Book Reviews

Jeannine Blackwell Anonym, verschollen, trivial: Methodological Hindrances in Researching German Women's Literature Frauenliteratur, like the terms Frauenroman and Frauendichtung, is a two-way mirror. It is a distressing reminder of the impotent and flowery sentimentality of Wilhelminian German literature: garden dwarfs, the Gartenlaube, tüchtige Hausfrauen, Hedwig CourthsMahler , and Vicki Baum. It is harmless literature, to be classified next to the children's stories, the codebooks , and home improvements. Yet with this term Frauenliteratur , as with so many, there is a cutting edge. Is Frauenliteratur really what Treitschke and Goedeke tell us it is? Is it not also the letters Caroline and Dorothea wrote, Bettina's Armenbuch, Gabriele Reuter's social protest? Were not these also by, for, and about women in Germany? To discover what Frauenliteratur was and is, scholars today must look through that dark, distorting mirror of literary history. Anticipating and identifying the cracks in that history, feminist critics must reshape the critical tools to deal with the anonymous, the unrecognized, the uncanonized, the "trivial"; to reconstruct or rediscover the verschollen ; and to locate and describe the dear ladies who read the books back then. The other side of the cracked mirror of literary history is Frauenliteratur today. It is the product of contemporary critical female authors for a predominantly female audience; it is also the reestablished or discovered tradition of women authors such as Sidonie Zäunemann (1714-1740), Thérèse Huber (1764-1829), and Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943?). Often a literature of the "other Germany" -- critical, republican, socialist, Utopian, or feminist -- it is not harmless, impotent droolings. This excavation work brings out the straightforward , graphic, even aggressive side of German women 's literary culture. This research has grown out of the second women's movement in both Europe and the United States. Its new female mentality, new consciousness of history and the private sphere demand a fresh reading of the old texts. In this reading, feminists cannot rely trustingly on that cracked mirror of German literary history. We must reread everything and question the verity of every fact already given. 39 The great reference works of the nineteenth century are some of the most important tools we have to reconstruct that literature. Knowing the history of these works will give feminist scholars today an idea of how Frauenliteratur was defined, which pieces were included, and which were omitted. Õ brief examination of the process of literary analysis in Germany will underscore the pitfalls of such reference works. These massive undertakings must be checked for factual error, but more importantly, they must be seen in conjunction with and contrast to the movements of social and political change within the German area. The establishment of modern German universities, under the leadership of the brothers Grimm and Humboldt, brought in a model of scholarly research which became paradigmatic for Germanistik as well as for the natural sciences. The unguistisch-literaturwissenschaftliche method of philological research, RTstorical dating, biographical data, study of origins and development started by the collections of Herder and the brothers Grimm put literature first into its historical context, and then into national and linguistic groupings; its authorial origins were sought out if possible. Criticism was no longer merely aesthetic, moral, and philosophical, but rather historical. With this group of scholars and with the establishment of new universities at Berlin, Göttingen, and elsewhere, the separation of the writing scholar and the artistic scholar was completed. While it had been customary up to the eighteenth century for the two fields to be combined -- one thinks here of Opitz, later Lessing, Herder, and Wieland, who wrote both scholarly treatises and creative works -- this era brings about the division and professionalization of poet and scholar. The division of labor between the Gelehrten and the Dichter that prevailed after the late 18th century was a boon to women authors. Since they had been and continued to be excluded from university study (with a few loudly proclaimed exceptions) and had little opportunity to learn the classics or consistent orthography, they had been essentially shut out from literary production. The new division of literary labor, combined with the spiritual justification of women's literary forms in Pietist confessional literature, changed that...

Food Banks: A Lens on the Hungry Body

This article endeavours to show that much of what has been considered ‘exceptional’ in Carolingian women's literary culture had in fact a much wider purview. An examination of key elements of a ninth‐century codex illuminates the continuity between the manuscript's creators and intended audience, providing plausible evidence for female involvement in the production and utilization of intricate literary compilations and, thus, also for a more inclusive role for women in the Carolingian Renaissance.

