University of Pennsylvania Press Inc.

This book is the most complete account in existence of a strange group of animals—the spadefoot toads. This small group of species, which, because of their secretive and burrowing habits, the author calls "gnomes of the night," have unusually numerous interesting facts in their life history. The purpose of the book is twofold: to give a factual picture of the lives of the spadefoots, drawing upon the technical literature as well as the author's wide experience with certain species; and to illustrate how a naturalist works, the mistakes he sometimes makes, his correction of them with time and further experience, and the necessity for him to accept and examine critically the comments on his work by others.

Gnomes of the Night should appeal to all zoologists, especially those whose interests are in the lives of animals in their natural habitat rather than in the laboratory. Illustrated with maps and photographs, it is a scholarly and fascinating account of little-known but prevalent animals.

This is the first full-length biography of Horatio Greenough. Aside from a short fifty page account published in 1853, no one up to now has attempted to write the complete story of his life.

Greenough, who lived from 1805 to 1852, was the first American to devote himself from the outset of his career to the profession of sculpture and the first to set forth at any length the concept of functionalism in architecture. He was generally forgotten after his death, chiefly because the heroic, classical tradition in sculpture to which he was committed gave place to the realistic depiction of subjects in the dress of their times. On the other hand, his architectural theory, for which he was far in advance of his time, made little impression on his contemporaries. In recent years he has been hailed as a forerunner of the architectural functionalists while his sculpture has been disparaged. Actually, his achievement in both these areas is considerable and highly significant in the history of American culture.

In this book Greenough's life is examined with a broad, historical, American-culture point of view rather than the specialized view of the art critic. Especially interesting and informative are the discussions of his virtual founding of the American colony in Florence; his association with such notable contemporaries as James Fenimore Cooper, Samuel F. B. Morse and Ralph Waldo Emerson; and his dealings with the United States government in the execution of two major works. One was the controversial "Washington," intended for the rotund. of the Capitol but, widely objected to because the figure was half-nude, now in the Smithsonian Institution; the other was "The Rescue," consisting of a pioneer restraining an Indian from killing a pioneer woman and child, a group which stood on the east front of the Capitol until its recent remodeling.

This book contains liberal quotations from previously unpublished letters of Greenough and accounts of nineteenth-century American travelers in Italy. In addition, there is a catalogue of the artist's sculpture and fifty plates (with seventy-eight individual illustrations), including photographs or drawings of most of his sculptures and photographs of representative specimens of his drawings, the majority of which are being published for the first time.

The new society that the world awaited might yet be born in the humble guise of a backwoods village. This was the belief shared by the many groups which moved into the American frontier to create experimental communities—communities which they hoped would be models for revolutionary changes in religion, politics, economics, and education in American society. For, as James Madison wrote, the American Republic was "useful in proving things before held impossible."

The communitarian ideal had its roots in the radical Protestant sects of the Reformation. Arthur Bestor shows the connection between the "holy commonwealths" of the colonial period and the nonsectarian experiments of the nineteenth century. He examines in particular detail Robert Owen's ideals and problems in creating New Harmony.

Two essays have been added to this volume for the second edition. In these, "Patent-Office Models of the Good Society" and "The Transit of Communitarian Socialism to America," Bestor discusses the effects of the frontier and of the migration of European ideas and people on these communities. He holds that the communitarians could believe in the possibility of nonviolent revolution through imitation of a small perfect society only as long as they saw American institutions as flexible. By the end of the nineteenth century, as American society became less plastic, belief in the power of successful models weakened.

This is the biography of a man who made his greatest contribution to science in his reorganization of the U.S. Coast Survey. Alexander Dallas Bache was appointed superintendent in 1843, and the Survey increased its scope and improved its methods in the study of winds, tides, currents, and harbors under his charge

Grandson of Benjamin Franklin, Bache was also active in education. Elected first president of Girard College when he was thirty, he visited European educational institutions in order to study their methods. And it may well be that, because of the admiration felt for his great ancestor, he was received in Europe with more attention than even his scholarship and personality merited. His survey of European educational institutions resulted in his monumental "Report on Education in Europe," which exerted a profound influence on educational methods in the United States.

At heart, however, Bache was primarily a scientist and he became a significant figure in the development of American scientific institutions in general, and of Philadelphia in particular. An indefatigable worker, he also served as Superintendent of Weights and Measures in the United States, as a member of the Lighthouse Board, a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and Secretary of the American Philosophical Society.

John G. Johnson, who died in 1917, became a legend soon after his death. His prodigious intellect and energy, his consummate skill in court, his independence of thought and action are still spoken of with the same awe his name provoked when it was considered the magic answer to almost any knotty problem of law.

