... and Presidential Government (Princeton). How Americans feel about the president and the presidency, McCann proposes, stands at the center of their nationality. Beginning with Whitman’s views on Lincoln as martyr, commander, unifier, and abuser of executive power, but mainly surveying a dizzying...

... in American Theatre, 1890–1916(Palgrave) reveals the gaps between older and newer approaches to theater history. The main contribution of the study, like traditional history, lies in its linking of a set of relatively unknown plays that together constitute a view of slum life. Such a subject...

... drinking and to the shifting views of drink even though the production was mounted in the midst of Prohibition. Similarly, he only brie y discusses rati cation of the th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution recognizing the right of women to vote, making the submission of the play s women seem all the more...

... to the attention of the broader reading public. In her fascinating survey of the period’s views on race, Levecq presents a valuable study on the nature of race relations and the importance of placing black texts of the period within their wider cultural and political contexts. In Evangelism and Resistance...

... an arrival into a peaceful utopia, she is constantly at war with herself and others, fighting to make her point of view understood and heard, and she must ultimately construct her own utopia herself, out of the air, as it were.” Another of Glaspell’s revolutionary heroines is Madeline in Inheritors...

...’: Julian Hawthorne on Melville” (Leviathan 12, iii: 93–101). This number compares with just 9 references previously identified by Brian Higgins in Herman Melville: An Annotated Bibliog- raphy (1979). Scharnhorst views these new discoveries, which include a 1924 essay, as confirming that in his...

... domes- tic fiction and customarily dismissed as inferior to realism. Challenging the prevailing view, Hoeller argues that sentimentalism in Wharton’s fiction is not an artistic flaw, as many reviewers and critics have claimed, but an essential element deriving from the literary tradition best able...

... waters of current popular opinion. By establishing female benevolent and literary societies, expressing their views on emigration and colonization in public lectures, and decrying intimidation tactics such as rape and lynching, these feminists used literature and lecture tours to draw national...

... sophisticated argument based on the ethics posited by French philosopher Alain Badiou, who attacks big-issue binaries as oversimplifying to an extreme, the binaries fabricated by homogenizing a wide variety of points of view. The point is that the same thing is being done in the Mamet/Miller attempt...

... James Fenimore Cooper’s The Water-Witch and The Bravo, William Hickling Prescott’s Peru, Washington Irving’s A History of New York, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha and ably demonstrates how 19th-century Americans fretted over the possibility of national decline. Viewing...

... “The Great Gatsby” in Crit- ical and Cultural Context (Camden) is a clearly written and organized study of critical and popular views of Fitzgerald’s novel, with particular emphasis on the former. Beuka successfully captures and understands “the very wide range of opinion and reaction” the novel has...

..., who were incognizant of each other’s work but were both confessional, frankly sexual, and ingrained into modern cities. Responding to the reactionary backlash against the rapid urbanization of the 19th century, both Whitman and Baudelaire offer an alternative, democratic view of cities...

... career and provides the intellectual climate necessary to urge him beyond adventure tales to the heights of Moby-Dick and the best of the short fiction. Melville is, in Delbanco’s view, an author who should be included in discussions of the “New York School” along with Whitman, Allen Ginsberg...

... more visibly only a few decades later.” This fine study surveys how various writers viewed suburbs as places that would take men out of work spaces and relocate them in more domestic, environmentally softer surroundings. Sari Edelstein’s Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence...

... contemporary views of Wharton in Edith Wharton, volume 3 of Lives of Victorian Literary Figures IV (Pickering & Chatto). Jane Spirit’s American Literary Scholarship (2006) doi 10.1215/00659142-2007-009 © 2008 by Duke University Press 118 Wharton and Cather...

.... In an introductory essay, Walker supports Ross Posnock’s view of James as an ambivalent observer, especially resistant to identity politics at the expense of ‘‘discrimination Walker also describes James’s his- torionic self-presentation in his occasional adoption of ‘‘the role of recluse...

... in much American literature in the thirty years prior to the Civil War viewed God’s love and his vengeance not as antithetical forces but instead as “necessarily cooperative and inseparably intermingled.” In Pelletier’s view, the apocalyptic “fundamentally shaped abolitionist narratives...

... biographical and historical focus of his discussion he leaves room for transcendence. This broader view is reflected in his analysis of Guirgis: He writes urban comedies with, implicitly, something to say about those who watch. Bigsby implies something similar in his analysis of Shinn s suggestion: I hope...

... lasting elite cultural status, endeavored to create works possessing intellectual pres- tige, and conducted commercially risky experiments in content and/ or form—who wrote for and about the movies during the studio era.” Cerasulo takes a largely constructive, though still pragmatic, view...

... the tension between deliberative and diasporic discourses that constituted peculiar rhetorics of colonization, Stillion Southard also investigates the views of vari- ous Black commentators, including Louis Sheridan and Hilary Teage. Presenting a convincing study of the various rhetorics that emerged between...