15 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Scholarship on modern fiction continues to proliferate: more than two dozen of the writers covered in this chapter received book-length studies this year. The Beats are the most popular with five books, including three substantial biographies of Kerouac and one of Burroughs. As always, Southerners reap a plentiful harvest. Southern Quarterly honors Zora Neale Hurston with a special issue, and Texas writer William Humphrey and Kentucky author Janice Holt Giles receive long-overdue attention. The 50th anniversary of Raintree County earns Ross Lockridge one essay collection and a special issue of Midwestern Miscellany.

i Proletarians

a. John Steinbeck

A significant contribution to Steinbeck scholarship is Michael J. Meyer's The Hayashi Steinbeck Bibliography, 1982-1996 (Scarecrow), which supplements Tetsumaro Hayashi's 1973 and 1983 volumes. Meyer opens with a brief chronology of Steinbeck's life, then turns to bibliographical matters—almost 4,000 entries covering primary and secondary works. New to the record is a brief record of movie and theatrical reviews from the 1940s and 1950s. Readings on The Grapes of Wrath (Greenhaven), in the Literary Companion to American Literature series, reprints 19 critical excerpts or essays. The composition of the novel, major themes, and Steinbeck's literary techniques are considered by Robert DeMott, Louis Owens, Mimi Reisel Gladstein, and Studs Ter-kel, among others. The volume also includes an introductory biography, a chronology of the life and writings, and a brief secondary bibliography.

In "Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath" (Expl 56: 101-03) Rebecca Hinton points out the significance of the family unit in the novel. Because of social circumstances migrant workers such as the Joads had toexpand their circle beyond blood kin for the sake of mutual survival. Terence R. Wright in "East of Eden as Western Midrash: Steinbeck's Re-Marking of Cain" (Religion and the Arts 2: 488-518) argues that in expanding and interpreting the biblical tale of Cain and Abel, overing commentary on language and translation and focusing on "moral choice," the novel can be considered a type of midrash.

b. James Agee and Dorothy Parker

Agee's literary legacy is the subject of Alan Spiegel's James Agee and the Legend of Himself: A Critical Study (Missouri). Because most scholars have been interested in Agee's posthumous personal myth—his status as a cult figure—his writing has been frequently overlooked. Spiegel argues that Agee's works in poetry, fiction, film criticism, and screenwriting all revolve around a common theme; they relate "virtually the same story, an auto-mythology, a developed figure of self-realization," in a voice singularly his own. Using Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee on Film, A Death in the Family, and The Morning Watch, Spiegel particularly explores Agee's quest for home and identity. Spiegel's prose is overly Ageean, but he overs a solid overview of Agee's contributions to American literature and film criticism.

In Dorothy Parker, Revised (TUSAS 701), an update of his 1978 study, Arthur F. Kinney presents a substantial assessment of Parker's life and writing, adding new biographical information, surveying relevant scholarship, and discussing new additions to the Parker canon. Gender parody is the subject of Andrea Ivanov Craig's "Being and Dying as a Woman in the Short Fiction of Dorothy Parker," pp. 95-109 in Performing Gender and Comedy: Theories, Texts, and Contexts (Gordon and Breach), ed. Shannon Hengen. Craig examines the many types of parody involved in three Parker stories—"A Telephone Call," "The Waltz," and "Big Blonde"—including escape fantasies, linguistic game-play, "the love story cliché," metafiction, and the parody of death.

c. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin

In Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of Modernism (Miss.) M. Lynn Weiss considers the friendship of the two writers who have much in common despite their diverse backgrounds and writing styles. Discussing Paris France in connection with Pagan Spain, Everybody's Autobiography with Black Power, and Lectures in America with White Man, Listen!, Weiss insightfully discusses Stein's and Wright's expatriation, the issue of modern identity, and the relationship between "thepoetics and politics of modernity." Especially valuable is Weiss's study of the authors' noncanonical works, which fills a gap in previous Stein/ Wright scholarship. Designed for students, Robert Felgar's Understanding Richard Wright's Black Boy: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (Greenwood) reprints materials that aid in placing "Wright's autobiography in the political, social, racial, literary, and general cultural contexts" of his era. Background information, suggested readings, writing topics, and study questions are provided.

Barbara Johnson in "The Re(a)d and the Black: Richard Wright's Blueprint," pp. 61-73 in The Feminist Diverence: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (Harvard), focuses on the ransom note that Bigger Thomas writes to Mary Dalton's parents. Because Bigger signs the letter "Red," its black vernacular is overlooked and its communist implications stressed instead. Ironically, the note cannot be "read" by the white detective, but only by a black woman, Bessie Mears, who dies as a result. In "Spectacle and Event in Native Son" (AL 70: 767-98) Jonathan Elmer looks at the "terrible, irreducibly ambiguous accident," the murder of Mary Dalton, as an example of the problematic nature of that novel. According to Elmer, Wright uses racial trauma to show that no approach, whether by law, aesthetics, or ethics, explains the tragic situation of Bigger Thomas. Damon Marcel DeCoste in "To Blot It All Out: The Politics of Realism in Richard Wright's Native Son" (Style 32: 127- 47) argues that Wright's novel is more than a realistic work; it is "about realism"; Bigger Thomas's story demonstrates that realism can "fight both conservatism and oppression" by undercutting ideology.

Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin are featured in the first half of Emily Miller Budick's Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (Cambridge), a multiauthor study of African American and Jewish American relationships. Budick explores the way in which "writers construct their separate, ethnic identities, textually, in relation to each other," noting that ultimately diverent ethnicities mesh and use materials of the other group. Arguing that the Jewish American/African American relationship began, rather than concluded, in the 1960s, Budick looks closely at Ellison's condemnation of Irving Howe and the Jewish culture he represents and at Baldwin's "protest against the protest novel." In addition to the Proletarians, Budick discusses the work of Bernard Malamud, Hannah Arendt, and Saul Bellow.

In "Mythic Guilt and the Burden of Sin in Ellison's Invisible Man" (MQ 39: 409-31) Stuart Noble-Goodman attempts to show "the ways inwhich the religious myth of the Fall informs the cultural history of African Americans in terms of the American myth of class mobility." Andrew Hoberek in "Race Man, Organization Man, Invisible Man" (MLQ 59: 99-119) argues that Ellison's novel is more than "a mere displaced imitation of the organization-man narrative." Since Ellison's organization man is black, the novel "rejects the romanticization of those excluded from the white-collar middle class." In "Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: Exploring Urban Frontiers," pp. 41-60 in Contemporary African American Fiction, Robert Butler sees Ellison's novel as more than a "stunted picaresque." Ellison's protagonist, unlike the protagonists in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God or Wright's Native Son, is not trapped by a spatial stereotype; rather, the Invisible Man's journey through urban America is "open," "liberating," and "limitless."

In "Grace in 'Sonny's Blues' " (ShortS 6, ii: 85-95) Jim Sanderson notes how the cup of wrath at the story's conclusion adds a biblical message: both Sonny and the narrator have to extend grace to each other. Tracey Sherard in "Sonny's Bebop: Baldwin's 'Blues Text' as Intracultural Critique" (AAR 32: 691-705) argues that while the story is a "blues text," it also points out the need for black artists to transform the traditional "blues matrix" into other forms. This process of signification is demonstrated through Sonny's transformation of the blues into jazz and bebop, Baldwin's way of showing that black urban culture, like Sonny, cannot merely follow old patterns but must design its own story. Andrew Shin and Barbara Judson in "Beneath the Black Aesthetic: James Baldwin's Primer of Black American Masculinity" (AAR 32: 247-61) view Baldwin as a forerunner of later 20th-century gay, gender, and race studies. Shin and Judson trace Baldwin's treatment of black liberation through his literary career, noting how in his fictional families the paternal is displaced by a liberal brotherly love that includes both females and males.

