... to the 1940s As she notes in her introduction, “For both Stevens and Williams, the artist’s absorption in local, creative moments, which involve a certain withdrawal from public politics, can offer a ‘solvent’ to a world fre- quented by war and teach it to be ‘at one with itself...

...Gary Lee Stonum © 2001 Duke University Press 2001 20 Themes, Topics, Criticism Gary Lee Stonum One of two widely visible features of this year’s scholarship is the engagement with some notion of the postmodern. Whereas American literary studies once nearly defined...

... Historicism. Fleissner reads male and female writers against each other—Crane, Norris, and Dreiser ver- sus Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. She also reads naturalism, realism, and regionalism as “genres” against one another. Thinking about gender relative...

.... iii  General Criticism Faulkner appears as a major figure in five monographs this year and as the central subject of one. Earl Rovit and Arthur Waldhorn have compiled an entertaining selection of commentary on Faulkner and his greatest contemporary in Hemingway and Faulkner in Their Time...

... inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ ” Although American history seems to nudge practitioners of improvisa- tion in a liberal direction, one can imagine other times and places where it might be used for conservative or even reactionary ends. Be that as it may, if the test of a new critical term is the value...

... follows is more than 400 pages of textual apparatus that represent the most thorough examination the two halves of the manuscript—664 pages located in 1990 and 697 pages already housed in the Bu√alo and Erie County Public Library—have ever received. One gauge of the enlargement of this edi- tion...

... was first launched and it was decided that each volume in the series should include one chapter not organized under the rubrics of authors, period, and genres. The renewed attention to themes and topics, ushered in by historical and culturalist movements from the 1990s, has fostered...

... and expanded’’ edition of William Cookson’s invaluable A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Persea, 2001) has ap- peared, a√ording the opportunity of revisiting Cookson’s lively gloss and useful commentary. Cookson, venerable editor of Agenda and Pound’s Selected Prose 1909–1965 (1973), is one of the great...

... exclusively literary, and now the scope brings under discussion even more of Twain’s lesser-known writings. Thus one can turn to Emerson’s book to ‘‘place’’ nearly any piece of Twain’s litera- ture within the context of his activities and concerns of the moment, and to find information about the publishing...

... colleges and universities simply because the name inspires marketing fear. Wasserstein exasperated materialist feminists because her plays were invariably set in a world of white privilege and peopled by anxious careerists mysteriously able to deliver Neil Simonesque one-liners while...

... Clarel as a Wisdom book in its own right. One notes here very fine close readings, particularly of Moby-Dick and Clarel. The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Eric Paul Roorda (Duke), contains riches for any teacher who wishes to place Melville within the field of oceanic studies...

... with widely noted insti- tutional contexts, journal articles continue to lose ground in comparison to monographs. Apart from other factors, if one seeks to make claims about the national imaginary, even well-crafted articles have difficulty attaining the scope of a book. i  Histories and Genres...

... features 247 articles, the American Literary Scholarship (2006) doi 10.1215/00659142-2007-013 © 2008 by Duke University Press 540 General Reference Works 1870–1920 one 245, their topics distributed among appropriately selected works, ideas, genres, issues...

... to which his poets must con- form. He practices a freewheeling, associative logic that often produces provocative, even brilliant insights. Yet the connections between poets, and between poets and philosophers, are often loose. One wonders if the concerns he brings to the poems are so deeply...

... Poems, Prose, and Let- ters, and, after Robert Lowell receives separate attention, another splen- did edition, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Bishop also figures as one poet among others in books by Bethany Hicok, Bonnie Costello, and Marit J...

..., Patrick Mullen a psychological one. Nick Bromell, Ann Pat- ten, Griffith, and Jenny Wahl examine economics, politics, and social practices and theories of democracy. Willa Cather scholarship this year continued to offer work drawn from the study of new materials: archival, textual, and contextual...

...Carol J. Singley; Robert Thacker © 2013 Duke University Press 2013 7  Wharton and Cather Carol J. Singley and Robert Thacker This year’s work in Wharton studies includes one book and 12 essays or book chapters of high quality. Scholars analyze a wide range of genres, including...

... is lost in the plague year. i General One such inspiring example is Chloe Johnston and Coya Paz Brown- rigg s Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide to Devised eater (Northwest- ern), which traces the city s unique theatrical tradition from its roots in Jane Addams s Hull-House in . Addams argued that the theater...

.... Guest, born in 1920 and for years a critically neglected member of the New York school, wrote one of the first acclaimed studies of H.D., Herself Defined, in 1984. Fraser, now in her sixties, the editor of HOW(ever) and its later electronic incarnation, HOW(2), has long situ- ated...

... of surplus value. That proposition leaves open two questions that one hopes will soon get the attention they deserve: Žrst, whether race is (as Young implies) not only endemic to capitalism but essential to it, and second, how and whether Marx’ s concept of surplus value stands up...