Themes, Topics, Criticism

Opening up the terms of literary study and debate has been a rallying point throughout American literary studies this year as we anticipate the transition to a new century of scholarship and the necessary transformation of many of our methodological and pedagogical conventions for approaching the study of literature produced in the United States. In the preface to a special issue of American Literature titled "No More Separate Spheres!" (AL 70: 443-63) editor Cathy N. Davidson brings together essays that attempt to kick-start the process of creative reevaluation of past modes of criticism by rejecting the influential "binaric gender division" that often structures 19th-century literary studies. Proving once again the significance of a feminist politics to the progressive reformation of theoretical models, Davidson argues that questioning the binary category of gender that "has organized critical discussion" inevitably leads us to consider "how other categories complicate the separate spheres paradigm, especially with regard to issues of race, sexuality, class, region, religion, occupation, and other variables" as well as how to "break down the divide between nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary studies." As we close out the 20th century, "the explanatory power" of the metaphor of self/other that drives gender binaries "shrinks even further." Yet, rather than completely reject the relevancy and influence of work on the so-called "separate spheres"—work that has spurred the growth of feminist and ethnic literary studies—Davidson believes that the challenge is to practice a "call-and-response" approach rather than a point-counterpoint one, such that the dialogue that ensues is not "tone deaf to its antecedents in order to make its own song sound sweeter." Davidson aptly describes the nature and intent of this year's scholarship, which often boldly challenged accepted standards and models organizing areas of study. Few of the year's most provocative works make the mistake of being tone-deaf to their antecedents, and in some important instances individual works and scholars seem to propel us in new directions by creatively reworking or expanding the implications of major themes and texts.

Within the "No More Separate Spheres!" issue, for instance, feminist scholars Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse reassess the recent criticism of the racism of '70s feminism and white women's writing in general. In separate essays—Fetterley's " 'My Sister! My Sister': The Rhetoric of Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie" (AL 70: 491-516) and Pryse's "Sex, Class, and 'Category Crisis': Reading Jewett's Transitivity" (AL 70: 517- 49) they argue that such criticism has often led us to reject out of hand the insights to be found in both venues, even if we concede their racist or imperialist implications. The result of this tendency has been the gradual and myopic devaluation of feminism in general. Both Fetterley and Pryse attempt to argue for a reinvigorated feminist analysis that employs a critique of the gender, class, and racial politics of a piece with an understanding of the historical and social context that informed the original production and reception of these works.

Taking a slightly different tack, José F. Aranda in "Contradictory Impulses: Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Resistance Theory, and the Politics of Chicano/a Studies" (AL 70: 551-79) compels us to resist the urge to valorize either marginality or historicity as the proper angle of a progressive critique, especially when the effort results in a refusal to contest either "the usefulness of resistance theory" or the hagiography of so much historical or biographical reconstruction. Writing about Ruiz de Burton, a Mexican American novelist who "stands rhetorically outside the histories and discourses that usually construct her subject matter," Aranda argues that while her work seems to privilege "resistance to white, Anglo-Saxon hegemony, its narrative takes up questions of nationhood, citizenship, civilization, race and gender in ways that invariably concede the power of the United States as a hegemonic force in the hemisphere."

In other essays in this special issue of American Literature, questioning the relevance of previous assumptions reigns. Lauren Berlant in "Poor Eliza" (AL 70: 635-68), for instance, admonishes us to be wary of the association of sentimentalism with women's writing and the potential to celebrate both without first querying their political and social effects. Deeming this a "post-sentimental project," Berlant pushes us to demand "that its protests and complaints are taken seriously in themselves, which involves occupying the present tense" and avoiding the fetishization of suffering and history for their own sakes. We must not, she points out, find ourselves "experiencing the same changes over and over again." Certainly this year's work appears to follow her injunction. Although the themes and concerns of many literary scholars were often guided by the emerging questions and trends of the recent past, this year also witnessed calls to fundamentally expand our understanding of the concepts underlying American democracy itself.

Notable among these is Nancy Ruttenberg's Democratic Personality, which philosophically explores the implications of its opening pro-nouncement: " 'Democracy' in our time has converted from noun to verb." Citing the fall of the Berlin Wall as a chief trope, Ruttenberg proposes "that democracy be re-conceived as a dynamic symbolic system or theater, historically realized in an untheorized and irrational practice of compulsive public utterance which gave rise, as popular voice, to a distinctive mode of political (and later, literary) subjectivity." This subjectivity, she argues, has generated various "crises of authority." Each chapter of this massive book works to divorce the concept of democracy from that of citizenship as Ruttenberg moves from the 1692 Salem witch trials, which she argues constitute the "first significant instance" of self-authorized public speakers making political decisions, through a series of (mostly canonical) 18th- and 19th-century American literary texts. Drawing on the literary historical work of Russian cultural semiotician Lydia Ginzburg, especially on the construction of personality, Democratic Personality shows how the witch trials and the spiritual revivals of the Great Awakening justified an American democratic personality as "humble self-enlargement." Using this concept to guide her book, Ruttenberg cogently demonstrates the emergence of democratic personality from the recognition of individuation in representation, from self-production rather than from political or philosophical movements. A second guiding principle, the notion of an "aesthetic of innocence," manifest in such works as Melville's Billy Budd and Cooper's Leather stocking tales, similarly expresses "a set of prescriptions for the realization of authentic national-poetic selfhood."

i Race and the "Nation"

Whiteness, an emerging topic of racial analysis in the 1990s, is once more the focus of several important studies of race and nationalism. The journal Transitions notably devoted an entire issue to whiteness, with scholars from a variety of disciplines offering a new round of compelling, even if sometimes contradictory, analyses of whiteness as a racial and political concept. Americanists, it seems, are particularly drawn to exploring the primacy of concepts of whiteness to the formation of American national identity. Valerie Babb extends the terms of this recognition in Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (NYU) by reminding us that the power of white identity in American society lies in "the ways in which one particular racial category so often exists unnamed" in American literature, even though, according to Babb, "from the 1700's on, whiteness is key to the maintenance of American nation-state identity." In his cultural history Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard) Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that the process of becoming American for European immigrants rested, at least in part, on adapting to and identifying with the changing ideal of a white nation, making the process of Americanization also a dynamic "racial odyssey."

But the most influential and original work on whiteness and American identity appears in two studies of masculinity: Dana D. Nelson's National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Duke) and David Savran's Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Prince-ton). In a fascinating and well-researched argument, Nelson reveals the patently antidemocratic effects of the linking of whiteness, manhood, and national identity from the 1780s to the 1850s. Beginning with negotiations over the constitutional plan, Nelson maintains, American discourses increasingly linked white manhood to civic identity in ways that "effectively trained, curtailed, and/or shut down" the realization of "radical democratic energies, imaginings and practices" in American life. Over the next hundred years the nation's president, in particular, became the iconic manifestation of this illusory belief in the capacity of a white fraternal order to symbolize and unify the nation. The broader intention of Nelson's study is to erode "the concrete referentiality of that term, 'white' man," and to invite interdisciplinary reevaluations of the concept of white manhood that further expose facets of American citizenship based on race and gender.

Related to Nelson's work in sharing his understanding of the relationship between masculinity and nationhood is Kristin Hoganson's Fighting for American Manhood (Yale), which investigates the cultural roots of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. Arguing that political decisions in the United States have been and continue to be shaped by culture, especially cultural representations of gender, Hoganson admirably articulates the gendered political environment of the late 19th century. She applies extensive original archival research to conclude that, in the face of the suffrage movement, political power was firmly identified as masculine, resulting in male politicians' determination to "act manly," to "prove" that politics and enfranchisement were "naturally" male activities. In her noteworthy analysis of the Spanish war, Hoganson shows that because women were activists in this cause, men tended to regard war as the manly expedient—specifically because this was a war in support of a chivalric Cuban male populace. By contrast, she demonstrates that the war in the Philippines pictured Filipino men as effeminate and thus unfit for independence. On the whole, Hoganson cogently argues that imperialism (and the absorption of dependents) constituted an American sign of maturity and national manhood.

David Savran's Taking It Like a Man takes a different approach. He develops an analysis of the contemporary state of white masculinity and focuses on sexual practices and popular cultural representations of white masculinity rather than on political or historical discourses, as Nelson and Hoganson do. Observing "the ascendancy of a new and powerful figure in American culture, the white male as victim," Savran attempts a genealogy of "the fantasy of the white man as victim, beginning with his entrance on the U.S. cultural scene in the 1950s" and culminating with the emergence of figures like Iron John, Forrest Gump, and Timothy McVeigh in more recent years. Savran concludes that "a marginalized and dissident masculinity," one invested in eroticizing its own submission and victimization, has become important to shaping white men's responses to the social and economic challenges of feminist, civil rights, and gay and lesbian liberation movements. The chief accomplishment of Taking It Like a Man is in offering both a psychoanalytic and materialist critique of the contemporary articulation of white masculinity in a variety of cultural forms, as Savran suggests how we might "press psychoanalysis into service for a historical project."