This is the first attempt to put this remarkable, nationally famous figure between the covers of a book. His career is traced, step by step, from his humble birth, through his rapid rise in legal circles, to the crowning rewards of his later years when he was considered the most brilliant corporation lawyer in America. He is shown as a man of single-minded, tireless devotion to the study and application of the law in all its aspects, who gave equally efficient service to big clients and little. He was one of the last general practitioners of law, handling every kind of case to the total of over 10,000 in his lifetime, but his greatest reputation was made in the early years of the century when he tried the Northern Securities Case before the United States Supreme Court, The Government case against the U. S. Steel Corporation and other legal battles of the antitrust era.

The story of Johnson's life is the story of his legal activities, for he had only one other genuine interest—art collecting. This aspect of his character is also described, but the book deals primarily with Johnson the living symbol of the law who well deserves this lasting record.

These finely tempered reflections of a small city lawyer restate, in a graceful and informal manner, the true meaning of law and government to ordinary men. F. Lyman Windolph, for twenty-five years a prominent attorney in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has handled almost every kind of legal case in his career, and through his close association with his clients he has gained an understanding of their lives and problems which, coupled with his wide legal knowledge, and alert sense of the social questions of the present, gives his essays a disarming and reassuring tone.

Lawyers especially will enjoy his discussion of his experience with various cases and the more general topics of the value of the jury system, the difference between city and country trials, the ethics of defending guilty clients. But all will find the chapters on the meaning of democracy and liberalism and the indirect picture which the book gives of the day-by-day life in a small American community richly rewarding. In the last instance, two final essays—one on the Pennsylvania Dutch religious sects and "A Letter to My Father"—are particularly delightful. Several of the chapters have previously been published in the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines.

Ernst Kurth as Theorist and Analyst is the first book length study devoted to the writings of one of this century's most important music theorists. In contrast to previous discussions, Lee A. Rothfarb's study explains Kurth's theories in light of his analyses of specific musical examples.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kurth approached music primarily from a cognitive rather than a purely technical viewpoint. In a unique kind of experiential analysis, he examined the psychological foundations of counterpoint, harmony, and form, and considered the affective, as opposed to solely structural or syntactic, effects of melody, chord, interval, and tone.

The introduction provides a biographical sketch of Kurth, based on archival research and personal interview with his widow, son, and many of his doctoral students. Rothfarb also discusses the intellectual currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both musical and nonmusical, which shaped Kurth's outlook. Eight chapters summarize the main ideas of Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts and Romantische Harmonik and show the directions Kurth took in his later works, Bruckner and Musikpsychologie. A final chapter identified his influence on several of his well-known contemporaries.

Ernst Kurth as Theorist and Analyst will interest music theorists, musicologists, and advanced students of music theory.

Based largely on manuscript material, this comprehensive account of the Irish Parliament in the Middle Ages shows that early Irish parliaments cannot be identified either in form or function with their modern namesake and, consequently, demonstrates that the concept of governmental democracy had a much slower, more gradual development than historians have heretofore believed.

The history of the Irish Parliaments proper begins with that held at Castledermot in mid-June 1264. During the reign of Edward II and the early years of Edward III significant changes took place—changes, the authors, point out, similar to those taking place in the development of the English Parliament, though there were important differences.

The book continues with a description of the Irish Parliament in the middle years of Edward III's reign and concludes with an account of the parliament at Drogheda held in 1494, when the passing of Poyning's Law brought the period of medieval parliaments to a close. The appendices include an almost complete list of the meetings convened between 1264 and 1494, as well as copies of documents that, the authors say, are the only means whereby a close glimpse may be had of the personnel and deliberations of the Privy Council.

The far-reaching social and intellectual changes in the United States since the Civil War have had a definite effect upon the religious thought of American churches. In this volume, a distinguished scholar and theologian has undertaken an inductive study of theological issues in one of the major denominations, the Presbyterian church in the United States of America. Since this church was in the thick of the social and intellectual ferment that changed the living and thinking habits of Americans, much that transpired in it finds broad parallels in other leading American churches. Thus, the story of the Presbyterian church is, in essence, a kind of theological barometer of American history.

Avoiding sweeping generalizations, Lefferts A. Loetscher briefly traces the history of the Presbyterian church from its founding by New England Puritans on Long Island in the 1640s to the disruption of 1837 and the "wedding day" of Old School and New School Presbyterians in 1870, following the reunion of 1869. From this point, he examines in detail the development of the church, analyzing the controversies that occurred over the years, interpreting the various theological issues that led to disputes.

Through scrupulous and perceptive analyses, Hopkins shows how parameters other than melody, harmony, and rhythm compensate for the weakening of tonal syntax in Mahler's music.