ii Southerners

a. Robert Penn Warren

Warren scholars will be pleased with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence (Missouri), ed. James A. Grimshaw Jr., which collects 350 letters exchanged over six decades and details the close collaboration shared by the two professors while they coauthored five undergraduate textbooks on fiction, poetry, rhetoric, and American literature. While the letters primarily concern the technical aspects of editing and publishing, they also provide a rareinsight into the friendship between Brooks and Warren, their love of literature, their teaching philosophies, and their lifelong commitment to both teaching and scholarship. In "The Making of a Historian: Robert Penn Warren's Biography of John Brown" (MissQ 51: 33-54) Jonathan S. Cullick deconstructs Warren's construction of John Brown as a historical personage, demonstrating how Warren's Brown foreshadows future Warren narrators.

b. Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty

Kimberly Egan, "Ruby Turpin in Flannery O'Connor's 'Revelation'" (NConL 28, ii: 8-9), argues that Turpin's view of herself as superior adds poignancy to her eventual transformation. In "O'Connor's Wise Blood" (Expl 56: 108-09) Gerard M. Sweeney notes that the shrike image is more important than simply being an aspect of animal imagery; it serves as a structural metaphor, showing that an escape from Christianity is not an option for Hazel Motes. In "Mystery, Magic, and Malice: O'Connor and the Misfit" ( JSSE 30, iii: 73-83) Gary Sloan surveys critical interpretations and asks, "What does O'Connor make of The Misfit?" Situational laughter is the subject of Mark Boren's "Flannery O'Connor, Laughter, and the Word Made Flesh" (SAF 26: 115-28). Using "abusive and accepting laughter" allows O'Connor to avoid "sentimental realism" while treating such serious issues as ignorance and racism, he states. In "The Action of Mercy" (KR 20, i: 157-60) Joyce Carol Oates stresses the uniqueness of "The Artificial Nigger," which ends more tenderly than the typical O'Connor story because its comedy is tempered with mercy. Sally Fitzgerald in "Flannery O'Connor: Patterns of Friendship, Patterns of Love" (GaR 52: 407-25) provides an enlightening account of O'Connor's friendships with Betty Boyd and other women writers, her academic benefactors such as Robert Lowell, and the men with whom she fell in love. The character types that recur in O'Connor's short fiction—for instance, grotesques, self-righteous farm women, evil children, aspiring artists, and intellectuals—are briefly considered in Lawrence Enjolras's Flannery O'Connor's Characters (Univ. Press).

To her critical biographies on the Southern writers Hodding Carter and Caroline Gordon, Ann Waldron adds Eudora: A Writer's Life (Doubleday), the first Welty biography. Although Waldron's study is unauthorized, and Welty's closest friends and associates were reluctant to contribute material, Waldron has researched her subject thoroughly, consulting international archives and libraries and Welty's own papers,reviewing transcripts of interviews, interviewing acquaintances, and even conversing with Welty in person several times. The volume is highlighted by insights into Welty's relationships with other writers, including Henry Miller, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, and Reynolds Price.

In The Late Novels of Eudora Welty (So. Car.) Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp bring together 14 original essays that over insight into Losing Battles and The Optimist's Daughter. An introduction is provided by Gretlund in "Reading Eudora Welty's Late Novels" (pp. xi-xviii). In "Eudora Welty as Novelist: A Historical Approach" (pp. 3-17) Michael Kreyling explores the historical influences on Welty the modernist and novelist and surveys critical responses to her writings. Jane Hinton in " 'Good as Gold': The Role of the Optimist in Three Novels by Eudora Welty" (pp. 18-26) considers the male optimists in The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, and The Optimist's Daughter who disclose a main Welty theme—"the paradoxical view that life is to be celebrated even as its dark sorrows and failures are unflinchingly held to light." In "Eudora Welty as Lyric Novelist: The Long and the Short of It" (pp. 29-40) Ruth D. Weston focuses on Welty's use of lyrical techniques such as dramatic ritual and rhythms of association and continuity. Richard Gray in "Needing to Talk: Language and Being in Losing Battles" (pp. 41-55) discusses the significance of various forms of talking and telling in that novel, especially in the characters' evorts to forge their identities. In "Beyond Loss: Eudora Welty's Losing Battles" (pp. 56-66) Karl-Heinz Westarp examines the biblical aspects of the novel, viewing it as "the depiction of a painful pilgrims' progress through numerous lost battles to the peace and hope of forgiveness." Bridget Smith Pieschel in "From Jerusalem to Jericho: Good Samaritans in Losing Battles" (pp. 67- 83) explores how "Welty uses the Parable of the Good Samaritan to ridicule the modern progressive conviction that salvation is by machine, rather than by love and compassion." In " 'Foes well matched or sweethearts come together': The Love Story in Losing Battles" (pp. 84-93) Sally Wolv proposes that Welty in this novel goes beyond her previous works to examine the theme of love more seriously and more philosophically, especially through the deeply romantic relationship of Gloria and Jack Renfro, who must navigate their private marital fidelity through the rough waters of community, particularly Jack's family. Darlene Unrue in "Losing Battles and Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools: The Commonality of Modernist Vision and Homeric Analogue" (pp. 94-104)notes parallels to many traditional literary works, especially The Iliad and The Odyssey, in Welty's and Porter's novels, connections that establish the two women as modernists reshaping conventional materials and making them their own. In "Eudora Welty's Indirect Critique of The Optimist's Daughter" (pp. 107-21) Patrick Samway, S.J., acknowledges the admiration that Walker Percy and Welty had for each other; in fact, Percy's influence on Welty is reflected in The Optimist's Daughter, which Percy nominated for a National Book Award. In "The Last Rose of Mount Salus: A Study of Narrative Strategies in The Optimist's Daughter" (pp. 122-33) Hans H. Skei argues that Welty's narrative strategies are designed to allow the narrator to control the novel, making Laurel Hand the character with whom the reader is most sympathetic, "despite the text's attempts to look at Laurel from more than one side." Mary Ann Wimsatt in "Region, Time, and Memory: The Optimist's Daughter as Southern Renascence Fiction" (pp. 134-44) examines Welty's novel as representative of such traits of the Southern Renascence as a sense of community and place, the uniqueness of the South, and the significance of memory. In "The Swift Bird of Memory, the Breadboard of Art: Reflections on Eudora Welty and Her Storytelling" (pp. 145-60) Marion Montgomery explores Welty's use of memory in The Optimist's Daughter, finding parallels with the philosophies of Augustine, Descartes, and Aquinas. An additional essay by Gretlund, "Component Parts: The Novelist as Autobiographer" (pp. 163-75), examines the fictional elements in One Writer's Beginnings, which can be categorized as a fictional memoir and postmodern narrative rather than an autobiography. In "The Construction of Confluence: The Female South and Eudora Welty's Art" (pp. 176-94) Peggy Whitman Prenshaw finds that Welty's interviews and nonfiction reflect "an explicit association of writing and maleness linked . . . with her father."

Two journal articles also focus on Welty's works. Dennis J. Sykes in "Welty's The Worn Path" (Expl 56: 151-53) addresses Welty's use of the character of Phoenix Jackson to "illustrate the theme of impending black equality and amalgamation in the South after the Civil War." In "Sew to Speak: Text and Textile in Eudora Welty" (SoAR 63, ii: 7-26) Géraldine Chouard examines the quilting and sewing motifs, especially in Losing Battles, where the quilt represents the Beecham-Renfro family members' desire "to preserve themselves from the flux of time and perpetuate their delectable presentism," and in The Optimist's Daughter, where sewing helps Laurel Hand become more secure in her artistic identity.

c. Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston is especially popular this year. Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Gloria L. Cronin (Hall), collects 30 reviews and essays. Critical writings come from Henry Louis Gates Jr., Richard Wright, Sandra Dolby-Stahl, Dolan Hubbard, and Sigrid King, among others. The book's introduction, two essays, and a bibliography appear for the first time. In her opening essay (pp. 1-29) Cronin thoughtfully surveys Hurston's literary contributions, her public history, and earlier critical scholarship on her work. Phillip A. Snyder in "Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks: Autobiography and Artist Novel" (pp. 173- 89) explores the way in which Hurston's "autobiography undercuts the search for identity" as "it undertakes that search," using conventional autobiographical techniques at the same time that "it innovates and fictionalizes them." Wilfred D. Samuels in "The Light at Daybreak: Heterosexual Relationships in Hurston's Short Stories" (pp. 239-53) argues that the theme of "the quest for female empowerment in a patriarchal world" that originates in Hurston's short fiction is important to all of her works. Blaine L. Hall's "Writings by Zora Neale Hurston" (pp. 257-62) completes the volume.