Hazel Carby's Race Men (Harvard) approaches the study of masculinity as a concept in African American political culture, which defines the "race man" as the very emblem of a strong cultural identity. Carby shows not only how such assumptions leave women out of the equation, but also how the drive to prove one's masculinity as a means of affirming the strength of the race exacts a high price. Like Savran, Carby ranges across a wide spectrum of cultural works, including novels, films, and—in the most intriguing analysis—the musical genius and cult of personality that made Miles Davis such a magnetic and controversial late-20th-century emblem of "the race man." Carby's argument echoes in Hortense Spillers's "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual," pp. 69-122 in Gendered Agents: Women and Institutional Knowledge, ed. Silvestra Mariniello and Paul A. Bové (Duke). Here Spillers suggests the influence of the "race man" concept in African American Studies, where departmental power is still concentrated around "a handful of males." But she goes still further to ask whether their ascent to stewardship of the field also does not seem to implicate a broader white, patriarchal administrative structure, in effect, a glimpse at "the shadowy 'laws' of cross-racial male bonding" that "has an impact on the entire field of inquiry: the women 'teach,' the men 'preach,' the women 'follow,' the men 'lead.' "

In Writing America Black: Race Rhetoric in the Public Sphere (Cam-bridge), C. K. Doreski also examines the role of the United States at war, studying the rhetoric of race in (primarily black) newspapers and popular magazines as well as in texts that incorporate excerpts from the African American press, from Pauline Hopkins's The Colored American Magazine through Jay Wright's Soothsayers and Omens. Also important is the book's focus on war, namely the Spanish-American War, the two world wars, and the Vietnam War. Doreski underscores the double entendre of the notion that blacks are always already "at war" in the United States: constantly, "there's a [race] war on." A variety of significant literary and journalistic figures are addressed, including John Johnson, whose regular columns in the Negro Digest were titled "If I Were Colored." Doreski reads with keen insight. Her interpretation of Eleanor Roosevelt's contribution, the last column published in the series, makes for especially interesting reading; her discussion of the race/war rhetoric of poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Sam Cornish is very valuable, as is her reading of Alice Walker's Meridian.

Kadiatu Kanneh's African Identities: Race, Nation, and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanisms, and Black Literatures (Routledge) is a carefully argued consideration of the construction of "Africa" and African identity, primarily in the 20th century. It focuses on British and American colonial practice and diasporic experience as represented in literature, post-colonial theory, autobiography, and travel writing. Through exemplary close readings of Naipaul's Bend in the River and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Kanneh suggests that Africa is primarily a textual and textualized object, one that results from the colonial encounter. Barred from the possibility of even imaging a direct encounter with [Africa], she states, these texts engage representations of Africa. Thus, colonial discourses have impinged on, indeed have created, the "modern understanding of African reality." Her equally inspiring readings of a range of texts—from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents to Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart to Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy—are eloquently and persuasively executed, its "high theory" notwithstanding.

Brook Thomas's essay opening the 1998 REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (14) also speaks to both British and American literature. Thomas, editor of the volume, begins "Placing Literature Written in English" (pp. 1-31) with the useful reminder that "the study of literature is frequently divided according to nation." From here, he discusses how shifts in national boundaries and borders, especially in countries with some relation to England or where texts are written in English, at the end of the 20th century affect scholarly comprehension of nation, transnationalism, and national literature. This leads him to a thoughtful exploration of the "proliferation of national sentiment" as a response to the proliferation of nations and to increasing globalization.

Such concerns also emerge in essays devoted to Jasmine. Deepika Bahri's "Always Becoming: Narratives of Nation and Self in Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine, " pp. 137-54 in Women, America, and Movement, for example, reaches a very different conclusion about the novel than does Rosemary Marangoly George's provocative "But That Was in Another Country," included in Ruth Saxton's study of The Girl (discussed below).Whereas George worries that Jasmine ultimately (and perhaps unwit-tingly) reifies essentialized notions of Orientalism, Bahri prefers to assess "Mukherjee's strategy of destabilizing the center/margin split as it operates in Anglo-American conflict politics through the liminal, evasive figure of its (anti)heroine and its challenge to the notion of 'American' identity." Because Mukherjee "constantly defers" any stable (national) identity, Bahri contends, we should read the novel as provering not merely two choices, forming a dilemma, but four, forming a tetralemma, privileging Buddhist rather than Aristotelian logic. "If we are willing to engage this kind of logic, Jasmine would emerge as both Other and not Other, neither Other nor not Other, both American and not American and neither American nor not." This dual reality permits a more complex reading of both Mukherjee's protagonist, Jasmine, and Mukherjee's alter protagonist, "the nationalist construct, America."

Ross Posnock's challenging claim in Color and Culture is that U.S. black writers circa 1900 were the first American intellectuals. He argues that these literary artists devised ways to make the term "black intellectual" mean more than "race man" or "race woman," and, in fact, they questioned "the very category of race." In particular, this study is concerned with the pragmatist "critique of the primacy of identity" developed by W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke under the tutelage of William James. Posnock distinguishes between the Du Boisian argument for "an idea of the political as civic participation by those whose qualifications are severed from family, tribe, class, color, and caste" and the "provincialism" of identity politics. Du Bois and Locke are not the only figures in this study; works by Ellison, Larsen, Douglass, Frantz Fanon, Booker T.Washington, Hurston, Baldwin, Baraka, Samuel Delaney, and Adrienne Kennedy receive sustained attention. Departing from other textual analyses, Posnock organizes his readings around the ruling contention that postmodernism has demonstrated a bias toward the local, particular, and relative, and its articulations of race may be characterized as "the reductionism of the ideology of 'authenticity,' which fixates on particularity or difference."

Most of the authors in David R. Roediger's anthology Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (Schocken) would no doubt generally disagree with Posnock's thesis. This collection confronts whiteness from the African American perspective in six distinctive ways. The first section exposes the fallacy of race categories in a range of texts that date from David Walker's 1829 Appeal up to the present. Sections 2 and 3 contemplate ways that white works as property throughout "the white world" in selections from Langston Hughes's poem "White Woman" (1936) to Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark (1992). The fourth section illustrates the volume's richness with its inclusion of excerpts from the paintings that form Jacob Lawrence's "John Brown" series of the early 1940s. Several hilarious selections in section 5 on "White Men, White Women," especially Anna Julia Cooper's "Wimodaughsis" (1892) and Alice Childress's "Health Card" (1956), ideally contribute to the developing trend in highlighting (African) American satire and humor. By contrast, the final section is sobering indeed, its selections surveying "White Terrors" that range from Jacobs's chapter on mustered-out soldiers in Incidents (1861) through historian Nell Painter's chilling scholarly treatise, "Slavery and Soul Murder" (1995).

Humor and solemnity are similarly juxtaposed in the essays in Hollywood's Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (Kentucky), ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor. To essays originally appearing in a 1993 special issue of Film and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies (23, i-iv) have been added others, creating a broad context for studying revisionist film representations of Native Americans. Several essays usefully contextualize "semiunderground" films like Powwow Highway (1989), whose "Absurd Reality" (pp. 12-26) leads Ted Jojola to ask, "Do Native Americans themselves need to be 'reawakened' to appreciate their own heritage?" Eric Gary Anderson's interpretation of the same film, "Driving the Red Road: Powwow Highway (1989)" (pp. 137-52), concludes that it is "a mixed bag of cultural statement, parody, and adventure." Other essays treat more popular (read non-Indian) films such as Little Big Man (1970), Dances with Wolves (1990), and The Last of the Mohicans (1992) as well as the dolls and CD-ROMs marketed with the children's movies Pocahontas (1995) and The Indian in the Cupboard (1996). Pauline Turner Strong in "Playing Indian in the Nineties: Pocahontas and The Indian in the Closet" (pp. 187-205) confesses hers a "contaminated critique," "completely influenced by participation in the cultural phenomenon that it analyzes."

