The Arts, Literature, and Society ed. by Arthur Marwick (review)

Book Reviews263 as place in such seminal works as Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Wings of the Dove, where that "beautiful dishevelled nymph" (Edel, Untried Years 295), Italy herself, is as palpable a being as Daisy, Isabel, or Milly. M. L. STAPLETON Stephen F. Austin State University ARTHUR MARWICK, ed. The Arts, Literature, and Society. New York: Routledge, 1990. 332 p. The growing attendance at the Literature and Other Arts session at the annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain MLA is a sign of the increasing interest in interdisciplinary studies throughout the humanities. For those scholars already taking an active part in such studies—and for those needing a prompt— Marwick's new book will be of great interest. The collection often essays is a product of the annual conference held by the Social History Society of the United Kingdom, the 1988 topic being the title ofMarwick's collection. Both the conference and the subsequent book were governed by a series of topics Marwick presented to the participants before the meeting and which set up the various dialogues among the contributors. The overriding question was whether or not it is legitimate to use terms such as literature, art, or society. Can these terms be profitably defined or must they remain simply social constructions defined variously by whatever group retains social and political predominance? Under this umbrella, Marwick identified six topics the contributors were to use to inform their discussions: 1) Methodology ; 2) Theory; 3) Style, period, taste; 4) National culture and foreign influences; 5) Autonomy versus social construction; and 6) Cultural production, consumption, and status. The ten chapters are arranged in chronological order based on the subject matter—from the sixteenth century to the present. Martin Wiggins' essay, "Macbeth and Premeditation," shows how Shakespeare's play was actually in the vanguard ofthe changing theories about murder in seventeenth-century criminology. Wiggins is using literary texts in an unusual fashion, as a way of informing our historical understanding of an earlier period, rather than using the historical background to inform our reading of the literary text. In the second chapter, Mark Thornton Burnett examines conduct books ofthe late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Burnett takes a New Historicist approach in analyzing the relationship between masters and servants in this popular genre. MtU-CIa Pointon argues for a blending ofverbal and visual functions within the career of the nineteenth-century painter J. M. W. Turner. By examining Turner's letters and cultural milieu, Pointon suggests that the artist is as controlled by the forces of the marketplace and the forces of verbal power as he is by an artistic vision. "The overall cultural dominance ofword over image needs, therefore, to be examined to discover how the word interpellates the image, how image creation and the making of an artist's reputation respond to the imperatives of the word" (77). 264Rocky Mountain Review John Barrell begins his discussion with a challenge of the terms set forth by the conference: literature, art, and society. He argues that privileged texts are not necessarily the most representative of a particular culture but that "interests compete to produce the text ofmaterial history, but not in discourses altogether of their own choosing" (98). Barrell fleshes out his argument by analyzing an early nineteenth-century text, W. H. Pyne's Microcosm, in an exploration of the "problem of authority in the discourse of labour" (101). Stana Nenadic examines the fiction of Wilkie Collins as a means of approaching three levels of historical relevance. This essay focuses on "the problems and opportunities provided by the nineteenth-century novel as a source ofsocial and economic history, and in considering these issues suggests a model by which the novel can be exploited" (133). Ultimately, Nenadic applies this model to the "sensation" fiction of Collins, not because of the fiction's inherent "value," but because of its popularity and because of what that can tell us about the society which popularized it. The sixth essay departs from British society and examines the relationship between tourism and salon painting in late nineteenth-century Germany. Robin Lenman suggests that the German youth movement was seeking refuge—in both tourism and the...