Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (review)

120Reviews the importance of race and ethnicity to the anti-Catholic literary tradition with which Griffin is interested. Written while the young Evans lived in San Antonio, Texas during the Mexican American War, Inezdepicts an earlier struggle for independence—the Republic of Texas' struggle for independence against Mexico and Santa Anna, whom Evans identifies as "the tyrant who had subverted the liberties of [their] country" (154). The arch villain, Father Mazzolin, thus comes to represent the despotism not only of Catholic, but of Mexican, rule. Because Griffin is interested in U.S./British anti-Catholic interactions, the ways in which U.S. anti-Catholicism might be in dialogue with French Canadian and South American catholic traditions are beyond the scope of her project. Yet such influences at times intrude into her project, raising questions that will no doubt generate further studies on anti-Catholicism. Griffin's closing reading of Disraeli, James, and Howells shows how anti-Catholic discourse, by late century, became widely dispersed throughout non-polemical Anglo-American writing. This ambitious and suggestive account of Disraeli's Lothair(1870), Howells' A Foregone Conclusion (1874), and James's The American (1877) shows the important part that anti-Catholicism plays in these writers' efforts to shape their professional writerly identities in the 1870s. Such a reading suggests that anti-Catholicism continued to exert a generative influence on prose that was not overtly engaged with religious debates, and thus that it infiltrated writing that seems at first reading to be entirely secular. We see one example of this influence in Griffin's final commentary on American women's regional writing. Harkening often nostalgically back to an earlier era, Mary Ward's Helbeck (1898), Mary Wilkins Freeman's "A New England Nun" (1891), and Alice Dunbar Nelson's "Sister Josepha" (1899), for example, illustrate how religious fiction becomes secularized at the end of the Victorian era. Yet as Griffin has made clear, this seeming secularization suggests the enduring , important influence that earlier anti-Catholic narratives have exerted , and continue to exert, on U.S. and British writing. Rice UniversityCaroline Levander Brickhouse, Anna. Transamerican LiteraryRelations and the Nineteenth -Century Public Sphere. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004. xii + 329 pp. Cloth: $70.00. It is increasingly impossible, or at least irresponsible, to consider U.S. literary production in isolation from the global context in which the nation has always been enmeshed. Anna Brickhouse's lavishly detailed new study joins the growing shelf of a more amply defined Americas Studies, going deep into the archives to identify "the seeds ofa largely untold story Studies in American Fiction121 about a period that was crucially formative ofthe literatures ofthe United States" (8). Incorporating both Spanish and French textual examples, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere aims at nothing less than "a reconsideration of nineteenth-century U.S. literary history from vantage points within the wider Americas" (30). Although the title suggests the centrality of the public-sphere concept, it is really the question of literary relations that occupies this study, as it elaborates moments of "overlap and simultaneity" (7) among writers who had uncannily similar rhetorical responses to similar historical circumstances despite the linguistic and cultural boundaries separating them. Brickhouse limits her focus to the three decades between the 1826 Congress of Panama and the height of William Walker's filibustering activities in 1856; her examples demonstrate that within this short span of time, "the Spanish Americas . . . devolved from putative members of 'the great family ofnations' in the hemisphere into passive objects" (81). While some of the earlier transamerican literary relations she catalogues indicate fraternal respect and mutual influence—the fascinating correspondence between Alexander Hill Everett and Cuban reformer Domingo del Monte, for example—most ofher examples speak to more indirect mediations of shared hemispheric reality. Brickhouse argues that the American Renaissance was "inherently dependent upon and sustained not only by nationalist discourses but by the underlying transnational desires and anxieties that such discourses seek to mask" (33). Those anxieties, she suggests, cluster most powerfully around representations ofthe long-ago indigenous past and the more recent Haitian Revolution, which raised the ominous threat of widespread slave rebellion violent end in the U...