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{ 177 } BOOK REV IEWS Burke’s career-long engagement with Shakespeare is niftily encapsulated in an appendix listing in chronological order over eighty “Additional References to Shakespeare.” This persistent recourse to the language and situations of Shakespeare’s plays explicitly illustrates Newstok’s most basic perception: “Shakespeare serves as a kind of test case for the whole of ‘language as symbolic action’” and the “core motivation . . . for his theory of ‘Dramatism’” (xxv), Burke’s most significant contribution is to social and literary theory. Although these conclusions seem to me to exceed the warrant of Newstok’s arguments and examples, his introduction and the collected essays and excerpts amply suggest that Burke’s commentary on Shakespeare nests near the heart of his grand project of exploring the implications for the study of behavior of the fact that humans are “symbol-using animals.” Students of both Burke and Shakespeare will be grateful for Newstok’s thorough and exhaustive collection. Some readers will find the endnotes useful for identifying persons of note mentioned in the essays. Others (and I am one of this band) will wish the notes might have referenced more completely Burke’s theoretical writings and the salient secondary scholarship most accurately characterizing it. For instance, the phrase “pointing the arrows of expectation ” occurs in a number of critical essays, as Newstok correctly notes. But this reader would have appreciated a note grounding that phrase in Burke’s “Lexicon Rhetoricae” and “The Philosophy of Literary Form.” I had similar longings upon encountering terms and phrases such as “paradox of substance,” “order,” and “socio-anagogic criticism.” That those needs were not met in the book may be an indication that Newstok’s larger aim—to stimulate an appetite for engagement and reengagement with Burke—has been achieved in my case. Readers of Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare might note that Parlor Press, founded in 2002 as an alternative scholarly, academic press, announces on its Web site that it has ten Burke books in process, four of which have been published , including Newstok’s. —WELDON B. DURHAM University of Missouri, Columbia Codifying the National Self: Spectators, Actors, and the American Dramatic Text. Edited by Barbara Ozieblo and María Dolores Narbona-Carrión. Brussels: P.I.E.–Peter Lang, 2006. 299 pp. $38.95 paper. \ { 178 } BOOK REV IEWS The seventeen essays in this volume originated as and were selected from presentations given at the Second International Conference on American Theatre at the University of Málaga,Spain,in 2004. Codifying the National Self is unique among edited collections in that it presents the reader with a transatlantic conversation among dedicated U.S., Canadian, and European scholars of American theatre past and present. That American drama generates a good deal of interest abroad comes as no surprise for most theatre practitioners; what might be surprising , however, is that a good number of European scholars have managed to keep pace with American scholarship despite lacking the access to resources available to their American colleagues. What results here is a high-quality collection of essays. Barbara Ozieblo’s introduction reminds us that this European interest in American theatre—which includes an interest in American history and American culture—is not merely an academically quaint undertaking but that the issues which so obsess the American consciousness today are not unique to Americans. The tragedy of 9/11 in New York City has its counterparts in Europe : 3/11 in Madrid and 7/7 in London. And the recent string of earthquakes and tsunamis, wars and acts of terror, sexual, ethnic, and racial strife bring us all closer together as we strive to maintain or reclaim a sense of humanity in a world seemingly bent on self-destruction. David Savran opens the collection with “Making Middlebrow Theater in America,” looking at the American theatre during the formative 1920s and seeing a continued trend toward intellectual pretense buried in commercial aspirations . Serving (or trying to serve) these two masters continues to problematize American theatre and in many ways continues to plague American culture. Susan Harris Smith’s “Reading Drama: Plays in American Periodicals 1890–1918” introduces the subgenre of American drama written for magazine publication and for consumption by...

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