Women in Popular Culture: A Reference Guide by Katherine Fishborn (review)

94ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW and the dramas Ponce de Leon (1801) and The Founding of Prague (1814). German quotations from Brentano's works, including the nine representative poems analyzed in chapter two, are followed by exceptional English translations, a wise concession to the extensive English-only reading public. The fifth and final chapter (the Postlude) gives a concise closing recapitulation of the work as a whole. This publication, in the Twayne's World Authors Series, features a good index and a very helpful appraised selected bibliography. Fortunately the author also gives sufficient attention to Brentano's 'Odyssey of faith" during the final twenty-four years of his life, beginning with his decision in 1818 to remain at the bedside of the stigmatized nun Anna Katharina Emmerich of Westphalia, recording, as a faithful amanuensis, her visions and her ordeal until her death in 1824. Fetzer makes this somewhat puzzling venture more comprehensible by pointing out that Brentano ultimately grew "leery of the ability of language to articulate properly those emotions and situations which the poeta vates reputedly is empowered to express. This . . . breakdown led to his search beyond the borders of art for a field of endeavor in which he could enlist his still salvageable talents to serve some suprapersonal cause" (p. 34). Hence it became Brentano's "task of a lifetime" to publish a trilogy, "a monumental historical-symbolical biography of Christ which he believed he had heard from the lips of the divinely inspired nun" (p. 24). Fetzer concludes that this work "would have formed an effective counterpart to the secularized and de-mythologized version by David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu (1835), had Brentano been less scrupulous in his efforts to delete any possible 'poetic' elements which might have intruded into the account via his creative fantasy" (pp. 24-25). Fetzer demonstrates once again his authority in the field, well versed in the previous Brentano scholarship, now adding his own unique insights in an erudite yet very readable style, illuminating yet entertaining. He admirably and successfully accomplishes the two-fold aim of this study, namely to introduce the English reading public unfamiliar with German literature to a romantic writer of "considerable skill and charm," and, to offer those familiar with German literary history "a thumbnail sketch and a critical survey of Brentano's career and creative writings from a perspective which will also throw light on the romantic age ... as a whole" (p. 7). RONALD H. NABROTZKY Iowa State University Katherine Fishborn. Women in Popular Culture: A Reference Guide. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982. 267p. One must give high marks to Katherine Fishborn's reference guide, especially upon considering the extreme vagueness of the two areas whose overlap she needed to delimit and research. Women's studies and popular culture are simply very hard to set bounds for. Fishborn has organized her material into the general categories of histories of the topic; popular literature; magazines; film; television; advertising, fashion, sports and comics; and theories of women in popular culture. As a look at these categories immediately reveals, the separation of popular from high-art culture is impossible to maintain. When the author must refer to materials that are not primarily concerned with popular culture but only applicable to the analysis of this culture, she is careful to make note of the fact and justify the inclusion of the material. Book Reviews95 I have only two complaints about the work. One concerns its slighting of the analyses produced as a result of the debate in post-structuralist circles over the issue of women's writing and post-Lacanian or revisionist-Lacanian concepts of womanhood. I had hoped to find discussion of these new concepts in the theory chapter, which instead contains discussion of many writers who might more properly be considered social essayists than theorists (e.g., Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich). The other objection is that Fishborn at times gives too hasty a judgment, e.g., "Although Sam J. Lundwall, in Science Fiction: What's It All About, discusses women, he reveals his antifemale bias in his chapter heading, 'Women, Robots, and Other Peculiarities'" (p. 116). Actually, Lundwall is exhibiting the Swedish fondness for perversely ironic humor by titling his...