The advent of the #MeToo movement and the scale of participation in 85 countries (Gill and Orgad; see Google Trends) has greatly expanded debate about the revival of feminism (Winch Littler and Keeler) and the contribution of digital media to a “reconfiguration” of feminism (Jouet). Insofar as these campaigns are concerned with sexual harassment and related forms of sexual abuse, the longer history of sexual harassment in which this practice was named by women’s movement activists in the 1970s has gone largely unremarked except in the broad sense of the recharging or “techno-echo[es]” (Jouet) of earlier “waves” of feminism. However, #MeToo and its companion movement #TimesUp, and its fighting fund timesupnow.org, stemmed directly from the allegations in 2017 against the media mogul Harvey Weinstein by Hollywood professionals and celebrities. The naming of prominent, powerful men as harassers and the celebrity sphere of activism have become features of #MeToo that warrant comparison with the naming of sexual harassment in the earlier era of feminism.While the practices it named were not new, the term “sexual harassment” was new, and it became a defining issue in second wave feminism that was conceptualised within the continuum of sexual violence. I outline this history, and how it transformed the private, individual experiences of many women into a shared public consciousness about sexual coercion in the workplace, and some of the debate that this generated within the women’s movement at the time. It offers scope to compare the threshold politics of naming names in the 21st century, and its celebrity vanguard which has led to some ambivalence about the lasting impact. For Kathy Davis (in Zarkov and Davis), for instance, it is atypical of the collective goals of second wave feminism.In comparing the two eras, Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas in the early 1990s is a bridging incident. It dates from closer to the time in which sexual harassment was named, and Hill’s testimony is now recognised as a prototype of the kinds of claims made against powerful men in the #MeToo era. Lauren Berlant’s account of “Diva Citizenship”, formulated in response to Hill’s testimony to the US Senate, now seems prescient of the unfolding spectacle of feminist subjectivities in the digital public sphere and speaks directly to the relation between individual and collective action in making lasting change. The possibility of change, however, descends from the intervention of the women’s movement in naming sexual harassment.The Name Is AllI found my boss in a room ... . He was alone ... . He greeted me ... touched my hair and ... said ... “Come, Ruth, sit down here.” He motioned to his knee. I felt my face flush. I backed away towards the door ... . Then he rose ... and ... put his hand into his pocket, took out a roll of bills, counted off three dollars, and brought it over to me at the door. “Tell your father,” he said, “to find you a new shop for tomorrow morning.” (Cohen 129)Sexual coercion in the workplace, such as referred to in this workplace novel published in 1918, was spoken about among women in subcultures and gossip long before it was named as sexual harassment. But it had no place in public discourse. Women’s knowledge of sexual harassment coalesced in an act of naming that is reputed to have occurred in a consciousness raising group in New York at the height of the second wave women’s movement. Lin Farley lays claim to it in her book, Sexual Shakedown, first published in 1978, in describing the coinage of the term from a workshop on women and work in 1974 at Cornell University. The group of participants was made up, she says, of near equal numbers of black and white women with “economic backgrounds ranging from very affluent to poor” (11). She describes how, “when we had finished, there was an unmistakable pattern to our employment ... . Each one of us had already quit or been fired from a job at least once because we had been made too uncomfortable by the behaviour of men” (11–12). She claims to have later devised the term “sexual harassment” in collaboration with others from this group (12).The naming of sexual harassment has been described as a kind of “discovery” (Leeds TUCRIC 1) and possibly “the only concept of sexual violence to be labelled by women themselves” (Hearn et al. 20). Not everyone agrees that Farley’s group first coined the term (see Herbert 1989) and there is some evidence that it was in use from the early 1970s. Catherine Mackinnon accredits its first use to the Working Women United Institute in New York in connection with the case of Carmita Wood in 1975 (25). Yet Farley’s account gained authority and is cited in several other contemporary radical feminist works (for instance, see Storrie and Dykstra 26; Wise and Stanley 48), and Sexual Shakedown can now be listed among the iconic feminist manifestoes of the second wave era.The key insight of Farley’s book was that sexual coercion in the