Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion ed. by Hester Blum

Reviewed by: Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion ed. by Hester Blum Melissa Gniadek Blum, Hester, ed. Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. Pp. 214. It can sometimes feel as though critical trends within nineteenth-century American literary studies shift at a dizzying pace. The essay collection Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion takes this very movement as its subject, acknowledging the field's shifting terrain and claiming this constant movement as an asset. As Hester Blum writes in the book's introduction, "The essays collected here seek both to understand the reasons for the critical mobility within the field of Americanist scholarship, and to argue for its propensity to turn as its constitutive strength" (2). Taking the figure of the "turn" as its organizing principle (the book grew out of a 2012 colloquium titled "Turn, Turn, Turn"), the collection does an admirable job of surveying some of the dominant recent critical turns within nineteenth-century American literary studies. Even more importantly, the collection reflects on the nature of turns as such. At various moments in the book, the authors of individual essays directly confront the notion that academic turns reflect utilitarian fads that gain currency because individuals need to be hired, to publish, and to remain current. Instead, these authors remind us, critical turns are dynamic products of where we have been as a field and indicators of where we are going. They are, as Geoffrey Sanborn puts it in the collection's first essay, to be valued as "affective amplifications, ways of turning up the volume on our collective interest in a field" (15). Turns of Event begins with a brief introduction that surveys some of the turns that have had a significant effect on nineteenth-century literary scholarship and introduces the eight essays in the collection. Those essays are divided into two sections. The first section, "Provocations," contains essays that offer helpful genealogies and potential futures for particular turns and fields, as well as more general reflections on "turning." At the center of this section, essays by Meredith McGill and Martin Brückner take up shifting relationships between "Literary History, Book History, and Media Studies" and the possibilities of the "Cartographic Turn," respectively. In her essay, McGill considers the past and present relationships between the three fields in her title, ultimately hoping for a "reintegration" of these fields "on terms that are perhaps more favorable to those trained in literary study" (34). Brückner, on the other hand, reviews the origins and pervasive nature of the cartographic turn, challenging himself and others to "slow down the turn" (56-57), to be mindful of the assumptions at play in cartographic language, and of the need to "comprehend the interconnection between the metaphorical and the material map" (59). Essays by Sanborn and Christopher Castiglia bracket these essays focused on particular fields and turns, opening and closing the book's first section by asking us to step back and appreciate the possibilities of seeing academic work "not as a war of positions but as a [End Page 169] sequence of positionings" (18), in Sanborn's terms, not as weighted toward suspicion but toward hope, in Castiglia's. The book's second section, "Turn-by-Turn Directions: Transnational, Hemispheric, Oceanic," contains essays focused on these various geopolitical orientations. In "Of Turns and Paradigm Shifts: Humanities, Science, and Transnational American Studies," Ralph Bauer considers the applicability of the Kuhnian notion of the "paradigm shift" to turns within the humanities and to the transnational turn in particular. Monique Allewaert's "The Geopolitics and Tropologies of the American Turn" considers the material significance of metaphors inherent in the trope of the turn also at play in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reading a short story published in 1828 and set in St. Domingue to ultimately argue for "an archipelagic approach […] to postnational American studies" (126). The final two essays in the collection similarly focus on aspects of transnational or postnational American studies, taking the Caribbean and Oceanic turns as their objects. Sean Goudie offers a genealogy of the Caribbean turn even as he challenges...

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