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100Rocky Mountain Review Despite the striking personalities he treats—and notwithstanding the founders' own extraordinary esteem for the biographical lessons of Plutarch's Lives—Richard's book is organized not by man but by topic and, within each chapter's topic more or less chronologically. After the first one on classical education, the chapters are: "Symbols," "Models," "Antimodels," "Mixed Government and Classical Pastoralism," "Philosophy," and the somewhat misleadingly entitled "The Myth of Classical Decline." "Models" and "Antimodels" are most interesting for their reach beyond practical politics and statesmanship, constitution-making, and the like; the chapter that follows them introduces the paradox which Richard neatly summarizes in his conclusion: "It was as if pure classical republicanism dies in the 1790s, and its heirs divided the intellectual legacy. The Federalists retained custody of mixed government theory, while the Republicans kept the classical pastoralism. Each party became half-classical, half-liberal: the Federalists remained aristocratic but embraced the new industry; the Republicans remained pastoral but embraced the new democracy" (237-38). The treatment of the "myth" of decline does concede that the Greek and to a lesser extent the Latin languages lost ground. Unabated nevertheless was the study of Greco-Roman political philosophy, and of ancient history and its great men, exemplars for good or ill (the republican martyrs Cato and Cicero; Julius Caesar the tyrant; the despots Caligula and Nero); and while modernists like Franklin and Rush (and Tom Paine) advocated relaxation of Latin requirements in the schools, they did not belittle the relevance to their centuries of translated and adapted classics. The book's comprehensive index of names and topics permits readers with specialist interests to pursue them conveniently. Richard provides no bibliography as such; his numerous notes, however, are bibliographic rather than argumentative, and are a useful guide chiefly to published primary sources, but also to important secondary discussions right down to "1994, forthcoming." The book therefore has notable value as a reference work. Its text is also admirably free from both typographic error and stylistic awkwardness—a pleasure to read. A few misstatements of fact, none pivotal to the thesis yet each of them embarrassing, could have been prevented had a classicist reader been consulted. All in all, however, this is an unusually appealing instance of the many studies and discussions prompted by the bicentennial of the Constitution, and one much less ephemeral than many another. VICTOR CASTELLANI University ofDenver DAVID R. SHUMWAY. Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy ofAmerican Literature as an Academic Discipline. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 359 p. 1 he eleventh volume in the American Culture series, this book continues an unusual and laudable practice of examining issues without observing Book Reviews101 either the constricting boundaries of established disciplines or traditional distinctions between academic and popular culture. In fact, Shumway begins with a premise which leads directly to the challenge of such limitations : "although it is possible to think of all of the writing in certain genres produced in the United States as 'American literature,' the term in critical or scholarly practice. . . . has always meant a small selection of writings produced in this country"(l). Why and how this restricted canon developed and the cultural impact of a narrowed definition are the subjects of Shumway"s analysis. Building on the argument of such theorists as Michel Foucault (about whom he has also written) that "knowledge is socially produced and historically contingent," (4) Shumway suggests that the formation of American literature was a response to forces in the "larger culture," and that race, class, and gender bias were (and to an extent still are) "structural" to the discipline . Institutional conditions—the departmental form of organization, the modern learned society, and the academic journal—were equally important shaping forces in the effort of "academic Americanists" to assert their authority over a field which continued to be discussed by non-academic groups. Shumway calls his study a "genealogy" because it is an incomplete history of noncontinuous developments. It traces changes in the discipline from the 1890s to roughly 1960, providing not a history of criticism, but a history of the way in which the discipline has conceived of itself. Inevitably such a project involves consideration of the connection...

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