The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts: Selected Essays from the Fifth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts ed. by Donald E. Morse (review)

110Rocky Mountain Review respect to an artistic career than her father's, in admonishing her by letter to practice her music lessons with more resolution and less pouting: "I still expect to see you able to teach Music & to command the highest price for your instruction ..." (5). Elinor was not passive, either as a child or as a young woman, and she may have been less easily domesticated in marriage than these letters reveal. If Howells, through Basil and Isabel March, projects some tolerance of and condescension toward Elinor's ways, Elinor in the early letters reveals a gradual acceptance of a secondary position with respect to Howells' career. From Venice in 1863, she writes: "Mr. Howells keeps me writing from morning till night you see. ... I begin to think I'm rather more his secretary than his wife" (18). Tb her private diary about the same time, she reveals, "A stupid day because Pokey [a pet name she consciously abandoned once they had returned to America] was cross" (21, n. 8). Still, her overall mood of the Venice years is probably expressed in her observation, "a selfish delightful life we lead" (20). As might be expected, the correspondence while abroad and that during their first years in Cambridge (1863-1873) make up half, and the most interesting half, of the letters. It may be revealing of a woman's position with respect to a man's that Elinor's letters are for the most part outgoing, social, concerned with the world of children, friends, visitors, houses, her husband's work. We get much less insight, it seems to me, into Elinor's inner life, than we do from the comparable collection of Howells' letters. This may be a distinction between a professional writer and other letter writers, or it may be the personal differences between Elinor and William Dean. Yet, I think it also reflects a socially ordained subordination through which Elinor, like most other women of the nineteenth century, gave up her own possibilities not only for a career but for an identity other than that ofbeing her husband's wife that may have inhibited expression of inner personal feelings. This is but a notation from the many reflections that these letters arouse. We are indebted for the work that went into searching them out and presenting them so well. The title ofthe collection, by the way, comes from a letter William Dean wrote to Elinor in 1865: "That letter which you wrote me . . . was, if not literature, something much better" (2). KENNETH E. EBLE University of Utah DONALD E. MORSE, ed. The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts: Selected Essays from the Fifth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 28. New York: Greenwood, 1987. 250 p. Back in the 1960s, writing about the fantastic was dominatedby Kafka, black humor, and the fun of confusing it with, or telling it apart from, the grotesque. In 1988, we have not come a long way, I am afraid: the fantastic—also called Book Reviews111 the Fantastic, or the "fantastic," sometimes within the same text, for lack of a cogent definition—is a broader and more unruly topic than ever, with as little as one single, albeit near-canonic text for common reference, Tzvetan Tbdorov's useful and obviously entitled The Fantastic, published in the U.S. in 1975, winner of the Most References Award for this publication. As the title indicates, the volume under review represents conference proceedings, with all concomitant disadvantages: a medley, from children's literature, through science fiction, to surrealist art, grouped under three highly insufficient and insubstantial categories of "Theory and Themes," "Individual Authors," and "Collage, Stage, and Film." Insufficient not only because certain papers on individual authors discuss theories and themes more intensely than the very papers so classed, while conversely, papers ofthe first group on theory and themes turn out to be principally devoted to one isolated author. These flaws could be taken in stride if only the one signal advantage of the single-topic conference were also preserved on paper here, as indeed it is in most conference publications reaching us from...