workplace was more than aberrant behaviour by individual men but was systemic and organised. She suggests how the phrase sexual harassment “is the first verbal description of women’s feelings about this behaviour and it unstintingly conveys a negative perception of male aggression in the workplace” (32). Others followed in seeing it as organised expression of male power that functions “to keep women out of non-traditional occupations and to reinforce their secondary status in the workplace” (Pringle 93), a wisdom that is now widely accepted but seemed radical at the time.A theoretical literature on sexual harassment grew rapidly from the 1970s in which the definition of sexual harassment was a key element. In Sexual Shakedown, Farley defines it with specific connection to the workplace and a woman’s “function as worker” (33). Some definitions attempted to cover a range of practices that “might threaten a woman’s job security or create a stressful or intimidating working environment” ranging from touching to rape (Sedley and Benn 6). In the wider radical feminist discussion, sexual harassment was located within the “continuum of sexual violence”, a paradigm that highlighted the links between “every day abuses” and “less common experiences labelled as crimes” (Kelly 59). Accordingly, it was seen as a diminished category of rape, termed “little rape” (Bularzik 26), or a means whereby women are “reminded” of the “ever present threat of rape” (Rubinstein 165).The upsurge of research and writing served to document the prevalence and history of sexual harassment. Radical feminist accounts situated the origins in the long-standing patriarchal assumption that economic responsibility for women is ultimately held by men, and how “women forced to earn their own living in the past were believed to be defenceless and possibly immoral” (Rubinstein 166). Various accounts highlighted the intersecting effects of racism and sexism in the experience of black women, and women of colour, in a way that would be now termed intersectional. Jo Dixon discussed black women’s “least advantaged position in the economy coupled with the legacy of slavery” (164), while, in Australia, Linda Rubinstein describes the “sexual exploitation of aboriginal women employed as domestic servants on outback stations” which was “as common as the better documented abuse of slaves in the American South” (166).In The Sexual Harassment of Working Women, Catherine Mackinnon provided a pioneering legal argument that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination. She defined two types: the quid pro quo, when “sexual compliance is exchanged, or proposed to be exchanged, for an employment opportunity” (32); and sexual harassment as a “persistent condition of work” that “simply makes the work environment unbearable” (40). Thus the feminist histories of sexual harassment became detailed and strategic. The naming of sexual harassment was a moment of relinquishing women’s experience to the gaze of feminism and the bureaucratic gaze of the state, and, in the legal interventions that followed, it ceased to be exclusively a feminist issue.In Australia, a period of bureaucratisation and state intervention commenced in the late 1970s that corresponded with similar legislative responses abroad. The federal Sex Discrimination Act was amended in 1984 to include a definition of sexual harassment, and State and Territory jurisdictions also framed legislation pertaining to sexual harassment (see Law Council of Australia). The regimes of redress were linked with Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action frameworks and were of a civil order. Under the law, there was potential for employers to be found vicariously liable for sexual harassment.In the women’s movement, legislative strategies were deemed reformist. Radical and socialist feminists perceived the de-gendering effects of these policies in the workplace that risked collusion with the state. Some argued that naming and defining sexual harassment denies that women constantly deal with a range of harassment anywhere, not only in the workplace (Wise and Stanley 10); while others argued that reformist approaches effectively legitimate other forms of sex discrimination not covered by legislation (Game and Pringle 290). However, in feminism and in the policy realm, the debate concerned sexual harassment in the general workplace. In contrast to #MeToo, it was not led by celebrity voices, nor galvanised by incidents in the sphere of entertainment, nor, by and large, among figures of public office, except for a couple of notable exceptions, including Anita Hill.The “Spectacle of Subjectivity” in the “Scene of Public Life”Through the early 1990s as an MA candidate at the University of Queensland, I studied media coverage of sexual harassment cases, clipping newspapers and noting electronic media reports on a daily basis. These mainly concerned incidents in government sector workplaces or small commercial enterprises. Wh

