Editors' Introduction

Introduction to Special Issue: Representing Queens Stephanie Russo (bio) Queens were at a unique nexus of gender and power in the medieval and early modern world. On one level, their power was inexorably tied to their bodies, as the mothers of future monarchs. However, the power exercised by queens could, and often did, extend far beyond their ability (or not) to bear an heir. As history has repeatedly shown, queens were key political players, not simply the wives of kings. The glamour and appeal of queens has hardly abated in the modern world, too; stories of queens are as easily consumed today as they ever were. The study of medieval and early modern queens reveals much about the relationship between gender, sexuality, politics, history, and power. The study of queens has been of much interest to a wide range of scholars, from historians to literary and cultural studies scholars, who have re-examined, or sometimes examined for the first time, the lives and reigns of queens from across the medieval and early modern world. The recent spate of publications relating to queenship studies is reflective of the strength of the field. The flourishing ‘Queenship and Power’ series, published by Palgrave Macmillan, is a testament to the outstanding scholarship in the field currently being conducted by medieval and early modern scholars. The Royal Studies Journal, established in 2014 and run by the Winchester University Press, also regularly publishes scholarship on queenship studies. The ‘Kings and Queens’ conference series, organised by Dr Ellie Woodacre, is also a popular forum for the dissemination of the latest innovative queenship studies research. That queenship studies is enjoying a particularly rich period is demonstrated by the fact that there are two major publication projects currently in development. The first is the English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty project, which is a four-volume series to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. This project will incorporate biographies of all the English consorts, as well as thematic dynasty-wide essays. Alongside this project will be a monograph series on the Queens of England, published by Routledge, which aims to produce richly contextualised book-length biographies of all the queens of England. Both of these projects have been designed to supplement the popular Penguin Monarchs series of books, aiming to fill the lacunae left by the absence of queens consort from this series. Popular culture depictions of queens continue to be widely sought-after. 2018 saw the release of two major films about early modern queens: Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, and Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots. Both films are intensely interested in the role of the queen regnant, and focus on the nexus of gender, [End Page 1] sexuality, and power in the courts of Queen Anne and Elizabeth I respectively. Moreover, the ongoing fascination with the Tudor period, and, particularly, with the wives of Henry VIII, shows no signs of slowing down. The Starz series The Spanish Princess, about Catherine of Aragon’s entry into England and her first marriage, premiered in 2019. The series’ presentation of Catherine is comparable to the teen Mary Queen of Scots of the CW series, Reign (2013–17), in which the French court was imagined as a kind of early modern high school. Over the past year, there have been two television adaptations of the life of Catherine the Great: HBO’s Catherine the Great (2019), and Hulu’s The Great (2020). While Netflix’s flagship series, The Crown (2016–) takes us into the mid-twentieth century, the premise of the series—to take viewers into the private life of Queen Elizabeth II— attests to the ongoing fascination with the emotional lives of queens. What unites all of these texts is their interest in unpicking the space between the domestic and the political, and between the public and the private. What, they ask us, are queens really like? The focus on the domestic that characterizes historical fiction about queens suggests that, while we have a model for what masculine power and authority look like, when we think about queens, we consistently still turn to the private emotional lives of queens to make sense of female rule. Over the next three years...

Reviewed by: Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature Todd Hoffman Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, edited by Emily Miller Budick. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 288 pp. $71.50. This important addition to SUNY Press’s Modern Jewish Literature and Culture series is a collection of thirteen essays by such notable scholars as Gershon Shaked, Wolfgang Iser, and novelist A. B. Yehoshua, among others. This anthology reads like an encyclo pedia of American and Hebrew-Israeli writers and their position in the contemporary history of Jewish writers in general. It is both a fine compilation of incisive analyses of cultural and historical influences on the shaping of American and Israeli Jewish identity and also a useful and thorough introduction to this particular field: namely, the debate [End Page 162] over what constitutes “Jewish” writing or writers. The general claim of this book is that despite what Emily Budick calls the “disinclination of writers and intellectuals from the world’s two major communities of Jews to relate seriously to the experience of the other,” this very disinclination “tells us as much about processes of Jewish self- definition . . . as the narratives themselves.” Furthermore, the historical conditions that gave rise to both American and Israeli conceptions of Jewish identity run along parallel lines: both literary traditions tend to construct narratives of Jewish identity upon secular grounds, exclusive of Judaism; both share commonalities in their early Zionist orientations and the subsequent separation from “Old World” values as immigrant groups slowly assimilated into a new culture; both were influenced by the Holocaust and the formation of Israel in 1948; and lastly, both have a “shared commitment to doing in the world” (Budick’s italics) and have a keen sense of one’s ethical responsibility and engagement with political issues. This anthology constructs “a dialogue” between these seemingly disparate groups who share a common culture and attempts a reconfiguration of the possible points of coordination in their literary output which would disclose an identifying category of Jewish writing and identity. The organization of the essays is effective, beginning with a comprehensive examination of the overall periods of Jewish writing in America and Israel, moving on to a discussion of the various methods of appropriating specifically Jewish “cultural goods” in order to reconstruct a secular Jewish identity in a new homeland, progressing to a series of critiques of conservative accounts of Jewish history and language use, and finally ending with a discussion of the role of the critic in facilitating the dialogue of what it means to be a Jew. Eliezer Schweid’s thorough and convincing account of the role of Zionism in the formation of a nationalist Hebrew-Israeli identity in his essay “The Construction and Deconstruction of Jewish Zionist Identity” nicely pairs with Shaked’s own more sweeping examination of the role of historical conditions in the continually evolving formation of Israeli literary themes (“Contemporary Israeli Literature and the Subject of Fiction: From Nationhood to the Self”). Both critics provide an encyclopedic account of the various authors involved on this grand historical stage, succinctly yet lucidly discussing each author’s subtle permutations in their respective delineations of Jewish identity. This nicely juxtaposes with Morris Dickstein’s account of the general trends in Jewish-American fiction, in his equally comprehensive essay entitled “The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer.” Because these general accounts of the last one hundred years or so of literature in America and Israel (or pre-Israel) can only provide a gloss of the major issues, two essays are provided that examine specific authors as emblematic of these trends. H. M. Daleski’s “Philip Roth’s To Jerusalem and Back” and Ruth Wisse’s “The Yiddish and the Hebrew Writers Head for Home” outline Roth, S.Y. Agnon, and Jacob Glatstein’s personal literary journeys and transformations as microcosms of the greater cultural trends in Jewish identity formation. [End Page 163] The compilation also provides interesting analyses of how specific cultural functions in religious or communal Jewish life were adopted for literary purposes in order to search for new grounds of establishing Jewish identity. Particularly fascinating is Hana Wirth-Nesher’s “Magnified...

