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254Rocky Mountain Review of the efforts at humor now and then funny. But overall, what is best about the book are the jokes. As of this writing, one awaits Whimsy IV with some skepticism, yet high hopes for perspicacious insights and clever wit. NORMAN V. LANQUIST Eastern Arizona College LOUIS D. RUBIN, JR., el al., eds. The History of Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. 626 p. Two of the major problems with critical anthologies that attempt to cover long historical sequences are focus and quality of writing. Much like a bumpy, backcountry road, many of these anthologies display an unevenness in prose or go off on specialized tangents. Or the essays tend to repeat ideas and phrases. But not The History of Southern Literature. Although one can pick this book up, open to any chapter, and read intelligently about a major figure like Poe or a literary movement like the Fugitives, one can also read straight through this anthology and perceive a sense of design. Credit the editors for this — for choosing good scholars who are also good writers, and for coordinating what at first might have seemed a babel of scholarly voices. Also credit the editors, as well as the individual scholars, for what is on the whole a first-rate literary history of the American South from 1607 to the present. The seventy-some-odd essays in this history are grouped into four sections: "Colonial and Antebellum Southern Literature, 1607-1860"; "The War and After, 1861-1920"; "The Southern Renascence, 1920-1950"; and "The Recent South, 1951-1982." Although most readers will be more interested in the latter two sections, the first half also makes for lively reading, and it is, I think, essential for understanding the Southern literary mind and culture. In fact, the first essay, J. Leo Lemay's "The Beginnings," is one of the most readable and interesting in the book. Besides 28 pieces on individual authors, the editors have included essays on minor authors (grouped by theme and period), on the intellectual and cultural backgrounds of the South, and on the publishing and academic worlds related to Southern literature. And unlike many anthologies which choose to conclude some years before the present, this one devotes nearly one-fifth of its space to contemporaries like Truman Capote, John Barth, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy, James Dickey, and thirteen others. One problem Rubin and his fellow editors admittedly grappled with was that of sources. A descriptive bibliography by Thomas Inge in an appendix partially solves the problem, He surveys primary and secondary sources for the general study of Southern literature, but he does not cite sources on individual authors. Another flaw related to the subject of individual authors regards the space given to major figures. The editors have been too democratic: they have given the same number of pages to Twain and Faulkner as they do to William Gilmore Simms. I would have preferred something like the format of Spiller and Thorp's Literary History of the United States with its long, in-depth essays on major writers like Thoreau or James. Perhaps what this all points out is that this anthology's primary strengths are not so much its critical portraits of major figures (although they are as good as one can expect given the space), but in having filled in the whole background of the Southern literary scene. One other minor criticism is that the scholars here pay little if any attention to the importance of landscape for various Southern writers. This seems especially Book Reviews255 myopic to anyone looking at the writings of William Byrd, Thomas Jefferson, William Faulkner, and others. Still, these are not major problems. Student and teacher alike will find this a most usable and reliable introduction to its subject. A well written and well edited anthology, The History of Southern Literature will for years be an invaluable companion for readers of Southern literature and a model for similar future endeavors. Southern Utah State College JIM ATON ROBERT SCHOLES. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. 176 p. Textual Power is Robert Scholes' third book on current literary theory...

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