General Reference Works

Though some reference books this year seem to dwell on very narrow or specialized subjects, at least these topics may be covered fully in a single volume. As in recent years, a number of reference tools focus on minority writers and literatures, a burgeoning field that is no longer a mere "niche" in the book market. Several scholars reminisce about the Beats, once the scourge of academe. Overall, the reference books published in 2003 demonstrate that traditional literary history is alive and well and living in the inventories of such publishers as Praeger, Cambridge, Greenwood, and Gale.

The most significant reference book to appear this year, in my opinion, is volume 5 of The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, which details the decline of the genteel tradition in American poetry and the corresponding rise of modernism in the arts during the first half of the 20th century. Unlike, for example, the Columbia History of the American Novel (see AmLS 1991, p. 474), in which no chapter heading includes the title of a novel or the name of an author, the Cambridge History is readable narrative free of cant and jargon, with actual characters and a sequential timeline, and without the dance steps and "deployments" of the New Historicists. It might even be read and understood by nonspecialists, which I intend as a high compliment. The author has been resurrected, if only as literary celebrity.

The first third of the book, entitled "Modernist Lyric in the Culture of Capital" and written by Andrew DuBois and Frank Lentricchia, features excellent chapters on Frost, Stevens, Eliot, and Pound. The maw of the early-20th-century literary market compelled such poets as Stevens, Eliot, and Williams to lead a type of double life: mild-mannered insurance executive, bank clerk, or country doctor by day and avant-garde poet by night. DuBois and Lentricchia are provocative in their survey of the topic: They suggest that the "apprenticeship of what we know as modern American poetry coincides with the big bang of modernist American philosophy," when William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana all taught philosophy at Harvard. They trace the influence of both William and Henry James on Eliot, for example, and claim that Pound's Cantos are "the least taught of the famous modernist texts."

The second third of the book, on "Poetry in the Machine Age" and contributed by Irene Ramalho Santos, includes informative chapters on Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes, professional poets all adept at self-promotion. Santos notes Stein's influence on the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and asserts that Hughes was "arguably the most widely traveled and cosmopolitan of the American modernist poets."

In the final third of the book William E. Cain traces the rise of American literature as a discrete (some would say discreet) academic discipline and the New Critics who acted as its gatekeepers. To be sure, "cultural criticism," as Cain reminds us, is nothing new. A minor quibble: Cain declares a bit too confidently for my taste that the Academists early in the 20th century "underrated Thoreau, Longfellow, and Hawthorne while overrating Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, and Holmes," as if any critical judgment can be set in stone. Who can say that the fireside poets may not be "recovered" some day?

Before Stonewall, before gays and lesbians became a specific consumer group targeted by retailers, Anglo-American novelists examined the complexities of sexual orientation and gay/lesbian experience. Anthony Slide in Lost Gay Novels: A Reference Guide to Fifty Works from the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Harrington) lists many of these novels and devotes between two and six pages to each. Among the most important American texts in this category: Kay Boyle's Gentlemen, I Address You Privately (1933), which Boyle rewrote shortly before her death in 1991; James M. Cain's Serenade (1937); Henry Blake Fuller's self-published Bertram Cope's Year (1919); Charles Jackson's The Fall of Valor (1946); Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door (1947), the basis of a Humphrey Bogart movie released...