Race-Making across Empires: The Racial Formation of Louisiana’s Filipino Communities from the Antebellum Era through Jim Crow Michael Menor Salgarolo (bio) At the height of southern Jim Crow and the dawn of America’s colonial empire in the Pacific, Filipino nationalist intellectual Sixto López paid a visit to Louisiana. López was surprised to learn that communities of Filipino fishermen had settled in Louisiana’s bayous decades before America’s colonization of the Philippines in 1898. He was even more surprised to see the way they were treated by their white neighbors. “[I]t might be thought,” wrote López, “that in New Orleans, where southern racial or ‘color’ prejudice is said to run to extremes, the Filipinos would be subjected to all the disabilities and prejudices attaching to the negro.” López found, however, that such was not the case. He noted that many Filipinos had close personal and commercial relationships with Cajuns, Italians, and the other white inhabitants of southern Louisiana. Many Filipino fishermen had married white women and sent their children to white schools. The apparent lack of discrimination faced by Filipinos in Louisiana was all the more unexpected given the context of American colonialism in the Philippines, where the United States justified its domination of the islands by propagating the notion that Filipinos were racially unfit for self-governance. While “in his own country, [the Filipino] is a semi-savage, incapable of exercising the rights of citizenship,” López observed, “the Filipinos of New Orleans are in all respects treated as white men.”1 [End Page 25] By the time of López’s arrival, Filipino men had established settlements in lower Louisiana for nearly half a century.2 Their arrival was a result of Western commercial expansion into East Asia in the nineteenth century. As Spain’s imperial government began to open Philippine ports to trade with all nations, a spike in foreign commerce led to a demand for native Philippine sailors, known in the English-speaking world as “Manilamen.” Often recruited through deception or coercion, “Manilamen,” like nineteenth-century sailors of all nationalities, frequently evaded brutal working conditions by deserting when ships came to port. Filipino deserters formed communities in port cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Liverpool, and Barcelona and built fishing villages in Australia’s Torres Strait and Kalk Bay, South Africa.3 In Louisiana, Filipino sailors established a semi-autonomous settlement at a place called Bayou St. Malo, located deep in the coastal marshes of St. Bernard Parish. St. Malo was named for Juan San Maló, the leader of an eighteenth-century Black maroon community who lived on the site.4 By the late nineteenth century, St. Malo had become home to nearly 150 people, mostly Filipino fishermen and their families.5 [End Page 26] In this article, I contextualize López’s observations about race by reconstructing the racial formation of Louisiana Filipinos from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth.6 Using newspapers, census manuscripts, memoirs, and court records, I shed light on a process shaped by both imperial racial knowledge and local racial ideologies. Much of the historical literature on Asian American migration to the U.S. South has focused on the issue of racial formation. A number of important studies have focused on the segregated South in the mid-twentieth century, seeking to answer the paradigmatic question, “where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus?” Scholars have built on Leslie Bow’s nuanced understanding of Asian Americans in the South as “interstitial” figures whose presence reveals both the limits and the flexibility of Jim Crow’s Black-white racial binary.7 These studies form part of a growing field of writing on “third” or “inbetween” peoples in the South and the nation that examines the ways non-Black racialized peoples have navigated, challenged, and upheld systems of white supremacy rooted in anti-Black racism.8 Scholars have tackled similar questions in studies of Creoles of color in New Orleans, seeking to understand how this population of mixed European and African descent claimed rights and defined their social identities within the rigid [End Page 27] Black-white racial binary...

Little Syria, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Aya Nimer (bio) Omar Offendum's musical show Little Syria nods to the rich history of Brooklyn's Syrian community and is part of a vibrant tradition of Syrian performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.1 Offendum highlights this history by centering the rich visual language of shammi (Levantine) design, using mother-of-pearl chairs and gold decor to amplify the narrative style of the show and create a bridge between the audience and the historical titular neighborhood where the show is set. Little Syria, a collaboration with musicians Ronnie Malley, Thanks Joey, and Nano Raies, tells a story of Arabs in American life. By interweaving different narrative and musical techniques, Offendum shines a light on a historic Syrian neighborhood in Manhattan, New York and creates a space for communal healing. Offendum uses multiple cultural touchstones to encapsulate the broader and more intimate histories of Little Syria, creating continuity in the historical narrative of Arabs in the United States. Offendum builds this historical narrative through two concurrent processes. The first is by telling the broader history of Little Syria and Arab immigration in tandem with the intimate histories of people in Little Syria. The second is the use of hakawati, an Arab storytelling tradition that relies on motifs such as allegory, music, and spectacle to tell a story. Offendum uses hakawati as a storytelling practice to interweave our own daily emotional experiences with those of Offendum's historical figures, giving us a parallax view of racism, finding a job, and making money.2 The show begins with a track that outlines the experience of migrating to America through the lyrics "It's time for a new chapter/in this land of opportunity/the promises of rapture and happily ever after/lay behind these golden doors … allow me to explain before you butcher my name/label me unhireable or worse yet undesirable/I'm a man with a heart and a soul on a mission/here to build a better life …" Starting the show with a broad picture of the [End Page 90] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. A snapshot of the stage and setup of Little Syria at the Brooklyn Academy of Music anxieties and emotions associated with immigration creates an aperture for Offendum to take us into the lived experience of a street salesman in Little Syria. The salesman sells his wares near an American soap factory that uses pig lard as a main ingredient. The owner of the factory often ridicules the Syrian salesman by calling him "dirty" and "unhygienic." The salesman thinks the ridicule is ironic considering Syrian soap's reputation as a valuable and potent cleansing agent. This segment animates the daily exchanges that comprised the lives of those living in Little Syria as they encountered racist institutions in their new neighborhood. This intimate history, which visualizes the emotional lives of historical figures, creates a space for us as viewers to reflect on our own experiences with racism. The interweaving of broad and intimate histories through hakawati shows how our emotional lives are intertwined with larger political histories. The musical structure is similarly comprised of two elements interwoven into a distinct style. Thanks Joey began the process of creating the musical soundscape of the show by sampling Arabic songs from the mid-twentieth century, which were then overlaid with Offendum's lyrics and complemented by Ronnie Malley's oud performance. Offendum's [End Page 91] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. A backstage shot of Omar Offendum, Thanks Joey, and Ronnie Malley at the Brooklyn Academy of Music [End Page 92] lyrics, combined with Thanks Joey's beats, create a moment that fuses the historic Arab soundscape of the 1900s with Offendum's contemporary hip hop style. This is further developed in Ronnie's live oud performance. The oud is an instrument with strong cultural associations and memories for many Arab listeners. The nostalgic nature of the oud evokes a soundscape reminiscent of home, another way that Little Syria engages with intimate histories. This soundscape simultaneously feels historic and contemporary, transporting listeners into a liminal world that acknowledges and draws...

