In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Edwards draws the evidence for her book from Granville County, North Carolina , but this is emphatically not a community study. As she explains early on, place really does not matter in her study. She began her project thinking she would write only a history ofGranville County, but this, she found, prevented her from making very large claims for her findings. Because Granville County really was not typical of anything, she changed her focus from theplace to itspeople, and by doing so, Edwards insists, she avoids the typicality problem that so often dogs the students ofparticular communities. She asserts that Granville County's black and female population can represent oppressed people all over the Reconstruction South. Granville County residents, Edwards writes, only seem unrepresentative because historians assume that history is something done by white men in major cities. GenderedStrife and Confusion is written well and solidly researched. Since it ends with an explanation of how whites' "best man" republicanism set the stage for North Carolina's 1 898 white supremacy political campaign, this would be a good book to read along with Glenda Gilmore's GenderandJim Crow. William Gilmore Simms and the American Frontier Edited byJohn C. Guilds and Caroline Collins University of Georgia Press, 1997 276 pp. Cloth, $5 5.00 From Nationalism to Secessionism The Changing Fiction of William Gilmore Simms By Charles S. Watson Greenwood Press, 1993 182 pp. Cloth, $5 5.00 Reviewed by Michael O'Brien, Phillip R. Shriver Professor of History at Miami University, Senior Mellon Scholar in American History at Cambridge, and author of several books about southern history. He also was the guest editor for the special Winter 1998 issue oíSouthern Cultures, "The South in the World." Reviews 107 William Gilmore Simms has long been a critical problem and opportunity. In the fitfully vanishing days when literary canons were confidentiy negotiated, he was nominated as die Old South's candidate for its greatest man ofletters. The hope was that the American schoolchild, in declaiming the names ofthe mighty, would chant, "Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Simms, Twain" and not stumble over the word "Simms" in puzzlement, diat The Yemassee and "How Sharp Snaffles Got His Capital and Wife" would be as routine as The Scarlet Letter, that Simms would be as familiar in our mouths as household words. This would be a final vindication , when all the wounds ofGettysburgwould be healed, when we might get back to the collégial moment when Simms, Melville, and the men of Young America in the 1 840s broke bread amiably together in the cause of an American national literature. This aspiration required some trimming, roughly upon the lines of New South ideology. New York was supposed to canonize Simms, if southern critics carefully repackaged him by deprecating his sectionalism and his pro-slavery writings, by making him a proto-Faulkner who happened to fall into bad company and worse times. On the whole, southerners have kept their halfof the bargain and, for a generation and more, have tried to make his texts available, written his life, edited his letters, studied his criticism, and made dieir case. But New York never responded, as it had when a similar offer had been made at roughly the same time for the canonization ofFaulkner. (On this, see Lawrence H. Schwartz's Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics ofModern Literary Critidsm, 1988.) Rather, Simms has appeared and disappeared in anthologies of American literature, been mentioned here and there, usually dismissively, has been rarely reprinted by metropolitan publishers, and has been thought never quite to have made the grade. Further, canons have moved on from the 1940s and 1950s, when the Simms brigade first made their big push. Irving and Cooper have been retired from the front, Hawthorne is in danger of court-martial for that remark about scribbling women, and canons diemselves are supposed to have fallen silent, now that authors are dead. So the Simms scholars seem often to be amassing ammunition for a war no one is fighting anymore, to be poring over maps ofcountries that no longer exist. To claim that Simms is a great American novelist to a critical generation that dismisses greatness, refuses nationality, and deconstructs...

pdf