A special issue of Southern Quarterly (36, iii) brings together eight new essays by contributors and three original Hurston works. In "Sounds of Silent Performances: Homoeroticism in Zora Neale Hurston's 'Story in Harlem Slang: Jelly's Tale'" (pp. 10-20) Neal A. Lester examines Hurston's subtle focus on homoeroticism in an often overlooked story. Through the public performances of Jelly and Sweet Black, Hurston expresses the dilemma of black gay men, who through ritual performance and language systems can speak a veiled homosexuality while presenting a public heterosexuality that masks their sexual preference. Debra Beilke in " 'Yowin' and Jawin': Humor and the Performance of Identity in Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine" (pp. 21-33) observes that "Hurston represents the humorous verbal performances of her fictional characters in order to theorize a performative basis of identity that represents diversity within the black community." Hurston's drama is the subject of Barbara Speisman's "From 'Spears' to The Great Day: Zora Neale Hurston's Vision of a Real Negro Theater" (pp. 34-46). Speisman documents Hurston's theatrical interests—her plays, awards, influences, and especially her interest in the establishment of an authentic black theater, the medium she thought best-suited to represent the songs, stories, and folklore of African Americans. In " 'Tell Ole Pharaoh to Let My People Go': Communal Deliverance in Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain" (pp. 47-60) Timothy P. Caron argues that Hurston's Moses figure deserves more critical attention. As an intertextual character, Moses has roots in both the Bible and African American folklore and serves as a liberator of the Southern black race whom he guides to a "Promised Land" comparable to Hurston's Eatonville, Florida. Frank Orser in "Tracy L'Engle Angas and Zora Neale Hurston: Correspondence and Friendship" (pp. 61-67) comments on the significance of nine letters that Hurston wrote to Angas, a former radio broadcaster, actress, and writer, between 1937 and 1946. In addition to noting Hurston's works in progress and her financial problems, the letters criticize W. E. B. Du Bois, propagandist drama, and Franklin Roosevelt, while they praise Harry Truman. In "Floating Homes and Signifiers in Hurston's and Rawlings's Autobiographies" (pp. 68-76) Annette Trefzer explores Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Hurston as "kindred spirit[s]" who shared a "common interest in creating and celebrating mythical southern communities and their protagonists," thus questioning Southern racial and social segregation. John Lowe in "Seeing Beyond Seeing: Zora Neale Hurston's Religion(s)" (pp. 77-87) draws attention to Hurston's mixed religious views. Her writing reveals tendencies toward more than traditional Christianity; she expresses interest in agnosticism, deism, and Afrocentric beliefs such as hoodoo. In "'The Monstropolous Beast': The Hurricane in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God" (pp. 89-93) Anna Lillios discusses the significance of the terrifying storm in that novel, which is the catalyst that leads Janie to depend less on other people and more on herself and to begin a new, more positive life. The journal issue concludes by reprinting "Three by Zora Neale Hurston: Story, Essay, and Play" (pp. 94- 102); "Under the Bridge," "The Ten Commandments of Charm," and "Spears" were originally published in the mid-1920s in X-Ray, a Zeta Phi Beta sorority annual.

Among essays that treat Hurston works, Robert Butler's "Stunted Picaresques: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Richard Wright's Native Son, " pp. 23-40 in Contemporary African American Fiction, focuses on the inner journeys of Hurston's Janie Crawford and Wright's Bigger Thomas, who move toward open spaces that would enable them to escape physical entrapment. Like earlier picaros, Janie and Bigger desire to escape their restricted social environments, one rural, one urban. However, because Hurston and Wright tempt their protagonists with "open journey[s] to the self " but deny them "fullnarrative form in outward experience," their novels can be classified as "stunted picaresques." In "A Medley of Voices: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God," pp. 243-87 in New Readings of the American Novel, Peter Messent examines Hurston's novel in light of modernism, reader response theory, Barthes's S/Z model, and Bakhtinian language theory. Because Hurston continually "dialogize[s] one voice with another," she demonstrates the polyphony of American literature's dialogue "of regional, social, ethnic, professional, and gendered voices" must be recognized. Pierre A. Walker in "Zora Neale Hurston and the Post-Modern Self in Dust Tracks on a Road" (AAR 32: 387-99) seeks to account for the criticism received by Hurston's autobiography. "Since it is in her relationship to her environment that the individual is defined," Hurston's text can best be understood in light of poststructuralist theory, which is skeptical of an "autonomous subject." In " 'The World in a Jug and the Stopper in [Her] Hand': Their Eyes as Blues Performance" (AAR 32: 401-14) Maria V. Johnson discusses how "Hurston uses techniques and processes of the blues performer to challenge the ways in which African American women have been controlled by others" while "celebrat[ing] the individual journeys of women like herself who have struggled to make spaces where self-expression is possible, if not always nurtured." Carol Batker in " 'Love me like I like to be': The Sexual Politics of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, the Classic Blues, and the Black Women's Club Movement" (AAR 32: 199-213) argues that Hurston's novel, "like historical discourses, refuses simple dichotomies between respectability and desire, and works with both blues and club discourse to legitimate sexual subjectivity." Barbara Rodríguez in "On the Gatepost: Literal and Metaphorical Journeys in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, " pp. 235-57 in Women, America, and Movement, examines Hurston's unique, innovative contributions to the genre of autobiography: the abandonment of chronological form, the use of legend and folklore in place of historical documentation, and direct incorporation of the reader as "listener." In "Mourning, Humor, and Reparation: Detecting the Joke in Seraph on the Suwanee, by Zora Neale Hurston," pp. 148-77 in Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (Oxford), Claudia Tate takes a psychoanalytical approach to the novel. The "Freudian 'joke-work' " leads Hurston's audience, especially women, to read it as an affirmation of romantic love; however, Hurston is really pointing out how psychologically damaging the portrayal of "normative female desire as passive andmasochistic" can be. David C. Estes's "The Neo-African Vatican: Zora Neale Hurston's New Orleans," pp. 66-82 in Literary New Orleans, studies Hurston's neglected works about New Orleans and hoodoo. The city was especially significant for Hurston, who immersed herself in the conjure culture, connecting it to "a mythic rather than historical Africa" and viewing it as a spiritual center, "a shrine counterpoised to Jamestown and Plymouth Rock." Patricia Felisa Barbeito examines Hurston in regard to other black women writers in " 'Making Generations' in Jacobs, Larsen, and Hurston: A Genealogy of Black Women's Writing" (AL 70: 365-95). According to Barbeito, Their Eyes Were Watching God is especially significant because Janie Crawford, Hurston's protagonist, feels a part of a community, whereas Nella Larsen's and Harriet Jacobs's main characters do not. Furthermore, in Hurston's novel, "the female body . . . is the center out of which a politics of race identity grows."