One particularly neglected facet of the generally neglected 1898 Reform Movement in China is the role of women. Chinese and Western scholars have tended to portray the campaign primarily as a male-led, Western-oriented enterprise in which Chinese women were largely silent and submissive, com-pliant rather than contentious. This article suggests, by contrast, that Chinese women participated in the 1890s reforms as active organizers and sophisticated thinkers. They had their own agenda, agency, organizations, and specific strategies for forming a new Chinese womanhood and for national strengthening. Their approach to reform drew substantially on Chinese traditions of learning with antecedents as early as the Wei-Jin period (220-420); it also reflected more recent traditions of women's literary culture and community in the Yangzi delta during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These open-minded and self-confident women reformers enthusiastically embraced new Western knowledge and attracted effective help from Western allies, both male and female.

This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been characterized as almost an exclusively male prerogative, but women writers had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. To offer a more accurate impression of the influence of the classics in Victorian women's literary culture, women's difficulties in gaining access to classical learning are explored through biographical and fictional representations of the development of women's education from solitary study at home to compulsory classics at university. The restrictions which applied to women's classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education, enabling women writers to produce distinctive literary responses to the classical tradition. Women readers focused on image, plot, and character rather than grammar, leading to imaginative and often subversive reworkings of classical texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot have been granted an exceptional status as 19th-century female classicists. This book places them in a literary tradition in which revising classical narratives in forms such as the novel and the dramatic monologue offered women the opportunity to express controversial ideas. The reworking of classical texts serves a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, and to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.

Jonathan Levin. The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism. Chapel Hill: Duke UP, 1999. xviii + 222 pp.

3001CN0TES Spivak's planetarity, on the other hand, shares at least one salient quality with the Old Comparative Literature that she professes to reject: its centripetal and selfconscious sense of being a traditional force preserving borders—its own and its texts'—from the onslaught of globalization's coercive sameness. Comparative literature turns out to be not so easily cleaved from its nationalist origins. Thus does Spivak's "planetarity" deconstruct itself, for in order to preserve its own disciplinary borders from the apocalypse ofa globalized world literature in English, comparative literature finds itselfretreating into an argument for difference that willy-nilly preserves national identities in one form or another. Whither nationalism? Here it finds itselfreinscribed, albeit in a subtler, more "planetary" form, as Spivak circles the wagons against both English and the global. Despite Spivak's cogent and necessary arguments for comparative literature as a corrective supplement to "the apparitions ofCultural and Ethnic Studies" (70) and the facile generalizations ofmuch ofpostcolonial studies, it is perhaps unavoidable that her concluding attempt at an expansive gesture undermines itself. As Spivak stands in the place and name ofthe man who once called for comparative literature to act as "a preserver and creator ofthe highest values ofmankind" (Wellek 295), she can muster only a fuzzy, ambivalent move towards telepoiesis: In this era ofglobal capital triumphant, to keep responsibility alive in the reading and teaching of the textual is at first sight impractical. It is, however, the right ofthe textual to be so responsible, responsive, answerable . The "planet" is here, as perhaps always, a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right. Its alterity, determining experience, is mysterious and discontinuous—an experience ofthe impossible. It is such collectivities that must be opened up with the question "How many are we?" when cultural origin is detranscendentalized into fiction—the toughest task in the diaspora. (101-2) This final gesture ofSpivak's Wellek Lectures confirms one last time the recurring structure of comparative literature's brave, doomed stand against the apocalypse, which neverturns out to be quite final—yet anothermessage in a bottle, sent offto "a future reader" (93), to be read and reenacted, again and again. Alfred López77ie UniversityofMississippi BOOKNOTES KATE A. BALDWIN. Beyondthe ColorLine andtheIron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. xii + 346 pp. The period referred to in the second title ofKate Baldwin's significant and highly readable work is in and ofitselfindicative ofthe historical shifts in politics, race relations, and the place ofthe intelligentsia in Russia and the US during the first half ofthe twentieth century. For Russia, this period covers the very early days of an emerging Soviet Union through the beginnings ofthe Cold War and the controversial reforms ofNikita Khrushchev, while the US at that time moves from the era of the speakeasy to the Civil Rights Movement. In the interim both countries will Vole 28 (2004): 162 THE COMPAKATIST endure the Second World War and crises ofidentity for large portions ofthe population while minority (i.e., non-white) peoples struggle with social, political, and economic inequities imbedded in each respective country. Baldwin deftly weaves her argument and commentary around the lives and works offour brilliant AfricanAmericans who all crossed both the color line and the Iron Curtain to have an impact in Russia and the Soviet Union as well as in the US. Baldwin's choice ofClaude McKay, Längsten Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson allows her to comment simultaneously on the international import of race and society as well as to trace the Civil Rights history ofthe American Left and its place in the creation ofScviet propaganda at home and in the West. Her choice oftexts for these writers and thinkers is excellent—drawing from both High Culture and popular cultural artifacts—as she eschews the best known and most discussed works in favor oflesser known and more revealing treatises and essays published during and after the writers' visits abroad and to Russia. She does well to use the experience ofeach in another country to contextualize the writers' attitude toward race, politics, and society abroad. She does less well, however, in relating the same attitudinal mix to the US...