A more profound and complex discussion of Native Americans is Philip J. Deloria's Playing Indian (Yale). Deloria also briefly comments on popular screen representations of Native Americans and reads such related historical "texts" as accounts of the Boston Tea Party and Indian captivity narratives as well as more modern texts that include children's games and summer camp rituals. Suggesting that "the figure of 'the Indian' holds an equally critical position in American culture" as the African American, Deloria persuasively demonstrates that "Indianness provides impetus and precondition for the creative assembling of an ultimately unassimilable American identity." In the end, the American experience of "playing Indian," Deloria concludes, has constituted a "final paradox": "Indianness may have existed primarily as a cultural artifact in American society, but it has helped to create [social, economic, and political] power, which has then been turned back on native people. . . . A nd so while Indian people have lived out a collection of historical nightmares in the material world, they have also haunted the long night of American dreams" (191). Truly, Deloria ascribes to Cathy Davidson's principle of "no more separate spheres."

Whereas Deloria is concerned with how all non-native peoples in the United States interact with Native Americans, Emily Miller Budick analyzes a narrower relationship in Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (Cambridge). Budick, an expatriate American Jew now observing Judaism in Israel, has a particular vantage point on U.S. race relations and the ways that they work in mutual (textual) constructions of the self and the other. To explore "how blacks and Jews function in each other's thinking and writing," her succinct book considers an intricate variety of conversations between and among the two groups, ranging from some of the better-known, such as Ralph Ellison's dialogue with Irving Howe (primarily about James Baldwin), to some intra-group contemplations of the history, if not the figure, of the Jew in fiction by Chester Himes, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, arguing: "American writers may seem never so American as when they are resisting that designation. And they may never so fully embody what they least respect in American culture as when they are protesting it." Budick examines the "manufacture" of hyphenated identities—the maintenance of separate spheres?—by writers who insist on the legitimacy of their ethnic distinction and yet borrow "the very specific, ethnically different, materials of another ethnic group" that is concurrently engaged in its own process of ethnic construction.

Another text concerned with "how interrelated discourses on race, gender, and nation shaped the development of black American literature from the turn of the century to the modern period" is Felipe Smith's American Body Politics: Race, Gender, and the Black Literary Renaissance (Georgia), a rich, comprehensive, and compelling work. It is organized around the trope of "the black 'body of death.' " Much more engaged with literary studies than with the scientific or anatomical texts that it cites, Smith's book significantly traces "the instrumentality of human bodies in the invention in white and black genetic, geographical, social, and cultural space." His goal is to show that early-20th-century pseudo-Darwinists—chief among them William B. Smith, author of the far-reaching The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (1905)—actually spurred African American writers toward the production of a black artistic "renaissance." Smith analyzes the rhetoric of white nationalism and its mythic representations of the body, especially the body of two different woman figures—first, the white woman whose fatality is bound up with her obstruction of black (male) aspiration, and second, the black madonna. Smith's research yields a chronicle of the movement from 19th-century erotic absorption with "the abnormal size of African male genitalia" to a 20th-century obsession with "aberrant female sexual anatomy through Europe's fascination with the literal descendants of the parodic black Venus, the 'Hottentot Venus.' " Smith proceeds to an inspired case for black men's turn-of-the-century regulation of black women by "enshrining" them "as the guiding spiritual force" in the black bourgeois household. Thus they were able to rein in the myth of African voluptuousness—to resist the pseudo-Darwinist promulgation that black extinction (like the vanishing of Native Americans) would follow from biological inferiority—and to assert a powerful black nationalism. Through astute readings of novels by black authors including Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Sutton Griggs, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen, Smith cogently outlines this repugnant paradox: "Without women under constraint, there could be no black patriarchy, but conversely, without a black patriarchy willing and able to police female sexuality, there could be no race-chaste black woman." American Body Politics reveals that complicity in nationalistic mythic notions of the body and in the propaganda that disseminated such myths systematically undercut the very artistic renaissance that drove black America to circumvent the death sentence pronounced on it by racist whites.

ii Narrativity and Culture

Two major African American feminist scholars have taken up the questions that David Savran's Taking It Like a Man raises about the continuing relevance of psychoanalysis to the study of American literature or narrativity. Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (Oxford), believes that "psychoanalysis can tell us much about the complicated social workings of race in the United States and the representations of these workings in the literature of African Americans." Looking primarily at African American novels in which racism or racial protest is not a central or overt concern, Tate's provocative book explores such novels' uses of "complex discourses that reveal what scholars of African American literature have heretofore largely neglected or intentionally suppressed: the residual surplus meaning of unconscious desire." This desire forms part of "an enigmatic presence that produces textual meaning, which in turn complicates the explicit social message of the text." Tate, of course, is well aware of the limitations of psychoanalytic theory and by no means intends to insist on its primacy as a methodology. But by bringing together a number of schools of psychoanalytic thought, she does endeavor to "tap the critical potential of psychoanalysis" as a first step toward revealing "how a black text negotiates the tension between the public, collective protocols of race and private, individual desire." Chapters on W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess (1928) and Richard Wright's Savage Holiday (1954) do perhaps more than this, for in both instances Tate is able to draw on her readings of desire in these novels to shed light on the writers' other works. She finds, for example, that in Dark Princess the linking of the sentimental longing for the lost mother and the eroticizing of racial difference highlights Du Bois's abiding interest in the relationship between propaganda and desire. At a number of points, Tate's study paves the way for further work on desire and identity formation in African American texts, as it marks what may come to represent an important and provocative new direction in feminist and African American literary scholarship.

Barbara Johnson renews her earlier advocacy of a feminist psychoanalytic perspective to carve out a new direction for literary study of African American works in particular. Well aware of the objections to using Freudian "master discourses" in the understanding of works by racialized or minority writers, Johnson sums up her purpose in The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (Harvard) by quoting Jacqueline Rose: "Only the concept of a subjectivity at odds with itself gives back to women the right to an impasse at the point of sexual identity, with no nostalgia whatsoever for its possible future integration into a norm," including, Johnson adds, "any 'norm' that might be wished for by feminism." Johnson overs quick takes on numerous authors, such as Larsen, Wright, and Morrison, by attempting to account for them in conjunction with other writers not normally associated with them. Thus, Johnson looks at Larsen's heroine Helga Crane in terms of Heinz Kohut's theory of "narcissistic personality disorder," at Morrison's concern with castration and loss as a racial and national revision against Freud's concerns with the same things, and at the manner in which, according to Johnson, Patricia Williams inverts Descartes's famous dictum to relocate the subject so that it reads, "I am where I am thought by, and think, the other." The results of Johnson's analysis are provocative and sometimes briefly illuminating, but ultimately the book may be more useful for what it suggests is possible than for any sustained analysis of the broader significance and ideological importance of these peculiar, trans-historical cross-hatchings. Johnson's intention, though, is to provoke further interest in the "intra-psychic processes" so often at work in texts about the twinned psychological and social effects of racism and sexism.

In keeping with Tate and Johnson's reevaluation of institutionalized theory and cultural difference, a number of other feminist scholars extended our awareness of the developing dialogue between narrative theory and women's culture. In editor Sandra Kumamoto Stanley's collection, Other Sisterhoods, feminists reconsider a range of theoretical and textual debates, including the state of identity politics and post-modernist or post-structuralist theory. The essays here acknowledge the wealth of feminist criticism produced in the last two decades, namely, that of bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Audre Lorde. Very little separates the contributors, who continually remind us "that there is no homogenous woman of color voice" and, therefore, a need to "interrogate various modes of theory making." Analouise Keat-ing's essay on identity politics, "(De)Centering the Margins? Identity Politics and Tactical (Re)Naming" (pp. 23-43), in which she argues for the need to unsettle the term, complements Dionne Espinoza's essay on Chicana "teorias" that have consistently proliferated modes of resistance to dominant white middle-class U.S. cultures ("Women of Color and Identity Politics: Translating Theory, Hacienda Teoria," pp. 44-62). So, too, both Renae Moore Bredin's essay on Leslie Marmon Silko and Paula Gunn Allen's mutual creation of a "guerrilla ethnography" in their fiction ("Theory in the Mirror," pp. 228-43) and Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez's "Mothering the Self " (pp. 244-62), a comparative critique of maternality in Lorde and Anzaldúa, remind us of the astonishing prescience of feminist critics who anticipated the questions of post-structuralism with their creation of "playful truths in a multi-vocal exchange." The volume's only shortcoming is the absence of any sustained consideration of the burgeoning feminist work on trans-nationality or globalization. Exploring the obvious debt that this new area owes to the border studies of earlier Chicana scholars is essential, and its inclusion would have expanded the intriguing discussions of territoriality and identity offered in many of the essays.

