central to the course, we describe the integrated course structure and content as well as our efforts to build community, provide support, and engage students in building skills crucial to scientists. We also highlight features of this course and institutional policies that facilitated its logistical and collaborative implementation that can be adapted to fit the needs, goals, and constraints of a diverse range of institutions. A companion article describes an assessment of our course in achieving academic and community building goals.

A fully integrated undergraduate introductory biology and chemistry course with a community‐based focus II: Assessment of course effectiveness

In the Fall of 2016, we created an integrated introductory biology/chemistry course for first-semester students at Wellesley College. This course was designed to meaningfully integrate chemistry and molecular cell biology while also building community and fostering mentorship both inside and outside the classroom. Here, we describe the assessment of this integrated course through a combination of multivariate analyses of student transcript data and student focus group discussions. Our assessment found that the integrated course provided a strongly collaborative working environment for students that provided them with skills that promoted success in future courses. Along with a rigorous consideration of the interplay between biology and chemistry, these skills appeared to support positive longer-term student outcomes. In particular, we observed significant impacts on student persistence into and performance in intermediate and advanced courses. Students from the integrated course were also significantly more likely to declare a major in biochemistry than students who took one of the traditional introductory courses. In addition, our assessment also noted the importance of a cohesive instructional team and broad faculty participation in the success and sustainability of the course.

New attribution to the Maestro dei Putti: an illuminated book of the Attic Nights by Aulo Gellio (Venice, Nicolas Jenson, 1472)

The paper presents the discoveries about a Venetian incunable studied during the cataloguing activities of incunables at the Regional Library in Catania (2018-2021). The aim of the paper is to inform the academic community about the crediting of the illuminations to the Maestro dei Putti; this results from a collaboration with Lilian Armstrong, professor of Art at Wellesley College, MA and specialist on Venetian Renaissance Book Illumination. This identification enriches the census of incunables with another copy, illuminated by the artist who was active between Venice and Padua in the 70s of XV century.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Grade Sensitivity and the Economics Major at a Women’s College

We use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of letter grades in introductory courses on the probability of choosing an economics major at Wellesley College, a highly selective women's college. We find that women just above letter-grade cutoffs are 18 percentage points more likely to major in economics than women just below, a 50 percent increase. The effects are larger among financial aid recipients. Grade sensitivity among women is not explained by the presence of male students or instructors; it is more plausibly explained by lower precollege preferences for the major and gender-specific responses to noisy signals like grades.

KURO-ARAK MONUMENTS
 NORTH-EASTERN AZERBAIJAN:
 ISSUES OF HISTORICAL, CULTURAL AND
 CHRONOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION
 (based on the materials of archaeological exploration 2001-2002.
 on the International project IPARC).

The article is devoted to the results of exploratory archaeological research in 2001-2002. in North-East Azerbaijan, incl. Khachmass-Cuban zone, within the framework of the IPARC project (The International Program for Anthropological Research in the Caucasus; project leader - Professor Wellesley College, USA F.L.Cole). Along with the study of the medieval Gilgilchay defensive system, an international expedition, in which Azerbaijani, Dagestani and American scientists participated, conducted an exploratory survey of 15 famous settlements of the Early Bronze Age. At one of the sites (Serkertepe), a deep exploration pit was laid, which gave a fundamentally new archaeological material. The first part of the article deals with the issues of the historiography of the archaeological study of this region of Azerbaijan, adjacent to Dagestan; provides an overview of exploration and monitoring of known Kuro-Arak settlements; outlines the prospects for their further scientific study. In the second part of the article, much attention will be paid to the characterization and analysis of the materials of the exploration pit at Serkertepe, and also a new concept of the historical, cultural and chronological interpretation of the Kuro-Arak monuments of Northeastern Azerbaijan in the framework of the Great Archaeological culture will be proposed.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

