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92Rocky Mountain Review might we not expect alphabetic Greek?) Yet so many brilliancies and so much good sense, with a series of clear and (mostly) very helpful diagrams and other figures, make this an auspicious Volume I in Toronto's intended series Visio: Studies in the Relations of Art and Literature, and whet one's eagerness to see Miller's promised sequel, on the cosmic dance in the "Catholic Millennium " (from Sts. Ambrose and Augustine, deliberately omitted from this study, to Dante). VICTOR CASTELLANI University of Denver DONALD E. PEASE. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in a Cultural Context. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. 303 p. Donald E. Pease has a double-barreled argument, one barrel aimed at American Renaissance literature, the other at modern criticism of this literature. He asserts that our major early and mid-nineteenth-century writers did not so much work in the spirit of the Revolution as in the fear of the coming Civil War, that they did not promote radical individualism and divisive controversy, but rather "visionary compacts" through which Americans could restore or realize a principled, caring cultural community. Pease contends that most modern criticism, by which he means criticism written in the wake of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941), exhibits a "cold war" tendency to see us enmeshed in a struggle against totalitarianism, and thus to misread our earlier literature as testaments of Revolutionary freedom and fervor. Pease's argument, made with considerable erudition, perhaps deserves our attention as a corrective, but needs correction itself. The assertion that there is a monolithic modern way of (mis)reading our past seems questionable. Nowhere, for example, does Pease mention the influential studies of Leo Marx or Henry Nash Smith, the interpretation of America as pastoral middle ground or as virgin land. Like many other critics, Pease appears to need to construct a myth he can then deconstruct. This is rather ironic, since it is the revolutionary, deconstructive trend he ostensibly hopes to halt. Pease most successfully proves his point that Renaissance writers offered their audience "visionary compacts" in his chapters on Whitman and Emerson , both of whom see natural law as constituting a shared regenerative context , whether for the masses or the self-reliant soul. More problematic are the chapters on Hawthorne, which claim that the author of The Scarlet Letter made a happy "compact" with the Puritans, a community of people "who care for one another, precisely because their relations are grounded in a collective memory" (71), unlike the groundless relations of Hawthorne's Custom House cronies; but surely The Scarlet Letter does not present seventeenthcentury Boston as a community in which all is well, nor does Hawthorne himself have an untroubled relationship with his Puritan past. And as for the visionary compacts of Poe and Melville, that of the former seems to be with death (202), of the latter only with Hawthorne (275), hardly the makings of a culture. A number of the book's specific readings seem skewed by the thesis. For example, Pease faults the narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" for not Book Reviews93 being open to the past Roderick is eager to hand on (177-78); no mention is made of the horror of that past. Dimmesdale's final speech and revelation is heralded as a catalyst for community redemption (106-07); no mention is made of the deep ironies of his speech, and of his abandonment of Hester. And since Pease wants to use Ishmael to underscore "the fundamental problem for a society which has lost sight of a shared covenant" (275), no mention is made of Ishmael's bond with Queequeg. Finally, consider this reading of The Leatherstocking Tales: "By converting those pre-Revolutionary years into a historical period in which Americans were affiliated with the last of a noble Indian line, Cooper enabled Americans to imagine the American nation as the beginning of a new cultural line which included all Americans as its heirs" (21-22). Cooper certainly did not envision a culture in which all races were peacefully compacted together. Pease's "all Americans" apparently does not include Indians, nor members of other races. Pease's new treatment...

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