Focusing on more specific questions of feminist writing, Kathleen M. Donovan and Traise Yamamoto over notable studies of Native American and Japanese American women's writing. Donovan hopes to bridge the conflicts plaguing white and Native American feminists by addressing, with varying degrees of success, the questions: "Who can speak? and how? and under what circumstances? What can be said?" Although these are by now well-rehearsed debates, Donovan in Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice (Arizona) nonetheless overs an able survey of "what women communicate across cultural, class, sexual, national and gendered borders." While her slender volume does not propose to exhaust these issues, it does provide a glimpse of the "interactive, dialogic" negotiation that ensues when white and Native American women write as feminists dedicated to Native rights in fields as diverse as ethnography, ecofeminism, and postcolonialism. Traise Yamamoto's Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (Calif.) has the distinction of being the first book-length study of Japanese American women's writing, and as such, it will merit a place among groundbreaking Asian American feminist texts. It overs a rich interdisciplinary framework, one that remains attentive to both "the specific ways in which Japanese American women construct themselves as subjects and their simultaneous construction as objects in an orientalist discourse." Building on earlier work on silence in Asian American women's writings, Yamamoto establishes the complex means by which "masking" their purposes served women writers who, despite the racialized, gendered discursive networks in the West that curtailed their articulation, both legally and socially, succeeded in constructing a resistant subjectivity.

In Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women's Liberation Movement (Penn.) Lisa Maria Hogeland traces the "increasing metaphorization" of consciousness-raising by marking its "slippage" from " 'hard,' theory-building CR in the early part of the decade to the 'soft,' self-esteem-building CR later on." Her argument is that during the "feminist high renaissance of the 1970s," definitions of "feminism" were as illusory as the many novels (and anthologies like Sisterhood Is Powerful ) labeled "feminist," and that there was no consistency about the ideology any more than there is commonality in the novels or their political agendas. In an engaging conclusion, Hogeland follows the movement of consciousness-raising fictions into film, where she focuses on Thelma and Louise (1991), cleverly applying Thelma's claim that "Somethin's, like, crossed over in me. I can't go back—I just couldn't live" to the "migration" of CR narrative strategies. The film's final scene of the convertible suspended in midair ambiguously depicts the 1980s' backlash against feminism (thus, the "migration" of the genre); one interpretation of it, Hogeland suggests, is that "feminism kills women." The critical reception of Thelma and Louise continues earlier controversies: Thelma figures as the housewife-protagonist of such novels as The Color Purple and The Women's Room, in which an "ordinary" woman is transformed into a woman "awakened" (by hetero/sexual violence). Thus, Thelma and Louise exemplify the genre's failure; they are "the lone rangers of the highways set against the red rock monuments, consciousness raising that can never become transformative political change or do any work, but remains only a fleeting, individual experience of freedom and power."

Thelma and Louise as well as a wide range of other films, including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), Bringing Up Baby (1938), the Mae West films of the 1930s, and Batman Returns (1992), come under scrutiny in Lori Landay's Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture (Penn.). In addition to the film stills and takes from woman-centered TV sitcoms like I Love Lucy and Ellen, the book's engrossing graphics include print advertisements dating back to the early 20th century. Landay discusses these texts' unifying subversion of the patriarchal contention that women like to be adorned and to have their adornment judged as pleasing to men. Although Landay's analysis is never fully satisfying, her project is compelling. It "participates in three scholarly discussions: so-called trickster studies, studies of the development of mass consumer culture in America, and feminist scholarship on the ideology of gender and feminist consciousness in America." Moreover, it sets out to examine "the increasingly permeable boundaries between the public and private spheres and the ideals of femininity against which female tricksters rebel." Locating the female trickster indoors in "the parlors, kitchens, and bedrooms of domesticity," Landay finds that not the more masculinized agonic but a feminized hedonic power permits women's subversion since "Hedonic power is achieved through adornment, display, and indirect methods of control like charisma, withholding of affection or sex, and dependency." Thus, "female tricksters articulate the paradox of femininity and autonomy."

New ideas about American women's domesticity also circulate in Through the Window, Out the Door, in which scholar and novelist Janis P.Stout reads both conventional and unorthodox manifestations of travel and departure, from the (dis)association of home with prison in Mar-ilynne Robinson's Housekeeping to the flying African motif in Morrison's Song of Solomon. Stout argues that critical explorations of the quest should include an analysis of women on the move and that the delineation of women's quest is a limited phenomenon; women writers generally find the articulation of women's mere desire to permeate the borders of their homes sufficient. Her most surprising—and surprisingly cogent—discussion reassesses the writings of Joan Didion (ubiquitous throughout this year's scholarship on 20th-century feminism), especially the feminist-mocking essay "The Women's Movement," as not at all "unidirectional." Stout situates Didion as coterminous with Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov, and she argues that Didion shares some of these poets' most feminist beliefs, including the existence of a link "between private and public concerns—more specifically, between private and public morality." Indeed, Stout contends that Didion is as politically motivated as Toni Morrison, "although in a very different manner." Though "Didion's voice is by far the more acerbic and the less tragic," both writers find "the answer to a spectacle of dispossession and dispersal" in the achievement of a home, a "place" wherein "women may remain because they choose to remain, not because social strictures compel them to."

iii American Girls and Boys

The new emphasis on the figure of the girl speaks to feminist reclamation of a pejorative label for women as well as to investigations of the current state of the conceptualization and treatment of females in U.S. society. The work implies that scholars should resist the temptation to romanticize girlhood as an idyllic or incipient stage of life. We also should not assume that young women's assertion of a girlness or a girl identity á la Riot Grrls will necessarily result in more feminist women—neither an increase in the number of feminists nor in women who conform to feminist principles to a greater degree. In an important article in the feminist journal Signs, "Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth" (Signs 23: 585-610). Gayle Wald defines girl studies as "a subgenre of recent academic feminist scholarship that constructs girlhood as a separate, exceptional, and/or pivotal phase in female identity formation."

Ruth O. Saxton's The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women (St. Martin's) continues earlier studies that combine issues of gender, feminism, and adolescence. Saxton has collected nine essays on the figure of the girl in contemporary American, British, and postcolonial fiction. Most of the analyses draw on some variation of psychoanalytic criticism. Saxton writes in the introduction that many (feminist) scholars responded to her call for 1996 MLA papers and that the diversity and complexity of the response indicated to her a growing feminist interest in ways that women writers develop girl characters. Although "romantic fulfillment or the rejection of romance still propels many of today's fictional young women," today's young women generally diver from their 19th-century counterparts in that earlier girl characters who married into conformity or who developed (mainly sexual) consciousness of their social location were compelled either to die (e.g.,Catherine Earnshaw, Mrs. Ramsey) or to live without reward for their intelligence or vitality (e.g., Dorothea Casaubon). In postmodernist novels, however, the heroines "survive at the cost of denying their own sexuality." Hence, "reaction and active subjectivity" are key areas of difference between 19th- and 20th-century characters. The girls in 20th-century novels like Bastard Out of Carolina and The Bluest Eye notably survive multiple forms of oppression, especially sexual violation.

Saxton writes that her book grows out of her plunge into the same consciousness-raising "feminist books of outrage," like Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, that Lisa Hogeland foregrounds in Feminism and Its Fictions. Saxton finds that "contemporary women authors [subvert] narrative genres in attempts to write with increasing truthfulness about the ways in which girls experience their varied lives." For example, rather than drawing a character as physically beautiful, recent novels tend to interrogate beauty standards as defining an ideal. Thus, girl studies attend to body issues and beauty standards and the myths that surround them as well as to issues of class and colony, "negotiating not only the boundaries of puberty, but also those of nation and language."

In what may well be the most important essay in The Girl, "But That Was in Another Country: Girlhood and the Contemporary 'Coming to America' Narrative" (pp. 135-52), Rosemary Marangoly George examines the weaving together of the coming-of-age plot with a coming-to America narrative by three "minority" authors. Analyzing Mukherjee's Jasmine, Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, and Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, George, like Saxton and Hogeland, ponders "the multifarious tasks performed by 'minority literatures' within the U.S. academy" and concludes that girlhood novels stand to do as much harm as good in terms of transforming contemporary (curricular) attitudes about women of color and transnational people in the United States. For example, the driving sentiment of Kincaid's bildungsroman can be read merely as "adolescent angst" since Lucy has a clichéd conflict with her mother, George argues. George concludes that "mapped onto the coming to America narrative, the coming-of-age genre creates a certain level of readerly tolerance (and dismissal) of rebellion, subversion of authority, and loss of innocence." Moreover, George criticizes Jasmine as a novel that collaborates "in the hegemonic notion of the psychic and linguistic rejections that are necessary to proper Americanization." Such a position is dangerous in U.S. classrooms, where we (often inadvertently) teach American students to exalt their own status as citizens and to insist that "immigrants" accept the values of the dominant society. These novels are as likely to be (mis)read as reifying rather than challenging the politicized mandate for assimilation.

