UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS: Literature
Fowlie, Wallace
Some Outstanding Books of the Year OO OOOOO OOOOOOO UNIVEHSITY PRESS BOOKS Literature Wallace rowlie D URING THE 1960S the number of books appearing in university presses increased each year....
...Bernard Bailyn is also sympathetic to his subject, the loyalist governor of the Bay Colony, though without the clear affection Terrill shows for his...
...Terrill likes his subject...
...Cohn acknowledges them without imposing any arbitrary elucidation...
...and one of the most remarkable short stories of J. F. Powers: "Lions, Harts, Leaping Does...
...Gide had greater prestige and was far more brilliantly the heroine de lettres...
...In Jean Cocteau and Andre Gide: an Abrasive Friendship (Rutgers University Press, $17.50), Arthur King Peters has collected a large number of documents each one of which is presented in French with an accurate translation...
...Flannery O'Connor, J. F. Powers and Elizabeth Bishop were first published in Accent...
...It ranked high in American periodicals in its support of established writers (E...
...The book is devoted to a description of the achievement of Rimbaud as poet...
...For almost forty years Gide and Cocteau carried on a kind of friendship-or rather, a kind of rivalry--by means of letters, cards, meetings, journals, "open" letters published in periodicals...
...The number dropped slightly in 1971 and has continued to drop since then...
...Cohn has taken great care to acknowledge his use of theories of previous critics...
...Each of these scholars makes a valid contribution to Proustian criticism...
...If this study is continued.--I presume that is Mr...
...The thirteen stories include "The Geranium" by Flannery O'Connor, rewritten at the end of her life and published under the title "Judgement Day...
...The following five books are not necessarily those I consider the best in the year's production...
...His study of this "socialist for all seasons," often identified only with Religion and the Rise el Capitalism, grows into a portrait of the moral conscience of much of the leadership of the Labor Party which finally came to real power in 1945...
...We follow, in reading the book, much more than the curious, often tortured friendship between Gide and Cocteau...
...He does not isolate any one pervading philosophy of Rimbaud or any one aesthetic interpretation...
...Peters found exactly the right word for this relationship: "abrasive," he calls it...
...It avoided any alignment with a political or literary movement...
...The Poetry of Rimbaud (Princeton University Press, $18.50) by Robert Greer Cohn, a professor of French literature for many years at Stanford, is an elaborate book of interpretive criticism...
...To start with men: Ross Terrill's R. H. Tawney and His Times (Harvard University Press, $15) sketches the English socialist's life as teacher, scholar, publicist: the upper-class boy, second at Balliol, devoting his life to learning and justice, developing his ideas--here elaborated as a system from books and essays and occasional speeches--through confrontation with the twentieth-century enemies of democratic socialism, capitalism...
...Whereas American and English writers were favored as subjects in university publications in 1972, French authors were strongly represented in 1973...
...She has acknowledged her debt to the French exponent of la critique thimatique, Jean-Pierre Richard, who provided a method of exploring the images drawn by the poet from his various experiences...
...The approach in most of the essays is historical criticism rather than the new structuralist criticism...
...It remained broadly humanistic and welcomed the newest avant-garde writing provided it could stand the test of appearing in close proximity with traditional literary forms...
...In emphasizing his own interpretation of each piece, Dr...
...This opens the way to a study of Lowell's confessional mode and the series of "Winslow" elegies written during the last thirty years...
...the "bureaucratization, apathy, and materialism" of collectivism...
...History & the Social Sciences Lou and John Ratte N EW SCHOLARSHIP is constantly reorienting learning in every discipline...
...She concludes that the norm of modern poetry is associated with the derangement of the senses proclaimed by Arthur Rimbaud exactly a century ago...
...They were competitive in seeking the same audience--the youthful esthetes and intellectuals of every country...
...Bailyn, whose books have illumined the origins of the Revolution for this generation, wrote this magisterial work in the late 1960s...
...The contributing scholars are known for previous writings on Proust...
...ordinary, rich in money and honors, Thomas Hutchinson failed in thought and action, in the minds of his contemporaries and in most of historiography...
...WALLACE FOWLIE, professor of French at Duke, has just published a critical study on Lautreamont...
...reader who wants to transcend pop social prophecy and panoramic warmedover history should read such books...
...This has come about not because of fewer manuscripts but because of increasing production costs and decreasing sales and subsidies...
...An entire chapter is devoted to Lowell's translation or "imitation" of Rimbaud's Mimoire in order to discuss his theory of verse translation...
...Perloff's concentration is clear and steady...
...Each poem, each prose...
