Brief Mention

Editions

The Female American Or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield. By Unca Eliza Winkfield [pseud]. Ed. Michelle Burnham. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press. 2001. 196 pp. Paper, $12.95.

Originally published in England in 1767, this anonymously authored volume is one of the many “female Robinsonades”—narratives of imitation that feature a female heroine in place of Defoe’s hero and describe her adventures after a shipwreck on a strange island. The biracial narrator, Unca Eliza Winkfield, is the fictional daughter of a Native American princess and the Virginia colony’s first president. Burnham describes this text as offering a “rare and unusual depiction of the role of women in the projects of New World colonialism and religious conversion” and believes that it “deserves consideration alongside other early modern transatlantic representations of women, race, and empire.”

The Life of P. T. Barnum. By P. T. Barnum. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2000. xxxvii, 404 pp. Paper, $14.95.

This new edition makes Barnum’s 1855 text available for the first time in over a century. In his thorough introduction, Terence Whalen explains that it may be difficult to treat this autobiography as historical evidence because of the author’s fascinating dissembling throughout the text. Nevertheless, readers can appreciate Barnum’s sense of irony, the illuminating depiction of a nineteenth-century conartist, and the illustration of the rise of U.S. mass culture.

Selected Letters of Mary Antin. Ed. Evelyn Salz. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press. 2000. xxv, 160 pp. $29.95.

This collection of Mary Antin’s letters (spanning the period between 1899 and 1949) selects the writer’s correspondence from her adolescence through her activism and fame after writing the celebrated Promised Land to her struggle with mental illness and her final years. Salz’s selections, including correspondence with Theodore Roosevelt and editor Louis Lipsky, are useful for scholars of women’s, Jewish, and American studies.

Trimalchio: A Facsimile Edition of the Original Galley Proofs for “The Great Gatsby.” By F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press. 2000. xv, 76 pp. $75.00.

With these seventy-six 6-by-24-inch uncorrected galley pages, Fitzgerald aficionados can now catch a glimpse of the original typescript for what four months later, following extensive revision, became The Great Gatsby. This version of the text, which comes in a limited edition of 500 numbered copies, is supplemented by a postscript with a previously unpublished letter by the author and an afterword by Bruccoli. Both alter long-accepted notions about the composition and revision of Fitzgerald’s classic.

“Trimalchio”: An Early Version of “The Great Gatsby.” By F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. James L. W. West III. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2000. xxii, 192 pp. $39.95.

Before a last round of unexpectedly major revisions that would produce Fitzgerald’s signature work, the author presented his literary agent with a complete version of the novel. In parts, the early manuscript differs significantly from the one ultimately published as The Great Gatsby: the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, more clearly dominates the story, while Jay Gatsby’s character unfolds in greater obscurity. Because the original typescript of “Trimalchio” has been lost, West bases his edition, complete with apparatus, on the surviving galley proofs.

Henry James: The Crooked Corridor. By Elizabeth Stephenson. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. 2000. xi, 172 pp. Paper, $24.95.

Originally published in 1949 as The Crooked Corridor: A Study of Henry James, this new edition contains a brief introduction by the author. The text provides a general overview of James’s life and works.

General

Signs of the Times in Cotton Mather’s “Paterna”: A Study of Puritan Autobiography. By Constance J. Post. New York: AMS Press. 2000. xxvi, 202 pp. $69.50.

In this first book-length study of Paterna, Post uses Mather’s text to examine seventeenth- and eighteenth-century transnational Puritan signifying practices, and he shows that Paterna is a useful text for demonstrating the constantly changing, “processual” nature of identity formation in U.S. culture. [End...