Brief Mention

Transnational Na(rra)tion: Home and Homeland in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. By John Dolis. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press. 2015. xii, 199 pp. Cloth, $75.00; e-book, $74.99.Eschewing literary criticism that has a political bent, Dolis seeks “the pleasure of the text alone.” Using deconstructive and psychoanalytic theory, he examines works by Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain, examining how the relation between citizen and subject relies on otherness. In each chapter, he chooses literary texts that define American identity as the coupling with a “foreign body,” locating an alterity every time American identity is performed.Communities of Death: Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning. By Adam C. Bradford. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press. 2014. xii, 248 pp. Cloth, $60.00; e-book, $60.00.This study critiques the critical tendency to marginalize Edgar Allan Poe’s relation to Walt Whitman. The book begins with an in-the-moment creative retelling of an 1845 meeting between the two poets, when Poe praised Whitman’s article on music’s ability to foster human interconnectedness. Given that the language of sentimentalism is what characterizes their initial engagement, Bradford argues that “the interpretive lenses provided by nineteenth-century America’s sentimental culture were crucial to these authors’ literary projects.” Focusing on the sentimental culture of mourning and memorialization, he first analyzes Poe’s aesthetics, followed by Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), Drum-Taps (1865), and Two Rivulets (1876).A Kiss from Thermopylae: Emily Dickinson and Law. By James R. Guthrie. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press. 2015. ix, 256 pp. Cloth, $80.00; paper, $25.95.The practice of law was so important to the Dickinson family that, as Guthrie notes, law “would have constituted the poet’s primary linguistic context.” Analyzing the role of law in both the Dickinson household and American culture in general, this study explains how Dickinson’s metaphors and poetic personae borrowed from legal terminology. An understanding of Dickinson’s awareness of the law leads to new insights into her poetry, which engages with such themes as authoritarianism and individuality, and social responsibility and citizen rights. Each chapter covers a specific legal theme, such as bankruptcy, equity, property, and crime and punishment.Alcohol in the Writings of Herman Melville: “The Ever-Devilish God of Grog.” By Corey Evan Thompson. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 2015. xii, 202 pp. Paper, $45.00; e-book available.Although Melville expressed a predilection for alcohol in his journal and correspondence, his novels, stories, and poems were highly critical of its consumption. This study argues not only that alcohol has a “significant and purposeful” presence in Melville’s novels, but also that his works are so thoroughly anti-alcohol that he can be considered “one of the most staunch supporters of temperance, if not prohibition, of all nineteenth-century American male authors.” After an initial chapter analyzing characters overcoming alcohol addiction, the majority of the book examines the ruinous outcomes that Melville inflicted on his imbibers.American Tragedian: The Life of Edwin Booth. By Daniel J. Watermeier. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press. 2015. xiii, 464 pp. Cloth, $55.00; e-book, $55.00.Brother of John Wilkes Booth, Edwin Booth is often considered America’s greatest Shakespearean actor. Since the mid-twentieth-century biographies of Booth have been published, many letters, journals, and financial records have been unearthed. Watermeier asserts that Booth’s life merits a complete and well-documented biography. Decades in the making, this particular biography emphasizes Booth’s career, including his journeyman years in California, his antebellum rise to fame, and his foreign tours.Mary Edwards Bryan: Her Early Life and Works. By Canter Brown Jr. and Larry Eugene Rivers. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida. 2015. xvi, 351 pp. $74.95.With the publication of her novel Manch in 1880, Mary Edwards Bryan became a literary celebrity. Modern critics, though, tend to dismiss her because she later resorted to writing mass-market Victorian romantic novels in order to make money. This biography hopes to recover Bryan as a significant writer by focusing on the years before she found literary fame at the age of forty. In order to reveal how her literature was influenced by the hardships she overcame, the authors juxtapose biographical sections with selections from her writings.Winifred Black/Annie Laurie and the Making of Modern Nonfiction. By Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 2015. vii, 208 pp. Paper, $35.00; e-book available.With a readership in the hundreds of thousands, Winifred Black (nom de plume, Annie Laurie) was one of America’s best-known newspaperwomen in the early twentieth century. By describing her influential career, this study hopes to recover the significance of a writer who, as the authors argue, “for almost fifty years . . . develop[ed] the American genre of nonfiction.” Using nonfiction techniques—such as telling stories through scenes—Black was an influential voice in cultural analysis, often expressing the hardships facing modern women.Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century. By Ewa Barbara Luczak. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. viii, 275 pp. Cloth, $95.00, e-book, $69.99.This cultural history of eugenics in American literature and life from 1900 to 1940 examines writings by Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and George S. Schuyler. Luczak argues that American literature of this period demonstrates how a discourse and practice of eugenics fundamentally shaped the spectrum of American social and political life during this period. Detailing the rise of American eugenics and its international transits, Breeding and Eugenics provides a historical context for focused readings of these authors, who demonstrate how a grammar of eugenics remains entrenched within key conceptions of race, gender and sexuality, nation, and the family.The Ecological Eugene O’Neill: Nature’s Veiled Purpose in the Plays. By Robert Baker-White. