Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature ed. by David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski (review)

Book Reviews105 intimate and personal genre, such as the autobiography, the diary, or the memoir, in which they could operate in "an intimate yet unrestricted space ... to perform their political, psychoanalytical, and social analyses" (65). Then she explains that women writers emerged after World War II in the historical novel of the Italian Neorealist movement in which their direct testimonies of war played a major part. Also interesting is the position of women writers in the detective novel, U giallo, which could be viewed as a potentially all male genre, but which in reality has been greatly shaped by women writers (such as Agatha Christie and others) and then used by them to express their views. In her last chapter, "Mainstreaming," the author mentions a new generation of Italian women writers, as described by Marisa Rusconi, women who now produce a "letteratura femminile" and not "femminista," thus reentering into the mainstream of Italian contemporary literature and recognizing the differences of their gender as a source of power. Italian women writers can now return to traditional literary structures from a position of force and authority, with the "coscienza" (the knowledge) of having the genius capable to compete with men and "to create their own intertextual network of reinterpretation of those general literary themes" (197). Lazzaro-Weis supports her views with an analysis derived from extensive scholarship and methodical study of current issues and documentation. She also introduces many contemporary Italian women writers, some well known and others just entering the literary arena, thus furnishing material for further studies on the subject. The book is completed with helpful notes, an extensive bibliography, and an index of subjects and names. It is definitely a welcome addition to studies on feminist literature of our century. CINZIA DONATELLI NOBLE Brigham Young University DAVID MÖGEN, SCOTT P. SANDERS, and JOANNE B. KARPINSKI, eds. Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature. London: Associated University Presses, 1993. 206 p. Jliver since D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Fiction, the phenomenon of an ever-receding frontier—that razor's edge that separates "civilization " from an unknown space rendered in the "civilized" imagination as either a pastoral wilderness or a zone of unspeakable savagery—has been regarded by many critics as the source of a specific American mythology. The endurance of Lawrence's thesis is evidenced by its formidable critical legacy, as in Leslie Fiedler's notion, in Love and Death in the American Novel, that the American male hero (Rip Van Winkle, Natty Bumppo, and Huck Finn) is engaged in a kind of adolescent flight from civilization, and later, in Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence, which brings broader social and cultural perspectives into play. 106Rocky Mountain Review This collection of thirteen essays attempts to combine the "frontier thesis " in American literature with another important concept, the Gothic (whose American versions are perhaps best explored in the critical work of Donald Ringe). In their introductory essay, the editors provide an admirable explanation of the Gothicism inherent in America's relationship to its past: Gothicism "results when the epic moment passes, and a peculiar rift in history develops and widens into a dark chasm that separates what is now from what has been" (16). The essays that follow serve, with remarkable conceptual unity, as a prism through which the concepts "American," "Frontier," and "Gothic" are refracted in new and significant ways, far beyond the "classic" American literature that scholars have been conditioned to associate with these concepts. Several of these essays are quite broad in scope and critical purpose. For instance, in what strikes me as the most important essay in the collection, Scott P. Sanders presents us with a patient and thorough analysis of the connections between landscape and cultural mythos as it operates in the three major cultures of the American Southwest—Indian, Chicano, and Anglo—as respectively reflected in the work of Leslie Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and Richard Skelton. Likewise interesting is Sanders' reference to Lawrence's concept of the "spirit of place," a concept which, significantly, occurred to him while working on the final draft of Classic Studies at his ranch near Taos, New Mexico. In yet another essay...