Editor's Page Stephanie M. Lang 'The articles in this issue of the Register highlight a series of sweeping changes occurring not only in Kentucky but also nationally during the early and mid-twentieth century. Spurred on by political corruption and the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few, reformers in the Progressive Era sought to inject morality back into society through a series of reforms. Punctuated by a back-and-forth between the forces of reform and reaction, the state had to navigate modernization. Within this environment, new ideas, mindsets, and lifestyles took root at an accelerated pace, but not all ventures fostered the intended outcomes. One example of a progressive reform that significantly altered Kentucky was Prohibition, which reshaped the bourbon industry. Although Congress celebrated bourbon in 1964 and recognized it as a distinctive product of the United States, temperance advocates in the first two decades of the twentieth century turned their energy to the prohibition of alcohol. In her article, "'America's Native Spirit': Prohibition and the Consolidation of the Kentucky Bourbon Industry," Bailey Browning chronicles the shutdown, impact on communities, and subsequent consolidation of the bourbon industry following repeal. Browning describes how many smaller, community-based distilleries permanently closed or were purchased by larger companies during this thirteen-year period. The industry that emerged utilized new strategies and technologies to produce bourbon for international markets. A failed experiment meant as a form of social control, Prohibition was repealed in 1933 as part of a larger effort to alleviate economic tensions during the Great Depression. [End Page 1] Modernism and fundamentalism also clashed in the early twentieth century over the teaching of evolution in schools and universities, signaling additional changes in the larger education system. After university enrollment plummeted during the Great Depression and World War II, an influx of students in the postwar period due to the G.I. Bill renewed issues over funding and curriculum. In "No Longer an 'academically inferior, church-controlled southern school': How Transylvania College Found Success After World War II," Jonathan Tyler Baker explores how Transylvania reconciled academic changes as a religiously affiliated institution. Seeking to move forward without depending entirely on funding from the Disciples of Christ, university administrators became policy-oriented fundraisers and campus builders. As Baker notes, the changes in higher education during this era could help us adapt as we move forward in a new digital age. The rapid speed of societal transformations during the twentieth century meant that adaptability was key for both the bourbon industry and Transylvania University. Refusing to buckle under the pressures of modernization, or shifting religious and political ideologies, both Transylvania University and the bourbon industry redefined themselves and emerged economically stronger. Today, Transylvania University is a renowned liberal arts college, while Kentucky produced two million barrels of bourbon in 2021 with a record 12 million aging in warehouses.1 [End Page 2] Footnotes 1. "Kentucky Distillers Set Records for Bourbon Barrel Inventories, New Fills—And Punishing Production Taxes," Kentucky Distillers' Association, September 27, 2022, available online via https://kybourbon.com/industry-news/kentucky-distillers-set-records-for-bourbon-barrel-inventories-new-fills-and-punishing-production-taxes/. Copyright © 2022 Kentucky Historical Society

Artifact NYMarion Weeber's Flatware of the Future Jennifer Lemak (bio) For centuries, cutlery was made from mixtures of silver, gold, pewter, or other hard metals. Silver, often purchased by wealthier families was the most common material for flatware. As a result, "silverware" was the general term used for flatware whether it was made from silver or not. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, spoons were the only utensil used at the dining table. Knives were treated as tools and were not to be used at the table. Forks were considered "coarse and ungraceful."1 Matching flatware place settings became common in the mid-nineteenth century, around the same time the new technology of electroplating was developed. Electroplating, or silver-plating, is a process in which a thin coating of silver is chemically adhered to a cheaper metal item. The resulting "silverware" was almost indistinguishable from flatware made from silver. Silver and silver-plated utensils remained the household norm well into the mid-twentieth century. However, new technologies were being developed. Stainless steel was first produced in Sheffield, England, in 1913 by Harry Brearley, a chemist and metallurgist working to improve armor plates.2 By the 1920s, stainless steel was used for medical equipment and small tools, which soon transitioned into military uses and engines during World War II; but it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the material made its way into household items such as flatware. Industrial designer Marion Weeber took advantage of this new medium for flatware. Weeber's Classic Column tableware was promoted as the future in 1967 when it was selected for the U.S. Commission for Design Excellence at the International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, Canada. Used in the American Pavilion at the Exposition, this tableware was made of highly polished stainless steel and featured futuristic geometric shapes that were rooted in classical forms. The design promoted specific American ideas [End Page 377] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Classic Column flatware designed by Marion Weeber, 1967. courtesy of the new york state museum, albany, h-1986.59.39. to the world: precision, polish, and forward thought, with an elegant nod to its classical past. Weeber designed several flatware sets and tableware lines in stainless steel for EKCO Products International Company. Working with stainless steel allowed her unlimited design possibilities resulting in a durable and affordable end-product.3 Like her flatware designs, Marion Weeber was ahead of her time. Born in Albany, New York in 1905, she was the daughter of Christian Weeber, an automotive pioneer and aeronautical inventor. She attended the Art Students League of New York City and became a lifetime member. At the age of twenty-three, her father encouraged her to postpone her art studies and work with him in his Albany shop as an apprentice on a helicopter rescue craft. During this time with her father and until his death in 1932, Weeber learned how to create industrial designs by producing mechanical drawings and drafts and work with patent lawyers—skills she would employ for the rest of her career.4 By the mid-1930s, Weeber returned to New York City to work for design and advertising firms, and by 1938, she started her own industrial design company, Marion Weeber, Inc., which lasted until the early 1990s. [End Page 378] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Marion Weeber models her tulip buttons and clip designs, ca. 1945. Polished silver plate with copper tulips. Designed for La Mode. courtesy of the new york state museum, albany, h-1986.59.40. As an independent industrial designer and business owner, Weeber designed and produced thousands of items—jewelry, buttons, scarves, housewares, kitchen items, lamps, and picture frames—that were sold in finer department stores.5 Additionally, she patented dozens of her designs over her long career. In the last decade of her life and still thinking about the future, Weeber donated several of her designs and finished pieces to museums all over New York State—to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, the New York State Museum, and the Albany Institute of History & Art. Each [End Page...