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 2015. viii, 225 pp. Paper, $45.00; e-book available.This study of O’Neill’s ecological imagination elaborates on existing critical insights into his drama and its world-building capacities. Baker-White traces how O’Neill’s representation of the “non-human natural” world in his plays might enhance critical connections within the playwright’s substantial body of work and across contemporary debates about literature and environmental thought. Drawing on O’Neill’s personal writings, his correspondence, and a range of his plays, Baker-White identifies four major motifs that merge toward a thematic ecology in his later plays: the sea, attachment to and escape from the rural, God or godliness in ecology, and “the fantasy of salvation” in “exotic nature.”The Influence of the European Culture on Hemingway’s Fiction. By Silvia Ammary. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2015. xi, 103 pp. Cloth, $70.00; e-book, $69.99.Using, among other frameworks, aesthetic analysis, critical race theory, and transnational studies, Ammary assesses how Ernest Hemingway’s works appropriate European food, music, architecture, and literature. She argues that Hemingway’s foreign characters act as “major catalysts” transforming the American characters. In other words, Europe is constructed as an “other” that is simultaneously contrasted with America, and yet allows the American characters room for growth. Organized thematically by nation, the book starts with Italy’s culinary influence on Hemingway, transitions to how Spain influenced his view of the land, and concludes with his perception of France as a setting for “aimless tourism.”Hemingway, Style, and the Art of Emotion. By David Wyatt. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2015. ix, 270 pp. $99.99.Drawing on both Ernest Hemingway’s fiction and nonfiction works, this study contends that a critical “overinvestment in the features of Hemingway’s early style” obscures recognition of the author’s “ongoing act of self-revision,” which is particularly evident in his later, unpublished works. Wyatt draws extensively on Hemingway’s archived papers to demonstrate how this practice of self-revision threads throughout his oeuvre, taking shape as key emotional groupings that correspond to different stages of his writing career: anxiety, embarrassment, forgiveness, and remorse. This study will be of special interest to literary scholars interested in methodologies of archival practice as well as Hemingway scholars.Towers of Myth and Stone: Yeats’s Influence on Robinson Jeffers. By Deborah Fleming. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press. 2015. ix, 142 pp. Cloth, $39.95; e-book, $38.99.In this extensive study of William Butler Yeats and Robinson Jeffers, Fleming close reads their poetry to discover related imagery and themes, such as the belief in eternal recurrence, distrust of rationalism, and dedication to tradition. She argues that critics are incorrect when they interpret Jeffers’s “rejection of modernism as a rejection of contemporary poetry.” The chapters are organized around such themes as ecoprophecy, rationalism, traditionalism, solitude versus society, and the relation between landscape and self.Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet. By James Karman. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press. 2015. xi, 245 pp. Paper, $19.95; e-book available.The reputation of Jeffers, as others have noted, seemed to change drastically over the course of his life: he went from being one of the most famous poets in 1920s America to being overlooked by critics by the 1950s. This biography argues that, although the poet’s decline in reputation is overstated, it can also be explained insofar as he was “an anti-modern modernist.” Although Karman primarily explores the concepts, events, and people that influenced Jeffers, he also discusses his major books.John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic. By Alec Marsh. London: Bloomsbury. 2015. xvi, 301 pp. Cloth, $104.00; e-book, $77.99.Many biographers of Pound tend to pathologize the militant far-right activist Kasper, devoting little thought to the way these two men influenced each other. In this analysis of the four hundred pages of correspondence between Kasper and Pound, Marsh argues that Kasper “was one of the most astute and committed readers” of Pound. Part of a book series historicizing literary modernism, this study examines how an American extremist influenced Pound’s thoughts on race and politics, as well as Pound’s later poetry.Wallace Stevens among Others: Diva-Dames, Deleuze, and American Culture. By David R. Jarraway. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press. 2015. xiii, 307 pp. Cloth, $60.00; e-book available.This study uses a Deleuzian lens to explore Stevens’s resonance within contexts that are often overlooked in the study of his poetry. These contexts include queer discourse, contemporary American fiction, classic American film, psychoanalysis, and avant-garde American architecture. By focusing on female subjectivity in both Stevens and Gilles Deleuze, he links each chapter to a larger focus on the relation between self-presence and American identity. The goal of this project is “to document the precise extent to which Deleuze’s theorizing about identity and difference is indebted to American literature.”Poems Containing History: Twentieth-Century American Poetry’s Engagement with the Past. By Gary Grieve-Carlson. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2014. xvi, 215 pp. Cloth, $85.00; e-book, $84.99.This study begins with a provocative question: Can poets tell us anything about history that historians cannot tell us more authoritatively? The answer, for Grieve-Carlson, is that poetry “can indeed help us to think about the past.” To explore this question, he divides his book into three categories: (1) poets who position poetry as an accessory to historiography (Stephen Vincent Benét, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Penn Warren), (2) poets who position history as meaningful (T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Carolyn Forché), and (3) poets who directly question historiography (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson).Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights. By Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. 2015. 359 pp. Cloth, $35.00; e-book, $34.99.Carolina Israelite retrieves Golden from critical obscurity in this comprehensive biography of his life as a popular journalist, author, and vocal civil rights supporter in North Carolina. Arriving in Charlotte from New York’s Lower East Side in 1941, Golden founded the Carolina Israelite in 1944. His regional and national importance as a popular champion of civil rights during his idiosyncratic newspaper’s run from 1944 to 1968 structures this study. Hartnett draws on archival materials, government documents, and interviews to consider Golden’s writings within a broader cultural history of Jewish immigrant experience, celebrity, print culture, and race relations in the nation and the American South of this period.All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin. By Douglas Field. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2015. x, 220 pp. Cloth, $35.00; e-book available.Assembling a “nuanced portrait” of Baldwin’s life and work, All Those Strangers weaves a cultural history of the author amid the “transformative politics” of the postwar, transnational world that he inhabited. Field considers a wide spectrum of Baldwin’s fiction and nonfiction writings alongside contemporary reviews and correspondences to compose a multifaceted account of his life and writings. This work organizes itself along topics ranging from Baldwin’s sexuality to his faith, his well-documented FBI domestic surveillance, his international travels, and his residencies, thus merging chronologically disparate chapters of Baldwin’s life to demonstrate his enduring and “manifest complexity.”The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture. By Timothy Jones. Cardiff, UK: Univ. of Wales Press. 2015. 256 pp. $160.00.The American gothic genre is often figured as a response to distressful historical situations. This overly serious approach, according to this study, doesn’t adequately explain why gothic texts speak to a desire for wicked pleasure. Jones’s volume explores the playful and performative aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century gothic writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Stephen King. In contrast to Mikhail Bakhtin’s view that carnival entails genuine lawlessness, Jones sees it as “a limited period of altered behaviors.”Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism. By Ian McGuire. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press. 2015. xxix, 128 pp. Paper, $50.00; e-book, $50.00.In this study of Ford’s fiction, McGuire examines how the author’s novels and short stories might compose “not only representations of pragmatic ideas and possibilities but also examples of intelligent, pragmatic thinking.” McGuire argues for a more expansive consideration of Ford’s work, pushing beyond the author’s categorization as contemporary minimalist or writer of “dirty realist” fiction. Rather, McGuire locates Ford within a continuum of American pragmatist thinking that ranges from such philosophers, critics, and authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, and William James to Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Richard Poirier, Jonathan Levin, and Ross Posnock.Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction. By Catherine Romagnolo. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. 2015. xxxi, 155 pp. $55.00.Opening Acts contributes to feminist narrative theory with this study of the formal beginnings of key texts by women writers. Examining works that span the twentieth century by H.D., Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, and Julia Alvarez, Romagnolo asserts that texts by women writers subject to “dominant articulations of gendered and racialized identity” align in their common attention toward the beginnings of narrative as sites of strategic disruption. This work challenges key elements of classical narratology by demonstrating how beginnings might instantiate both formal and structural elements of narrative as well as the text’s broader social and ideological work.American Political Fictions: War on Errorism in Contemporary American Literature, Culture, and Politics. By Peter Swirski. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. 214 pp. Cloth, $90.00; e-book, $69.99.Parsing political fact from fiction, this study analyzes America’s erroneous self-conceptions via popular political art. Swirski’s case studies include the relation between historical fact and satirical fiction in Joseph Heller’s Picture This (1988), the publishing success of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s Left Behind series, rap lyrics as a countercultural expression, and the of political in The The are all founded on the author’s belief that a genuine in the American By New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. xii, pp. Cloth, $90.00; e-book, studies the of “the to the In this study uses cultural studies to a to the In other words, the goal of this book is “to at the of the the of Examining cultural about and the explores how with the South, such as the gothic and to be across and cultural Jonathan By Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press. 2015. pp. Cloth, $39.95; e-book, study how the of plays an important role in the works of including such novels as The of and from the of fiction and fiction, literary and genre fiction to such a that, as his works us to about itself in new literary as the of new on how uses these to new The of Ecological in American Literature. By Univ. of Press. 2015. viii, pp. Cloth, e-book, America, they the with the American landscape was simultaneously a the of God and a to be This study traces this into the ecological writings of David John and This that at the of the provided the by which these authors a view of as a to a view of as a responsibility and

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