d. Katherine Anne Porter and Others

In "Constructed Narratives and Writing Identity in the Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter" (TCL 44: 349-61) M. K. Fornataro-Neil examines Porter's interest in silent characters who cannot communicate by conventional language. Specifically, in "Noon Wine," "Old Mortality," "Holiday," and "He," this lack of ability to communicate contributes to the characters' difficulties with identity. Janis P. Stout in "Katherine Anne Porter and Mark Twain at the Circus" (SoQ 36, iii: 113-23) notes the similarities between the circus scenes in Porter's "The Circus" and Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the spectacle's fearful evects on the child protagonists. The commonalities between the two works, Stout suggests, reveal fear on the parts of Porter and Twain that their successful artistry will decline and that they will be perceived as clowns who lose their audiences rather than as respected writers. In "Katherine Anne Porter's Journey from Texas to the World" (SWR 84: 140-53) Don Graham comments on the status of Porter as a Texas writer and the evects of her early, restricting life in Texas on her later writing, especially "Old Mortality" and "The Grave." Ann Fears Crawford and Crystal Sasse Ragsdale also examine Porter's connection to her home state and provide an overview of her life and career in Texas Women: Frontier to Future (State House, pp. 126-42). Jeraldine Kraver in "Laughing Best: Competing Correlatives in the Art of Katherine Anne Porter and Diego Rivera" (SoAR 63, ii: 48-74) "suggest[s] that, just as Rivera signified for Porter the failures of the Mexican Revolution, Porter signified for Rivera the colonial legacy that continued to oppress Mexico."In paintings such as "Folklore and Tourist Mexico" Rivera lampoons Porter with his inclusion of a thin, blonde American woman who resembled her. In "'The Native Land of My Heart': Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda Stories," pp. 419-43 in Literature of Region and Nation: Proceedings of the 6th International Literature of Region and Nation Conference, vol. 1 (Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada), ed. Winnifred M. Bogaards, William V. Davis sees the Miranda stories as the works that best reflect the influence of Texas on Porter, both her early life there and the memories and dreams of that life as reflected in her literature.

Michele Janette in "The Freakish Female Body in Caroline Gordon's 'The Petrified Woman'" (SCR 30, ii: 81-91) examines Gordon's portrayal of her petrified woman, Stella, as a shallow object to be looked at only in terms of desire and as an example of Gordon's ambivalent view of female artists. To Gordon, "the 'traditional' life becomes monstrous, and an artistic one, freakish," regardless of "whether pursued or repressed."

The often overlooked William Humphrey is recognized in Bert Almon's William Humphrey: Destroyer of Myths (North Texas). Devoting a chapter apiece to nine Humphrey novels or short story collections, Almon draws from Humphrey's letters, archives, and unpublished works, including journals and notebooks, in his consideration of Humphrey's writing and personal ambitions. Underlying Humphrey's work is his interest in destroying popular myths, such as those of the western cowboy, the hunter, the "Lost Cause" of the South, the jilted lover who turns to crime, and the young rural writer searching for an urban mentor. Despite Humphrey's attempts to extend his work beyond the region, his strongest work, argues Almon, is his Texas writing.

Fred Hobson in "The Sins of the Fathers: Lillian Smith and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin" (SoR 34: 755-79) approaches Smith's Killers of the Dream and Lumpkin's The Making of a Southerner as "racial conversion narratives" in which the two women acknowledge that they "had set aside the world of their fathers, had rejected a salvation-centered southern religion," and "had abandoned their old attachments to segregation for an ardent integrationism."

In "'My Country Is Kentucky': Leaving Appalachia in Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker," pp. 176-89 in Women, America, and Movement, Rachel Lee Rubin notes how relocating from Kentucky to Detroit permanently alters the ethnic identity of the Nevels family.

Janice Holt Giles receives overdue attention this year with the publicationof Dianne Watkins Stuart's substantial biography, Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life (Kentucky). A former Kentucky Museum curator of education and an acknowledged Giles specialist, Stuart in her account brings together her lifelong interest in Giles with her own museum experience. Beginning with the courtship of Giles's parents, Stuart traces the path of Giles's 24-novel career, examining in the process the important role that Giles's husband Henry and his Kentucky heritage played in her development as a writer.

e. Peter Taylor, Thomas Wolfe, and Others

Family is the focus of David M. Robinson's World of Relations: The Achievement of Peter Taylor (Kentucky). The era in which Taylor first wrote was that of the cold war, known for its emphasis on the nuclear family where stability and unity dominated. However, as Robinson notes, Taylor's works unravel the notion of the cohesive family, focusing instead on "the myriad ways that families devise to make themselves unhappy." Examining a wide range of Taylor works, including short stories, novels, and plays, Robinson insightfully studies Taylor's exploration of the complexity of family relationships, especially those between parents and their male children, and the means by which individual family members seek growth and identity within both the confinement of the family unit and a rapidly changing Southern culture. C. Vincent Samarco in "Taylor's The Old Forest" (Expl 57: 51-53) notes the significance of the car accident in that novella. The accident, which occurs at a time when Nat Ramsey, the protagonist, is on the verge of making a serious life change, ultimately keeps him from gaining the self-knowledge that he so desires.

Five articles in this year's The Thomas Wolfe Review deserve mention. Anne R. Zahlan's "Thomas Wolfe's Scheherazade: Narrative Performance in The Good Child's River" (TWN 22, ii: 10-16) analyzes Wolfe's use of Bakhtinian "double-voiced discourse" in that novel, noting that while the stories of Esther, the protagonist, may seem to be her own, her tales are really directed by Wolfe, who guides her performance through his narrator. In "Dialogic Agreement: Thomas Wolfe's The Lost Boy and the Multiple Narrator Novel" (TWN 22, ii: 17-27) Stephen Souris points out that The Lost Boy is unique in that Wolfe, rather than creating contradiction or focusing on the subjective nature of reality, uses four diverent narrators to present consistent versions of the character Grover. In fact, Souris argues, the novella can be read as "a decentered first person narrative" written by Grover's fictional brother, who is actually ThomasWolfe trying to learn about the sibling who died before he truly knew him. Dieter Meindl in "Thomas Wolfe's The Hills Beyond: A Reappraisal in Generic Terms" (TWN 22, ii: 28-38) argues that when viewed as a combination of an ancient chronicle and a modern short-story cycle, The Hills Beyond is a complete work rather than only a portion of a novel. In "Looking at Wolfe Through Many-Colored Glasses: Two Versions of The Party at Jack's" (TWN 22, i: 46-53) Nicholas Graham explores the ways in which three versions of Wolfe's story reflect various editorial decisions by Elizabeth Nowell, Edward C. Aswell, and Suzanne Stutman and John L. Idol Jr. These diverent versions are evidence of the need to continue to read and interpret Wolfe's last work, which, despite its variations, still reflects "Wolfeness." Michael J. Everton in "The Yiddish Inquisitor and the Voices of Wolfe's America" (TWN 22, i: 38-44) proposes that the textual voices in Of Time and the River reveal an awareness of ethnic diversity in the United States not evident in Wolfe's other works. In "American Exodus: Movement as Motive and Structure in Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River" (SLJ 30, ii: 37-53) Michael Everton argues that "through the thematic metaphors of movement in Of Time and the River Wolfe asserts that without pastoralism and . . . pioneerism America will progress into a tradition not unlike the antiquated ones of Europe."

Carol Ricker-Wilson in "When the Mockingbird Becomes an Albatross: Reading and Resistance in the Language Arts Classroom" (EngJ 87, iii: 67-72) discusses the reactions of Canadian students to the racial and sexual issues raised in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Since reading the novel caused Ricker-Wilson's students "to feel demoralized," she concludes that Lee's book would best be taught with a "tandem text" such as Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor, a black author. The soft-pedaling of race in Lee's novel is the focus of Diann L. Baecker in "Telling It in Black and White: The Importance of the Africanist Presence in To Kill a Mockingbird" (SoQ 36, iii: 124-32). According to Baecker, Lee uses African American characters metaphorically to help raise issues such as gender, class, sexuality, and racial identity. Laura Fine also concentrates on gender and sexual identity in "Gender Conflicts and Their 'Dark' Projections in Coming of Age White Female Southern Novels" (SoQ 36, iv: 121-29). Fine examines Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in conjunction with Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina. Allison, who writes decades after Lee and McCullers, focuses on "the sexual ambivalence and violencein the family unit" and breaks the pattern of earlier female Southern writers who "project . . . gender alienation onto African Americans."