Closure and Mahler's Music provides a conceptual framework that can enhance understanding of the stylistic changes that took place during the first part of the twentieth century.

In Highpoints Zoltan Eitan investigates a universal melodic phenomenon—the melodic peak—in Western repertories ranging from eighteenth-century Galant music to twentieth-century Expressionism. Using "hard" statistical analysis, Eitan examines the rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, and dynamic configurations associated with contour peaks in the music of Haydn, Chopin, and Berg, three composers of decidedly different t musical casts. This empirical examination serves as a starting point in Eitan's exploration of the structural and expressive functions of melodic shape in these diverse bodies of music.

Melodic contour has received increasing attention from psychologists, music theorists, and ethnomusicologists partially because, unlike functional tonal relationships, it is a universal facet of auditory patterning and may be strongly related to primeval, "natural" aspects of perception. By focusing on this elemental aspect, rather than on pitch syntax or conventional form, the author provides fresh insights into the work of the individual composers he discusses as well as an innovative approach to broad issues of musical style and style change. Highpoints concludes with a discussion, drawing on empirical findings, of melodic gesture and syntax as distinct, independent dimensions of style, style boundaries, and style change.

From the Introduction:
"The texts of Aman used in the preparation of this edition are taken from five editions of Montchrestien's plays, i.e., 1601, 1603, 1604, 1606, 1627. There are, however, in fact only two editions which differ from each other, i.e., the 1601 and 1604 editions. . . . In the arrangement of the present text in this edition of texts of [the editions of 1601 and 1604] are printed on opposite pages."

New disorders require new polices, says economist Sidney Weintraub. In this book he draws together many of his shorter writings to deal with economic problems that have defied orthodox monetary and fiscal remedies.

Weintraub has long been noted for his vigorous criticism of both monetarist and Keynesian schools of thought for their failure to cope with disorders in our economy involving unemployment and inflation. Keynes, Keynesians, and Monetarists contains the original article on TIP, written in collaboration with Henry Wallich, outlining a tax-based incomes policy to combat inflation in an era of unemployment. This essay has been the focus of extended discussion in official quarters, among economics and in the public press.

For years the novel Watt has been overlooked or explained away in the most cursory fashion by scholars and critics who have otherwise paid the most scrupulous attention to the rest of Samuel Beckett's work. Now, Gottfried Büttner, a philosopher as well as a physician trained in psychology, offers a penetrating analysis of the work's narrative form and a convincing interpretation of Watt's journey.

Büttner interprets Watt through hermeneutic analysis in order to demonstrate the metaconscious state of being which he believes is central not only to this novel, but also to Beckett's oeuvre. Büttner's method combines a biographical, psychological, and anthropological approach. He offers an exegesis of the narrative form and moves to a convincing interpretation of Watt's journey as the Lebenswanderung from birth to death and back to birth into the unknown. His analysis reveals that in Watt Beckett sought to unveil the hidden experience of a soul suffering under the ordeal of birth and death, and even under an ordeal of rebirth. A kind of soul-wandering, a metamorphosis of the spirit, has thus been made clear for the reader in the figure of Watt in Beckett's novel.

Büttner's work is informed not only by his far-reaching literary interests but by his twenty years of intellectual friendship with Beckett. Their correspondence has touched upon questions of translation, philological intent, and interpretation of the text. While Beckett made it clear that he would not explicate his writings and would insist that text and exegesis stand separately, his degree of interest in Büttner's work is unparalleled.

Franklin C. Watkins (1894-1972) was born in New York but pursued his work as painter and teacher in Philadelphia. Over his long and distinguished career, he was awarded many honors and prizes, and his paintings hang in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as in many other museums, university collections, and private collections.

During a series of highly informal meetings betwen Franklin C. Watkins and author Ben Wolf—both deeply engrossed in art, one asking and listening, the other searching for answers with the naked honesty that distinguishes both the man and his work—this book found its natural though unorthodox form. The transcriptions of the actual conversations between the author and the painter are framed by an introductory essay on the origins of the book and by an account of the painting of Watkins's mural-sized canvas for the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. But the book's contents resist classification.

Ninety-four of Watkins's paintings are reproduced, together with a catalogue containing his comments on individual pictures.

In the years since Proust's death there have been many specialized studies of his extraordinary novel, and his character and viewpoint have been violently attacked and warmly defended. Here at last, written with sound scholarship but addressed to the general reader, is a full, frank, and unbiased account of the man and his work, and a clear statement of what he has to say to the world today.