Introduction:The Promise of Experimental Writing Tyler Bradway (bio) What promise does experimental writing hold for literary studies now? This special issue of College Literature asks why experimental writing has risen to the forefront of contemporary literary studies in a historical moment defined by reactionary nationalism and populism, weaponized state violence against people of color, the enclosures of digital surveillance, and the ongoing economic and ecological precarity wrought by global capitalism. After all, experimental writing has often been understood—and understood itself—as removed from the everyday concerns of the social world. By now, the epithets are familiar: elitist, esoteric, solipsistic, formalist. The pure commitment to aesthetic experimentation has been seen as an end in itself; the artwork's autonomy from the social world has been understood as the very locus of its critical power.1 Yet the past decade has witnessed a scholarly reappraisal of the social and cultural relevance of experimental writing. This reappraisal is evident in the notable publication of The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (Bray et al. 2012) and the inauguration of Wesleyan University Press's annual Best American Experimental Writing anthology in 2014. Moreover, there has been a proliferation of scholarly monographs, articles, and special issues of academic journals focused specifically on the politics of experimental writing—its responsiveness to the [End Page 1] material forces of social strife; its embeddedness within progressive and radical political movements; and its innovations in the politics of aesthetics.2 These considerations arise in monographs such as Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (2009); Evie Shockley's Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011); Alex Houen's Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960s (2012); Anthony Reed's Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (2014); and Ellen Berry's Women's Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique (2016)—to name just a few representative examples.3 If "experimental writing" once nominated a tradition of innovative writing by European, white, male, and heteronormative authors, then the new criticism of experimental writing finds promise in the excavation of hidden, degraded, and ignored experimentalisms developed among marginalized writers and communities. Yet the return to experimental writing is not solely a project of recovery; its conceptual ambit is much broader, as intimated by the title of this special issue. The phrase, "lively words," is drawn from Gertrude Stein's Lectures in America (1935), in which Stein famously invokes the concept of "liveliness" to describe an experimental poetics of language that does not operate primarily through meaning—through denotation or connotation—but through the affective forces of language itself. Indeed, for Stein, language is quite literally alive, if not exactly human: it is autopoietic and signifies without necessarily expressing an authorial subject.4 Words have a materiality and force all their own—a liveliness that experimental writing makes uniquely perceptible by undoing our unconscious readerly habits. Undoubtedly, Stein's experimental writing inaugurates an important genealogy of modernist, queer, and feminist literature to which many of the authors and texts in this volume owe a debt. Yet it is her more expansive conception of experimental writing—as revealing the entanglements of language and matter, of words and the world—that anticipates contemporary interest in experimental writing. This entanglement underlies the conjunction of "politics and poetics" that this special issue seeks to understand with fresh eyes. To be sure, the essays collected here do not advocate for a single, overarching conception of the politics and poetics of experimental writing. Rather, each is invested in experimental writing because the texts themselves are actively rethinking the chiasmus of politics and poetics through their formal experimentations. The new [End Page 2] criticism on experimental writing thus promises to discover an array of new practices for reading the politics of literature, and its search is guided by the specific poetic forms and interpretative protocols that experimental writers innovate. If literary studies again finds itself debating the work that form can do, experimental writing gets there first.5 Whereas formalism and historicism have often been opposed by literary scholars, this has not been the case for experimental writers, particularly...

Reviewed by: Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman Sooyoung Chung (bio) Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020), pp. ix + 321, $37.50 paperback. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman’s Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical examines the Broadway musical’s creative and critical engagement with Victorian literature and culture. Weltman focuses on the intertextual network surrounding Broadway adaptations and their Victorian sources and explores other adaptations including plays, films, and illustrations. Beginning with the musical theater adaptations of Victorian literature produced in the “Golden Age of Broadway” in the 1940s, Weltman follows the chronological development of American musical theater, from musical comedy to integrated musical to the megamusical (4). This chronological organization allows Weltman to analyze each Broadway musical adaptation in the historical and cultural context of both Victorian literature and American musical theater. [End Page 662] Weltman’s extensive research bolsters her analyses of the literary and musical texts, helping the reader gain “reciprocal insights” to both texts (227). The strength of Victorians on Broadway lies in its attempt to understand Broadway adaptations of Victorian literature within a larger network of texts and contexts. The first chapter sets the stage for Weltman’s intertextual exploration of Broadway adaptations by providing a history of the American musical theater; a historiography of Victorian studies with reference to scholars such as Virginia Woolf, F. R. Leavis, Kathleen Tillotson, Walter E. Houghton, Lytton Strachey, and Richard Altick; and an overview of the twentieth century’s reception of Victorian literature and culture. Weltman examines One Touch of Venus (1943) in this larger context and argues that the musical “is a precursor and an outlier, illustrating an important conjunction of intellectual and aesthetic changes occurring simultaneously in the 1940s and 1950s” (53–54). Chapters 2 and 3, examining The King and I (1951) and Oliver! (1968) respectively, illustrate how these musicals negotiate each Victorian source text’s commentary on race, gender, and class for its American audience in the mid-twentieth century. “In The King and I’s mythologized Victorian milieu,” Weltman argues, “the white British governess represents in part an idealized United States” (56). Weltman’s claim that these musicals “use their Victorian lenses to refract contemporary American concerns” is more clearly demonstrated in Oliver! (56). Oliver! carefully downplayed the Jewishness of Fagin to address concerns of post–World War II audiences and recreated him, “a virulent anti-Semitic stereotype, in a way that makes the character likable while still utterly recognizable” (92). Weltman rightly acknowledges that this is a great example of an adaptation affecting the public view of its source text. At the heart of Weltman’s argument is the contention that Broadway’s perception of the Victorian equals Dickensian. She not only discusses the musicals adapted directly from Charles Dickens’s works, Oliver! and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985), but more interestingly finds influences of Dickens in other musicals based on Victorian texts, such as Sweeney Todd (1979) and Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical (1997). In chapter 4, Weltman provides insight into Sweeney Todd’s relation to Victorian cultural contexts based on her personal interview with the creator, Stephen Sondheim. When asked about his idea of Victorian literature and culture, Sondheim pointed to Dickens—both the novels and their film adaptations (109). Weltman also examines how Sweeney Todd enjoyed a successful afterlife in opera and film, which also employed Dickensian features to ensure their Victorianism. In chapter 5, Weltman examines Rupert Holmes’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, adapted from Dickens’s unfinished novel of the same title. She pays particular attention to the show’s metatheatricality, in which “Dickens, Holmes, the performers, and the audience as well as the [End Page 663] characters all seem to participate” (134). The musical actively engages with the unfinished state of the novel’s narrative and offers a do-it-yourself ending where the audience votes for a desired conclusion. This meta theatricality illuminates the inherent musical theatricality in Dickens’s novel, Weltman argues, supporting her central claim that “adaptations indelibly affect our understanding of Victorian literature and...