Editors’ Introduction:Children’s Culture and the First World War Gills Stacy (bio) and Esther MacCallum-Stewart (bio) As the centenary for the First World War approaches, interest in how this conflict has been—and continues to be—articulated, represented, and interrogated has been growing steadily. Of all the wars in the twentieth century, this has been the one that has retained the strongest emotional pull on the popular consciousness. The figure of the solider-poet still remains a key part of our understanding of the conflict. One of the results of other wars—particularly the Second World War and the Holocaust—has been the widespread acknowledgment that wars are not only experienced by those on the front lines. How noncombatant and combatant (albeit often unacknowledged as such) women and children experienced the First World War has formed some discussion since the 1970s. Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig's Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars (1978) was one of the first projects to identify the ways in which the wartime experiences of women and children were articulated. More interest, however, has been paid to re-examining the history of women in wartime, from the essays in Margaret Higonnet et alia's seminal collection Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (1989) to Jane Potter's Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War, 1914–1918 (2005), than to the experiences of children and war. While Holocaust studies have recently foregrounded both the war experiences of children as well as writing the Holocaust for children, the First World War remains little studied by scholars of both war and children's culture.1 The essays in this special issue are concerned with how the war has been retold: how "the story of their war, in its local, particular, parochial, familial forms, can be told and retold" (Winter 40). In the telling and re-telling of the relationship between children and the First World War, it is revealed that the "construction of the narrative . . . is itself the process of remembrance" (40). In this way, these narratives produced during [End Page v] and after the war are just as much artifacts of war as are the trenches or Blackadder Goes Forth. The articles that make up this special issue are equally concerned with what occurred in children's culture during the war as with what has occurred in the century since. Andrea McKenzie's article examines the responses made by children to the war through their contributions to St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folk, a widely-circulating magazine for children in America. McKenzie argues that children's contributions forced the war, initially a subject suppressed by the editors, onto the magazine's main pages. She points out that, by the time of the entry of the United States into the war in 1917, writing by readers about the war had gained priority in the pages of St. Nicholas. In turn this caused a reversal by St Nicholas, so that by 1917, writing by readers about the war had gradually gained priority. In this case, reader autonomy suggests that the war was of direct concern to young people. Krista Cowman's piece is concerned with a reading of the foreigner in British novels written for children: Bessie Marchant's Molly Angel's Adventures (1915) and D. H. Parry's With Haig on the Somme (1917). Cowman argues that notions of Britishness are modelled in these texts, not only through the image of the British at war, but crucially through its civilians and the foreign "other." This articulation of British nationality is, for Cowman, key to reconstructing how the heroic was understood during the war. Margaret Higonnet's article focuses on French and Belgian children's picture books, drawing connections between the images therein and ways in which children were widely expected to absorb the conflict. Through investigations of several texts, she traces the ways in which war toys, specifically soldier and doll figures are "made" and "unmade" within each story. Each of these articles points to ways in which specific genres conceptualize the war as an ideological event for their child...

