In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Book Reviews93 commentaries on these stories. Even in the context of the sociocultural framework and feminist narrative theory presented in the introductory chapter, the readings of the various fictions tend to reiterate standard formalist interpretations of these works. Too, although her argument is convincing at the theoretical level, the differences in style, character, milieu, and theme between the two writers are so pronounced as to make Mobley's intellectual linkage between them difficult to keep in the foreground of the reader's consciousness. What may be the most important contribution of this book to contemporary scholarship is its renewed attention to Sarah Orne Jewett, a writer of visionary power who has been disserved by her conventional classification as a local colorist. Feminist scholars have already done much to revamp Jewett's reputation in American letters, and Mobley's book adds considerable momentum to that objective, in part by the inventive pairing with Toni Morrison that provides a refreshingly original glass through which to review Jewett's work. Mobley's treatment of Jewett's fiction is appreciative in the best sense of the word, and does much to remind us of that writer's rich sensibility and deeply humane world view, as well as to enhance our understanding of the ways Jewett's women characters enact redemptive rituals by calling forth expressly female mythologies and narrative patterns. The sections on Morrison's fiction are equally intelligent, if perhaps too brief to do justice to the labyrinthine matrices of that writer's story worlds. SuIa and Beloved are only curtly considered, yet both of these novels, particularly the latter, seem manifestly to embody Mobley's argument, and their relative absence from the discussion diminishes the efficacy of her case. On the whole, Folk Roots and Mythic Wings is a provocative and interesting study. One might fault Mobley for an overambitious project—there are too many strands of analysis to interweave coherently into the discussion, and the yoking of Jewett and Morrison remains something of a stretch. In spite ofits shortcomings, however, this book is an innovative contribution to literary scholarship, offering important insights into the cultural function of narrative. LIAHNA BABENER Montana State University ROBERT L. MONTGOMERY. Terms of Response: Language and Audience in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theory. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. 216 p. Ocholars acquainted with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and Continental theories about relations among nature, language, and audiences ' affective response to literature and art will find this graceful and trenchant study particularly informed and interesting. Moreover, those concerned more broadly with the development of rhetorical and critical theory will value the lucid history provided here, while literary critics of the period 94Rocky Mountain Review may finds ways to use Terms ofResponse to reconstruct not only how critics articulated various and conflicting responses to texts, but also ways to move beyond the book's scope to consider texts' cultural production and reception. Robert L. Montgomery presents a keen survey oftheories about the affective power of language from the baroque rhetoricians of the mid-seventeenth century (Tesauro, Peregrini, and Pallavicino, for example) who praised the diverting qualities of wit and wordplay, to various eighteenthcentury responses, such as the neoclassical reaction and restraint of Bouhours and Boileau, who sought to restore intimate, even transparent bonds among audience, sign, and nature. Montgomery's fine review moves from the disturbing disjunctions between word and idea raised by reconsidering Longinus and the sublime, to Addison's emphasis on audience psychology and an emerging conflict between whether affective power derives from natural or figurative sources. The narrative proceeds to the debates of Enlightenment philosophers (Hutcheson, Burke, Mendelssohn, Lessing) over identifying taste as emotive or cognitive, to Kames' and Hume's respective theories of spectator response and tragic pleasure via responses to Aristotle's Poetics. Finally, Montgomery concludes his analyses with a fine and provocative review of the work of Du Bos, Condillac, and Diderot that reveals both the culminating effort of neoclassical and Enlightenment theorists to assert unified and mutually affirming relations among nature, art, and audience response, and opposing skepticism over the possibility of integrating such relations when one's affective response may be traced not to the real, the...

pdf

Share