Chronological biography is interpolated with detailed analysis of Proust's work in reference to his intellectual and emotional development. Stressed as important contributing factors in his development, aside from the influences of the decadent '8Os and '90s, are the subordination of intellect to intuition, the discovery of involuntary memory, the search for affection and the enduring friendship, the torments of jealousy in a sensitive mind, the burden of homosexuality.

The author shows how the dreamy, sensitive, affectionate boy who loved sunlight and the out-­of-doors was transformed into the legendary recluse of the cork-lined chamber—a strange, somnambulistic creature with luminous eyes, waxy pallor, and dank matted hair who, shivering and drugged, had himself driven in a tightly dosed limousine for a look through glass at his still-loved fruit trees in bloom.

It was asthma that accomplished the transformation—asthma and the strange paralysis of the will when he was called upon to make a decision. But in his enforced seclusion Proust's profoundly analytical mind, extraordinary intuitions, and astounding memory explored the fruits of experience, and produced his epoch-making work. Out of his physical and emotional sufferings he evolved his philosophy of the two worlds: one the world of time, where necessity, illusion, suffering, change, decay, and death are the law; the other the world of eternity, where there is freedom, beauty, and peace. Normal experience is in the world of time, but glimpses of the other world may be given in moments of contemplation or through accidents of involuntary memory. It is the function of art to develop these insights and to use them for the illumination of life in the world of time.

In Mechanism and Mysticism, Louis J. Zanine provides the first full-length study of Theodore Dreiser's interest in modern scientific research and of the impact of scientific ideas on the thought and work of a writer who would gain fame as a deterministic naturalist, but who would end his life as a mystic pantheist.

Dreiser was raised in a household dominated by the fanatical Catholic faith of his father and the superstitious beliefs of his mother. In 1894, having rejected the orthodox Christianity of his upbringing, he underwent a significant intellectual and spiritual revolution, precipitated by his discover y of the evolutionary writings of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. The concept of an evolutionary universe provided Dreiser with the philosophical framework for the pessimistic naturalism of his early novels (Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier). In the next decades, his discovery of scientific mechanism would reveal a universe that was a well-ordered machine, and it is in the context of Dreiser's reading of the mechanistic philosophy of Jacques Loeb and others that Zanine examines An American Tragedy and The Hand of the Potter.

The philosophy of mechanism, combined with his under standing of evolutionary thought, provided Dreiser with a scientific world view that gave him a coherent system of beliefs about human beings' place in the universe, their origins, and the bases of their behavior. Yet Zanine demonstrates that Dreiser never fully adopted the stark materialism or atheism of the mechanists. He continued to have a deeply superstitious side, and a number of experiences with fortune tellers, séances, Ouija boards, and spirit apparitions convinced him of the existence of some controlling supernatural force in the universe. During the same years that he was espousing the principles of mechanistic philosophy in correspondence and conversation with Jacques Loeb, Zanine shows Dreiser was also drawn into speculations about the supernatural through his friendship with the eccentric investigator and author, Charles Fort.

In an effort to further his understanding of mechanistic philosophy and to reconcile his faith in the supernatural with the facts of modern science, Dreiser began an intensive period of scientific study in 1927. For the next ten years, he befriended many of America's most eminent scientists, and read numerous works on biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy. In 1937, at the Carnegie Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, he experienced a spiritual epiphany in which he was suddenly able to intuit a Divine Being's presence in all of nature. Dreiser's scientific quest had culminated in a mystical conversion that would dominate the remaining eight years of his life.

Mechanism and Mysticism offers substantial insight into the character of one of America's leading literary figures. With its unique brand of interdisciplinary research data, it will be of interest to students and scholars of American studies and literature, twentieth-century history, and history of science and religion.

Open space in urban regions is fast disappearing, but it can still be saved by coordinating man's design with the processes of nature. The authors demonstrate here methods that permit better and more profitable economic and industrial development, while raising the quality of life and saving the environment.

The problem is all around us, David Wallace observes: "As metropolitan areas grow and Megalopolis takes shape before our eyes, nearby open space where nature predominates seems doomed. Forces apparently beyond our control eliminate all traces of an untouched countryside, and replace it with thousands and thousands and thousands of houses. The pattern of ultimate suburban development finally removes the last vestiges of woods, streams, thickets, and wildlife with the filling of vacant lots carelessly left over from the first great surge of growth. The individual houses that result art perhaps pleasant enough in the micro-scale. But unrelievedly continuous urbanization—even in the case where the individual parts are attractive—appalls, bores, and numbs the senses. . . . Must it be this way?"

This study, based on research at the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests how the process of indiscriminate exploitation of open space can be reversed through understanding and application of natural processes in the environment. When these natural processes are understood, planners can discriminate among land that should be retained as open space in a natural state, land that can stand limited development, and land that can be fully developed without significantly affecting natural processes.