A Lavender League of Their Own? Voice and Visibility of Lesbian Ballplayers

A Lavender League of Their Own?Voice and Visibility of Lesbian Ballplayers Peter Dreier (bio) In 2010, President Barack Obama nominated Elena Kagan, the Solicitor General and former dean of the Harvard Law School, to serve on the Supreme Court. The New York Post ran a seventeen-year-old black and white photograph of Kagan smiling and getting ready to swing a bat in a softball game under the headline, "Does this photo suggest high court nominee Elena Kagan is a lesbian?"1 Other news outlets quickly raised the same question, stirring a controversy over Kagan's sexuality, which was no doubt what those opposed to Kagan's nomination intended. The controversy reflected both the persistent stigma against lesbianism and the persistent stereotype that links women athletes—and particularly baseball and softball players—to lesbianism. The story of lesbians in baseball parallels the struggles of women and gay people to gain more equality in all walks of life. In the 1940s and 1950s, when lesbianism was a taboo topic, especially in the sports world, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League—the inspiration for the 1992 film A League of Their Own—did everything it could to avoid that stigma. The rise of modern feminism in the 1970s, especially the passage of Title IX of the federal Education Act of 1972, significantly increased the number of girls and women participating in organized sports at all levels, from preteens through the professional ranks. As the gay rights movement also burgeoned, a growing number of lesbian athletes came out of the closet, and the stigma was no longer as powerful. women in baseball Since its inception in the early 1800s, baseball was known as a sport for boys and men. "Baseball is too strenuous for womankind," wrote Albert Spalding in 1911,2 reflecting the dominant views of the period. Women faced ostracism [End Page 230] and derision—including the fear of becoming unmarried "spinsters"—if they dared violate social norms about engaging in sports.3 The first women's colleges were established in the 1860s and within a few decades some of them—including Smith College, Wellesley College, and the Women's College at Brown University—fielded baseball teams.4 In 1919, New York City's school system incorporated baseball as a physical education activity for girls. Most young girls played what eventually became known as softball, but some insisted on playing by men's rules and with baseball equipment.5 Gladys Palmer's 1929 book, Baseball for Girls and Women, included a variety of rules for indoor and outdoor games.6 the aagpbl During World War II, professional baseball faced a labor shortage. Eventually, over five hundred major leaguers served in the military during the war, while others worked in defense plants. Major league owners worried that fans would not pay to watch teams with second-tier players, but Philip K. Wrigley, the multimillionaire chewing gum magnate who owned the Chicago Cubs, figured they might buy tickets to see women play baseball. He recruited businessmen to sponsor local teams in midsized industrial cities within a one hundredmile radius of Chicago. The league started with four teams—the Racine Belles and Kenosha Comets in Wisconsin, the Rockford Peaches in Illinois, and the South Bend Blue Sox in Indiana—and eventually grew to ten. Softball had grown in popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. By 1943, there were at least forty thousand women's softball teams—one quarter of all the teams in the country.7 They provided a talent pool for the AAGPBL, but Wrigley insisted that they play some version of regular baseball. Over six hundred players participated in the league, which operated from 1943 to 1954. (Even after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line in 1947, the AAGPBL excluded Black players). Most players were from working-class families. Their salaries—initially ranging from $45 to $85 a week—were considerably higher than most other jobs available to women, and many men, even in defense plants. Most of them still had to work during the off-season, in factories or at clerical and office jobs. In 1987, Kelly Candaele made a public television documentary about the AAGPBL called A League...