The term “home front,” as distinct from “war front,” is so familiar today that we tend to forget that the concept is less than a century old, a coinage of the First World War. Ironically, it was the very collapse of the familiar boundaries between military and civil sectors of society that prompted the invention of a term that purported to differentiate clearly between the “battle front” and the “domestic front.” In a war in which all sectors of society were directly or indirectly affected by the military conflict, the distinction between the actual combatants on the front lines and their fellow citizens in the factories, on the farms, and in the shops becomes, at times, difficult to determine. The novelty of appending the modifier “home” or “domestic” to the military term “front” captures the essence of “total war.” The First World War was fought not only in the trenches of northeastern France, but in the urban bread lines and the munitions factories, and in every town subjected to the aerial bombardments that literally demolished any real distinction between military and civilian life.

Reviewed by: Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature Paul K. Saint-Amour Patrick Deer. Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. xi + 329 pp. In our habits of argument, most of us are modernists these days. Not content simply to advance a reading, we outfit our scholarship with methodological manifestos, declamatory battle plans, and self-branding campaigns, all of them intended to maximize the visibility and positionality of our work. It is not enough for our claims to be [End Page 650] usefully new; they must shock received wisdom. We write as if only the radically discontinuous could further our thinking, yet that claim of breakage is propped, and often belied, by the work’s massive citationality. Theory, meanwhile, acts as the chief portal through which the counterintuitive enters and upends the self-evident, the consecrated, and the flat-footedly empirical. Patrick Deer’s Culture in Camouflage quietly signals its awareness of those theorists (Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, Schmidt and Agamben, Benjamin, Derrida, Scarry, and Virilio) in relation to whom recent war studies scholarship situates itself. But this intelligent, unstrident book understates its interventions and its theoretical stakes, preferring to keep company with its primary texts. Culture and Camouflage leaves it up to its readers to recognize it for what it is: a major contribution to scholarship on the literature and official culture of World War II and on twentieth-century warfare’s intimate links with imperialism. Scholars of peace and conflict have lately been much concerned with “total war,” an expression coined in 1916 by Léon Daudet to denote the complete mobilization of a nation’s resources in a bid to eliminate its adversary, irrespective of distinctions between combatants and noncombatants. The totality that most occupies Deer, however, is neither the limitless extent of targeting nor the engulfing reach of the war economy; it is, instead, the totalizing energy of official war cultures whose manufactured traditions aimed, as he puts it, to “cure and unite the diverse, fragmented spheres of everyday life” (6). When, as in the British case, such official cultures were disseminated through propaganda and enforced by state censorship, they exercised an enormous power to disparage or promote a given aesthetic mode along with its practitioners and political valences. During the Great War, for instance, the emerging official culture stigmatized modernism as bohemian, foreign, degenerate, and unmanly while looting it for battle-ready innovations. Deer joins other critics in seeing camouflage—the deployment of Cubist, Vorticist, and Expressionist painters and techniques in advancing covert optics—as the cardinal example of this dynamic. But unlike some of its interlocutors, Culture in Camouflage refuses to read wartime writers simply as dupes, victims, or disciplined instruments of the militarized state. For Deer, “camouflage” principally tropes wartime writers’ practice of challenging official narratives while appearing to comply with them, producing ever mutating hybrid forms that could ferry innovation, criticism, and even subversion past the state’s censorious gaze. Deer names that high-altitude gaze the “strategic” perspective after the war planners who employed it (4). In contrast to them, the writers who resisted the totalizing war culture did so through tactical appropriations of the panoramic viewpoint and, more, by dwelling on the partial and [End Page 651] the particular—on haunted localities, effaced and unofficial memory, occulted continuities, and the wartime collapse of distance. Although it opens with compelling chapters about the Great War and the interwar period, Culture in Camouflage is above all interested in refuting the common claim that the 1940s were a failed or fallow period for British literature. This refutation involves a three-pronged rescue and recovery mission: World War II literature, says Deer, needs to be repossessed from postwar neo-realists (for example, the Angry Young Men and Movement poets) who constructed a British literary canon that excluded both wartime literature and a great deal of interwar modernism from current scholarship that relies too narrowly on ideology critique and trauma studies in examining the period, and from “recent mobilizations of the memory of the Second World War, which symbolically invoke the cause of that ‘good war’ in the name of new imperialisms” (242). Deer...