iii Expatriates and Émigrés

a. Vladimir Nabokov

Gavriel Shapiro in Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading (Peter Lang) concentrates on the "diverse subtexts, the implicit meanings . . . the 'delicate markers' " in Nabokov's eighth novel. Nabokov's subtexts are interdisciplinary, alluding not only to literature, but also to history, cartoons, social issues, painting, and religion. "The subtext as bait" is especially important to Nabokov, who engages his readers in game play to teach them "a lesson in individuality and spiritual independence." In The World of Nabokov's Stories (Texas) Maxim D. Shrayer looks at Nabokov as a short story writer, a traditional Russian author, and a modernist. Examining Nabokov's Russian tradition rather than his Western one, and exploring his relationships with two other writers, Ivan Bunin and Anton Chekhov, Shrayer attempts to answer two ignored questions: "What makes Nabokov's short stories unique as compared to the other short stories of the great Russian tradition . . . and what places Nabokov the writer of short stories in a peerless position on the map of Russian modernism?" He concludes that Nabokov's stories are distinguished from those of his predecessors in their "unprecedented harmony" in "language, narrative, and world vision." Insight into Nabokov is also provided in Stacy Schiv 's Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (Random House), an intriguing account of the courtship and marriage of Vladimir and Véra Nabokov that reveals as much about Nabokov as it does his wife, his constant companion and "creative partner." As Schiv points out, Nabokov's marriage to Véra "was at the heart of his existence," her influence on his work pervasive. Letters, diaries, and other unpublished materials are the basis for Schiv 's story of the intelligent, innovative, and persistent woman behind the man who could not have become the writer he was without her.

Bill Delaney in "Nabokov's Lolita" (Expl 56: 99-100) notes a resemblance between Nabokov's Humbert Humbert and Charlie Chaplin. Allusions to Chaplin and his films can be found throughout Lolita, both in events and in the names of characters and places. Simon Stow in "The Return of Charles Kinbote: Nabokov on Rorty" (P&L 23: 65-77) examines the relationship between Richard Rorty and Nabokov, which went beyond that of critic and author. The two men shared the same politicalviews and philosophical beliefs; in fact, Stow views Rorty as a real-life version of Nabokov's Kinbote. Elizabeth Freeman in "Honeymoon with a Stranger: Pedophiliac Picaresques from Poe to Nabokov" (AL 70: 863-97) traces the development of the American pedophiliac picaresque work, demonstrating how Nabokov provides a contemporary version of this genre in Lolita, where "the travelogue becomes national rather than local, and the wedding seems to explode outward into the landscape of American mass culture." Pedophilia is also a topic in Frederick Whiting's "'The Strange Particularity of the Lover's Preference': Pedophilia, Pornography, and the Anatomy of Monstrosity in Lolita" (AL 70: 833-62). Whiting argues that Humbert's perverse sexual desires must be examined "in the context of the complex intersection of Cold War political and sexual fears." As a result, formalist scholars have avoided integrating the moral and the political so that they could keep that which was "monstrous" at a distance. The "self-reflexive game" that Nabokov played in regard to both his writing and his life is explored in Susan Elizabeth Sweeney's "Playing Nabokov: Performances by Himself and Others" (StTCL 22: 295-318). Using Andrew Field's Nabokov: His Life in Part, Nabokov's Look at the Harlequins!, and Roberta Smoodin's Inventing Ivanov as examples, Sweeney demonstrates that scholars who try to "play" Nabokov run the risk of discovering that their work may be only a reenactment of that which "may seem to have been written already, and with more authority . . . by Nabokov himself."

b. Djuna Barnes and Others

Erin G. Carlston in Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford) argues that Djuna Barnes in Nightwood, Marguerite Yourcenar in Denier du rêve, and Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas make use of "typically fascist themes and tropes while also departing sharply from fascist rhetoric in some manner." Such modernist works, then, cannot necessarily be categorized as antifascist or fascist. In her chapter on Nightwood, Carlston points out the ambiguity involved in trying to link Barnes's novel to fascism, and she suggests that a definitive reading of Nightwood is not possible. In "Troubling the 'Master's Voice': Djuna Barnes's Pictorial Strategies" (Mosaic 31, iii: 61-81) Irene Martyniuk examines the significance of Barnes's illustrations in her works. According to Martyniuk, Barnes combined her visual texts with verbal ones "as a means of engaging and destabilizing the reader" and thus of more successfully relating the experiences of women; in Ryder, for example, she "disturbs the entirereading process," even though the illustrations "do not upset conventional reading patterns." Georgette Fleischer in "Djuna Barnes and T. S. Eliot: The Politics and Poetics of Nightwood" (SNNTS 30: 405-37) argues that the editorial relationship between Barnes and Eliot was positive, not negative. Since Eliot obviously took a personal and professional risk by publishing Nightwood, he must have thought the novel especially worthy of publication.

An interdisciplinary approach is taken by Diane Richard-Allerdyce in Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self: Gender, Modernism, and Narrative Identity (No. Ill.), an ambitious Lacanian psychoanalytic study of Nin's literary criticism, fiction, and diaries. A highlight of Richard-Allerdyce's text is her inclusion of material on Nin's four-volume A Journal of Love, a diary initially withheld by publishers because of its objectionable content.

Randian cultism is the subject of Jev Walker in The Ayn Rand Cult (Open Court). Walker traces the history of Objectivism from its "Collective" origins in the 1940s to its transformation into a selfish Randian philosophy that mistrusted humanity and that lost the affirmative qualities espoused by early Objectivists. As Walker points out, "Students of Objectivism," as Rand dubbed her followers, were paradoxically commended for being independent thinkers, yet in reality were expected to think like Rand and her protagonists in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Walker delineates the origins of Rand's beliefs and explores parallels between Rand's cultist Objectivism and Soviet communism, Haeckel monism, and Dianetics; included are chapters on individual cult teachers such as Nathaniel Branden, Leonard Peikov, and Alan Greenspan. The volume provides a thorough and enlightening analysis of Rand's elitist movement as not only a cult, but a destructive one, complete with its "utopian carrot" and "apocalyptic stick."

In Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (Penn. State) Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra collect 19 essays—14 previously unpublished—that consider Rand's work in the context of feminist philosophy. In their introduction (pp. 1-21) Gladstein and Sciabarra explain Rand's Objectivist philosophy and survey the volume's contents. Rand's "feminist manifesto" is explored in Barbara Branden's "Ayn Rand: The Reluctant Feminist" (pp. 25-45). "Feminist Rereadings of Rand's Fiction" are overed in articles by Valerie Loiret-Prunet, Barry Vacker, Wendy McElroy, Judith Wilt, and Karen Michalson. The question of a "Randian Feminism" is pondered in essays by Nathaniel Branden, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Sharon Presley, Susan Love Brown, Robert Sheaver,Diana Mertz Brickell, Thomas Gramstad, and Melissa Jane Hardie. Reprinted material includes articles by Gladstein, Wilt, Susan Brownmiller, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, and Camille Paglia.

Two notable books appear on Paul Bowles. Millicent Dillon in You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles (Calif.) seeks to provide a biographical account of the enigmatic Bowles, whom she met while working on a book about Jane Bowles, his wife. Dillon acknowledges that despite her many encounters with him, the more time she spent with Bowles the less she learned of him. As a result, her biography is "a meditation on the nature of biography," subjectively presented, a blend of fact, conversations with Bowles and other people, and "pure speculation," all of which give the reader a sense of how difficult it is to characterize Bowles. The only chronological material on Bowles's life appears briefly in the introduction. The biography mostly consists of interesting accounts of the author's visits with Bowles and his friends in Tangier in 1977, 1991, and 1992 and their discussions about Jane Bowles, Paul's childhood, the relationship between his musical compositions and his fiction, and his reactions to his conversations with Dillon. Gena Dagel Caponi expands her reputation as a Bowles scholar with the publication of a third critical work. To her 1993 Conversations with Paul Bowles (Miss.) and her 1994 Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage (So. Ill.) she adds Paul Bowles (TUSAS 706). More critical analysis than biography, the book includes chapters on Bowles's surrealist writing, travel essays, and translations and examines his existential, postcolonial, detective, and historical fiction.