Contributors: William G. Grigsby, Ian McHarg, William H. Roberts, Ann Louise Strong, Nohad A. Toulan, and David A. Wallace.

John G. Johnson, who died in 1917, became a legend soon after his death. His prodigious intellect and energy, his consummate skill in court, his independence of thought and action are still spoken of with the same awe his name provoked when it was considered the magic answer to almost any knotty problem of law.

This is the first attempt to put this remarkable, nationally famous figure between the covers of a book. His career is traced, step by step, from his humble birth, through his rapid rise in legal circles, to the crowning rewards of his later years when he was considered the most brilliant corporation lawyer in America. He is shown as a man of single-minded, tireless devotion to the study and application of the law in all its aspects, who gave equally efficient service to big clients and little. He was one of the last general practitioners of law, handling every kind of case to the total of over 10,000 in his lifetime, but his greatest reputation was made in the early years of the century when he tried the Northern Securities Case before the United States Supreme Court, The Government case against the U. S. Steel Corporation and other legal battles of the antitrust era.

The story of Johnson's life is the story of his legal activities, for he had only one other genuine interest—art collecting. This aspect of his character is also described, but the book deals primarily with Johnson the living symbol of the law who well deserves this lasting record.

This is the first modern biography of Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin. Between the turbulent years of 1793 and 1798, Bache was the young nation's leading political journalist and a sharp critic of the Federalists and their policies. As editor of the most important radical newspaper of the 1790s, he lived at the center of most of the political storms of that decade. He defended the Democratic Societies as the earliest vehicles of public opinion; he strenuously opposed the ratification of the Jay Treaty, the central political event of the decade; he led and orchestrated the attack on George Washington in an attempt to curb growing executive authority; and his defense of French policies contributed to the sedition crisis of 1798. A primary target of the Federalist-sponsored Sedition Act, he was indicted for federal common law seditious libel before that act took effect. In 1798, at the height of the political hysteria, Bache died of yellow fever at the age of twenty-nine.

Like Thomas Paine, to whom Bache was personally and ideologically connected, Bache was not a product of Whig Oppositionist or classical republican ideology. Yet neither was he an inheritor of a more thoroughly modem liberal ideal. Committed to rational self -interest, he promoted a civic vision and only partially embraced the newer world of nascent capitalism. James Tagg establishes the ideological and psychological framework of Bache's later radicalism by carefully examining Bache's childhood at Passy with his grandfather, his education in Geneva, and his adolescence in Philadelphia.

Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora will interest scholars and students of American history.

As prominent as the Wharton School of Business is today, so was the Wharton family in the mercantile world of eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Nineteenth-century scion of this large and wealthy business family, Joseph Wharton amassed a huge new fortune in his American Nickel Company and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and through these enterprises helped catapult the nation into the modern age of industry. In 1881, while still in mid-career, he contributed part of his accumulated wealth to endow the Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania. Wharton's purpose was to prepare the city's young men "of inherited wealth and capacity" to assume control of the complex economy that he and his fellow entrepreneurs were then creating. He would have the university provide that cultural background needed by all gentlemen of society, while the new Wharton course would instruct students in those economic experiences necessary for success in the world of practical affairs. Wharton's investment and instructional program began the modern tradition of collegiate management education.

Steven A. Sass's The Pragmatic Imagination not only provides a history of the world's oldest and still one of the most prestigious schools of management but also offers a fascinating exploration of the interaction of higher education and economic activity. The volume illuminates the essential tension in professional business education—that between utilitarian training and scholarly speculation—and analyzes the various regimes of conflict, accommodation, and synergy between these two interests. Providing the unifying theme of the history is Joseph Wharton's ambition to create a leadership class for industrial America. Careful attention is devoted to the various strategies adopted to achieve this end and to the forces that facilitated or frustrated the founder's purpose. Essentially an essay on the role of authority in the development of American culture, The Pragmatic Imagination carries the history of Joseph Wharton's experiment from its origins in the ironmaster's entrepreneurial ethos; through the vigorous Mugwumpery of the 1880s; to the gospel of the Progressive Era of civic revival and practical education; into the crises of depression and war; through the flowering of econometrics and operations research; down to the present-day vogue for the M.B.A.

Our colonial ancestors knew how to build houses as well as constitutions. It may even be that they built the one as enduringly as the other, for many of their mansions still stand, firm in joist and beam, having required in nearly two centuries no more serious repairs than shingles and paint. As the Constitution did not spring, a magic structure, fresh from the minds of its builders, but was a welding together of ideas as old as the Magna Carta, so the style of architecture known as Colonial was not a new creation but an adaptation of the Georgian to new material and new social conditions.