Sea Notes

a POETRY 44 WLT AUTUMN 2021 E Sea Notes by Marjorie Agosín The sky over tonight’s sea is a mirror of glittering fireflies. Writing expands, attentive to this limitless sea that, night after night, grows even more immense. In the distance a tear splashes and slides in the sand. This sea, perhaps only my sea, has only a few islands to spare. Perhaps only two, quite far away. I think of those two lonely islands under a rainfall of ashes. When my heart was a seed, poppies grew beside the sea, guiding my dreams. The sea watching over me, like a firefly over a good night’s sleep. I imagined her spreading sheets over me, rocking me gently. I imagined her imitating siren songs for me and the seashells and I grew up. I grew up between the sea and dreams of water. How was that sea? Was that sea yours too, the one we saw in the distance, bringing us the voices of the wind and of fearless women? It was only the sea and its words. The sea and its flowing world. On this sea always searching for light, I see your eyes filling with light. Then a hand reaches for mine or lips seek some wave with desire that leads us halfasleep around the moon. That sea at night is a sea of fragility, a sea of absence, an ocean of questions. The children of the sea who descend the steps in their shiny leather shoes and dressed in silk. They walk along the shore of that sea condemned by mankind. Children trapped deep in the sea and condemned by the decree of men. My mother’s eyes are ancient like the sea, sometimes blue and at times violet. I have seen myself in them and have also found in them a sea of mirrors like fate. One day I found an island in her eyes and a sad darkness shipwrecked upon her shores. She Lydia Rubio is a Cuban-born multidisciplinary artist who lives in Hudson, New York, and has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in national museums, international galleries, private collections, and public art displays. Her awards include the Tree of Life 2020, Ellie’s Creator Award 2019, a Pollock-Krasner grant, and the Cintas Fellowship. Photo by Patrick Farrell. Visit worldlit.org to read the poem in Spanish. PAINTING BY LYDIA RUBIO, “THAT SEA AT NIGHT IS A SEA OF FRAGILITY” WORLDLIT.ORG 45 Marjorie Agosín is the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies at Wellesley College. She is an award-winning poet and human rights activist whose work addresses issues of social justice as well as the pursuit of memory. The United Nations honored her with a leadership award for her work in human rights. Her most recent books include Braided Memories / Memorias trenzadas and Maps of Memory. An eminent translator of Latin American literature and Guggenheim Fellow, Suzanne Jill Levine’s recent works include her five-volume edition of Jorge Luis Borges’s poetry and nonfictions for Penguin paperback classics, the anthology Untranslatability Goes Global (Routledge), and her translation of Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (Seven Stories). looked at you that way until one day you filled with light the world you kept captive in your eyes. In her brief pauses, in the amazement of a silence that seeks us out, I learned what is forgotten, and that love itself fades away. What is treasured by day can be found again in the sound of a freshwater sea, in a sea that enfolds everything into its refuge. One loves the sea from a distance. The sea that every night becomes peace and sleep. The subtle cadence and rhythm. The sea at night that tells stories and that also I desire. The sea also waits and wants your eyes, needs your lips to name it from time to time. The sea also looks for warmth among us, a light with a voice, eyes that come to gaze. The sea and its shared solitude. Beneath that sea there might be a nest, a nest that is always warm and still, a nest is a country...

Guest Editor's and Editor's Notes

Guest Editor's and Editor's Notes Katherine Grandjean (bio) and Marion Rust I confess I have no idea how to write this note. It is January 2021. Two days ago, I learned of the death of Sarah Schuetze. She was a gifted scholar and teacher, much beloved by many people. But she was much more than that, to me. She was my friend, my guide, my sister. We met as fellows at American Antiquarian Society. I loved her immediately. She was funny and warm and snarky. She took notes by hand, in fat spiral notebooks. We sat across from each other in the reading room for months, interrupting each other, passing notes. "Finding a new friend is so funny," she said to me once. "It's kind of like falling in love." And it was. Her work was about disease, and she could tell you gnarly things about syphilis and typhoid and scurvy. She loved writing. She wrote expansively and fearlessly. She wrote long meditations on things, on texts, confident that she would find the way, and she usually did. She gave excellent advice. She listened endlessly to my research dilemmas, and she generally had very little patience for my insecurities, which helped me, always. This issue was her idea. When she told me she wanted to do this, and that she wanted me to coedit with her, I was reluctant. I knew it would be a lot of work. But Sarah's enthusiasm for things was irresistible. She liked to try new projects. Building things. Planting roses. Layer cakes from scratch. She took things on wholeheartedly, without betraying an ounce of reservation. She once threw herself a raccoon baby shower, to collect necessaries for the baby raccoons she was fostering. There was even a registry. So I said yes. And it was not easy. But this issue is a testament to her and to our friendship. It is surreal to think that she won't see it in print. The past year has been full of disruption and shock. But her death, to me, is the cruelest interruption of all. Words fail. [End Page 1] I am grateful to Sarah Schuetze, Katherine Grandjean, Linda Coombs, and the many anonymous readers who made this special issue possible. And with this first issue of the calendar year, thanks are due to several EAL editorial board members who conclude their five-year terms with volume 55: Matt Cohen (University of Nebraska–Lincoln), Paul Downes (University of Toronto), Gene Andrew Jarrett (New York University), Meredith Neuman (Clark University), and Christopher Phillips (Lafayette College). As a field, we owe you a debt of gratitude for your acumen and your generosity of spirit. I would also like to welcome our new board members: Wendy Bellion (University of Delaware), Lisa Brooks (Amherst College), Sarah Chinn (Hunter College, CUNY), Andrew Newman (Stony Brook University), and Derrick Spires (Cornell University). Thank you in advance for the unique contributions each of you are prepared to make. I look forward to working with you. [End Page 2] Katherine Grandjean katherine grandjean is an associate professor of history at Wellesley College. She is the author of American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Harvard UP, 2015). Her essays have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, American Quarterly, and Early American Studies, and her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, and others. She is currently working on a new book about the violent legacies of the American Revolution. Copyright © 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

