Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature by Trudier Harris (review)

77? Reviews practice, even granted a transatlantic lag, than McGill's narrow analysis of legal discourse reveals. Moreover, exclusive focus upon printing distorts the overall pic? ture of the literary field, in so far as it severs everyday scribal production practices away from print. The introduction of this into McGill's argument, however, would undermine her Habermasian conflation of printing with the putative public sphere (after Michael Warner) and thus her juridico-politico (read: Republican) correction of Gilmore's economic determinism. Yet, perhaps 'the literary' was itself a key cul? tural category circumscribed by traditional social needs of which Republicanism and Jacksonianism were only a part. Political culture per se was hardly the main barrier holding authorship back from full-throttle market influence. McGill works out the implications of her vision of literary property at the incongruous intersection of economics and politics in detailed case studies of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. While her treatment of each author's relation to reprinting opens new perspectives on literary professionalization in the US, her departures into textual interpretation do not always follow through on the rich promise of her bio-bibliographical insights. For example, she attributes the fragmented, problematical narrative structure of Dickens's 1842 American Notes, for General Circulation, to his mirroring of American decentralization, which, to this reader's mind, accords him more artistic acumen than he probably deserves in this case. Certainly, too, some of Poe's ambiguous attitude towards the market reflects the unstable nature of authorship within it, but it goes too far, as McGill does, to extend that condition into Poe's penchant for 'intimate, empty address' (p. 158)?the ambivalence of 'strategic generality' (p. 157) because he could not divine the fate of his reprints. And can the 'narrative impasses' of Hawthorne's 1851 House ofthe Seven Gables (p. 220) really be solely derived from that author's liminal status between the prior system of reprinting and the author-centred national market of the 1850s? If only all authorial fumbling could be so facilely explained. With McGill's interpretative over-reach in view, one cannot help but wonder at the very notion of 'a culture of reprinting', as ifthe practice is so all-encompassing to be determinative within the broader cultural field. One can only think of, improbably , a current 'culture of xeroxing', as an equally misfitted small practice to describe very large trends. In short, McGill's causal arrows here tend to point the wrong way: reprinting, farfrom spawning its own culture, emerged from chaotic conditions surrounding early nineteenth-century American capitalist development, itself often uneven and contradictory. The unsurprising result: a chaotic market summoned an equally chaotic literature, of which rampant reprinting was but one symptom. University of Pittsburgh Ronald J.Zboray Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature. By Trudier Harris. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. vi + 218 pp. ?13.99. ISBN 0-312-29303-8. Trudier Harris is the author of five previous books on African American literature. Her sixth makes a case for the centrality of strength as a dominant stereotype in the literary portrayal of black women. Provocative in content and tone, Saints, Sinners, Saviors provides an in-depth view of several African American literary works of the twentieth century, identifying physical and moral strength as a problematic feature, a symptom of 'disease' (p. 10) bordering on evil, which often has detrimental effects. Harris criticizes this one-dimensional pattern of portraying female characters, as it does not allow for character complexity, foreclosing other possibilities of character depiction, and thereby potentially hindering future directions for the representation of black women. MLR, 99.3, 2004 771 In her firstchapter, Harris outlines the historical development of images of the black, female body, arguing that the stereotype of the physically large, strong, and asexual black woman is the creation of both Euro Americans and African Americans. Black writers have embraced this image, thus being 'complicit in their perpetuation of the dominant images' (p. 7). In the following chapters, Harris provides detailed examples of literary portrayals of strong black women. She touches on a great variety of black American writers, but focuses particularly on works by Lorraine...

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