The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder (review)

{ 290 } Book Reviews Amy S. Green, Julie Malig, Carol Martin, Sandee K. McGlaun, Chiori Miyagawa, Andrea J. Nouryeh, and Maya Roth. There is no way an anthology on the topic of feminist revision could be comprehensive. Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works appropriately makes no attempt to be inclusive, and Friedman laments in a footnote that some major productions are omitted, most notably Caryl Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds (an adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae cowritten with David Lam) and­ Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea. While I understand the need to carefully delimit the scope of this book, I feel Friedman’s decision to anchor this study in revisions of canonical Western texts in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom limits the impact this volume might have. Of the fourteen essays in this collection, many of which are eru­ dite and illuminating , only Roth’s provocative and compelling “The ­ Philomela Myth as Postcolonial Feminist Theater: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Night­ ingale” engages in any significant way with issues particular to intercultural, transnational, or global feminist theatre, although Martin’s “The Political Is Personal: Feminism, Democracy and Antigone Project” gestures in this direction in an interesting essay on secular individualism. The volume’s lack of diversity coupled with its Anglo–North Ameri­ can focus and its rehearsal of tired taxonomies (most notably in the introduction’s “capsule history of feminist theater theory” that concludes with the 1990s) reflects an anachronistic mode of feminist inquiry, one more in line with the hegemony and homogeneity of earlier decades than befits a book published in 2009. The cracks in the anthology’s architecture, however, do not damn the book, not by any stretch of the imagination. On the contrary, they reveal that the practice of revision remains essential to the project of feminism and that as feminists we must revisit and reimagine not only male-­ authored texts and patriarchal structures but our own history, ideology, and modes of critical and cultural production as well. To revise Rich for our generation: until we can understand the assumptions in which feminism is drenched, we cannot know our selves. Sara L. Warner — Cornell University \ \ The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. Edited by Robin G. Wilder and Jackson Bryer. Foreword by Scott Donaldson. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. xxxviii + 729 pp. $59.95 cloth. { 291 } Book Reviews The editors of this collection estimate that Thornton Wilder wrote over ten thousand letters during his lifetime, and they examined more than six thousand for this selection. Other collections already exist: Edward M. Burns and Joshua A. Gaylord edited the correspondence of Wilder and Adaline Glasheen on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (A Tour of the Darkling Plain, 2001); and Burns, Ulla E. Dydo, and William Rice edited The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (1996). In each of the latter cases, the focus is on someone other than Wilder. The notes and commentary on the correspondence with Stein seem to operate on the assumption that Stein matters, and Wilder is significant only in that he happens to have corresponded with Stein. Somewhat more justifiably , the editorial focus of Wilder and Glasheen’s correspondence is actually on Finnegans Wake, and the purpose of that volume, according to Burns, is “to encourage others to tour the plain of Finnegans Wake” (Tour, xxvi). But the editors of this collection, while fortunately actually interested in Wilder, make what seems to me to be an odd choice as well: “we have had to omit a number of valuable letters, especially those relating in detail to Wilder novels or plays or to specific works by other writers, because they would have required the reader to possess extensive knowledge of the material discussed” ( xxxvi–xxxvii). My own view is that readers come to a volume of an author’s letters because they are interested in the works of that author and seek further information; that is, the readers of this volume are likely to have precisely that detailed knowledge or may be inspired to go find it by the kind of letters omitted from this collection. This is, of course, by no means the only way to...