The Selected Letters of Juanita Brooks

Book Review| January 01 2021 The Selected Letters of Juanita Brooks Craig S. Smith, ed. The Selected Letters of Juanita Brooks. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. Claudia L. Bushman Claudia L. Bushman Reviewed by Claudia L. Bushman, a historian of women and other matters, holds degrees from Wellesley College, BYU, and Boston University. She is the author of several books, the most recent, Going to Boston: Harriet Robinson’s Journey to New Womanhood (University Press of New England, 2017). She hopes to live long enough to complete the final chapter of her autobiography, to be titled “I, Claudia.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Mormon Studies Review (2021) 8: 185–190. https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.8.2021.0185 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Claudia L. Bushman; The Selected Letters of Juanita Brooks. Mormon Studies Review 1 January 2021; 8 185–190. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.8.2021.0185 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressMormon Studies Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Perumal MuruganEstuary by Nandini Krishnan

BOOKS IN REVIEW peers have shocked readers all over the world with monumental autobiographical provocations (Karl Ove Knausgaard and his overreaching My Struggle), enlightened them with light philosophical fare (Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World), or truly surprised them with striking panoramas that link Norway to recent world history (Johan Harstad’s Max, Mischa & Tetoffensiven, yet to be translated into English), Mytting prefers to play it safe and plain. He puts a young pastor into a desolate hamlet, driven by ambitions that are a tad larger than the small old church in which he delivers his sermons. Standing out from his lost flock is Astrid, a young woman who “has a restless mind, and her thoughts always seemed to race ahead of her.” Trying to dive deep into the geographically remote and economically backward community, Mytting simply surrenders our perspective on life back then and awkwardly embraces the language of the past to render his bucolic portrayals: “There was a strong preference for a well-built woman, wide in the beam, preferably with big breasts and with a good, strong back. Astrid was longlimbed and bony, with a thin face and dark, curly hair, and in another village she might have been reckoned pretty.” Once this predictable melodramatic arrangement has been set into play, Mytting tries to heat it up by introducing yet another suitor fascinated by Astrid who is considered “mulish and impossible to discipline .” A student of architecture, hailing from Dresden and in charge of overseeing the dismantling and transport of the village ’s church to Germany, this young man quickly will achieve what the pastor could envision only in feverish dreams. All this would be hard for the reader to bear if Astrid’s ensuing plight were not told against the intricate backdrop of her ancestor’s generous gift to commemorate the loss of conjoined twin sisters. The bells of the church that the young pastor is ready to have shipped to Germany become a powerful Dingsymbol that the author handles much more convincingly than the flat characterization of his stock characters. Revisiting life in the nineteenth century has emerged as a productive pastime in recent European fiction: Thomas Hettche’s Pfaueninsel or Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century succeeded in taking the pulse of historically removed times and characters by neither sentimentalizing nor patronizing them. Mytting still has a long way to go. Thomas Nolden Wellesley College Perumal Murugan Estuary Trans. Nandini Krishnan. Hyderabad. Eka. 2020. 250 pages. IN ESTUARY, HIS LATEST NOVEL in English translation, Tamil writer Perumal Murugan depicts the predicament of the generation gap between parents and children in contemporary India. In the wake of technological advancement and the launch of a new model of a mobile phone or other gadgets every month or so, many parents find themselves entrapped in a vicious cycle of fear and ignorance. As urban India gears toward a more cosmopolitan outlook , rural and small-town people are still bound with age-old traditions and living conditions. The protagonist of the novel, Kumarasurar , is obsessively caring for his only son in a society where sons are revered as gods. Kumarasurar and his wife are left worried when their son takes a long, arduous path to find a place in an engineering college, against their wish to see him become a doctor. At times, it feels like Kumarasurar is going through a mental health crisis, which is not addressed—neither by Kumarasurar himself nor by the author. Kumarasurar is bound in a traditional marriage and a salaried middle-class life. His wife is a homemaker who prefers the confinement of her home and daily chores over anything else. Kumarasurar finds himself trapped in a vicious cycle of fear, confusion, and anger. The constantly changing world around him brings out his worst fears. He worries about the future of his son, who might go astray and become good for nothing in life. He also finds it absurd that people consume pornography, alcohol, or any such deviant pleasures. He believes in simplicity and is at times too obstinate to change himself according to the changing society. Murugan’s choice of the novel’s theme is safe and pertinent, given...