...The common I LOU and JOHN RATTE live in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he is chairman of the History Department at Amherst College...
...It is also a picture of French culture as it unfolds between the first letter sent by Cocteau in 1912 and his last letter in 1951, and as it was seen by two of France's most articulate and most informed witnesses...
...When they happen to be clearly structured and well-written--as well as thoroughly researched--such books are more valuable than the survey and the digest even for the busiest reader, who knows that these studies will be the building-blocks of the next synthesis or policy debate...
...Roper was instrumental in shaping) and of personal conCommonweal: 287...
...poem (from Les Illuminations) and each section of Une saison en enfer is analyzed separately...
...This collection, wisely edited by three members of the English Department of the University of Illinois, is grouped under three headings: narrative prose, poetry, and critical prose...
...Among the eleven critical essays are studies on Henry James by B1ackmur, on Keats by Kenneth Burke, on Eliot by Ransom...
...University presses certainly do not control original scholarly publication, but tradition and money sustain, even in inflation and recession, their commitment to printing books which will never have a second printing--complete with the rich apparati of notes, charts, bibliographies and illustrations which enable others to test and progress further...
...Next year the Rattes will be teaching history at Lander College in South Carolina...
...A number of titles published by university presses this past year show why: they reveal larger worlds of events and issues through careful study of one man, or one milieu, or one problem...
...Many difficulties still remain and Mr...
...In discussing the nature of the work as seen against the background of contemporary poetry, Mrs...
...Marjorie Pcrloff's volume, The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (CorneU University Press, $9.50), presents a new focus on the more formal aspects of Lowell's poems: their imagery and tone and syntax...
...The full use of the Olmsted collection (which Mrs...
...The men were too much alike 24 May 1974:286 for each not to be fully aware of the other's weaknesses and vulnerability...
...It is a fresh vigorous attempt to analyze and interpret the beauty of the various texts...
...the authoritarian ideologies...
...Johnson's intention--it may well be monumental...
...Perloff considers all the books of Lowell but pays special attention to Life Studies which she looks upon as the poet's "central achievement...
...The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Harvard University Press, $12.50) presents, through full use of a fund of papers, many never touched before, the picture of a constrained and meticulous and intelligent merchant and public servant inhibited by personality, political conviction, and wealth and family connections from any understanding of the ferment seizing the American colonies in his day...
...During the past fifteen years many of the major poems of Robert Lowell have been submitted to close textual scrutiny, "explications" that have tended to analyze his political, social and religious views...
...But the longest in the book, by Professor Theodore Johnson, seems to me exceptionally important not only in the facts concerning Proust's discovery of Giotto, but in the allegorical interpretation of the vices and virtues in Giotto's Padua and in Marcel Proust's Combray...
...E, Cummings, Eudora Welty, R. P. Blackmur) and in its acceptance of new writers...
...Eccentric, a material failure, Tawney rode the leading edge of social thought in his times...
...There were moments of affection, but there were more moments of peevishness, irritability and even anger...
...They are those about which I would like to make a few comments...
...An attempt is made to see Olmsted as more than the genius of landscape architecture...
...Here they write either on Jean Santeuil or on specific topics related to Remembrance o[ Things Past...
...The section of fiftytwo poems contains representative poems of most of the leading poets of the day: Aiken, Gregory, Nemerov, Nims, Plath, Stevens, Dylan Thomas, T. Weiss, William Carlos Williams, and others...
...But Cocteau was a poet and had far more wit and versatility than Gide...
...Accent: An Anthology 1940-60, edited by Daniel Curley, George Scouffas and Charles Shattuck (University of Illinois Press, $12.50) is an homage to the late Kerker Quinn who served as principal editor for twenty years and whose impeccable literary taste largely accounted for the success of the magazine...
...The editors of these presses believe literary criticism was overpublished in the 1960s, and they tend now to be more rigorous in their acceptance of monographs on single literary figures and revised dissertations...
...His "tragic" historiograph is not only the product of distance in time from the eighteenth century but of an understanding "sharpened by the course of American politics" in the last ten years...
...Four of the thirteen essays in Marcel Proust: A Critical Panorama, (University of Illinois Press, $7.50), edited by Larken E. Price, were originally papers read at the University of Illinois to commemorate the centennial of Proust's birth (1871-1971...
...Such awareness of social milieu, either in the time of the subject or that of the scholar, is less significant in Laura Wood Roper's FLO: A Biography o[ Frederick Law Olmsted, (Johns Hopkins Press, $15...
...Professionals ignore at their peril the articles and books in which new models of inquiry and the results of new researches are presented to the academic and general public...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 12