In "The Toy Madness of Jane Bowles" (ArQ 54, iv: 83-110) George Toles examines the "mad evects" of Bowles's anxious writing, classifying her works as "tentative comedies about moments of scalding exposure."

In "Little House on the Rice Paddy" (AmLH 10: 360-77) Blake Allmendinger provides a history of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, both the novel and the film, and predicts that Peter Conn's recent cultural biography will renew scholarly interest in Buck.

Steven F. Carter revives James Jones scholarship with his James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master (Illinois), a study of Jones's spiritual beliefs and their influences. Carter begins with an insightful overview of previous Jones scholarship and discusses Jones's philosophical underpinnings, especially his debts to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the theosophy of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and the mentorship of Lowney Handy and her writers' colony. Jones, however, was "a literary alchemist" who skillfully refined what he learned from others, blended it with hisown experience, and transformed it into his own "eclectic philosophy" that emphasized spiritual development. Examining a number of Jones's novels and short stories, Carter demonstrates that an "unsevered thread of reincarnation and spiritual evolution places all of Jones's writing within the steadily developing tradition of American literary Orientalism that stretches from the transcendentalists to the present."

iv Easterners

a. Saul Bellow

Insanity is the focus of Walter Bigler's Figures of Madness in Saul Bellow's Longer Fiction (Peter Lang). Bigler wisely provides background on the psychological complexity of the concept of madness before turning to an examination of Bellow's use of the theme of insanity in nine long works that blend the sociopsychological, psychological, historical, ethical-religious, and psychopathological. Beginning with Henderson the Rain King, the protagonists of Bellow's novels exhibit "a notable ontological instability" that is manifested in brain fever, paranoia, lunacy, manic depression, hysteria, maladjustment, and schizophrenia. Ultimately, the characters' madnesses reflect the insanity of this century in which they "become lonely voices in a heartless modern wilderness."

Bellow is also featured in an essay collection, New Essays on Seize the Day (Cambridge), ed. Michael P. Kramer. In "Introduction: The Vanishing Jew: On Teaching Bellow's Seize the Day as Ethnic Fiction" (pp. 1- 24) Kramer analyzes reactions to Bellow from his students at Jerusalem's Hebrew University; they argued that in Seize the Day "Bellow's Jewishness is deliberately encoded or malgré lui embedded in the text." Hana Wirth-Nesher in " 'Who's he when he's at home?': Saul Bellow's Translations" (pp. 25-41) explores the dynamic that occurs in Bellow's translations of other Jewish works, where he serves as a "cultural mediator" for both Jewish and non-Jewish readers. In "Manners and Morals, Civility and Barbarism: The Cultural Contexts of Seize the Day" (pp. 43-70) Donald Weber examines the way in which "the novel dramatizes contrasting styles of behavior, moral and economic, as it explores the complex psychological relationship between fathers and sons." Sam B. Girgus in "Imaging Masochism and the Politics of Pain: 'Facing' the Word in the Cinetext of Seize the Day" (pp. 71-92) uses Kaja Silverman's literary and cinematic exploration of multiple and masochistic masculinities to demonstrate the importance of transferring Seize the Dayfrom literature to film. In "Yizkor for Six Million: Mourning the Death of Civilization in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day" (pp. 93-109) Emily Miller Budick argues that though the Holocaust is not portrayed as a central event of the novel, it nonetheless plays an important role; not only does Bellow lament the extermination of the Jews, but he also deplores the post-Holocaust lack of interest in Judaism. Jules Chametzky in "Death and the Post-Modern Hero/Schlemiel: An Essay on Seize the Day" (pp. 111-23) concludes that Tommy Wilhelm, a typical Bellow "dangling man" and schlemiel, has no choice but to sadly accept the normality of death and continue living. Faye Kuzma in "The Demonic Hegemonic: Exploitative Voices in Saul Bellow's More Die of Heartbreak" (Crit 39: 306-23) argues that the novel "unmasks questionable assumptions to parody fashionable cynicism as it produces a world bereft of feeling."

b. Bernard Malamud

Begoña Sío-Castiñeira in The Short Stories of Bernard Malamud: In Search of Jewish Post-Immigrant Identity (Peter Lang) analyzes Malamud's Selected Stories, giving primary consideration to ten stories that best convey his concern about what it means to be a Jew in the 20th century. Moving chronologically from the 1950s to the 1970s, Sío-Castiñeira examines Malamud's existentialism, specifically how he demonstrates that modern society lacks clearly defined religious, communal, or familial values: "the human being has only himself in a disparate existence, whose unity he must find." In "'The Jewbird': Bernard Malamud's Experiment With Magical Realism" (ShortS 6, i: 55-64) Sío-Castiñeira argues that "The Jewbird" is not a fantasy, as is often thought, but a work of magical realism, especially since the story contains a realistic setting and lacks authorial intrusion. In "Malamud's Echoes of Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown' " (NConL 29, ii: 6-8) Lawrence Jay Dessner compares the use of ambiguity in the presentation of the supernatural aspects of "The Magic Barrel" and "Angel Levine" to that in Hawthorne's earlier story, noting that "Angel Levine" ends more affirmatively than "Young Goodman Brown."

c. J. D. Salinger and Henry Roth

As part of its Literary Companion to American Literature series, Greenhaven Press contributes Readings on The Catcher in the Rye, a collection of 14 previously published essays on Salinger's novel. Topics of discussion by critics such as Clinton W. Trowbridge, Maxwell Geismar, and Mary Suzanne Schriber include theme, style, and character, the novel's relationship to other literaryworks, and the issue of censorship. Included are a brief Salinger biography and a chronology of his life and work with primary and secondary bibliography. Robert A. Martin in "Remembering Jane in The Catcher in the Rye" (NConL 28, iv: 2-3) notes the role of Jane Gallagher, an overlooked character in that novel. Because Holden Caulfield fears that Jane may have changed as a result of sexual experience, his relationship with her can only be that of a memory.

In "Facing the Fictions: Henry Roth's and Philip Roth's Meta Memoirs" (Prooftexts 18: 259-75) Hana Wirth-Nesher proposes that the two authors "have so much of themselves invested in their readers' constructions of their lives that their self-representation cannot be disengaged from their audiences."