Kay Ferguson Ryals's antisentimentalist reading of Charlotte Temple in "America, Romance, and the Fate of the Wandering Woman: The Case of Charlotte Temple, " pp. 81-105 in Women, America, and Movement, declares Rowson's a "United States post-colonial novel." Her interpretation surprisingly but closely parallels George's reading of Jasmine as a bildungsroman that collapses the coming-to-America plot with the coming-of-age story, especially since Rowson's 1794 novel situates Charlotte en route to America on her birthday. Issues of learning and teaching also obtain in both essays, with Ryals focusing on women's education and on both the power of epistemology and an epistemology of power, and George examining the white supremacist nature of the epistemology implicit in Mukherjee's novel. Also, although she is white, Charlotte's poverty marginalizes her in a society where her female antagonists (e.g., Mrs. Beauchamp) are well-married and therefore propertied. This ostracism links her to the figures of the girl—in some cases, the victim—in Saxton's introduction who, though monied, does not survive because she is (prematurely) wise or knowing or fallen. Ryals effectively argues that Rowson, a professional educator, has written an epistemological novel that criticizes the failure of patriarchy and the new republic to educate women, thereby keeping them dependent. She underscores Rowson's depiction of women's dependent state as a threat both to women's economic and sexual virtue (since they do not learn what they need to protect themselves from knaves like Montraville and Belcour) and to the republic's political virtue.

In the introduction (pp. 575-84) to Signs 23, iii, a special issue on girl studies, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Kathryn R. Kent, and France Winddance Twine assert their intention to examine ways that the "connotations of youth—agency, change, rebellion, optimism" influence, "innovate," and "renovate" contemporary interdisciplinary feminist scholarship. Defining girls as females between the ages of 13 and 30, they make an exception for Jessica Dubrov, who died at age seven. In "Girls Who Act Like Women Who Fly: Jessica Dubrov as Cultural Troublemaker" (pp. 771- 808) Sarah Projansky situates the media attention paid to the girl among "a spate of discourses on the subject [that] continues to emerge, including, for example, girls in beauty pageants (e.g., JonBenet Ramsey), girls in the Olympics (e.g., Dominique Moceanu), girl tennis phenoms (e.g.,Martina Hingis and Venus Williams), girl heroines on television (e.g.,Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo; and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and self-help books such as Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls [by Mary Pipher]." Projansky and other contributors to Signs critique a U.S. anxiety about girls, specifically about losing girls and losing girlhood. Projansky's work is a splendid reading of the media coverage of Dubrov 's death, comparing it to that of the deaths of Amelia Earhart and of JonBenet Ramsey. In her analysis of JonBenet, Projansky interrogates the media tendency to draw Dubrov as a baby lesbian, neglected by her "wild" mother to the point of denying her femininity and girlhood. JonBenet, conversely, has been hypersexualized and hyperfeminized by the same media. Projansky reads both cases as reifying dangerous norms about who girls are and what constitutes girlhood, in the process not only laying down the law about gender norms and gender outlaws but also linking these girls' deaths to an American motherhood run amok.

Another Signs article, Michele Byers's "Gender/Sexuality/Desire: Subversion of Difference and Construction of Loss in the Adolescent Drama of My So-Called Life " (Signs 23: 711-34), reads the implications of race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality issues as developed in the short-lived 1994-95 television show to demonstrate how the status quo operates. Like Projansky's exposé of the vilification of Jessica Dubrov 's mother, Byers's analysis reveals that the idea(l) of the standard North American family "comes to mean safety or a necessary protection against the . . . dangers that in the text are written onto the bodies of those characters who do not come under [its] protection." Although she admires My So-Called Life 's brave representation of issues generally ignored in mainstream TV (particularly a teenage girl's movement between social groups and her insistence on her right to determine when and with whom she will become sexually active), Byers argues persuasively that in My So-Called Life "difference is associated with pain, subjugation, and exclusion from the nostalgically coveted community of middle-class life." And castigating viewing audiences' noxious "will to purity," Byers further argues that "the mystification of its hegemonic structures allows" the program "to be taken by people who are racist, classist, or homophobic and who see the essentialist moments of the text as reinforcing their value system. It also allows good people to reinscribe their racism, classism, or homophobia as unconscious but commonsense truths."

Byers identifies a psychosocial continuum of sexuality in My So-Called Life, at one end of which the idealized central character, Angela (as in angel) Chase, is positioned, and at the other the show's most problematic character, Rickie Vasquez, "a poor, Catholic, Latino boy who is gay and lives with his [white] teacher because he has been abused." She further infers that because "Rickie's sexuality is predicated more on his behavior and dress than on any explicit sexual contact with other men," the show thereby reinforces "the notion that homosexuality is an adult terrain." This conclusion interestingly counters inferences about childhood and homosexuality put forth by Catrióna Rueda Esquibel in another Signs article, "Memories of Girlhood: Chicana Lesbian Fictions" (Signs 23:645-81), and the difference undoubtedly has everything to do with gender. The (homo)sexual agency and experience that Byers contends Rickie lacks, Esquibel cogently argues is written into the experiences of the central characters of four novels by Chicana writers—two of whom (Sandra Cisneros and Denise Chávez) do not identify themselves as lesbian and whose novels (The House on Mango Street and The Last of the Menu Girls, respectively) are not explicitly lesbian texts. Esquibel shows how Cisneros, Chávez, Terri de la Péna, and Emma Pérez all depict their characters as developing a lesbian sexual orientation while they are yet girls: "In Chicana contexts, girlhood is a space and time before the imposition of normative heterosexuality and, as such, provides a site for texts to stage lesbian desires." Perhaps this difference between Byers's and Esquibel's findings points to differences between the sexual development of boys and girls as inscribed on television by white screenwriters and producers in contrast to that inscribed in fiction by Latina writers. In other words, the fearfulness of white male writers and producers leads to a pathologizing of the boy's character that does not materialize in the girls'.

In a study destined to provoke controversy, James R. Kincaid in Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Duke) analyzes the figure of the girl from a very different angle. Kincaid focuses on points of change or heretofore neglected areas of Gothic American culture, highlighting the Gothic obsession with the victimized, innocent child, a fascination that clearly shapes contemporary television news coverage. Kincaid argues that the repetitive or "cyclic" elements of Gothic narratives simultaneously fetishize and deny the sexualization of children. Thus, he calls to mind the media's surrealistic coverage of the JonBenet Ramsey murder case. In the extreme, the failure to deconstruct and confront the appeal of these narratives may result in the neglect of less sensationalized forms of child abuse: hunger, abandonment, and illiteracy, to name a few. In this way Kincaid links the widely recognized psychological effects of Gothic narratives to a realm of continuing political and social problems. Erotic Innocence is a sobering and important investigation of the historical persistence of our interest in stories of children and abuse and Gothic narrative.

Although the book is not restricted to girls, Gail Schmunk Murray's American Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood (Twayne) extends research on the figure of the girl. From the first chapter (on Christian and moral lessons from 1690 to 1810), Murray cites rare children's books: she opens with a 1691 advertisement that "comprises the earliest information extant on the best-known children's book of the entire British colonial era in North America, the New England Primer. " Murray puts her dazzling archival finds to good use; the writing is rich, the scholarship solid, and the analysis incisive as she argues that "the meaning of childhood is socially constructed and that its meaning has changed over time." American Children's Literature is arranged (loosely) in chronological order and surveys the themes addressed by children's books to instruct children in the transformation of their real and actual lives into ideal, exemplary lives. Murray traces the influence of the nation's shifting political hegemony on what and how children learn. For example, in the Puritan era, books emphasized "preparation for adult religious discernment," and after the Revolutionary War those republican (and capitalist) virtues put forth by John Newberry and John Locke as essential to the New Nation's citizenry—"self-sacrifice, honesty, dependability, charity, and thrift." Thus, Murray proves that the image of the child has changed from era to era in American history. Little Eva, Huck Finn, Laura Ingalls, and other figures represent the nation's conflicted attitude toward children: Murray contends that it is not clear, for example, whether Twain intends Huckleberry Finn and its eponymous hero to satirize (white) Reconstruction values or to illustrate their absurdity. While children's books between the world wars sustained the basic values of family love, the doctrine of separate gender spheres, condescension toward stereotyped people of color, social conformity, and acceptance of death, Murray reads a "cataclysm" in early 1960s' children's literature, marked by "a dramatic turn away from the family story [of Dick and Jane books] . . . to embrace the 'problem novel.' " This upheaval, she claims, is steeped in belief that children possess "the inner resources to handle emotional pain"—in other words, that just like colonial American adults, contemporary adults tend to regard children ambiguously as both miniature incarnations of their imperfect selves and tabulae rasae on which to practice the perfection of the next generation. Although she overlooks Lucille Clifton's acclaimed Everett Anderson series (1970-83), Murray's gender, race, and class analyses are astute, and her critique of ethnic stereotypes aligns her with those scholars whose work attends to the figure of the girl. An undercurrent that advocates against American white supremacy and imperialism distinguishes Murray's work. Thus, these scholars not only express concern for the fate of the nation at the end of the 20th century, but more specifically they locate the hope of the nation in progressive, healthier attitudes toward children and toward the representation no less than the reality of children's lives.

