...Clarence Gohdes The Notebooks of Henry James . Edited by Matthiessen F. O. Murdock Kenneth B. . New York : Oxford University Press , 1947 . Pp. xxviii , 425 . $6.00 . The James Family: Including Selections from the Writings of Henry James, Senior, William, Henry and Alice...

...James D. Bloom F. O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic . By Stern Frederick C. . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 1981 . Pp. ix , 281 . $24.50 . Copyright © 1983 by Duke University Press 1983 102 The South Atlantic Quarterly events and the decline...

...Lewis Leary Theodore Dreiser . By Matthiessen F. O. . New York : William Sloane Associates , 1951 . Pp. 267 . $3.50 . Copyright © 1951 by Duke University Press 1951 Book Reviews 597 thesis of James s otherness, would remind us that he was a native of mid-century America...

...James Southall Wilson Henry James: The Major Phase . By Matthiessen F. O. . New York : Oxford University Press , 1944 . Pp. xvi , 190 . $2.50 . Copyright © 1945 by Duke University Press 1945 Books 229 words that sink below the level of epic poetry, such as buddy (IV, 412...

...William E. Cain William E. Cain F. O. Matthiessen s Labor of Translation: From Sarah Orne Jewett to T. S. Eliot F O. Matthiessen s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) is one of the landmark texts of American literary studies, and it is the book...

... opus, American Renaissance (1941) a book familiar to any serious student of the mid-19th century efflorescence of American literature. Despite his lasting importance, Matthiessen now seems taken for granted or, according to one view, calculatedly ideologically neglected. For this reason, Frederick...

... critique. In any event, the latter is at no time in danger of becoming impressionistic or doctrinaire. In its making, Mr. Dupee has borrowed liberally but judiciously; and if the reader occasionally wishes for a little of Matthiessen with his lot of Spender and Eliot, he is likely to wish for more of Dupee...

... their figures with an eye to such issues. On the basis of his treatment of Edison, a critic guesses that Wachhorst may be the author of some of these studies, and they will be welcome. UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAVEN DAVID E. E. SLOANE F. O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic. By Frederick C. Stern. Chapel Hill...

..., for the kind of substantial study which not even the earlier work on Dreiser by F. O. Matthiessen or by Professor Elias himself has fully provided. Matthiessen s Theodore Dreiser, in 1951, was a sturdy attempt to define what its author called Dreiser s long look at his characters, full of the perception...

... and darkness of the past.2 In the 1940 s, however, F. O. Matthiessen called for a rein­ terpretation of the romantic Hawthorne, stating the need to cor­ rect the prevailing conception of him as the re-creator of a dim past. 3 Since then has emerged a new understanding of Hawthorne and of his use of the past...

.... Matthiessen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1944. Pp. xvi, 190. $2.50. Certainly Henry James has not been neglected by the critics, and recently there has been a resurgence of interest that encourages a hope that there may be reissues of his major novels. Which these are, Mr. F. O. Matthiessen tells us...

... satis­ factory history of American literature. In the case of Dreiser the path is now cleared, as a consequence of Professor Elias s persistent industry and sensitive editing, for the kind of substantial study which not even the earlier work on Dreiser by F. O. Matthiessen or by Professor Elias himself...

... chap­ ters, is suggestive of Matthiessen s American Renaissance in its pattern of wide-ranging allusion. In the body of the book Mr. Poirier takes up Matthiessen s preoccupation with expression and examines the way in which style defined broadly to include form, content, structure, and above all...

... reading. In following ideas rather than anything else as the basis for his selection of anthology material, Mr. Matthiessen has of course been able to do best with such of the Jameses as abounded in ideas the father and son William. But when he comes to the novelist, who was fundamentally interested only...

... to combat feelings of insecurity, doubt, and confusion with things stable, concrete, and posi­ tively known. F. O. Matthiessen rightly asserts that Hawthorne was more struck by decay than by potentiality, by the broken ends to which the Puritan effort had finally come, by the rigidity that had been...

... being Ethan Brand. As Matthiessen has remarked: Ahab suffers, but unlike Hawthorne s Hester or Miriam, he is not purified by his suffering. He remains, like Ethan Brand, damned. Melville read Ethan Brand in the summer of 1851. The story evoked the fervent comment in a letter to Hawthorne: I stand...

... the howling [W, in, 242]. This is but an instance of Thoreau s objectivity. Often he was struck by the strange and mysterious texture of wildness and wild creatures. This sense of strangeness is partly why Thoreau, accord­ ing to F. O. Matthiessen, never felt himself to be wholly in­ volved in Nature...

... and Director of American Studies at Wellesley College. He is the author of The Crisis in Criticism (1984) and F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism (forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press). He is now working on a book-length study of W. E. B. Du Bois. Susan Gillman is Assistant Professor...

... of Edgar Allan Poe, the one major writer of the Old South, illustrates the failure of the Literary History and most of its predecessors to integrate the literature of that region with that of the rest of the nation. F. O. Matthiessen s chapter on Poe is in many ways the best thing of its kind...

..., Cooper, the so-called Founding Fathers, both Puritan and Revo­ lutionary, and their preaching and political rivals). In addition, the book offers astringent critiques of the modern tradition of American literature studies from Matthiessen to Poirier, detailing the ways in 696 Daniel T. O Hara which...