While there were no architects among our early ancestors, there were master builders who had served apprenticeship to the creators of the manor houses of Georgian England or of the small chateaux of France. Accustomed to work lavishly in stone and brick, these master builders adapted their methods to wood and unconsciously developed the style we know as Colonial. They kept the type pure whether they applied it to the mansion of the East Indian merchants of New England or to the hospitable home of the owners of the plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas, but in detail they yielded to climate and personality.

In this volume, Imogen Oakley meticulously examines the historical climate and the personalities that influenced the construction of six examples of colonial architecture—three in New England and one each in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland:

The Moffatt-Ladd House, Portsmouth, New Hampshire
The Quincy Mansion, Quincy, Massachusetts
The Webb House, Wethersfield, Connecticut
The Jumel House, New York, New York
Stenton, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Mount Clare, Baltimore, Maryland

By relating the character of the homesteads as they stand today to the circumstances under which they were built and the personalities who built and occupied them, the author illuminates these monuments of our American past and demonstrates the relationship of their design to their function. In addition, she traces the history of these homes and shows how it happened that they still stand today, their interior decor completely preserved in every detail. With the aid of over twenty photographs, the reader is able to gain an intimate view of many of the magnificent rooms that grace these famous old mansions.

This volume represents a valuable and entertaining contribution to American colonial history and the study of an architectural style that has withstood the vicissitudes of time and taste. It will also prove of great interest to the antique enthusiast, who will be able to see many of the finest examples of colonial interior design in their original setting and thus gain a picture of a style of living that reflects the unique personality of a hardy and practical society and which compares favorably with so much of what has grown up around and threatened to displace it.

The meter of Middle English alliterative poetry, Thomas Cable contends, holds the key to a reinterpretation of both Old English meter and iambic pentameter, which in turn provides a new understanding of Middle English meter itself. Drawing upon recent insights in linguistics, Cable articulates a revolutionary theory of rhythm in English poetry from its beginnings through the Renaissance and beyond.

Cable's discussion moves from the rhythms of Old English poetry and prose to the poetry of Chaucer and the Alliterative Revival, to Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot. He demonstrates that Middle English poetry does not show the continuity of tradition that standard authorities have asserted. With the Norman Conquest of 1066 came a clear break, and what followed was a drastic misreading by the poets of what had come before. Throughout the book, Cable constantly asks fundamental questions regarding the intentions of the poet, the impact of the perceived metrical tradition upon that poet, and, with reference to Peircean abduction, the possibility of constructing any metrical theory, especially one from the distant past. The answers and their implications—metrical, cognitive, and philosophical—provide the foundation for a new understanding of the creation and evolution of English versification from the seventh century to the present.

The English Alliterative Tradition is a major and controversial study in medieval English poetics that illustrates and clarifies key ideas of the New Philology. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Old and Middle English, prosody, and historical linguistics.

Appearing in print for the first time in 1558, the book that we now know as the Heptameron is the work of Marguerite, Queen of Navarre. Left incomplete, but dearly modeled on Boccaccio's Decameron, the Heptameron consists of a frame narrative and seventy-two tales told by five men and five women characters in the shady meadow at Notre Dame de Sarrance.

As John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley contend in their introduction to this volume, the tales of the Heptameron portray the conflicts, ruptures, and upheavals that agitated early modern French society. They present a forum in which different elements of Renaissance and Reformation culture meet and, at times, collide. Contradictory suppositions about men and women are easily discerned behind almost all of the stories, and the discussions among the fictional storytellers represent attitudes both feminist and misogynist, masculinist, and misandrous. Less oppositional are the religious conflicts among the storytellers; some are less ardently religious while others are concerned with the corporeal rather than the spiritual.

The stories of the Heptameron are often cautionary tales about the corruption of the late medieval church, about decadent priests and monks, or about the unfortunate faithful whose belief in the efficacy of good works for salvation leads to disaster and death. The conflicts of the Reformation loom over the Heptameron not just as the origin of its ideological tensions but also as a prominent symptom of the larger, related disruptions that marked sixteenth-century Europe.

Provocative and wide-ranging, appealing to specialists in numerous fields, Critical Tales is the first collective volume of studies in English on the Heptameron. The authors—Robert D. Cottrell, Hope Glidden, Marcel Tetel, Donald Stone, Tom Conley, Michel Jeanneret, Cathleen M. Bauschatz, François Cornilliat and Ullrich Langer, Mary B. McKinley, Philippe de Lajarte, Andre Tournon, Daniel Russell, François Rigolot, Paula Sommers, and Edwin M. Duval—present different approaches to Marguerite de Navarre's tales, dealing with such topics as confession, rape, the impact of printing on knowledge and narrative, narrative theory, and androgyny. The contributors to Critical Tales, like the storytellers of the Heptameron, are not afraid to challenge the critical establishment and one another. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of French and comparative literature and women's studies.

