Prospects for the Study of American Literature (II) (review)

Volumes in the AMS Studies in Modern Literature Series are always welcome items on reference library shelves. They're handy volumes to be consulted by upper-level and graduate students, who are casting about for a workable and interesting paper topic; and they're also good places to go to when one is stretching oneself or revisiting ground not plowed since one's own student days. This volume is no exception. The essays, organized chronologically by author, and written by prolific and respected experts in the field, offer more or less explicitly a brief biography and overview of the oeuvre, a reception and/or critical history of the author's works, and a survey of recent trends in scholarship together with calls for new directions in the same.

Three essays in particular stand out as being of interest to readers of Studies in American Naturalism: "Frank Norris," by Eric Carl Link; "Jack London," by Jeanne Campbell Reesman; and "Theodore Dreiser," by Paul A. Orlov. All have value and offer points of absorbing interest. The devil in writing essays of this sort is to avoid a deadly lecturing mode while at the same time clearly offering the reader in search of "prospects" signposts toward them. Link manages this with a conversational and sometimes speculative essay that balances consideration of the brevity of Norris's career and correspondingly limited creative output against the "wide open" fields of inquiry available, from pedagogical methods to studies of Norris's influence on later generations to newly theoretically informed considerations of Norris's peculiar intelligences and the impact of his educational environment and early training on his own aesthetic. Reesman takes a more methodical approach to London in a highly informative essay that ends by making a compelling argument for rethinking everything from biography to textual scholarship. Theodore Dreiser, arguably the most extensively and continuously written-about of the trio, finds Orlov calling for more: more bibliography, more, and more particularized, biographical studies, more scholarly forays into new media, and, laudably, more explicitly theoretical handlings of the oeuvre, particularly from Lacanian and gender studies perspectives. Having browsed all three, the reader emerges with a sense of energy, urgency, and possibility.

The down side of projects such as Perspectives (II) lies in the limited palette of writers whose prospects for study are canvassed. The essays run the gamut from James Fenimore Cooper to Eudora Welty, with a heavy emphasis on writers of prose fiction: of the fifteen writers included, eleven are primarily novelists or short story writers. There are only two poets, both women: Marianne Moore and Emily Dickinson. One playwright, Eugene O'Neill, and Margaret Fuller, who exists in a category all her own, round out the contents. Women make up only one-third of the total, with Louisa May Alcott the second of two fiction writing women; two of the novelists are African-American men, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. The first Perspectives was similarly limited to other of the usual suspects. Excellent as these essays are, helpful as the apparatus is, including a useful introduction by Kopley, the reader curious for prospects encounters a limited canon of American writers not markedly different from one s/he might have encountered ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago. But even acknowledging that limitation, this is a book worth perusing.