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Re-Viewing the New World James Doyle, ed. Yankees in Canada: A Collection ofNineteenth-Centwy TravelNarratives. Downsview,Ont.: ECW, 1980. 231 pp. Stephen Fender. Plotting the Golden West: American Literatureand the Rhetoric of the California Trail. Cambndge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 241 + ix pp. Carolyn Gilman. Where Two Worlds Meet: The Great Lakes Fur T,ade.St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1982. 136 + vii pp. WilliamH. Goetzmann and Joseph C. Porter. The West as Romantic Hori=on.Omaha: Center for Western Studies, Joslyn Art Museum, 1981.128pp. Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Paul Hulton. America 1585: The Complete Drawings a/John White.Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press and British Museum Publications, 1984. 213 + ix pp. Lee Clark Mitchell. Witnesses to a Vanishing America: TheNineteenth-Centw:v Response. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. 320 + xviipp. Bryan Jay Wolf. Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness inNmeteenth-Centwy American Painting and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.272 + xx pp. Robert Thacker Surelyamong the most-quoted passages in American fiction is the final scene of The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway offers his musings the evening before he flees the "haunted" East for his home in the West. Sprawled out on the beach behind Gatsby's now-closed house, Carraway gazes across Long Island Sound, toward the Buchanans' also-closed house-its green light extinguished- and watches the moon rise. Gradually, he says, he "became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world"; at that moment, he thinks, "man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired .... " He continues, of course, and links Gatsby's wonder with that of these sailors, concluding, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." In this same vein, too, Carraway says that he is "brooding on the old, unknown world." Without rehearsing yet again well-known interpretations of these passages, crucial both to any understanding of this novel and of American culture, it is evident that Fitzgerald here strikes a chord that has continued to sound, not only in American fiction but in American scholarship aswell. Like Carraway, scholars have found themselves perpetually drawn to the "old, unknown" land, to that "fresh, green breast of the new world" which met our forebears as they stood in "the presence of this continent" stretched out ever-westward before them. 1 Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17,Number 1, Spring 1986, 51-68 52 Robert Thacker So, like Carraway and Gatsby, we wonder yet. Moreover, the group of books here under review amply represents the various paths scholars are followingin response to their wanderings. Two of them, by Hulton and Gilman, make available materials that add to our understanding of the factual aspects of, respectively, initial exploration and sustained contact between Indian and European. Doyle's Yankees in Canada, similarly, makes easily available extracts from travel narratives sometimes difficult to locate. In something of the same manner, Goetzmann and Porter bring together a great deal of information on their subjects-the artists of the western frontier during the nineteenth century (who are known, to be sure, but are in need of far more scrutiny and interpretation). The remaining books, by Wolf, Fender and Mitchell, are detailed syntheses, offering new interpretations of materials already widelyknown (Wolf,Mitchell) and well-known materials reinterpreted in the light of newly-used sources (Fender). As such, these books reflect the ongoing process of re-viewing the new land, as we continue further to define and refine our understanding of America's beginnings through discovery, rediscovery, interpretation and reinterpretation, "ceaselessly borne," as we are, "into the past." Paul Hulton's America 1585 recounts the first attempts by the English to secure a permanent American colony at the behest of Sir Walter Raleigh. John White, a shadowy figure made the more so by his commonplace name, was appointed official artist to Raleigh's first Virginia expedition. Though the facts of White's life are uncertain, it is evident from his earlier drawings of Inuit that he...

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