Michael Moon's eclectic A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Duke) explores the proto-gay influence of imitation and initiation in the boy-hoods of central male cultural figures, some of whom were gay but many of whom were not. Although Moon acknowledges that the obsession with the performance of maleness often evokes an undeniable sense of "queerness," he is too scrupulous in his analysis to limit the meanings and effects of such boyhood rituals to questions of sexuality alone. Instead, Moon overs an engaging historical portrait of the traditions and customs of the intimate realm of American boyhood and its simultaneous impact on men's sexual identity and their forays into art and culture.

With an economy of detail, Margit Stange in Personal Property: Wives, White Slaves, and the Market in Women (Hopkins) makes a compelling argument for the significance of female sacrifice, which predominates in women's turn-of-the-century writing, as indicative of the social and economic circulation of women as property. In essays on the work of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Jane Addams, Stange explores "the period's near-obsession with the view that in the booming market economy of the twentieth century" the exchange of white women's virtue and innocence articulated anxieties about consumer capitalism and a longing for so-called "natural" or presocial woman as a counter to the figure of the New Woman. The ruin of the nation's cultural innocence was effectively incarnated in stories of the debasement of young white women. For feminists as well as critics of American literature, Stange's concise study is an important contribution to theories of American literary realism and women's culture.

iv Genres and Tropes

a. Autobiography and Biography

Barbara Rodríguez's "On the Gate-post: Literal and Metaphorical Journeys in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, " pp. 235-57 in Women, America, and Movement, argues that "Dust Tracks documents the constructions of a self that attests its subjectivity by bridging both public and private, realistic and imaginary spaces, and by surviving physical and psychic dislocation and relocation through the processes of narration." This interesting reading of Hurston's autobiography centers on the death of Hurston's mother and the depression that she endured afterward, as expressed through her identification with the Gospel figure Lazarus. Rodríguez compares Dust Tracks to other American autobiographies and demonstrates "the relation between context—place and the communal voice associated with place—and the self that emerges in the text." Cogently arguing that Hurston's narrator positions her readers in dual roles as both listeners and interpreters of her autobiography, Rodríguez writes: "Instead of calling attention to reliance on memory in that construction [of narra-tive], the visions call into question Hurston's own position as subject of her text and serve as metaphors for a fragmented self and for the self as sign and interpreter; in fact, the visions effectively literalize the fragmentation of the self that they both foretell and document."

The self in the text also emerges in Crispin Sartwell's Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity (Chicago), in which he works from his own position as white, middle-class, and mid Atlantic American to detail his formative experience as an adolescent who is both committed to enacting "progressive" politics and assimilating black culture and to "passing" within white, "red-neck culture"—a culture that he describes as producing a "pleasure of power" which derives "simply [from] not being black." Thus, Sartwell introduces his thesis: that whites "attend to the autobiographies of black people" to the exclusion of more "theoretical" expressions, in order "to remove . . . those [black] voices from the space of authoritative theory." What Sartwell hopes to undermine is the tendency of "European American male theoretical production [to] fail to acknowledge its sources in personal experience . . . its location in the social situation of privilege and oppression." As a result, Sartwell's book blends theoretical and autobiographical elements and sees the study of African American autobiography as about black experience as well as an invaluable critique of white racism that helps to make visible the process of the construction of the white subject.

b. Sentimentalism

In Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton) Bruce Burgett draws, perhaps too heavily, on the theory of Jürgen Habermas to cite a paradox central to sentimental literature: that the body "is both critically utopian and deeply ideological." Burgett acknowledges that "Sentimental Bodies enacts a similar paradox. It traces the history of the modern body to a sentimental ideology that, by naturalizing publicly mediated taxonomies through recourse to the immediacy of 'feeling,' masks the political power located at the 'heart' of both the body and the body politic. It also deploys the body, or more precisely, the various sensations that bodies express as unpredictable points of structural resistance to the corporeal-ization of those ideological codes." Burgett returns to the Revolutionary War period to read sentimental texts by men, though his focus is primarily on women. At one point he overs a captivating reading of correspondence between Abigail Adams and John Quincy Adams; the section, titled "Loose Letters" (punning on the couple's concern with an insecure post), illustrates Burgett's sage decision to read men and women writing sentimental fiction in opposition to each other.

Laura H. Korobkin's Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery (Columbia) poses two important sets of critical questions, both of which will transform studies of sentimental discourse. "One set of questions interrogates the relationship between trial process and narration in real life. Who is authorized to speak, and who sits silent in the courtroom?" The second set asks about women's empowerment as speakers in court: "do they figure primarily as objects in stories told to and by men?" Furthermore, Korobkin investigates the effects of "the past century's changes in America's images of women, sexuality, and marriage, particularly as those images are discursively embodied in its literary narratives." In short, how have women's relations to the law changed? What sets this study apart is its contention that for all the mythically masculinized emphasis on the rational, the most effective courtroom stories are in fact profoundly sentimental. Korobkin cogently argues that law is all about stories and that lawyers' stories, like novelists', are used "to elicit deeply emotional, personal responses" from readers and jurors. Her concentration on adultery cases further sets this book apart. "Criminal Conversations is not a theme study of fictions dealing with sexual infidelity," she writes. "Yet my analysis is deeply engaging with literary fictions and with literary genres and modes of storytelling." Perhaps Korobkin's greatest contribution is her reminder that sentimental readers read to respond: "the success or failure of a sentimental text can be gauged by the intensity of response it elicits. . . .Sentimental texts thus interpret the lives of their readers." Thus, rhetorical maneuvers disrupt the narrative flow, whether in the courtroom, the bedroom, or the reading room.

Rosemary Marangoly George's hefty Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity (Westview) not only reproduces such landmark articles on sentimentalism as Nancy Armstrong's 1991 "When Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism" (pp. 23-46), but also presents new approaches to sentimental rhetoric. These accounts are especially notable—and transformative—for their postcolonial emphasis, as in Aparajita Sagar's "Repetition and Unhousing in Nawal El-Saadawi" (pp. 170-86), Gayatri Gopinath's "Homo-Economics: Queer Sexualities in a Transnational Frame" (pp. 102-24) and, closer to home, Ann duCille's "Domesticity and the Demon Mother: A Review Essay of Sorts" (pp. 270-97).

c. The Gothic

While the dispute continues over whether the Gothic represents a genuine genre of literature or simply an aesthetic sensibility, scholarly interest in Gothic forms remains strong. This year's criticism on Gothic literature represents a range of theoretical schools and historical periods. Clive Bloom's Gothic Horror: A Reader's Guide from Poe to King and Beyond (St. Martin's) anticipates and to some extent attempts to give shape to the shifts in Gothic works. In a slender survey of 19th- and 20th-century writers and critics, Gothic Horror manages to cast a wide net that covers the esoteric ( Julia Kristeva) as well as the popular (V. C.Andrews). Bloom's volume serves as a reliable primer on the evolution and development of the Gothic and its critics, particularly for neophytes.