“In Ireland I’d Have Starved”: North American Fiction about the Great Irish Famine, 1850–1918 Christopher Cusack (bio), Marguérite Corporaal (bio), and Lindsay Janssen (bio) this dossier brings together popular fiction originally published between 1850 and 1918 in the United States or Canada that represents, in various ways, the Great Irish Famine, a watershed event in Irish and Irish-diasporic history.1 The Great Famine (1845–51) was caused by successive failures of the potato crop and the seriously inadequate government response to this agricultural crisis, and resulted in at least one million deaths. Moreover, between 1845 and 1855 over two million Irish emigrated, mainly to the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.2 Though Irish emigration figures had been increasing before the Famine, the crisis drastically accelerated out-migration. By 1890 about 40 percent of Irish-born people were living outside of Ireland, mainly in the United States and Great Britain.3 Not surprisingly, the Famine is generally considered one of the formative events at the heart of Irish American and Irish Canadian identities.4 In many ways, it has become what Margaret Kelleher calls a “charter myth,” even though Irish migration to America significantly predates [End Page 129] the mid-nineteenth century and even though millions more actually came over after rather than during the Famine.5 Despite its centrality in Irish-diasporic history, the notion that the memory of the Famine was so traumatic that it has been culturally repressed persists in popular understandings of the Irish-diasporic past and in some scholarship on the North American Irish diaspora.6 This notion, however, is not borne out by the available source material. On the contrary, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the Famine was a prevalent theme in journalism and fiction written by Irish-diaspora authors based in the United States and Canada, as well as in Irish-interest material produced by North American writers without Irish ancestry. However, most scholarship on diasporic identity formation during this era focuses primarily on journalism and contemporary historiography, and literature in particular remains a sorely neglected resource.7 This contribution showcases a considerable yet largely unknown corpus of popular fiction published between 1848 and 1918 in the United States or Canada that engages with the legacy of the Famine. In particular, our work underscores the added value of fiction for examining processes of diasporic identity formation and affiliation. In so doing, it also offers starting points for critical reconsiderations of established narratives regarding the position of the Great Famine in the diasporic imagination. This body of fiction is valuable not only because it comprises a sizable repository of materials that imaginatively engage with the Great Famine but also because these texts once reached a substantial and diverse audience. Recollections of the Famine can be found across the full range of fictional genres during the period, including romantic didacticism, regionalism, (urban) realism, and [End Page 130] “lace curtain” fiction, as well as in texts that straddle multiple genres.8 For the Irish characters in works by romantic-didactic authors, such as Mary Francis Cusack’s From Killarney to New York (1877) and Mary Anne Sadlier’s Bessy Conway (1861), the Famine provided an opportunity to overcome adversity and demonstrate their steadfast Irish Catholic faith. Nationalist writers employed famine memory and the charge of British responsibility to justify Fenianism, the campaign for Home Rule, and later republicanism. For political novels like James Doran’s Zanthon (1891), famine suffering served as a first step on the journey to the United States for its eponymous protagonist. Moreover, novels such as Zanthon and John Brennan’s Erin Mor (1892) cast US republicanism and its doctrine of liberty as the solution to Ireland’s colonial hardships. Conversely, Irish American (urban) realism was more critical of diasporic self-presentations and, as shown by John Talbot Smith’s story “How The McGuinness Saved His Pride” (1891), excerpted below, Irish American intolerance toward other immigrant communities. Such examples indicate that in the United States and Canada, as in Ireland, famine memory was deployed for a variety of objectives.9 Authors assimilated such memories into their preferred genres and...

