Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings ed. by James Barbour and Tom Quirk (review)

80Rocky Mountain Review world of linguistics through an exchange with history and geography. For specialists, her fascinating book provides more tools for comparison with previous publications in this field and therefore with their own research. BRIGITTE ROUSSEL Wichita State University JAMES BARBOUR and TOM QUIRK, eds. Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. 334 p. Although genetic criticism has been out of fashion since the advent of the New Criticism, with its passion for "verbal icons" and "organic wholes," James Barbour and Tom Quirk persist in believing that the process of composition bears an important relation to literary meaning. This perverse idea generated Writing the American Classics in 1990, to which the editors have now added a sequel. With an impressive disregard for theoretical truisms concerning such matters as the death of the author, the contributors to both collections "seek to explore how certain works came to be, how they took shape under the ministry of their creators' art." The imagery employed here to define a critical orientation is defiantly old fashioned, yet the essays in Biographies of Books occasionally glisten with originality and flaunt their stubborn commitment to the idea of individual creativity. The results are necessarily uneven, but taken together the two collections serve notice that the author is no longer entirely dead to contemporary critical sensibilities, and that antiquated concepts like "creative intelligence" once more fall within the province of literary studies (1). Outlining their theoretical project in an introductory chapter, Barbour and Quirk note that the genetic critic runs a gauntlet between the antithetical objections of post-modernists and traditionalists. Decried by theorists for maintaining a "positivist" commitment to empirical method, attacked by more empirically minded critics for harboring a "romantic ideology," the geneticist is assaulted from all sides. In order to forge a little space between this rock and hard place, Barbour and Quirk ingeniously deem themselves "romantic positiviste," explaining that "the combined epithets really amount to calling us pragmatists, a term that more accurately reflects the method and, to the extent that it has one, the ideology of genetic criticism" (6). This admirable finesse conveys a general sense of geneticism's theoretical aims, but one cannot ignore the way individual essays tend to strain the relationship between the editors' "combined epithets" (6). The collection's outstanding contributions—Albert von Frank's illuminating discussion of Emerson's fitful effort to repair the "tonal dissonance" produced by successive versions of Nature, for example—rely on sound archival evidence as a means of demystifying elements of the creative process (39). In another brilliant essay, Howard Baetzhold describes the impact of Mark Twain's Book Reviews81 shifting political affections on the uncertain satirical logic of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Richard Hocks contributes perhaps the collection's finest essay, a concise and revealing analysis of the multiple versions of Henry James' celebrated "germ" for The Ambassadors. Other essays, by contrast, testify more to the romantic than to the positivist impulse in genetic inquiry. According to Robert DeMott's essay on Steinbeck, for example, a passage from The Grapes of Wrath comes "from a place far deeper than the intellect . . . from the visceral center of the writer's being" (210). It is unfair to single out DeMott's compelling essay for criticism , for this statement betrays a tendency that is at work in several contributions to Biographies of Books, a tendency to treat genetic inquiry as a romantic quest for "the visceral center of the writer's being." When genetic criticism takes this route, it is difficult to make sense of the editors' wishful linkage between the terms "romantic" and "positivist," and even harder to accept "pragmatism" as a gloss for the ideology of geneticism. Perhaps the most important fact about Biographies ofBooks is that, with its forerunner, the volume testifies to a revival of interest among literary critics in the creative process of individual artists. Differences in the conception and methodology of genetic inquiry constitute a significant challenge to practitioners of the mode, but the same differences suggest the range and variety ofAmerican criticism now being written on compositional history. Barbour and Quirk have performed...