Examining critical scholarship in American Gothic literature, Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy's anthology of essays, American Gothic, advocates a view of Gothic American literature as "a poetics" that unsettles and subverts subjectivities, including national identity, rather than a closed genre that substantiates the idea of a unified national letters. The essays in this volume include critiques of literary and filmic narratives, with an emphasis on the enduring link between the Gothic and racial identity across a century's worth of American representations. Sections on the theory and history of the Gothic, psychoanalysis, racial politics, women's narratives, and the postmodern testify to the historical breadth of the essays. George Piggford's "Looking into Black Skulls: American Gothic, the Revolutionary Theatre, and Amiri Baraka's Dutchman " (pp. 143-60) opens new territory by taking literary criticism of the Gothic beyond 19th-century sentimental fictions that are usually cited as the primary African American Gothic texts and into an engagement with contemporary performance or dramatic literature by African Americans. In addition, intriguing essays attend to the cultural dilemma of Gothic literature's mass appeal, which William Veeder explores in "The Nurture of the Gothic, or How Can a Text Be Both Popular and Subversive?" (pp. 20-39) and on the relationship between the rise of postmodernism and the Gothic by Steven Bruhm ("On Stephen King's Phallus: Or, The Postmodern Gothic," pp. 75-96) and Jodey C. Cas-tricano ("If a Building Is a Sentence, So Is a Body: Kathy Acker and the Postcolonial Gothic," pp. 202-14), who overs a rich consideration of the potential in Acker's Empire of the Senseless (1988) for a postmodern, postcolonial Gothicism not ensnared in the "epistemological and ontological binary oppositions" so common to Gothic American fiction. Castricano's critique of postmodern Gothic follows and resonates with Piggford's reading of Baraka's revolutionary 1964 Dutchman in which blackness "signifies virtue and naiveté, whiteness vice and disingenuousness." Castricano's and Piggford's combined suggestion, that Gothic visions are potentially subversive, is partially undermined by David Punter, who in Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body, and the Law (St. Martin's) confidently and simply claims that "Gothic is the paradigm of all fiction, all textuality" since "the form of the haunting" unique to Gothic literature is "the form of all textuality." As such, according to Punter, Gothic elements always invoke the law and psychology, "the rival regimes" of surveillance and the imaginary, in ways that can both affect and reflect cultural shifts and anxieties. Although Punter primarily examines the British roots of Gothic literature and law, his book comments on the power to alter social visions of self/other that some critics perceive as the most compelling aspect of the Gothic.

The terror and violence of murder, and the historical roots of our national fascination with it, are the subjects of Karen Halttunen's worthy study of the rise of Gothic narratives of murder in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Harvard) Halttunen isolates the reasons for the rise of the Gothic story of violent murders in the crisis of Enlightenment liberalism, which failed to explain the origins and causes of such human cruelty. Gothic "conventions" "affirmed the ultimate incomprehensibility of any given crime of murder, in sharp contrast to the execution sermon's unproblematic acceptance of the nature of the act and the guilt of the condemned murderer." The melding of the Gothic to the crime of murder also "proved central to the modern liberal construction of the concept of criminal deviance" as, in the words of Charles Dickens, "a horrible wonder apart" and shaped the institutional and cultural approach to murder and murderers. Halttunen's study is particularly interested in the gender politics of murder, including the "pornography of murder" or the way in which "images of the body in pain and death" were increasingly used "to arouse . . . repugnance" and thus position the reader as the voyeur who derived an implicit guilty pleasure from the visual and narrative reconstruction of the crime's details. Murder Most Foul also explores narratives of domestic murders, which "affirmed the new domesticity [of the 19th century] in terrifying tales of people who violated its tenets," as well as the subject of female murderers, who were perceived at the time as "moral monstrosities," "fallen angels" who had abdicated their natural position as the moral standard bearers of society to the peril of us all; even the female victim of murder was routinely "demonized" as a creature whose "peculiar sexual characteristics" had somehow precipitated her own murder. In this sense, the Gothic serves the function of paradoxically exposing the potential for human cruelty as well as enforcing society's most restrictive and oppressive codes. This is clearly different from arguments for the subversive possibilities of Gothic representations made in American Gothic and Gothic Pathologies. Halt-tunen's book is a fascinating and well-researched piece of literary history, a contribution to theories of the Gothic, feminist studies of criminality and madness, literary histories of domestic and sentimental narratives, and interdisciplinary cultural studies of violence and deviance in contemporary America. She anticipates the currency of her topic in an epilogue that manages to invoke the connections between this early Gothic literature and the omnipresence of TV "true" crime shows like America's Most Wanted, which, however removed, owes a debt to the history that Halttunen vividly recaptures.

Susan J. Navarette's The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence (Kentucky), which looks primarily at English horror fiction from the 19th century, also contributes to an understanding of the considerable Gothic aspects of American Gothic works, notably those of Henry James. Like Kincaid, Navarette is interested in the evasions of bodily or sexual realities made possible by Gothic effects. She finds that the scientific discoveries of the time influenced writers immensely, as those findings "expressed the pervasive fear that the otherwise pleasant-looking human body" might camouflage alien "horrors spiritual and material." In James, the degeneration of bodies is paralleled by linguistic degeneration, which the narrator laments in "The Turn of the Screw," for example, in the form of an eerie nostalgia for "the dear old sacred terror."

v Pedagogy and the Future of the Field

Steven Mailloux's Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics (Cornell) continues the discussion of the relationship between critical and literary theory and politics that Mailloux initiated last year in Rhetorical Power. In this year's offering, he turns his attention to tracing the history of reception theories, including critical or poststructuralist theory, rhetorical or cultural studies, and the theory of multiculturalism or cultural politics, and he reveals the historical continuities among these usually separate areas of interest. Reception Histories "uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history" and in so doing promotes a radical transformation of the humanities by concentrating on the study of theory as "the study of textual effects, of their production and reception." In a fascinating chapter with implications for 19th-century scholars, "Ideological Rhetoric and Bible Politics: Fuller Reading Douglass," Mailloux analyzes Margaret Fuller's 1845 reading of Frederick Douglass's Narrative in order to demonstrate how "an act of reading is precisely the historical intersection of the different cultural rhetorics for interpreting such texts within the social practices of particular historical communities." Mailloux also overs "a meta-critical narrative" that situates his own reading within the changing theories of reading of the past two decades in an example of the rich, layered historical theorizing that distinguishes his work and that promotes a powerful new critical inter-disciplinarity, as advocating a deep, self-critical awareness in academic and pedagogical work.

In addition to Mailloux's continued work to bridge the divisions of knowledge that plague the discussion of theory and history, Michael F.Bernard-Donal's The Practice of Theory: Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in the Academy (Cambridge) makes an important contribution to American literary studies in that it critiques contemporary rhetoric/ composition theories as having inadequately examined questions of ontology and epistemology that pertain to the nature of rhetoric; therefore, recent theories are too limited to be politically effective. Thus Bernard returns to classical texts of rhetoric to argue cogently for a liberationist pedagogy, although Josefina Figueira-McDonough et al., The Role of Gender in Practice Knowledge (Garland), notes the invisibility of women in the curriculum and in curriculum development despite such a context. Bernard's chapters on the Los Angeles riots and the act of redescription are particularly engaging. Michael F. Bernard-Donals and Richard R. Glejzer's Rhetoric in an Anti-Foundationalist World (Yale) argues that language does not reflect the real but creates it. Truth is a set of accepted practices, largely rhetorical ones, and the formulation of knowledge is discursive. By the same token, all discursive practice is pedagogical because it proposes a theory of reality. Therefore, efforts to link theory and pedagogy are reasonable and necessary.

vi Sexualities

Reflecting the current interest in the intersections of masculinity, nation, and sexuality—which only promises to grow as the 21st century begins—two anthologies emerge to suggest the significance and possible parameters of a gay male canon in American letters. Reed Woodhouse's Unlimited Embrace (Mass.) presents a personal experience of gay writing since the end of World War II. According to Woodhouse, the development of gay writing in the United States may be mapped into "five houses" of literature, which more or less proceeded from each other. First, there was simply "closet literature," followed by "proto-ghetto" works that anticipated the defiant stance of the third, crucial house of "ghetto literature" produced from out of gay, urban enclaves that resisted the petty censure of "straight" America. The fourth and fifth houses, which are, respectively, the "assimilative" or "homosexual" texts of the 1980s and the recent, transgressive "queer" works of the '90s, followed this golden age of "ghetto literature." Woodhouse's purpose is to construct a canon that reflects the everyday culture and political transformations of gay men in America, a venture that owes much to Woodhouse's personal journey as a member of the first generation of gay men to experience political and social visibility in the "ghetto literature" that grew out of the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature:Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Byrne R. S. Fone (Columbia) overs a decidedly more comprehensive and formal survey of gay male writing that is especially useful for its historical and national breadth and its inclusion of personal and political essays in addition to fiction, poetry, and drama.

