American Literature, Culture, and Ideology: Essays in Memory of Henry Nash Smith edited by Beverly Voloshin (review)

246Reviews Seeking literary themes in their own surroundings, these antebellum authors prefigure the ethos in I'll Take My Stand. Faulkner, too, comes repeatedly to mind as one reads these pages, even though he is mentioned but twice (pp. 3, 4). The reluctance to change, coupled with mismanagement of the land and moral unsoundness, as Bakker depicts them in Paulding's Westward Ho!, Kennedy's Swallow Barn, and Caruthers' Knights of the Golden Horse-Shoe, pave the way to The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and the Snopes trilogy. So much, then, for the carping critics who would have it that there was no actual Southern literature before the twentieth century, carpers who are recognizable kindred to those who urge that no American drama existed before O'Neill. Nearer the era of the antebellum romancers themselves, to be sure, stands the figure of Edgar Allan Poe. Bakker's idea that Ruffner's "Seclusaval" (1839) may have influenced Poe's "The Domain of Arnheim" (1847) merits attention, and, equally worth noting, Poe's words, voiced by the successful literary editor in "How to Write a Blackwood Article"—"Hint everything, assert nothing"—reinforce Bakker's conception that suggestion is more significant than directness in Southern pastoralism, as if the pastoralists shied from overt acceptance of change and the crumbling oí idyllicness it effected. The subversiveness that Bakker detects in Swallow Barn (where, as in Dickey's Deliverance, the city becomes the genuine center of security [p. 49]) and the reactionary themes underlying Horse-Shoe Robinson may come as surprises to those who want their Kennedy to be a southern Washington Irving in all his geniality. Bakker, however, bolsters his ideas with persuasive readings of the texts, and his observations about Kennedy's gothic wasteland enable us to perceive a writer who might better keep company with T. S. Eliot or the subjects in Irving Malin's New American Gothic. Along with the Simms who, says Bakker, provided in Woodcraft the swan song to his beloved "Revolutionary-War era," the Kennedy emerging here may make many of us rethink certain long-cherished notions about writers in the Old South. As Bakker positions them, they may well stand in ranks with Cooper, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville. Pastoralism in Antebellum Southern Romance offers good companion reading to two recent indispensable works in Southern literary studies, Mary Ann Wimsatt's The Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms and John C. Guilds, ed., "Long Years of Neglect": The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms, a provocative gathering of essays about Simms. Brief as it is, Bakker's book offers a great challenge. University of MississippiBenjamin Franklin Fisher IV Voloshin, Beverly, ed. American Literature, Culture, and Ideology: Essays in Memory ofHenry Nash Smith. New York: Peter Lang Publishing , Inc., 1990. 353 pp. Cloth: $61.95. In the preface to this Festschrift we read that Henry Nash Smith had reservations about his seminal work, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth: he "viewfed] the west as free land and miss[ed] the native peoples as actors or victims in American history" (p. xi). Editor Beverly Voloshin rectifies this omission in her collection of essays that eliminates no one. Both Smith and the victims of nineteenthand early twentieth-century American literature are memorialized; native Americans, males, females, and "ritual clowns," to name a few, are examined as literary figures who depict or shape culture and ideology. These personae are fittingly represented Studies in American Fiction247 in a diverse collection of essays, five of which have been published elsewhere. (At the back of this book, Voloshin pays tribute to Smith's own multifaceted talent. She compiles a "selected list of Smith's published writings" that includes a videotape Smith wrote and recorded.) The opening sketches of Smith by Henry May and Thomas Gassett and the penultimate piece on M. C. Tyler by Kermit Vanderbilt are informative and frame the text within the tradition of literary history. These biographical pieces note the scholarship and liberalism of these two historians and set the tone for the other essays in this collection. In "Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?" Leo Marx explores whether the technological advancement begun in the eighteenth century...