v Westerners

a. Edward Abbey and Others

Abbey is honored with one essay collection, Coyote in the Maze: Tracking Edward Abbey in a World of Words (Utah), ed. Peter Quigley. In his introductory overview, "Heraclitean Fire, Bakhtinian Laughter, and the Limits of Literary Judgment" (pp. 1- 17), Quigley surveys the importance of Abbey's work and previous scholarship on it. Edward S. Twining in "Foreword I: The Roots of Abbey's Social Critique" (pp. 19-32) focuses on Abbey's acceptance of the world and its occupants as "real." In "Foreword II: Magpie" (pp. 33-46) SueEllen Campbell discusses a number of classroom questions that the teacher of Desert Solitaire could pose. David J. Rothman in "'I'm a humanist': The Poetic Past in Desert Solitaire" (pp. 47-73) examines the influence of 19th- and 20th-century American and British poetry on Abbey's treatment of society and nature in Desert Solitaire. In "Who Is the Lone Ranger? Edward Abbey as Philosopher" (pp. 74-87) David Rothenberg advocates viewing Abbey as an elusive figure, who, like the Lone Ranger, continually stayed in motion and who, like philosophers, knew that the best questions can only be asked, not answered. Tom Lynch in "Nativity, Domesticity, and Exile in Edward Abbey's 'One True Home' " (pp. 88-105) argues that "to Abbey, the desert wilderness . . . is a defamiliarized landscape devoid of familial ties," a view unlike that of Native Americans, who feel an obligation to nature and the land. Paul Lindholdt in "Rage Against the Machine: Edward Abbey and Neo Luddite Thought" (pp. 106-18) considers Abbey's contributions to Luddite philosophy. In "Edward Abbey's Inadvertent Postmodernism: Theory, Autobiography, and Politics" (pp. 119-36) William Chaloupka speculates that "Abbey's work functions against the grain of green ideology." Harold Alderman in "Abbey as Anarchist" (pp. 137-49) answers the question, "Was Edward Abbey an anarchist?" by concluding that "Abbey had no developed political theory." In " 'Getting the Desert into a Book': Nature Writing and the Problem of Representation in a Postmodern World" (pp. 150-67) Claire Lawrence finds parallels between ecocriticism and postmodernism in Abbey's work. Rebecca Raglon in "Surviving Doom and Gloom: Edward Abbey's Desert Comedies" (pp. 168-83) posits that Abbey's nature writing is unique because of his inclusion of comedy and joy. In "Nietzschean Themes in the Works of Edward Abbey" (pp. 184-205) Steve Norwick demonstrates how Abbey, in his use of concrete description, oxymoron, "masking," fools, and "complex irony," his abhorrence of domestic animals, and his admiration for the wilderness, shares commonalities with Nietzsche. Barbara Barney Nelson in "Edward Abbey's Cow" (pp. 206-25) remarks the importance of cows in his writings, especially female ones. In "Edward Abbey and Gender" (pp. 226-41) Paul T. Bryant debunks claims that Abbey was sexist, particularly in his writing. David Copland Morris in "The Life of the Author: Emerson, Foucault, and the Reading of Edward Abbey's Journals" (pp. 242-62) discusses the ways that Emerson's and Foucault's philosophies can provide insight into Abbey's journals. In "From the Banks of the Illisus to the Arches of Utah: Edward Abbey as Noble Rhetorician" (pp. 263-76) Bryan L. Moore applies Plato's ideas about rhetoric to show "the essential nobility of Edward Abbey's rhetoric." In "Biocentrism and Green Existentialism: Edward Abbey's Conflicting Conceptualizations of Nature" (pp. 277-95) Werner Bigell proposes "that Abbey's texts often exceed the scope of radical environmentalism as he simultaneously battles anthropocentrism and asks questions about the meaning of existence." Quigley in "The Politics and Aesthetics of a Hopeful Anarchism: Edward Abbey's Postmodern 'Angelic Demonology' " (pp. 296-315) argues that Abbey's final work, Hayduke Lives!, has been unjustly overlooked and is especially important because of its ironic voice, its condemnation of patriarchy and capitalism, and its symbolic use of Norway. In "The Politics of Leisure: 'Industrial Tourism' in Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire" (pp. 316-34) James A. Papa Jr. calls attention to Abbey's dismay at "industrial tourists" who view the desert from their vehicles instead of exploring it on foot.

In "Misogyny in the American Eden: Abbey, Cather, and Maclean,"pp. 97-105 in Reading the Earth, J. Gerard Dollar examines the presentation of the Western American Eden in three texts. Abbey in "Down the River," like Willa Cather in The Professor's House and Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It, excludes women, who, it is implied, are more threatening than the wilderness.

Joseph J. Wydeven pays tribute to Wright Morris in Wright Morris Revisited (TUSAS 703). Taking "into account Morris's dual artistic preoccupations as writer and photographer," Wydeven argues that scholars examining Morris's fiction have underestimated the importance of his photography to it. Morris was uncertain which field he wished to emphasize; as a result, he experimented with both artistic forms, an experimentation that was strongly autobiographical and reveals his search for himself. Wydeven's introductory text includes material on all of Morris's novels and reprints a small selection of his photographs. Reginald Dyck in "Carnival and Ceremony at Wright Morris's Lone Tree Hotel" (GPQ 18: 293-303) examines Ceremony in Lone Tree as a critique of a 1950s middle-class society based on a conformity for which Morris and his character cannot find a viable alternative. While Boyd, the protagonist, rebels, he is too much a product of his own society to use subversive acts to evect positive cultural change. In " 'The True Witness of a False Event': Photography and Wright Morris's Fiction of the 1950s" (WAL 33: 27-57) Laura Barrett explores the ways in which Morris uses his fiction to show how "photographs can over a dangerously attractive alternative to reality."

Roseanne Hoefel in "Gendered Cartography: Mapping the Mind of Female Characters in D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded" (SAIL 10, i: 45-64) focuses on the female characters in that novel who have been overlooked and negatively portrayed, even though they are the "only agents of independent action" and, as such, "are the ones who stave ov cultural murder as well as cultural suicide."

b. Ross Lockridge and Wallace Stegner

The 50th anniversary of Rain-tree County sparks renewed interest in Ross Lockridge. David D. Anderson edits Myth, Memory, and the American Earth: The Durability of Raintree County (Midwestern), a collection of eight essays. In his "Raintree County and the 'dark fields of the republic'" (pp. 9-15) Anderson urges that if Lockridge's novel is a failure, then it is a wonderful one. Ray Lewis White in "Raintree County and the Critics of '48" (pp. 16-35) summarizes almost one hundred 1948 reviews of the novel and speculatesthat the uncertain critical response may have contributed to Lockridge's suicide. In "Ross Lockridge, Raintree County, and the Epic of Irony" (pp. 36-46) Gerald C. Nemanic argues that "it is Lockridge, viewing from the artist's perspective, and not Shawnessy, his creation, who strives to indite the ironical American epic." Like White, Nemanic believes that the novel may also over a clue to Lockridge's suicide. Joel M. Jones in "The Presence of the Past in the Heartland: Raintree County Revisited" (pp. 47-55) ponders the many literary genres that are applicable to the book: literary realism, myth, romance, stream of consciousness, critical biography, historical novel, and certainly "The Great American Studies Novel." In "Habits of the Heart in Raintree County" (pp. 56-67) Park Dixon Goist finds Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life a useful cultural framework to apply to Lockridge's novel. The "individualism / community dialogue" especially shapes the life of Johnny Shawnessy, who chooses the inner identity—"his own home place"—over an outer success that would entail societal restrictions. In "Blurred Boundaries and the Desire for Nationalism in Ross Lockridge's Raintree County" (pp. 68-76) Dean Rehberger suggests that the novel is about the very "impossibility of producing the American novel." Through both theme and technique Lockridge debunks the idea of a unified nation. Douglas A. Noverr in "Memory, the Divided Self, and Revelatory Resolution in Ross Lockridge Jr.'s Raintree County" (pp. 77-83) states that while John Wickliv Shawnessy is the victim of a divided self, he is able to suppress this division and find unity with his wife and children. In "Author in the Epic: Ross Lockridge and Raintree County" (pp. 84-120) Larry Lockridge overs a biographical assessment of his father's life, drawing parallels between the lives of Lockridge and other family members and those of the novel's characters, such as John Shawnessy and Professor Jerusalem. So many people and places are alluded to that Larry Lockridge considers the novel a carnival of encyclopedic dimensions.

Midwestern Miscellany devotes one issue to Lockridge. In "The Southern Myth in Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s Raintree County" (26: 9-17) Patricia Ward Julius discusses Lockridge's treatment of the Southern myths surrounding slavery. Dean Rehberger in "Raintree County Lines" (26: 18-23) argues that the novel is typically excluded from mainstream American literature because it is a work of historical fiction; the protagonist is too tied to history and cannot stand alone like an American Adam. In "Chronology, Time, Epic Mythology, and American History in Rain County" (pp. 24-30) Douglas A. Noverr notes the significance of the three chronologies in the novel, which represent individual, personal, and American histories, especially when they are linked to the 4th of July. David D. Anderson in "Raintree County and the Cycle of American Literature" (pp. 31-37) examines the novel as representative of America's past and that of the protagonist John Wickliv Shawnessy. In "Raintree County 50 Years Later" (pp. 38-42) Theodore R. Kennedy compares his recent second reading of the novel to his first and acknowledges Lockridge's place in the American literary canon. The issue concludes with "Larry Lockridge's Informal Responses to Papers on Raintree County" (pp. 43-48), reflections by a son on four contributors' essays.