Reviewed by: The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction: Intertextual Readings by Richard Van Leeuwen Dominique Jullien (bio) The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction: Intertextual Readings. By Richard Van Leeuwen, Brill, 2020, 832 pp. This is an ambitious and capacious survey of twentieth-century fiction, seen through the lens of the Thousand and One Nights as a foundational narrative text and a model for narrative innovation. As Van Leeuwen points out in his introduction, there have been many studies of intertextuality in various national literatures, but a comprehensive survey of the influence of the Nights on twentieth-century fiction as a whole had not been attempted so far. The author is an Arabist and a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam, the translator of the Nights into Dutch, and the coauthor (with Ulrich Marzolph) of the two-volume The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (2004). This study is also encyclopedic in its shape, method, and goals. The ambition of this learned and stimulating book is to explore a broad sample of [End Page 337] contemporary fiction. Readers find themselves immersed in an ocean of novels and stories. Admittedly, the book's corpus is limited to its author's area of linguistic and literary expertise: the only Asian representative is Japanese writer Haruki Murakami; there are no novelists from Africa, and only two from Latin America (Gabriel García Márquez, unsurprisingly, and more unexpectedly, the Cuban Abilio Estévez). Even so, this book covers such a range of writers, mostly from the Western and Middle Eastern traditions, and commands such an impressive number of languages (Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Danish, and Arabic) that it is already a world in itself. The study is organized into six thematic parts: "Enclosures, Journeys, and Texts"; "Capturing the Volatility of Time"; "The Textual Universe"; "Narrating History"; "Identifications, Impersonations, Doubles: The Discontents of (Post-) Modernity"; and "Aftermaths: The Delusions of Politics." Some of the framing themes are reminiscent of Proppian fairy-tale functions (enclosures and departures in Part 1), while others follow dominant themes of twentieth-century fiction, such as politics, time, postmodern metatextuality, or doubles. Each of these thematic umbrellas covers three or four chapters, pairing close comparative readings of two or three different writers. At times the writers are joined because they belong to the same literary movement (Oulipo members Italo Calvino and Georges Perec; magical realists Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie), or the same national or cultural tradition (Egyptian novelists Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Husayn, and Najib Mahfuz); other times the affinity is thematic (the Marquis de Sade and Angela Carter, for their entanglement of sexuality and storytelling), or formal (Vladimir Nabokov and Margaret Atwood, for storytelling as a deferral of death). Very often, the surprise pairing of canonical with less well-known writers is suggestive and exciting. There are numerous rewarding analyses: for instance, on the incidence of the signature technique of embedded tales-within-tales on André Gide's novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925), with its narrative open-endedness and philosophical musings on chance. Or the pages on Proust, which tie back to Hoffmannsthal through the theme of the enclosed space as a narrative precondition, and lead forward to the Turkish writer and Proust admirer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62), in an original pairing that highlights the parallel focus on social and historical upheavals in French and Turkish societies, in tension with the narrator's individual time. Claiming no allegiance to a critical method beyond specific studies of individual novelists and novels, the author describes his book as "a mosaiclike overview of different kinds of intertextual relationships" (13). A wise decision, given the vastness of the field. As Robert Irwin acknowledged in his classic Companion to the Arabian Nights (2004), it is an easier task to list the books not influenced by the Nights; quite sensibly, Van Leeuwen also begins by [End Page 338] recognizing the daunting challenge of tracing that ubiquitous influence. His method (multiple close readings) endeavors to do justice to this multitude of rewritings. The book aims to describe an encyclopedic abundance of novels; it does not aspire to theorize. Yet, as readers venture into...

Introduction to the Special Issue on CRISPR George Q. Daley As i was finalizing this introduction to the Special Issue on CRISPR genome editing for Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, news broke that the Chinese scientist He Jiankui had been sentenced in Chinese court to three years in prison for "illegal medical practice" for his role in the creation of the world's first genome-edited babies. This official reprimand reinforced the worldwide condemnation and censure that followed He's announcement in November 2018 that his team at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, had used the CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing tools on human embryos created via in vitro fertilization. He produced and brought to term two babies (and later a third) carrying mutations in the CCR5 gene, a critical co-receptor for HIV, in hopes of rendering these babies immune to infection with the virus that causes AIDS. The work was criticized as premature practice of an unproven and controversial biomedical technology, and vilified for its flouting of widely promulgated international guidelines. Numerous expert committees that had called for restraint, further research to understand the potential risks, and wider social dialogue to determine which, if any, of the many possible genetic changes that could be introduced into the human germline might one day be [End Page 1] deemed permissible. Scientists, bioethicists, and laypeople who had previously been at odds over whether genome editing of human embryos for the purpose of altering an individual's entire genetic constitution—and by virtue of passage through the reproductive germline, that of all of their offspring—should ever be practiced, were virtually united that the world's first experiment in human germline genome editing had been a gross violation of medical and bioethical norms. While the imprisonment of the first practitioner of human germline genome editing will likely dampen enthusiasm that might have been building in some quarters, an IVF clinic in Russia has boldly announced their intentions to create genome-edited babies, and application of this technology, however premature, may be inevitable. This volume is an important exercise in the critical dialogue that is essential if the potential application of this technology is ever to be managed for maximal benefit and minimal harm. Gene editing is not a new technology, nor is the genome editing of humans a novel concept barely entertained prior to the discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing toolkit. For more than a century and a half, dating from the time of Mendel's discovery of the rules of heredity, the later definition of the gene as units responsible for the generational passage of hereditary traits, and ultimately the discovery of DNA as the molecular vehicle of such inheritance, farmers and scientists have been engaged—wittingly, or unwittingly—in the manipulation of genetic traits through selective breeding or experimental interventions. The potential that scientists might one day prove capable of altering and defining human traits either chemically or genetically in the context of in vitro fertilization and embryo manipulation has long been the subject of critical commentary and fiction. Perhaps most notable was the publication in 1932 by Aldous Huxley of Brave New World, a dystopian view of a future society in which highly mechanized in vitro embryo manipulation produced babies preordained into specific castes of social strata. The modern era of gene editing began, arguably, in the Stanford laboratory of Paul Berg, who in 1972 published the creation of the world's first hybrid DNA molecule, a link between genes of the monkey tumor virus SV40 and a virus that infects bacteria, called lambda phage (Jackson, Symons, and Berg 1972). A natural next step was injecting this novel gene construct into the bacterial host Escherichia coli, a denizen of the human intestine. But Berg deferred this experiment because of concerns about the potential risks of propagating a monkey tumor virus within the human gut, and together with other scientists, he advocated for restrictions on certain types of recombinant DNA research (such as inserting toxins, antibiotic resistance, or cancer genes into bacteria) until safety concerns could be better addressed. Berg and colleagues organized a conference of scientists to address ways to ensure the...

