v Scandinavian Contributions

Most of the Scandinavian scholarship this year can be described as a search for new perspectives on well-established authors: Don DeLillo and Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, Henry James, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison all come under scrutiny, but no single critical agenda provides the lens for these readings. As one book-length study of anthologies of "American Literature" would have it, perhaps such diversity is finally managed only by the assumption that they are all in some way "American." Be that as it may, the drive to find ways of restoring particularity to each author's work best characterizes this year's sample.

a. 19th-Century Poetry and Prose

One road toward particularity, not always taken, involves a concern with social forces. Domnhall Mitchell's monograph Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception (Mass.) reads like the answer to a riddle which has been silently staring at us for decades: the myth of Emily Dickinson as an asocial recluse whose writings represent highly personal and privatized lyrical expressions presupposes an Emily Dickinson so concerned (consciously or unconsciously) with the social, economic, political, and public issues of her class, place, and time that her need for refuge from such concerns is urgent. "Any act of exclusion," as Mitchell states, "has a clearly social dimension that can be recovered in part through attention to historical particularities." The first four chapters function as a comprehensive presentation of just such recovered material, applied to detailed readings of individual Dickinson poems and letters. Chapters on the Dickinson family's involvement in risky economic enterprises, such as the bringing of the railroad to Amherst and the various transactions involved in the purchase of Dickinson's childhood and adult homes, as well as a chapter on the significance of the cultivation and exchange of flowers as a specific cultural phenomenon, show that Dickinson had sufficient class privilege to protect herself from market demands at the same time that she implicitly expressed anxiety about the loss of such privilege in poems such as "Publication—is the Auction."

The following five chapters examine how various aspects of Dickinson's (non)publication are also related to her historical position as an upper-middle-class woman. Of particular interest is Mitchell's constructive critique of the current tendency in Dickinson scholarship to treat her fascicles (the booklets of poems she bound together before her death) as the authoritative editions of her work and to reject the printed versions as misrepresentations. In his attempt to present a more balanced view of which publication methods are most appropriate, however, Mitchell tends to rely too heavily on the preferences of Dickinson's sister-in-law, even to the extent of attempting a sustained interpretation of the poem "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" based largely on a postscript added by Susan Dickinson. If there is a weakness in Mitchell's book it is this tendency to pursue certain (arbitrary) details at great length, occasionally leading us away from, rather than closer to, the poet. Yet on the whole Mitchell's historicist approach provides a wealth of valuable information which illuminates how class concerns are as much a part of Dickinson's writing as are aesthetic, religious, erotic, and gender concerns.

While Mitchell's research explores complex reasons why Emily Dickinson stayed out of the limelight during her lifetime, Axel Nissen in his biography Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper (Miss.) examines the equally complex factors leading to Harte's position as a literary star during his. Of the many reasons Nissen proposes for Mark Twain's eventual hatred of Harte, envy clearly was an important factor. Their friendship and collaboration, Nissen suggests, were accompanied by rivalry, and Harte's popularity in America and abroad during the last quarter of the 19th century surpassed Twain's. Reading Nissen's narrative of this fascinating career, the most important biography to date on Bret Harte, reminds one that this chronicler of the California gold rush "expanded the reach of American fiction and the range of characters and situations it was possible to bring before a respectable public." Nissen...