Wallace Stegner is the subject of one book, James R. Hepworth's Stealing Glances: Three Interviews with Wallace Stegner (New Mexico). In his introduction Hepworth provides an account of his friendship with Stegner and reflects on Stegner's contributions to American literature. Subjects covered in the interviews include Stegner's travels, his opinions on other writers, the art of writing fiction, the relationship between fiction and biography, and the teaching of writing.

vi Iconoclasts and Detectives

a. The Beats

The Beats are popular in book-length studies this year. In The Beat Generation: A Bibliographical Teaching Guide (Scarecrow) William Lawlor briefly discusses sources and methods for teaching the Beats and annotates hundreds of bibliographies, anthologies, books, collections, book chapters, articles, and audiovisual aids, even internet addresses, on the Beat Generation. Lawlor devotes a section each to Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg. A significant contribution to the volume is a chapter on more than 70 other Beats, some of whom rarely receive attention. The list includes such mainstream Beat writers as Charles Bukowski, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as lesser figures like Tuli Kupferberg, Janine Pommy Vega, Philip Lamantia, Kirby Doyle, Richard Fariña, and Brion Gysin. Concluding the volume is a list of "Topics for Investigation and Writing."

Kerouac is the subject of three biographies. To his studies of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Barry Miles adds Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats (Holt), a portrait of Kerouac's life and literary career. Miles blends his chronological account of Kerouac's life with excerpts fromcritical reviews, snippets from conversations and letters, and Kerouac's reflections on writers and friends. Miles views Kerouac primarily as a "storyteller," not merely a "diarist," "chronicler," or "novelist," because Kerouac's "tales have their basis in fact, but are filtered through Jack's imagination and are told from his very personal viewpoint." Kerouac the icon and the myth is examined in the context of the Beats, from whom, Miles points out, Kerouac cannot be divorced. Writers like Ginsberg and Burroughs are at times as much a part of the biography as Kerouac. Those who are interested in the most intimate and graphic depiction of Kerouac's life will find Ellis Amburn's Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac (St. Martin's) of interest. Amburn, Kerouac's final editor, provides a lengthy, detailed account of Kerouac's life and work, overing clues to each chapter's contents through its title, for instance, "Macho Manslaughter" and "Orgasm, Buddhism, and the Art of Writing." No topic seems unworthy of consideration, from the impact of Kerouac's brother's death, the Great Depression, sports, and bebop to Kerouac's homoerotic behavior, numerous sexual liaisons, alcoholism, and mental breakdowns. Amburn compares Kerouac's life to "a Greek tragedy in which a great and talented human being is destroyed by his fatal flaws." The volume is perhaps typical of other Kerouac biographies in constituting a portrait of the Beats. Jim Christy's The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac (ECW), while casually written, overs an interesting theory about the final, and frequently overlooked, decade of Kerouac's life. According to Christy, Kerouac is a misunderstood writer and a religious one, who has more in common with Augustine than with either James Joyce or Thomas Wolfe and whose Catholicism is extremely significant to both his life and writing. Christy finds a connection between Kerouac and the sixteenth-century "beatas," Catholics who rebelled, and he argues that Kerouac was "a cultural revolutionary" whose journey can be considered a religious pilgrimage.

Michael H. Begnal in " 'I Dig Joyce': Jack Kerouac and Finnegans Wake" (PQ 77: 209-19) notes the influence of James Joyce on Kerouac. Kerouac's letters and novels reveal that his "innovations in voice, in language, and in dream exploration are extensions" of structural patterns used by Joyce in Finnegans Wake.

Burroughs is represented by Graham Caveney's vivid Gentleman Junkie: The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs (Little, Brown). Caveney's biography bombards the reader with more than 150 photographs, letters, news clippings, book jackets, drawings, and film cameos,epitomizing the legacy of Burroughs's oeuvre. In addition to capturing Burroughs's many identities, Caveney's colorful account captures the Beat Generation that Burroughs embodied.

b. Nathanael West

Susan Edmunds in "Modern Taste and the Body Beautiful in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust" (MFS 44: 306-30) focuses on the character of Faye Greener, the nemesis of painter Tod Hackett. According to Edmunds, if one views Faye as a serious artist, then the novel becomes more than Tod's confrontation with mass culture; rather the novel records "a fierce competition between several artists and several kinds of art to shape the dominant terms of modern taste and culture." In "Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Contempo Magazine" (RALS 24: 84-100) James M. Hutchisson concentrates on West's 1932-34 correspondence with Contempo editors Minna and Milton Abernethy. The letters are important not only because they are relatively few, but also because they provide details concerning West's writing of Miss Lonelyhearts and its publication and explain the paucity of critical response to the novel.

c. H. P. Lovecraft and Others

Lovecraft enthusiasts will welcome Lovecraft Remembered (Arkham House), ed. Peter Cannon, a collection of 65 memoirs, recollections, notes, letters, tributes, and critical opinions honoring Lovecraft the man and the writer. Contributors include Lovecraft's neighbors, fans, and female friends, both amateur and professional writers, members of the Kalem Club, and critics, including R. M. Barlow, Rheiner Kleiner, Edith Miniter, Hazel Heald, Robert Bloch, E. Hovmann Price, Winfield Townley Scott, and Sonia H. Davis, Lovecraft's wife. Cannon's section commentaries throughout the volume provide useful exposition on Lovecraft's relationship to the contributors. An interesting addition to the Lovecraft canon is a reprint of a rare pamphlet of an early 1960s dialogue on Lovecraft's writing, "Los Angeles Science Fiction Society," pp. 78-95 in Gothic Horror: A Reader's Guide from Poe to King and Beyond (St. Martin's), ed. Clive Bloom. August Derleth annotates the transcript of the dialogue between symposium participants Sam Russell, Leland Sapiro, Fritz Leiber, Arthur Jean Cox, and Robert Bloch, who discuss Lovecraft's use of the themes of psychic displacement, death, and decay, his employment of first-person points of view, his views on science, his interest in heredity, and his influence on the works of other writers.

Two writers are the subjects of single essays. Insight into Robert Bloch's view of himself as a writer is provided in Jevrey Kahan's "Interview with Robert Bloch: Author of Psycho" (Paradoxa 4, ix: 148-54). The mid-1980s interview covers such subjects as the influence of H. P. Lovecraft, Bloch's foray into detective fiction, and his fondness for black humor. In " 'To Build a Mirror Factory': The Mirror and Self Examination in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451" (Crit 39: 282-87) Rafeeq O. McGiveron analyzes the use of mirrors to figure the process of self-examination in the novel.

d. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler

"The ways in which hard-boiled narratives construct a world in which romanticism, the romantic, and romance function as alternatives to the harsh world of social and cultural change" are explored in Jopi Nyman's Hard-Boiled Fiction and Dark Romanticism (Peter Lang). Citing Hammett's Red Harvest, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not as examples, Nyman points out the significance of the romantic tradition in hard-boiled fiction, a male-dominated world characterized by violence, fear, threat, alienation, and cynicism. Such a world, states Nyman, takes for its literary antecedents Gothic fiction, the Arthurian quest, and the wasteland myth. However, Cain's Serenade "subverts" romance tradition and the hard-boiled genre by delving into the concepts of identity, sexuality, and Otherness, changing the male subject into an object, and "rewrit[ing] the heterosexual romance."

William Brevda in "The Private Eye, the Femme Fatale, and the Sign: Epistemology of the Hardboiled Narrative" (NDQ 65, ii: 26-50) explores the role of the femme fatale in the works of Hammett and Chandler, noting that their novels "serve as momentary stays against the deconstructive confusions of the nihilist crisis."

In "The Inscribed Heart: Raymond Chandler and The Lady in the Lake" (Clues 19: 111-38) J. O. Tate examines literary game play in Chandler's fourth published novel, which incorporates elements not only of a novel but also of romance and detective fiction, in short "a book of books" that draws from T. S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, Arthurian romance, and Shakespeare, among others. The reader is thus led to question the multiple meanings of words such as "lady" and "lake."