A Surgery of a Star by Margarita Serafimova

BOOKS IN REVIEW the inevitable change of seasons and the elementary techniques of rendering raw nature hospitable. Jacobsen depicts the harshness in the encounters between people and their surroundings as well as the one between people themselves by strictly undernarrating the emotional dimension of his taciturn characters while sharing their rich knowledge of sustaining themselves in great detail. As a result, we learn more about their ways of gutting cod or selling the precious feathers of eider ducks than about the inner lives of men and women who don’t dwell in the pain inflicted on them. This is not to suggest that the tight economy of Jacobsen’s art of storytelling would deny his readers a suspenseful line of events. A plot is slowly set into motion when Ingrid clandestinely offers a soldier of unknown colors refuge in her home and in her heart. Washed ashore on Ingrid’s poverty-stricken island from a troop carrier sunk by British planes, the survival of the badly injured man needs to be hidden from the German occupying forces. The readers, too, will get to learn only specks of his identity: Ingrid “asked whether he was a Russian and he said Da, but only after she had repeated the question three times. She asked if he was a soldier and he answered yes and no, she had never felt more attractive , and she stopped asking questions.” Jacobsen does deny us, however, the illusion that there can be happiness in the time of collaboration and war, when knowing as little as possible appears to be as tantamount to survival as sharing even less. The brief moment in which Ingrid and her torn-up soldier “lay in the North Chamber like husband and wife” is crushed by the pitiless realities of brute force that threaten to render Ingrid helpless, if not lifeless altogether. After a vicious assault that robs Ingrid of her memory of the attack on her, she needs to set out to rebuild her sense of self as a member of a community in which it is at times impossible to tell friend from foe. Bodily harmed, she is also emotionally scarred as she and her readers are trying to reconstruct the circumstances and the motive of the assault on her. Despite the inability of the protagonist to articulate what she is experiencing and her lack of introspection, White Shadow is a powerful psychological novel precisely because it doesn’t bother to give a voice to Ingrid. Not knowing “the difference between what has to be remembered and what forgotten,” Ingrid emerges as a cipher for a people ravaged by an enemy who has taken more than just their land and homes. Over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that White Shadow is a powerful psychological novel about a people’s devastation by the war and their subsequent attempts at reestablishing order out of persecution; loss of property, memory, and honor; of poverty; and of nameless crimes. The narrowly constricted world of Ingrid’s tiny island—which in the first part of the Ingrid Barrøy trilogy could still be told as the story of a family—has been shattered and is replaced by the story of the displaced “Finns and Lapps,” no longer “kept separate from the Norwegians,” as they join Ingrid in rebuilding her home. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw offer a translation that conveys the book’s regionalisms (“Ingrid told him to clear off, an’ don’t show tha face hier again”) as well as the bone-dry cadence of a prose whose sentences tend to be anticlimactic—just like the lives that they tell. Thomas Nolden Wellesley College Margarita Serafimova A Surgery of a Star Trans. by the author. Sonoma County, Calif. Staring Problem Press. 2020. 48 pages. My eyes goldened. / You are mirrored in the surface / of my internal organs. –Margarita Serafimova, “My eyes goldened” ONE BLINK. A snapshot taken. Time frozen in a few lines. Margarita Serafimova’s poetry captures a moment in time as perceived by the poet, revealing her bodily and mental experiences to readers in words that appear simple in their choice but create complex, thought-provoking scenes from that simplicity...