In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Ashton continuedfrom previous page a reactionary history managed to alter the tone and trajectory ofliterary history ofthe twentieth century. Stedman's veneration for the New Englanders previously painted as elite and distant intellectuals (such as Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes) managed to appeal to a reactionary turn, and by the twentieth century the tradition of venerating the Bostonians over, well, everyone else (as it might be framed) became powerfully established once again. As Stokes points out, the most influential literary histories ofthe early and mid-twentieth century were written by men who had worked with Wendell at Harvard— scholars such as Van Wyck Brooks, F. O. Matthiessen, Vernon L. Parrington, and Robert Spiller, all of whom continued to reify the Great Men of Harvard/New England tradition in their own works. An intense, scholarly study, Writers in Retrospect provides a complicated but much needed map of the networks and context that informed literary histories written during the late nineteenth century. Susanna Ashton is an associate professor ofEnglish at Clemson University. She is the author o/Collaborators in Literary America, 1870-1920 (Palgrave 2003) as well as many other articles about nineteenth -century literary culture. Quest Completed David Savat Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby Algonquin Books http://www.algonquin.com 287 pages; cloth, $24.95 paper, $13.95 Some weeks ago, while attending a small party, I found myself subjected to what I felt to be incredulous stares. The guest of honour, a close and non-game-playing friend of mine, had decided, in a very public manner—along the lines of "Hey everybody!"—to introduce me to a WoW playing friend of his. "WoW," for those not familiar with the term, stands for World ofWarcraft, the most successful Massive Multiple Online Role Playing Game, MMORPG or MMO for short, to date—though why, especially afterreading the case made by Smartbomb, that I still feel a need to explain the term is somewhat unclear to me. Indeed, the very act of doing so is beginning to feel somewhat anachronistic to say the least, and this is part of the point Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby try to make with Smartbomb: The Questfor Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. In any case, it was a rather strange moment, as the other WoW player and I, with little in common apart from the fact that we are known to play WoW and are white males in our thirties, suddenly felt as if some dirty secret of ours had been outed. Indeed, one of the other guests comically announced it was an intervention. After one of those uncomfortable silences, which afflicted the entire small crowd, another person piped up, came to our defence, and also announced she was a WoW player, as were her husband and children. As the numbers shifted ever so slightly, it was almost as if the roles had become reversed: how come you are not gaming yet? In many respects, that is one of the questions asked by Smartbomb. The epilogue of Smartbomb was written as WoW was rapidly in the process of upstaging Star Wars Galaxies, a game that, together with Anarchy Online, features in Chaplin and Ruby's chapter on MMOs and the people who play and, at least for some, live these games. WoW, especially when it comes to MMOs, is at this point the undisputed juggernaut in computer gaming, having by the latest count a base of seven million subscribers worldwide. Given its popularity, it certainly further strengthens one of the main points of Smartbomb, which is that computer games are increasingly mainstream, and if they are not competing for "leisure time" on a large scale with TV and movies yet, as Microsoft's J Allard pointed out some time ago now, that very soon they will be. The financial figures that Chaplin and Ruby list, as well as those that the gaming industry itselffrequently reminds people of, certainly attempt to back that up. Smartbomb is not a history of computer gaming , nor does it claim to be that. For this one should consult work...

pdf

Share