Alfred Bendixen

Thank you so much for this collection, Mr. Bendixen. I'm working my way through the stories and savoring them. Harriet Beecher Stowe's "The Ghost in the Cap'n Brown House" is positively brilliant in so many ways. Surprisingly current. I wasn't familiar with Gertrude Atherton or Mary E. W. Freeman and am now chomping at the bit to buy their collected works. Edith Wharton is one of my favorites; glad to see two of hers in the list. Kate Chopin's "Her Letters" is a terrific study in psychology.

Hope you have more collections coming!… (plus d'informations)

This anthology was referenced several times in "The History of the Gothic: American Gothic" by Charles L. Crow, a book I very much enjoyed last year, so I chased the anthology down. "Haunted Women" contains thirteen stories, which date from the 19th through the early 20th century, by eleven different authors.

As the editor notes, “the treatment of the supernatural has been a liberating force in American literature…often enabling writers to explore subjects they could not have addressed any other way.” And American women writers were among the “liberated.” The Gothic provides the, “ideal framework for a complex exploration of moral and psychological issues.”

With this in mind, I read twelve of the thirteen stories, skipping only Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” because of having studied it in the past. The stories include some conventional ghost stories, but also others that are more psychological hauntings, such as Kate Chopin’s “Her Letters,” where the protagonist allows himself to be haunted by the letters of his dead wife. I particularly enjoyed the two stories by Edith Wharton (one written early in her career, one much later), the two stories by Mary Wilkens Freeman, and Gertrude Atherton’s 1905 “The Bell in the Fog,” which I think is the most ambitious story in the collection. Atherton’s story is a Jamesian ghost story, with a character clearly based on Henry James. As the editor notes, what may have begun as a tribute ends as an “intense questioning of both James’s values and of a literary tradition dominated by men.”… (plus d'informations)

Years ago, when I reviewed the remarkable Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, my only complaint was that it didn't cover more geographic regions. Now my wish has come true with The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing. Like its predecessor it is a collection of linked essays by 15 scholars. It is broken into three sections: 1) travel writing by Americans about America (Niagra, Mississippi, Southwest); 2) travel writing by Americans outside of America (Europe, Middle East, Pacific, Latin America); 3) and thematic topics like black and woman travel writers, and an essay on the "road book". In general I found most of the essays useful surveys of the important literature within the defined scope. The authors take unique approaches - some are more theory based, using particular works as examples to make a point, while others are more practical, attempting an authoritative survey of the field.

After reading through this I wonder about the wisdom of categorizing travel literature by nation-state. Why limit it to American writers only, at a minimum British and American writers were equally influential, it's impossible to untangle the field by nationality. I think it is the books ultimate weakness, it is not an authoritative survey since it arbitrarily excludes so many important non-American writers. Geography has political borders, but writers from all nations have written about America, just as Americans have written about other nations. It's ironic because the field of travel studies looks at this very issue of "exclusion", it is one of the core tenants of the discipline, but the book remains trapped by the very thing it purports to describe.

I recommend it for the serious reader of travel writing because the essays are generally good and one will find a number of reading ideas ranging from the 18th century to the 2000's.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd… (plus d'informations)