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900. By Martha S. Jones. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Private Politics and Public Voices: Black Women’s Activism from World War I to the New Deal. By Nikki Brown. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.Joyce A. HansonJoyce A. HansonCalifornia State University, San Bernardino Search for more articles by this author California State University, San BernardinoPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 34, Number 1Autumn 2008 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/588438 Views: 44Total views on this site © 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In Memoriam: Tribute to Rita K. Gollin (1928–2022)

The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition. By Jacqueline Bacon. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. i, 352. Cloth, $39.95.) The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860. By Linda M. Grasso. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 249. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $18.95.)Despite the entrenchment of freedom of speech in the Constitution, some people in antebellum American were not permitted to speak, and some truths could not be spoken. Jacqueline Bacon and Linda M. Grasso, researchers in rhetoric and literature respectively, examine ways in which various groups of marginalized Americans tackled this problem. Bacon, pointing to crucial relationships between rhetoric and liberation, explores ways that subaltern groups such as African Americans and white women made places for themselves in the discourse of antislavery and reform. Grasso argues that antebellum women, white and black, angered by oppressive gender ideology yet forbidden by that same ideology to express anger, fashioned an innovative artistry of to express their anger in their literary productions. Historians of the early republic will find both these works provocative and useful.Bacon's The Humblest May Stand Forth provides a close analysis of the rhetorical strategies of black abolitionist men, white female abolitionists, and black abolitionist women. She focuses on how members of these marginalized groups found their voices, legitimated their right to speak, and constructed their arguments. Bacon notes that until recently, abolitionist historiography has ignored these abolitionists, in effect continuing to silence them. Striving to recover their rhetorical productions, she concludes that standard narratives of antislavery as beginning with Garrisonian immediatism, dividing over the woman question and unwilling to contemplate violence until the 185Os, must be modified. For example, Bacon reminds us that a great deal of antislavery effort occurred long before 1831 in black associations not devoted solely to abolition. Accounts of abolition focussed solely on the American Anti-Slavery Society or the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society do not tell the whole story and indeed often ignore African Americans' struggles to achieve agency in these organizations.Drawing from the wide range of primary sources she has assembled, Bacon grounds her analysis in texts rather than theoretical frameworks. A firm grasp of historiography as well as classic theories of rhetoric and newer concepts such as muted group theory (8) inform her examination of rhetorical practices among those sidelined by mainstream discourses. Each group's practice of the technology of persuasion utilized prevailing discourses in subversive ways. Self-help rhetoric, for example, encouraged African-American participation in racial uplift to undermine racist stereotypes. However, it also critiqued white prejudice, demonstrated black agency, and promoted racial solidarity among African Americans. Similarly, black speakers promoted abolition and challenged racial prejudice by invoking distinctive versions of classic American forms such as jeremiads and revolutionary rhetoric and by the traditional African-American practice of signifying.Bacon details white female abolitionists' struggles to appropriate rhetorical authority, arguing they accomplished this by manipulating conventional notions of femininity. However, she criticizes their obliviousness to the concerns of African-American women. She notes, for example, how white women's antislavery discourse targeted negative impacts of slavery on white southern women and ways white female abolitionists utilized black women's suffering to authorize their own speech. Bacon attributes these failures to their inability to escape both their bourgeois worldview and an essentialist view of women that slid all too easily into racial essentialism. …

This chapter examines how the New Verse movement achieved spectacular success by focusing on the role played by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, particularly in creating a space for contemporary American verse where none had been. Poetry, founded by Harriet Monroe in Chicago in 1912, exemplifies the productive intersection between twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes and the forces of modern disciplinary specialization. This chapter looks at how Monroe and others forged Poetry's identity through antagonistic opposition to such “standpatters” as the “quality magazines,” transforming it into a pioneering endeavor in the rhetorical self-fashioning of a twentieth-century American avant-gardism. It also considers Poetry's feud with The Dial, which still saw poetry as an instrument of moral uplift that was now menaced by what it called “Futurism.” Finally, it discusses Poetry's advocacy of institutional support for contemporary poets, and especially how it reformulated central concepts of literary value—genius, masterpiece, tradition, form, audience—into a forceful poetics of avant-garde progressivism. The chapter argues that Poetry's avant-garde experiments have a transformative impact upon American poetry, and literary culture more generally.