During the colonial period in India, English historians portrayed the British conquest and domination of India as the realization of a historic destiny, absorbing the particular history of India into the overarching narrative of the Empire. When Indian scholars educated in the British system began to write their own histories of the period, they had to struggle to reclaim their past and to make the Indian people the subject of their history.

Henry Schwarz explores this struggle through an analysis of Indian cultural histories written between 1870 and the present. Focusing on English-language texts written by Bengali historians on the subjects of literature and culture, Schwarz critically analyzes landmark works of the genre and compares Indian writing about cultural heritage to the dominant forms of European historiography prevalent during the colonial period.

Indian historians incorporated European aesthetic standards and theories of history into their writing, yet they managed to transform these ideas in ways that challenged British ideological domination. Schwarz shows how, in writing a distinctly Indian history of India, they produced a unique historiographical style of great complexity deploying brilliant reconfigurations of the dominant themes, styles, ideologies, and tropes that characterize acceptable modes of history writing in the West.

Moving from the late nineteenth century to the present, Schwarz identifies six distinct modes of translation and transformation produced by these writers, ranging from liberal-nationalist text to those of writers associated with the Subaltern Studies project. He analyzes the narrative modes employed during the period and traces the movement toward the metaphoric and ironic styles of the post-Independence era.

Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India provides a needed counterweight to the emphasis on colonial discourse that has come to dominate recent postcolonial scholarship. By examining how the colonized interpreted and transformed the experience of oppression through their own work, this book represents postcolonial studies written from the other side.

The Federal Reserve Act became law on December 23, 1913. The need for the new monetary system for which this law provided was traceable to the frequently stated causal connection between crises and failure in the banking and currency system and crises and failure in commerce, industry, and agriculture. The supporters of the law argued that the continued prosperity and growth of the nation demanded that monetary malfunctions be cured.

The powers and responsibilities given to the new system were enveloped in structural arrangements designed to assure the organization itself as well as the nation that there would be competent, adequate, and independent authority to provide for a more efficient monetary system. Although unique, the solution was not simple in either structure or operation, for besides protecting itself from the dangers of government or private ­banker domination, the Federal Reserve System had to win and keep the help and cooperation of this same government and these same private banks.

The System maintained its independence in two ways. First, the Federal Reserve System found its fundamental meaning in the "governmental" function delegated to it by Congress—the formation and execution of credit and monetary policy for public purposes. Yet it was set apart from the ordinary legislative and executive departments of the government. Second, the System worked to achieve its purposes by acting through and with the cooperation of the nation's private financial interests. Yet it was separate from those interests. The Federal Reserve System was designed to cooperate and still be independent. How it promoted this harmony, and yet avoided domination was its glory and its cross. It is of the history of this achievement that this book tells.

Tough girls are everywhere these days. Whether it is Ripley battling a swarm of monsters in the Aliens trilogy or Captain Janeway piloting the starship Voyager through space in the continuing Star Trek saga, women strong in both body and mind have become increasingly popular in the films, television series, advertisements, and comic books of recent decades.

In Tough Girls, Sherrie A. Inness explores the changing representations of women in all forms of popular media and what those representations suggest about shifting social mores. She begins her examination of tough women in American popular culture with three popular television shows of the 1960s and '70s—The Avengers, Charlie's Angels, and The Bionic Woman—and continues through such contemporary pieces as a recent ad for Calvin Klein jeans and current television series such as The X-files and Xena: Warrior Princess. Although all these portrayals show women who can take care of themselves in ways that have historically been seen as uniquely male, they also variously undercut women's toughness. She argues that even some of the strongest depictions of women have perpetuated women's subordinate status, using toughness in complicated ways to break or bend gender stereotypes while simultaneously affirming them.

Also of interest—
Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture
Lori Landay

American voting behavior has long been paradoxical. Although levels of voter participation increase with age, income, and education, middle- and upper-class voters—those who profess to hold the electoral process in the highest regard—still tend to cast their ballots by "image" rather than issue.

Beyond the Electoral Connection provides a comprehensive analysis and systematic explanation of this fundamental paradox. Kim Ezra Shienbaum's unusually broad perspective leads her to conclude that the nature of American democracy has been altered in fundamental ways over the past thirty years. She asserts that voters have rationally adjusted their political behavior to cope with a system in which public policy outcomes are determined largely by judicial and bureaucratic politics rather than through electoral politics. Shienbaum concludes that for the average "smart" voter, a trip to the polls is little more than an act of political ritualism: a demonstration of support for the status quo.