In Female Masculinity (Duke) Judith Halberstam overs a dissenting and corrective perspective on the myths and fantasies about masculinity that have made masculinity and maleness excruciatingly difficult to pry apart. Her provocative book both examines female contributions to the construction of masculinity and views "female masculinity" as a mark of the proliferation of masculinities. In particular, her well-historicized chapters on gender ambiguity and female-female desire in America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries form a solid foundation for her excellent reading of the novels of Radclyffe Hall.

vii Literature and Science

In " 'Professional Truths': A Reading of Literature and Medicine" (EAS 27: 1-22) Lisa J. Fluet observes that the crisis of the humanities in an era that increasingly emphasizes the importance of technological and scientific advances has been "to regain some of the educational ascendancy and social benefit claimed for the field by Matthew Arnold, but largely lost to the theoretical and applied sciences in the twentieth century." If as Bruce Robbins once sarcastically argued, to the literary critic "it was all narrative" in the end, then literary scholars surely suppose the study of literature must have a primary function in all areas of intellectual endeavor. Reminding us of the important work that has been done in the field of literature and medicine since the early 1980s, including the founding of the journal Literature and Medicine and the controversial Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (1997) by Elaine Showalter, Fluet asks not only that we continue to pursue scholarship on the narrativity of medical diagnoses but also raises the question of how literary studies endeavor "to join its 'knowledge-products' with other, apparently unrelated, disciplines." The delightful irony—and perhaps also vanity of viewing science as narrative only—is that the utter erosion of Western trust in the unity and stability of language over the last century is now followed by an insistence on the continuing power of language or narrative in securing the jurisdiction of medicine, science, and technology. The "professional truths" in Fluet's title, taken from Showalter's sardonic use of the term to suggest how scientific "truths" are enabled by an almost subconscious blending of physical evidence and cultural story lines, must refer to the illusions perpetuated by both science and literature and the inevitable compromises that must be made if two such divided disciplines are to address the interrelated means by which they make meaning and contribute to a cultural atmosphere. We must, for instance, consider how our national literary or narrative modes, no less than our literary criticism or canons, are justified by scientific changes or how they respond to technological trends.

Tim Armstrong's Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge) is an important step in this direction, as it explores how rapid technological advances, which have so altered perceptions of the body in early 20th-century American culture, have helped shape the aesthetic philosophy of modernism. The growth of industrial sciences and economies as well as medical practices results in a restructuring of the body's boundaries and, inevitably, its function and meaning. Modernity arrived to bring "both a fragmentation and augmentation of the body in relation to technology; it overs the body as lack, at the same time as it overs technological compensation." As a result, "modernist texts have a particular fascination with the limits of the body, either in terms of its mechanical functioning, its energy levels, or its abilities as a perpetual system." Armstrong reads the effects of artists' awareness of and anxiety about the crises surrounding the body in their literary works, including the auto-facial constructions that appear in Mina Loy's poems, the many asides about electricity in Sister Carrie, and the importance of Henry James's belief in "the chewing cure" as an aid to proper digestion to his production of narratives that often obsessively ruminate on detail after detail. Armstrong's book is successful at turning questions of narrative to an engagement with the material changes wrought on daily existence. It asks literary critics to pay greater attention to the significance of medical or scientific information about the body for the literary construction of the body.

The body as an unstable social construction and a site of resistance is also the focus of The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science (NYU), in which editors Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, and Constance Penley have collected essays from medical doctors and activists as well as academic scholars. The obvious importance of gender differences in the social circulation of the body, an area of inquiry missing from Armstrong's study, is the focal point in a compelling interdisciplinary approach to exploring the lived body's importance in determining our relationships to institutions like medicine and the humanities. Although the anthology overs no sustained studies of the body and narrativity or literary texts, its insights into the historical and political motivations for the shifts in our discursive networks for representing the body come from critics both inside and outside the humanities. As such, The Visible Woman advances the feminist investment in science and literature that, in the past, has included the work of Donna Haraway and Elizabeth Fox-Keller. Similarly, Lisa Cartwright's "Community and the Public Body in Breast Cancer Media Activism" (Cultural Studies 12: 117-38) focuses on the relationship between U.S. health cultures and media representation. In particular, Cartwright highlights the representations of prosthetic surgery after mastectomy as portrayed in film, television, and print. She argues that reconstructive surgery is portrayed as necessary to "return" the female body to its normative state of public viewing. This marks the erasure of disease from the damaged/ non-normative female body, making community identity among survivors problematic. In addition, she identifies the representation of breast cancer as raced; that is, black women's bodies are exposed (in imitation of the medical use of the black body for study) for white viewership, while white women's experiences remain private.

The politics of scientific discourse and media representation are also exposed for distorting, perhaps irrevocably, the regional dimensions of the debate over Darwinism. Ronald L. Numbers's Darwinism Comes to America (Harvard) argues that "Historians of Darwinism have paid far too little attention . . . to regional and denominational variations" in assessments of Darwin. Numbers sets out to demonstrate that "the common misrepresentation of two or three celebrated incidents in the American South has led to the portrayal of that region as distinctively hostile to Darwin," a portrayal he finds misleading. Moreover, such regional misrepresentation has yielded a variety of additional myths, Numbers contends, including that Fundamentalists generally dislike and fear science more than do other religious sects and that "social class played a greater role than theology in influencing religious responses to evolution." By focusing on the (in)famous 1925 Scopes trial, and comparing it to the O. J. Simpson murder trial, Numbers shows "the distorting effects not only of regional prejudice but of willful ignorance of the beliefs of Fundamentalists." His reliance on the original records of the Scopes trial makes this a highly valuable defense of both a region and the history of science and literature.

viii Territories and Transnationalisms: Borderlands Redux

If, as the "No More Separate Spheres!" issue of American Literature suggests, American literary scholarship must confront the limitations of its methodological conventions, then surely the continuing interest in transnationalism and the globalization of culture points the way to a radical reconsideration of many of the assumptions that have validated the national study of literature. Although most of the work on globalization continues to be concerned with contemporary culture (including two recent volumes on global cultural studies, The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi [Duke] and Sassen Saskia's Globalization and Its Discontents [New Press]), the study of the effects of globalization on 19th-century literary culture is also increasing. In Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism (Duke) Thomas Peyser argues that global pressures influenced late-19th-century writers who attempted to reconceive the world in terms of a human rather than a national solidarity. Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, both of whom are remembered for their utopian fictions, as well as realists like Henry James and William Dean Howells, were each struggling to define an early indication of the globalization to come, although Peyser is right to point out that rather than hailing a new global order, these writers instead "paved the way for such a conception by thinking of it as, in Bridgeman's phrase, an 'organic unity.' "

Most of the work on global or transnational culture, however, continues to be concentrated in Asian and Asian American studies, where two new books on Asian American literature reveal the undeniable evects of transnational theory on the field. Sheng-mei Ma's Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (SUNY) tackles the issue directly by pointing out the status of immigrancy has been vital to distinguishing the critical power of Asian American subjec-tivities. Whether Asian Americans "claim" American status or exist suspended in what Ma terms a peculiar form of "immigrant schizophrenia," the memory or sense of displacement and marginalization remains. Although Jinqi Ling in Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (Oxford) and David Leiwei Li over analyses of the importance of national citizenship and identity on the narrative conventions and literary history of Asian American writing, their analyses also admit the influence of theories of Asian transnational-ism on the study of Asian American literature. In Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford) Li investigates and expands Lisa Lowe's influential claim that Asian American cultural production bears the burden of the contradictions of American citizenship, which hinge on the necessity of permitting Asian labor while simultaneously advocating the exclusion of Asians from national belonging. Li illuminates the specific narrative effects of this recognition by Asian American writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee, and David Wong Louie, each of whom attempts to deal with "the dilemma of Asian American cultural intelligibility in the nation." Ideally, Li argues, "the notions of difference and diaspora can then meaningfully bring out the important contradictions within both 'Asia-Pacific' and 'Asian America' that do not diminish the function of the state." The increasing focus on transnationalism in Asian American culture promises, then, to disrupt forever the field's original investment in "claiming" a native American identification in favor of confronting the much more complex interrelationships of U.S. imperialism in Asia and anti-Asian discrimination at home, as well as the class distinctions and labor practices that mark the boundaries between a desired and maligned Asian presence in the United States.

The concentration on "boundaries" or on the borders that distinguish territories of influence is, of course, not new in literary studies, which recognize that a rich tradition of regionalist writing informs national identity. Elizabeth Ammons and Valerie Rohy have collected some of these writings in their anthology American Local Color Writing, 1880-1920 (Penguin). In their introduction the editors point out that the "issues of social control, self-determination, and conflicting definitions of Americanness have in many ways dominated the United States at the turn of the century." In "Sector vs. Nation: The Missouri Compromise and the Rise of American Literature" (REALB 14: 223-40) Robert Levine demonstrates the particular means by which the debates on the Missouri Compromise "were crucial to the reconstruction of American literary nationalism during the 1820s and 1830s." Levine argues that the War of 1812 and the Missouri controversy revealed that as late as the early 19th century "there was hardly one national narrative." David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1830) is cited as evidence of the tensions between nationalism ("our country") and an early sense of transnationalism ("our enslaved brethren all over the world"). In fact, the effect of Walker's text is that it leads to the concentration on an African American canon that "pays greater attention to such writers as Garnet, Delany, and Shadd Cary, who similarly addressed connections between nationalism and transnationalism, and racial and geographical borders." It is important, then, to see "competing nationalisms" at stake in the "rise" of American literature.