... demonstrate that Americans are adept at improvisatory maneuvers. Fittingly, Wallace even finds in a passage from Henry James “as precise a definition of what happens during improvisation as any [he had] encountered.” The invocation of Henry might lead us to suppose that improvisation should...

... to close examination of Bishop’s poems, however, she finds that she, as do the other poets, figures alcohol and states of mind associated with it in code. Images from the natural world often stand in for alcohol and its effects. The principal symbolic manifestation of alcohol in these eight poets...

... Wienen finds in broadside polemics of the same period. No matter which position each of us takes, the implications are huge not only for our profession but for America’s public life. I suspect that the concern shown in this year’s work will expand in years to come, especially as we digest the NEA...

... conjure Tiny Tim singing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” Some cross-century comparisons clearly work bet- ter than others. Usually, however, the book’s stylish prose captures the essence of Melville’s achievement, as when Delbanco finds that the more Long Ghost “delights in his own cleverness...

... one, akin to work readers are more likely to find in much older periods. He has, in other words, established a canon, doing so on the basis of the consensus he cites. What guides this consensus? Principally a belief that “the postmod- ernism of the Sixties is the result of the liberation from...

... and finds that “Melville resists Western maps,” the “cartographic empiricism” that had come to dominate British mapmaking in the 18th century. “For all his imperialist tendencies,” Phillips writes, “Melville does not believe in the ultimate epistemological or even anthropologi- cal success...

... in ‘‘Communion in Captivity: Torture, Martyrdom, and Gender in New France and New England’’ ( Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 50–63) these accounts cele- brate the transŽguration of the mutilated body of the sinner into the redeemed spirit of the saint. That such early reports of Native Americans also...

..., not of a tragic silence, and in this vein Ronald Bush makes it clear that the crisis over Marcella Spann left Pound suicidal. He finds these feelings encoded in the Na Khi sections of the very late poems. The Ezra, Dorothy, Olga ménage, which made Pound’s artistic life possible, also did harm...

... finds that his articulation of both principles was influential in the development of “universal human rights as an emerging doctrine,” codified in the 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” “So long as first principles of education and human rights are thought to matter,” Buell concludes...

... with the research toward this essay. 338 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present sense of experiment. Dickstein finds the novels and short stories of his decades dominated by World War II and Vietnam, conflicts that bracket a later 20th-century culture struggling to redefine itself...

... family (the ‘‘shadow family’’ in and around Oxford) into his Italian American char- acters. Drawing on Joel Williamson for biographical material and ex- tending the work of Doreen Fowler for Lacanian methodology, Argiro finds, for example, that in The Sound and the Fury ‘‘the Italian girl, posi...

... 165 sophisticated, avoiding the critical pitfall of misreading it as sociology or migrant history. For example, she finds in The Hamlet a ‘‘pattern of expanding narratives’’ which ‘‘parallels Flem’s increasing power over Ratli√ ’s imagination and the lives of the people of Frenchman’s Bend...

... analysis of Israel Potter, Melville’s other novels largely disappear from this year’s scholarship. Cultural studies critics find new ways of relating Melville’s writings to contemporary economic, environmental, social, and ethical issues, an approach that has given new life to the Marxist critic C...

... exploring Chopin’s well-known “The Story of an Hour,” Mohanalakshmi Rajaku- mar’s “Kate Chopin and the Non-American Reader” (TALJTP 7, iii–iv: 49–57) thoughtfully describes how Rajakumar approaches the story in a Qatar classroom with non-American students, finding that Chopin’s themes resonate...

... 1983 Sent for You Yesterday is explored in Denise Rodriguez’s “Homewood’s ‘Music of Invisibility’: John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for You Yesterday and the Black Urban Tradition,” pp. 127–44 in Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman. In both novels the protagonists leave their communities to find...

.... Second, critics interested in trauma theory are finding a rich mine of examples in Faulkner. Third, studies of individual novels are declining in favor of work that takes into account more than one text, as is evident by the length of the section on general criticism. i  Biography Jay...

.... Their spirit lives on in the abundance of superior criticism Pound and Eliot continue to receive. Surveying the field, we find that the culture wars continue to be fought on the contested ground of these two poets. Two essays on the controversy surrounding the awarding of the first Bollingen Prize...

...-adult literature, areas in which literary scholars continue to search for understanding of the present through the past. i Realists and Naturalists Two international publications assess the state of realism and natural- ism, both finding a shifting landscape. The ambiguously titled Revision- ist...

... touchstone, Henry Thoreau, . . . sets his sights both on cosmic process and on a shape called I, where shape is a Whitmanian term of art it names a formation less stable than entity, less mentalistic than concept, more haptic than literary figure. Bennett finds in Leaves of Grass an I who is both...

..., Mississippi, trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear (Farrar), which argues a holistic view of Faulkner and finds a cohesive set of intellectual concerns woven through analyses of content, form, and structure. The first part, an encounter narrative of Glissant’s pilgrimage to Je√erson/Oxford, is very...