The Films of MM Serra:Art(core) and the Explicit Body MM Serra (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Mary Magdalene 2017 [End Page 134] "Mary Magdalene" is separate from you, but comes from you. It is a brilliant, explosive, fierce, and passionate gem, the kind that catches light but can also cut. As I said last night, the woman's body is there to contain and resist; she fights the frame and ideology all at the same time, forcing us to think about how images of the body both seduce and confuse us at every turn. The film does not offer easy answers but rather stirs us to move through the world so much more aware. A film about touching that no one can touch. —Lynne Sachs1 I, MM Serra, have since 1982 created over twenty-four short experimental documentary films. Over the last four decades, through my creation of films such as Turner (1987), L'Amour Fou (1992), Darling International (1999, co-directed with Jenn Reeves), Chop Off (2009), Bitch-Beauty (2011), Enduring Ornament (2015, co-directed with Josh Lewis), and Mary Magdalene (2017), I have explored my personal vision in moving image making by focusing on explicit content with a variety of aesthetics and techniques. Not having a camera or access to film equipment, I had the good fortune to be able to study filmmaking with a pioneer of the American avant-garde film scene Shirley Clarke in 1982 at UCLA. My first six films were created in Los Angeles while I studied with Clarke and were cinematic exercises in creating one-minute films about light and shadow and movement. In my early film Turner, sexuality is expressed through the film's star, blonde Marilyn Monroe-esque C. [End Page 135] Breeze, who is reading her poetry. The lyrics of her poetry are part of a dream about her dog, Turner, eagerly licking her nude body, after she put lotion on herself (canine sex). The film is layered with superimpositions and C. Breeze's use of blue-tinted fabrics. These early films from the 1980s serve as an indication of themes I would explore more explicitly in my later works, after I moved to New York in 1987. My mother, Josephine, named me Mary Magdalene (MM) for the only woman disciple of Jesus in the Christian New Testament. I think she was prescient; she knew deep down that the mythology of Mary Magdalene had a double life and multiple meanings. For many Christians, MM has a reputation as a repentant prostitute or loose woman. I have been inspired by this dichotomy throughout my life. As a girl growing up in a small, factory-based town in Western Pennsylvania in the mid twentieth century, I realized that my name was iconoclastic then and still is today. In June 2018, in response to Stormy Daniels's allegations, Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani said, "I respect all human beings. I even have to respect criminals. But I'm sorry, I don't respect a porn star the way I respect a career women or a women of substance or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman and as a person and isn't going to sell her body for sexual exploitation." Even now, at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, a woman within the heteronormative system who uses her body in a sexual manner is demonized and censored. Ever since my early childhood, this name Mary Magdalene has propelled me to stand outside the conventional institutions. By resisting normative paradigms in regards to the art I should create, the clothing I should wear, the films I should watch, the food I should eat, and the life I should lead, I am shaping my existence as a woman and as a filmmaker, using my own terms and initiatives. In childhood, looking at images of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in my mother's Italian Bible, I was awestruck by the beauty of the colorful, voluptuous bodies. I wanted to be Michelangelo using photography and filmmaking, creating not just the celestial bodies, but the body in all of...

Imago/American Imago: 1912–2012 Preface Louis Rose The first issue of Imago, under the editorial direction of Sigmund Freud and co-edited by Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs, appeared in Vienna in March 1912. The journal continued to appear during the First World War and remained active until 1938, when the Anschluss between Nazi Germany and Austria made it impossible to go further as a Viennese publication. In that same year, Sachs recommended to Freud that Imago be revived within the psychoanalytic émigré community in the United States and that Freud serve as one of its editors. Although Freud initially hoped that Imago in exile would remain a German-language publication, he eventually agreed with Sachs’ idea for an English-language journal and suggested that it be called American Imago (Sachs, 1944, pp. 182–183). Freud died before the initial issue of the transplanted journal appeared, but Sachs successfully put their project into effect. Now, with the current March 2012 issue, Imago/American Imago has reached its 100th anniversary. Throughout its 100 years, the journal has published the work of analysts and authors across the fields of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. It has also published across boundaries determined by war and exile, demonstrating a recurring awareness of the crisis conditions in which it was born and had to exist, and keeping a steady focus on the future of the psychoanalytic movement. The breadth of both its mission and concerns appeared in Imago’s first issues, in which Freud published the four essays that became Totem and Taboo (1913 [1912–13]). Those essays directed the attention of the psychoanalytic movement to moments of crisis in history and specifically to the psychological and social meaning of authority, obedience, and revolt at such moments, the question from Totem and Taboo that Stanley Milgram identified as directly relevant to his own seminal study [End Page 1] of obedience to authority (1974, p. 113). But those same four essays also confronted the question of loss and reflected upon the mortal obstacles and vicissitudes—internal and external—that attached to humanity’s deepest personal and social strivings. Fittingly, having published Totem and Taboo in Imago in the journal’s earliest years, Freud revisited the work’s central themes in the opening two essays of Moses and Monotheism (1939 [1934–38]), which he published in the journal in 1937, during the last year of its Viennese existence, before he was forced to find refuge in London. Imago came into existence only two years before the outbreak of the First World War. It was present at the collapse of the centuries-old European continental empires. And it experienced the hope-filled creations and troubled lives of the new Central European republics, Austria and Germany chief among them. In Vienna, an author of the constitution of Austria’s First Republic and member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Hans Kelsen (1922), published a social psychological theory of state formation in Imago, and Erich Fromm (1931) published a psychological and social analysis of crime and punishment in the postwar world. Outlining future directions for psychoanalytic theory and practice, Melanie Klein’s works on child analysis (1923 and 1926) and Erik Erikson’s early contribution on traumatic configurations in children’s play (1937) appeared in the Viennese Imago. There too the art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris—also an editor of the journal—moved psychoanalysis into the academic fields of art history and image studies through the project on caricature that he pursued with his friend and colleague E. H. Gombrich (1934). Such directions, however, became swept up by the events that surrounded the analysts in Europe, and as the decade of the 1930s reached its deepest moment of crisis, Thomas Mann (1936) published his somber contemplation of Freud and the future in Imago’s pages. In the United States at the start of the Second World War, in one of the first issues of American Imago, the German émigré analyst and Marxian thinker Otto Fenichel (1939/1940) interpreted the nature of the political anti-Semitism that had undermined the new European republics, contributed to the rise of fascism, and forced psychoanalysts into exile. Yet, even in [End...

