Elizabeth Bishop's World War II-Cold War View, and: Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction, and: Revising Flannery O'Connor: Southern Literary Culture and the Problem of Female Authorship (review)

In investigations of relatively unexplored areas, Camille Roman identifies the political implications of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry during the 1940s and 1950s; Roberta Rubenstein redefines the function of home in women's writing; and Katherine Hemple Prown uncovers a complicated female voice in Flannery O'Connor's work.

Using the trope of conversation, Roman presents Bishop's participation in prevailing dialogues, identifying the poet as both "observer" and "storyteller" of national politics and events at midcentury. In order to elucidate Bishop's utterances and silences and to "resituate Bishop more centrally" within canonical 1950s poetry (5), Roman analyzes Cold War rhetoric, details Bishop's life and writings during World War II through 1950, and reads Bishop's published work in relation to her manuscripts.

Offering superb analyses of "Roosters," "Songs for a Colored Singer," "View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress," and "12 O'Clock News," Roman argues that Bishop possessed a keen awareness and concern regarding World War II militarism, Cold War politics, and the Korean War and that through her poetry and her silences Bishop challenged the official narratives. Roman identifies a "rhetorical interrogation of Fascism and other virulent forms of militarism" in "Roosters," a continued investigation into the effects of militarism on civilians as well as a lesbian subtext in "Songs of a Colored Singer," a "critique of militarism" and an uneasiness about military domination of home and private citizens in "View of the Capitol," and a debunking of Cold War rhetoric in "12 O'Clock News." With persuasive readings of the ideological and political content of these poems, Roman further argues that Bishop's concerns extend beyond U.S. preoccupations to a rendering of the "‘Ugly American' attitude of the U.S. cold war policy" (146). She adeptly locates this concern in three of Bishop's Brazil poems: "Arrival at Santos," "Brazil, January 1, 1502," and "Questions of Travel."

Roman's arguments about Bishop's silences on the Korean War and U.S. nuclear buildup (both of which occurred while Bishop held the post of national poet laureate at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [1949–50]) prove to be one of the strengths of this book. Placing Bishop "at the center of cultural power in Washington" during this time (116), Roman poses provocative questions about Bishop's "deafening" silences. Roman rightly refuses to attribute Bishop's silence either to disinterest or to personal or medical problems; instead, she reminds us that Bishop's lesbianism put her at great risk during those years. As she does throughout the book, Roman turns to Bishop's personal correspondence to uncover the poet's views. Roman's careful and relentless reading of Bishop's personal writing proves a valuable contribution to understanding these years in Bishop's life and work and to the significance of her poetry within American letters.

While Roman focuses on reinterpreting Bishop's politics, Rubenstein uses the work of Barbara Kingsolver, Julia Alvarez, Anne Tyler, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison to reconfigure "nostalgia and tropes of home and homesickness" as a medium of reparation for the emotional and psychological effects of displacement experienced by those separated from "home/land . . . and/or cultural practices that contribute to identity" (6). In Home Matters, Rubenstein unmoors homesickness and nostalgia from the sentimental and "psychologically regressive modes of feelings" (6) by arguing that within a narrative framework, both these elements...