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  • Late-19th-Century Literature
  • Nicolas S. Witschi

The biographer's art is much in evidence this year, particularly in three impressive volumes detailing the lives of essential though often unheralded authors. The South features prominently in critical analyses, with questions being asked about how the region was defined and redefined throughout the period and about how it has served as both a literary and a critical category. Studies of Stephen Crane and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are fewer in number than usual, with W. D. Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Frances Harper, and Frank Norris each receiving roughly the usual amount of coverage. Historicism and attention to history, always a hallmark of scholarship in this period, are well represented.

i Biography

Each of the three biographies published this year chronicles the life of a historically significant but long-forgotten or underappreciated writer; each is also eminently readable and beautifully researched. Considered alphabetically by subject, the first is Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist (Syracuse) by Gary Scharnhorst. Field was an "unorthodox feminist" who led the way for women as a professional journalist, actor, and publisher, and she was a direct inspiration to both Henry James and Anthony Trollope. Ironically enough, the dearth of personal documentation about Field's private and inner life—few letters and even fewer diaries and manuscripts from her hand [End Page 257] remain for scholars to work through—results in a narrative rich in the kind of newspaper-bound detail that made this life so fascinating, such as the time she lectured against Mormonism in Salt Lake City. Scharnhorst's extensive bibliographical scholarship shows Field to be a public figure through and through, and his narrative compellingly renders this complex public figure in a manner that also illuminates the newspaper-and lecture-based culture of the period.

According to Keith Newlin's Hamlin Garland: A Life (Nebraska), Garland was by virtue of his combination of ambition and short-sightedness a "representative man of letters" of the era. Newlin certainly establishes this perspective in this long-overdue, comprehensive, and thorough critical account of the life of one of the most famous and influential writers of the period. With access to a wealth of archival material—Garland was a scrupulous diarist and prolific letter writer—Newlin tells the story of an artist who was deeply ambivalent about his success and about his prospects for the future. That he resisted adapting his aesthetic principles in the face of a burgeoning modernism offers one piece of evidence for this ambivalence. The claim about Garland's representative status is a compelling one, in large part because it relies on the assumption that the exemplary artist is not the one who leads the way in responding to and determining the direction of an era but rather the one who struggles with the changes that come unbidden.

Lois Brown's Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (No. Car.) paints a much-needed portrait of a complex, interesting, and essential contributor to the culture of the period. This densely wrought portrait of a life documents in wonderful, engaging detail the depth of Hopkins's familial ties to old New England. It provides extensive descriptions of Hopkins's early career as a singer and performer, and recounts in great detail Hopkins's work with the Colored American Magazine and her politically damaging falling out with Booker T. Washington. The compositional histories of Hopkins's important fiction, particularly Contending Forces and Of One Blood, are enhanced by extended, engaging readings of these books as literature. As is the case with the other two biographies mentioned here, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins brings to light long-forgotten or never-fully-known information about its subject. And like the other two works it easily satisfies both the need for a complete accounting of a key cultural figure of the period and a wish to understand more fully just how richly interesting, in terms of gender, race, class, and of course literary production, the late 19th century was. [End Page 258]

Hopkins's impact is assessed in several other useful and impressive works. In The Black Nation Novel: Imagining Homeplaces in Early African American Literature...

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