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Book Reviews201 STEVEN M. OBERHELMAN, VAN KELLY, and RICHARD GOLSAN, eds. Epic and Epoch: Essays on the Interpretation and History ofa Genre. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1994. 313 p. JYLany recent contributions to feminist theory use the terms "intersectionality " and "conjunction" to negotiate the difference and distance, but also the connection, between discussions of the discursive construction of gender roles and attributes, on the one hand, and analyses of the material conditions of women's lives, past and present, on the other. Theorists such as Kimberly Crenshaw and Elspeth Probyn have suggested that reading events, lives, and texts intersectionally and conjuncturally challenges the terms of any monolithic discursive, biologistic, or crudely materialistic determinism by deploying multiple analytic and methodological frames to reveal the complex overlay of factors that contribute to identity and subject position. The turn to comparative and combined analytic and theoretical models that enable readings of this complexity is the result, I believe, of a growing frustration with single-minded approaches that privilege either "History" (understood as the material and socio-political conditions that impact women) or "Discourse" (understood as a wide vEiriety of discursive figurations of "Woman") in their analyses of sex-gender systems. It is an interesting and welcome phenomenon that the same gesture in the direction of developing a hybridized methodology has also made itself felt in some corners of an increasingly divided literary critical and theoretical community in the form of historicizing and specifying approaches to literature and culture. Such an approach, of course, presupposes the importance of formal, rhetorical, and textual structures and traditions as part of—as produced by, but also productive of—that very historical specificity. Those essays in the volume under review here which address these and related intersections between what co-editor Van Kelly, author of the Introduction ("Criteria for the Epic: Borders, Diversity, and Expansion"), calls the "topical" and the "formal" elements of the genre (17) are the most successful ones. Those which concentrate on one to the exclusion of the other, while perhaps of interest to and even reflective of innovative scholarship in the various sub-specialties, are less convincing in a collection that seeks to explore from a comparative perspective the issue of genre per se in a wide range of epochs and texts. The fourteen essays in this volume, which appears to have emerged from a symposium on epic at Texas Tech sponsored by its Interdepartmental Committee on Comparative Literature, treat issues and texts from the classical period up to the early to mid-twentieth century. One third of the essays address ancient epic, one third Renaissance and early modern epics, and one third post-Renaissance theories and texts. The disciplinary range is wide, with the usual suspects (Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Milton) complemented by somewhat lesser known authors and texts including Callimachus and Walter de Chatillon, medieval Spanish epics of revolt and Icelandic family sagas, the "boring" epics of early modern France (so designated by Ullrich Langer in his article of that title) and the non-epic, even 202Rocky Mountain Review anti-epic novels of the nineteenth-century novel tradition. The final section on post-Renaissance epic includes articles on Ezra Pound, on Bakhtin, Nadezhda Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, and on nineteenth-century epic novels in Spain. It is the assembly of these manifold readings under the banner of comparatism that causes the "topical7"formar question of method to emerge. A number of the essays are deliberately and convincingly comparative in the traditional sense. Victoria Pedrick, for example, uses scenes in which women exchange confidences in Vergil's Aeneid to unpack the relationships between Penelope and her female advisors, Eurycleia and Eurynome, in Homer's Odyssey; in similar fashion, Reed Way Dasenbrock reads Vergil, Willa Cather, and Ezra Pound (and many more authors and texts) in and through one another, arguing that "the more heretical their [Cather's and Pound's] reading ofVergil, the more they are at variance with the orthodoxy of their times" (255). Others can be understood as engaged in comparative work broadly defined insofar as they engage theoretical issues in their analyses of specific sets of texts. Thus, George S. Tate uses Girard's "literary anthropology" (165) to read...

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