Reviewed by: Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East Jonathan Bone Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East. By Elena Shulman . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 280 pp. $109.00 (cloth); $79.00 (e-book). Writing in the New Yorker in 1838, newspaperman Horace Greeley famously advised young American men coming of age to "go to the West." Go they did, although not necessarily in direct response to Greeley's appeal. Almost exactly a century later, on 5 February 1939, a lengthy article attributed to a hitherto unknown Red Army officer's wife appeared on the second page of Komsomol'skaia Pravda (the [End Page 653] newspaper of the Young Communist League). Said Valentina Khetagurova to young Soviet women coming of age, "Join us in the Far East!" Elena Shulman's erudite, elegant study Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East begins with the roughly three hundred thousand women who volunteered to do just that. More importantly for our understanding of the Stalin era, she focuses in considerable detail on the roughly twenty-five thousand "Khetagurovites" who actually made the long migration to the Soviet Union's Pacific rim. Underlying Shulman's approach is the sensible idea that "Stalinism" (defined à la Fitzpatrick as shorthand for the institutions, structures, and rituals of the 1930s) had peripheral as well as comparatively better-known central roots. It was worked out not only in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev but also on the conceptual and physical margins of Stalinist space. As inconsequentially peripheral (or more so) as anywhere in the Soviet Union going into the Stalin Revolution, the Far East suddenly became vulnerable when the Japanese moved into Manchuria in 1931. The Politburo's response was a crash military buildup facilitated by forced labor, a kind of über Stalinism that Shulman calls "an exaggerated version of practices and policies associated with Stalinist rule" (p. 4). At the same time, however, the Far Eastern frontier offered enormous potential for those involving themselves in its development. This was particularly true for women—historically in short supply regionally, and whose presence needed to become permanent if the eastern sixth of the Soviet Union ever was to become well integrated with the rest of Stalinist society. From this came the Khetagurovite movement. And with its earnest young volunteers came a host of questions, chief among them the factual nature and terms of their participation upon arrival, along with the discrepancies between their idealism and frontier-Stalinist realities. Shulman's book explores those questions in six substantive chapters plus a framing introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1, "Women and Soviet Power," contextualizes the Khetagurovites by outlining the basic contours of Soviet gender policies since the October Revolution and by situating the Far East in terms of dynamics (e.g., upward mobility, repression) accentuated in the 1930s under Stalin. Chapter 2, "Where Steel Cracks Like Glass" (the reference is to extreme winter cold), illuminates the Khetagurova movement proper: its origins, the resonance of its appeal, the selection of what are rather convincingly presented as enthusiastic volunteers, and their transport and dislocation in the Far East. Chapter 3, "'Our Famous Valia': The Rise of a Soviet Notable," takes a close look at the eponymous instigator of the [End Page 654] movement, who became what Shulman calls a "local celebrity" and (briefly) a regional patroness of women at the age of twenty-three. Says Shulman, Khetagurova "was not an inert archetype publicized by the propaganda establishment for its own ends" (p. 118). Rather, within the possibilities open to her she exercised considerable agency on behalf of "her" cause. Chapter 4, "'Envy for Everything Heroic': Women Volunteering for the Frontier," gets to the heart of gender issues in the construction of Stalinism by examining the enormous public response to Khetagurova's Komsomol'skaia Pravda appeal. The idea of honorable service in the defense of the Soviet state apparently had considerable general resonance; moreover, says Shulman, "women's possible contribution in the event of total war became an arsenal in the women's demands for entry into previously all-male...

Reviewed by: Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski Carl C. Creason (bio) Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South. By Gracjan Kraszewski. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2020. Pp. ix, 196. $45.00 cloth; $37.99 ebook) In the spring of 1864, Jesuit priests at St. Charles College in Grand Coteau suspended classes to celebrate the "good news" of Confederate victories in Louisiana (p. 50). Months later, in neighboring Mississippi, federal troops arrested Bishop William Henry Elder of Natchez for refusing to offer a prayer in support of President Abraham Lincoln. And, in July 1864, Bishop Patrick Lynch of [End Page 92] Charleston arrived in Rome to meet with Pope Pius IX. The American prelate, commissioned as an official Confederate diplomat, traveled to Italy in hopes of securing papal recognition of the Confederacy. All of these events serve as examples of what historian Gracjan Kraszewski terms "Catholic Confederatization." In Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South, Kraszweski examines the nature of "Catholic commitment to and involvement in the Confederacy," demonstrating that, for the majority of white southern Catholics, religious and political identities "were not in tension; rather, they mutually reinforced each other" over the course of the Civil War (pp. xvii–xviii). Organized both chronologically and thematically, Catholic Confederates includes six chapters that examine the lives of prominent southern Catholics. Presented together, these case studies provide a representative portrait of the overall white southern Catholic experience. Chapters devoted to the wartime activities of bishops and priests as well as lay soldiers and civilians highlight the spectrum of Catholic Confederatization. Even though "almost all Southern Catholics were somehow involved in the Confederate nation," the degree and manner of Confederatization differed among Catholics for a variety of reasons (p. xix). Chaplains and soldiers remained the most "highly politicized" Catholics, donning rebel uniforms and supporting southern independence on the battlefield (p. xvii). Confederatization among members of the hierarchy, however, ranged from Bishop Lynch's overt display as an international lobbyist to Bishop Elder's position that he prayed only for a quick end to the war. As Catholic Confederates shows, southern prelates often couched their Confederate sympathies in messages advocating peace. Kraszewski's interpretations, then, call into question those religious leaders who claimed to be apolitical or neutral. And, finally, the chapter on sister-nurses focuses on a group of Catholics who participated in the Confederacy "without politicization" (p. 95). Catholic Confederates makes important contributions to the fields of Civil War religion, nineteenth-century southern Catholicism, and [End Page 93] Confederate nationalism. Kraszewski frames his study as an examination of a minority group within the newly established Confederate nation. In doing so, Catholic Confederates builds on the work of Emory Thomas, Drew Gilpin Faust, Anne Sarah Rubin, and other historians who have analyzed loyalty, identity, and citizenship in the Civil War South. Scholars of the Confederacy will benefit from Kraszewski's study of non-Protestant as well as immigrant expressions of nationalism, thereby broadening our understanding of the social makeup of the Confederacy. Historians of U.S. Catholicism, on the other hand, will appreciate Kraszewski's "Confederatization thesis," an alternative to the "Americanization thesis," which has influenced much of the historiography since the mid-twentieth century. While the Americanization thesis highlights the problems Catholics faced with assimilation, often depicting them as "others" or "outsiders," the Confederatization thesis posits that Catholics "were fully integrated members of [Confederate] society" (p. 141). As such, Kraszewski's work supports the arguments of recent publications by Andrew H. Stern, David C. R. Heisser, and Adam L. Tate, all of whom demonstrate that Catholicism thrived as an element of antebellum-southern and Confederate cultures. Throughout Catholic Confederates, Kraszewski illustrates how Catholics seemed "practically indistinguishable from Southern Protestants" (p. xxi). Differences of theology and modes of worship appear in sections about chaplains dispensing the sacraments in campgrounds and on battlefields. However, these activities are presented as examples of accepted religious diversity. In large part, Catholic inclusion in the Confederate nation crystallized because Church leaders either accepted or publicly endorsed slavery and the racial order established by the institution. Kraszewski joins a growing body of scholars who...