Fantasy, Forgery, and the Byron Legend by James Soderholm (review)

104Rocky Mountain Review reservation communities, Nagel slides between discussing their discord and a general tendency to universalize Indian interests and objectives. Because urban and reservation populations had specific agendas, more care should have been taken to distinguish between these two groups throughout the book. In addition, to claim that Red Power is the "progenitor of American Indian ethnic rebirth" (130) dims the contributions made by the reservation community. Strategies for cultural survival existed on the reservations. Native peoples on reservations might have been more conservative than the activists involved in Red Power, but they nevertheless influenced the identities of urban Indians as well. Nagel claims that Indians "exemplify ethnicity at its most primordial and immutable" and "represent ethnicity in its most authentic, historical form"; they "must be the foil against which all other ethnic constructions are laid bare," because they are the "most traditional, the most invariant, the most unconstructed of American ethnic groups" (32). Such a statement belies her assertion that "the myth of unchanging culture is . . . dangerous and potentially discrediting" (72). This primitivist construction of Indians greatly undermines the aim of the book, despite any attempt to move their image from victims "to powerful players in their own survival and renewal" (72). There is still a lot of work that needs to be done with Native American issues, but we need books that are sensitive to the contemporary needs and concerns of this country's indigenous population, even though the issues being discussed might be of an historical nature. ELIZABETH ARCHULETA Penn State University JAMES SODERHOLM. Fantasy, Forgery, and the Byron Legend. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996. 195 p. G ootnotes often reveal a great deal about academic studies, even if they do so in the "ghetto" ofendnotes. And such is the case of one of Soderholm's observations tucked away at the back of this study. In response to a critic's smug celebration of biographical "reliability and objectivity," Soderholm rejoins : "This way of thinking of biography seems pointlessly positivistic, particularly in the case of Byron and the constructors and purveyors of his legend, all of whom seem caught up in a grand game of illusions, allusions, public and private images, and personal fantasy" (184, n. 25). Fantasy, Forgery, and the Byron Legend is essentially an attempt to counter this pointless positivism in Byron studies through "revisionist biographical criticism " (5), and it succeeds splendidly. Rather than trying to sort out this "grand game" into a factual account of Byron's intersections with those who produced and influenced public and private images of him, Soderholm instead joins in the game, accounting for (or, actually, recounting) the various strategies these mythographers Book Reviews105 employed to associate themselves with, and thus become a part of, the Byron legend. In the process, he also offers a manifesto for a biographical approach to writers that attempts to draw attention to inconsistencies or errors in the methods of previous biographical critics by scrutinizing their use of source material and looking elsewhere for material they neglected, in part because it was associated with "lesser" (often female) sources of information . This approach, of course, would be especially useful for Byron studies since he spent so much time fabricating numerous personae of his self, both in his work and in his life. "Biographers have fallen prey to Byron's spells," Soderholm argues. "They refrain from reporting certain aspects of their subjects precisely in order to supply themselves with materials for a pretty—or prettified—romance" (26). Throughout this study, Soderholm fleshes out this argument in a measured and compelling fashion. Soderholm traces Byron's relations with five women who figured prominently in the ongoing "Byromania" of the time: Elizabeth Pigot, Caroline Lamb, Annabella Milbanke, Teresa Guiccioli, and Marguerite Blessington. While to a certain extent, this plan reinforces the unfortunate trend in literary studies to focus on women in large part because of their relations with famous men, Soderholm goes out of his way to emphasize these women in their own right, and does so commendably. As he points out, the giveand -take between Byron and these women went both ways, exercising a significant impact on the lives and work of everyone involved. Moreover, each account...