Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts. (review)

91 opportunities of African Americans. Noonan persuasively argues, then, that an ideological agenda was pervasive in the magazine but always unevenly enforced, allowing for resistant as well as confirmatory viewpoints. At times Noonan’s theoretical framework edges toward pronounced eclecticism (he variously mentions Althusser, Habermas, performativity, and national identity), and the impact of Matthew Arnold’s ideas of culture would have benefited from elaboration, especially since Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, serialized in Cornhill Magazine (1867–1868) so closely parallels the cultural vision of Holland and Gilder. These, however, are decidedly minor caveats. Noonan’s work richly repays careful attention and should be consulted by anyone interested in American studies, literary realism, and/or print culture. LINDA K. HUGHES Texas Christian University Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts. Ed. Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2011. 288 pp. Cloth, $49.95; CD, $9.95. Most students and scholars of American literature know Charlotte Perkins Gilman best for her chilling short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) and perhaps also for her utopian novel Herland (1915). But over the course of her lifetime, the prolific Gilman published nearly 500 poems, several dramas , several hundred fictional works, and over 2000 works of non-fiction. The aim of this edited collection is to provide additional context for Gilman ’s life and work and to engage with texts often overshadowed by her now-canonical story and novel. In their lucid and thoughtful introduction, Tuttle and Kessler maintain that the volume will situate Gilman more fully in her times and widen the scholarly lens so that more of Gilman’s numerous works come into focus. These are worthy aims, and overall the editors and contributors achieve them. Individual essays examine neglected texts including Gilman’s journalism, plays, serialized novels, detective fiction, and gothic stories other than “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” They also shed new light on both the author and her more familiar works by focusing on “new contexts,” exploring, for instance, Gilman as a humorist, journalist, nativist, and important interlocutor for ongoing discussions of racial and gendered oppression and domestic violence. Several essays juxtapose Gilman’s writings with those of other authors including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Ida davis  Reviews american literary realism  45, 1 92 Tarbell, and Gloria Naylor. Some of these contexts prove more illuminating than others, but the eleven essays taken together succeed in complicating this important figure, presenting a clearer and more detailed picture of the range and scope of her life’s work. At least three of the six published Gilman collections arose from International Gilman conferences. This holds true for this new volume as well, which emerged out of the Fourth International Conference held in Maine in 2006. The essays, written by either well-known or emergent Gilman scholars , are as a rule well-written, insightful, and persuasive. The strongest essays in this volume include Knight’s meticulously researched examination of how Gilman’s pride in her New England stock influenced her thought; Rich’s exploration of Gilman’s complicated maternal history and views and how these inform her neglected 1912 Bildungsroman, Mag-Marjorie; Cane’s examination of the periodical-based debate between Gilman and Tarbell concerning the pros and cons of woman’s suffrage; Bergman’s intriguing conjecture that Gilman’s overlooked detective novel Unpunished signifies a shift in Gilman’s views on reform in that transformation occurs less through a strong heroine than through the defeat of a patriarch by a gender-shifting protagonist; Lunden’s well-researched and original essay on neurasthenia (its originality no small feat given the sheer tonnage of scholarship on “The Yellow Wall-Paper”), and Edelstein’s exploration of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” within the context of yellow journalism. The volume closes with Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s overview, derived from her keynote address at the 2006 conference, of Gilman’s strategies as a humorist, an emphasis that refreshingly counters the dour and scolding tone that has occasionally crept into recent Gilman scholarship. Overall, the volume contains solid and in numerous cases original essays that offer new perspectives on this complex and prolific figure. CYNTHIA J. DAVIS University of South Carolina, Columbia Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins...