Afro-American Women Writers: 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide by Ann Allen Shockley (review)

258Rocky Mountain Review (communism) and Universal Siblinghood (incest) are, on the one hand, the teloi and antonomasias of marriage and, on the other hand, the very anarchic 'institutions' against which marriage militates for the sake of civilization as we ordinarily conceive it" (170). While Shell's study provides a thought-provoking analysis of incest, it is at times frustrating to read, difficult to penetrate. Frequently, the text repeats the same examples, even the same quotations, to bolster its arguments. More serious, however, is the peculiar absence of a clear historical sensibility. Despite 50 pages of notes for its 200 pages of text, despite its extensive research on the Catholic orders, incest, and bastardy during the Tudor period, the text fails to provide a consistent historical context for the play. Even a reader familiar with the methods of new historicism may be left wondering, "How familiar would an audience of Shakespeare's time be with Catholic hagiography?" Even more interesting is the absence of insights provided by social history and by gender study. In his penultimate chapter, Shell argues that the idealized marriage of Brother and Sister ending Measure for Measure figures forth the possibility of the end ofgender discrimination. Conceding that the Catholic orders do "affirm a patriarchal God," he nevertheless maintains that Christian marriage, conceived in Catholic theology, is represented as both androgynous or hermaphroditic (196). A quick glance at the social documents ofthe period reveals that while in marriage the man and woman may become one, that "one" is definitely gendered male, as Lawrence Stone and others have shrewdly pointed out. Similarly, the text is only quixotic in its references to the performative aspect of the play. One wonders what might happen to Shell's argument about incest if he considered the fact that Isabel (like the other female characters) would have been played by a male. Nevertheless, The End ofKinship offers a surprising and fresh vantage point on Measure for Measure. It inserts the conflict between incest and the political order into the heart ofthe play as it rereads this "problem play" anew. MARY ANN BUSHMAN Illinois Wesleyan University ANN ALLEN SHOCKLEY. Afro-American Women Writers: 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988. 465 p. No one interested in American literature, women's studies, or Afro-American literature could have ignored the publication ofthe ground-breaking Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Woman Writers, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and published by Oxford University Press (1988). Such interested readers should now become aware of an anthology that, while offering less of each writer's work than the Schomburg Library, has a larger scope, covering the literature from Lucy Terry Prince's "Bars Fight" (1746) to Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928). Ann Allen Shockley, University Archivist at Fisk—and the author of the novels Loving Her and Say Jesus and Come To Me—has provided Book Reviews259 critics and students with an invaluable new reference work. This anthology, as the author herself claims, is the first of its kind because it documents black women's contributions to both Afro-American literature and American literature (xiii). The anthology will provide a suitable text for courses on AfroAmerican literature, especially at the graduate level. There are forty Afro-American women writers represented, including all of the writers Shockley could discover who wrote in the period between 1746 and the Civil War. From then to 1933, Shockley concentrates on the writers she considers major. Authors are arranged chronologically in four major sections: Colonial Period to the Civil War (1746-1862), Reconstruction to End ofthe Century (1868-1899), Pre-World War I to the New Negro Movement (1900-1923), and The New Negro Movement (1924-1933). Each of these four sections has a general introduction discussing important background issues, such as the conditions black women experienced under slavery, and providing a rich and compelling literary history. The book's critical apparatus suggests an author/editor who has clearly read and digested the literature cited in each introduction. In addition, each writer's life is recounted and amply documented by notes and secondary sources. These biographies are not only learned but also interesting works in themselves, the...