Albertanus of Brescia is an important figure in the cultural history of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. He is best known among literary scholars for the influence of his writings on Brunetto Latini, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer. In addition, his sermons have received attention as part of the history of lay confraternities and lay preaching in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. James M. Powell shows that Albertanus's contributions considerably surpass even these notable attainments.

Powell contends that Albertanus was an original social theorist who drew on his experience with religious confraternities and with the law to develop a theory of consent. Albertanus developed the idea that society rested on voluntary acceptance of a rule, much as did religious life. This acceptance laid the foundation for social cohesion and legal enforcement. Albertanus's ideas were to find great prominence in the later Middle Ages. Powell's purpose in writing Albertanus of Brescia goes beyond the study of his eponymous subject. Through Albertanus, Powell examines how major developments of the twelfth century began to find expression in the mind of an early thirteenth-century secular thinker. In Albertanus, Powell perceives an individual bringing received, bookish authority into confrontation with lived experience. To Powell, the example of Albertanus suggests a much more complex picture of medieval approaches to social theory than that previously evident in the literature.

This is the first book-length study of Albertanus and his works. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of medieval, Italian, intellectual, and literary history, and political theory.

Alice Walker has described the Barbadian American novelist Paule Marshall as "unequaled in intelligence, vision, craft, by anyone of her generation, to put her contributions to our literature modestly." Such praise has echoed through reviews and analyses of Marshall's work since the 1959 publication of Brown Girl, Brownstones, a novel followed by The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1984), and Daughters (1991).

Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom is the first study of Paule Marshall's work to focus explicitly on her contribution to feminism. It is also the first to identify one of her original contributions to narrative art-a technique of "superimposition" or "double exposure" through which her books have explored topics now at the heart of feminist debate.

Centered around the subject of voice and silence, these issues include the interrelation between women's power and powerlessness, the interpenetration of the political and economic world with the world of the psyche, and the mechanisms through which oppressions on the basis of race, class, and gender operate as mutually shaping forces.

Carl Berger here relates the fascinating story of the propaganda and subversion activities of both factions during the American Revolutionary War. The writ­ings of the period, the archives and litera­ture, are filled with intriguing references to "secret arts and machinations," some relating to incidents familiar to students of American history, others touching on events long since forgotten. This book for the first time brings these known and little-known events into perspective, ex­amining in a single, authoritative narra­tive their role and importance.

In his Preface to Broadsides and Bay­onets, Berger explains the great effort which was made by the supporters of both causes toward effective and wide­spread psychological warfare. "During its eight-year progression the war gave birth to many divisive operations, well planned in some instances and often involving minority groups on the scene as well as Englishmen and Americans. Drawn into the colonial struggle were French Canadians and German mercenaries, Indian tribes and Negro slaves, Irishmen, and other peoples."

Propaganda activities were not confined to the actual wartime period by any means. The newspaper and pamphlet attacks on the British started well before 1776 and brought to a fighting edge the spirits of the American colonists. Each major protagonist planned intelligent and extensive	campaigns to subvert and weaken the enemy camp. "It was a provocative war in which the atrocity story, kidnappings, false rumors, and bribery stirred the people. It was a conflict which inevitably spread to Europe and there engaged the talents of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, in America's first organized overseas propaganda campaign."

Broadsides and Bayonets is the absorbing study of the techniques of Revolutionary propaganda. The author encompasses a great lot of original material on the hot and cold war of the period, much of which has not been previously available in a single volume.

This is a study of the effect of their travels in Italy on thirteen American writers, among them Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, W. D. Howells, and Henry James. Nathalia Wright's thesis is that Italy was a major influence on the American writers of fiction who visited that country. Some of these writers went to Italy for reasons of health. others because they were dissatisfied with the status of artists in the United States and wished the pleasure and adventure of living in a country permeated with artistic sensibility. They all had in common a love for the Italian countryside, even if their opinions of the Italian personality varied.

American Novelists in Italy is concerned with those writers who wrote between 1804 and 1870 or had begun to write by 1870. It deals with their travels in Italy and discusses in detail the treatment of Italian material in their subsequent writing. From their Italian experience issued such diverse novels as Cooper's The Water-Witch, the most lighthearted and imaginative of all Cooper's novels, Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, and James's The Golden Bowl. In addition, Dr. Wright views in detail numerous works by lesser-known authors.

Illustrated with works of nineteenth-century artists who also travelled in Italy, this book should be of interest to all students of American literature, especially since it is the first book to deal in depth with the influence of Italy on the American novel.