ISSUE: Autumn 1980
The South is the setting for new editions of three books recently published by Georgia: Suwannee River: Strange Green Land by Cecile Hulse Matschat, with a foreword by Pat Waiters, first published in 1938 in the Rivers of America series [$17.50 cloth, $5.95 paper]; On the Plantation, “A. Story of a Georgia Boy’s Adventures during the War,” by Joel Chandler Harris, with a foreword by Erskine Caldwell, a work which first appeared in 1892 [$15.00 cloth, $4.95 paper]; and The Gardener’s Calendar, “An Eighteenth-Century Classic of Southern Gardening,” by Robert Squibb, the first edition of which appeared in 1787 [$9.95 cloth]. Illinois has reprinted a paperback edition of Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865—1890 by Howard N. Rabinowitz as a volume in its Blacks in the New World series edited by August Meier [$7.95], Noted historian C. Vann Woodward called the hardcover edition of this work “the most thorough and important study we have had on any period or sample of race relations in the South.” South Carolina is offering a paperback edition of George C. Rogers, Jr.’s Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, an account of the period between 1730 and 1820 when Charleston was one of America’s most dominant cities and the Pinckneys that city’s most prominent family [$4.95]. Bantam has republished Dolly Freed’s Possum Living, an account of “living easy off the land without a job and almost no money” [2.50].
In a joint venture, the Iowa Center for Textual Studies and California are bringing out new cloth editions of the works of Mark Twain, and they are doing so in a very handsome way indeed. The latest volume contains the three novels Twain wrote about a character of his creation who became a classic figure of children’s literature, namely, Tom Sawyer; and the novels are, respectively, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer Abroad, and Tom Sawyer, Detective [$27.50]. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has a similar project involving the republication of cloth editions of the works of Lionel Trilling. One of the latest volumes in the series is Trilling’s only full-length novel, The Middle of the Journey, first published in 1947 and, according to the dust jacket, “one of the handful of American novels of this century to achieve a permanent place among our literary classics” [$14.95]. The latest novel to appear in Oxford’s Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot is one of her most famous, The Mill on the Floss, with the new cloth edition having been edited by Gordon S. Haight [$55.00]. A recent Harvest/HBJ Book is British novelist Rosamond Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove, a “haunting, harrowing story of two sisters in love with the same man,” one being his wife, the other being his mistress, which first appeared in 1953 [$5.95]. Another Harvest/HBJ Book is a novel set in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War that John Ford later turned into a cinema classic, Liam O”Flaherty’s The Informer [$2.95], with a preface by Denis Donoghue. Harvest/HBJ Books also has a new edition of Thomas Mann’s next-to-last novel, The Black Swan, which appeared in America in 1954 [$2.95].
Princeton has published a limited paperback edition of James Nohrnberg’s The Analogy of the FAERIE QUEENE, a hugh (870 pages, including index) volume [$15.00]. One critic called this study of Edmund Spenser’s masterpiece “the greatest in conception,” while another praised it as “an impressive act of historical and cultural reconstruction and imagination.” Another large new paperback, published by Atheneum, is Richard Howard’s Alone With America [$12.95]. Offered as an enlarged edition, with a new introduction by the author, the book is subtitled “Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950” and contains comprehensive studies of 41 contemporary American poets, ranging from A. R. Ammons to James Wright, from John Ashbery to Louis Simpson [$12.95]. Harvard has published a paperback edition of The Poems of Edgar Allan Foe, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, a collection The American Scholar found to be “distinguished by its thoroughness, clarity, and ample documentation” [$8.95]. A poet and a writer are the respective subjects of two recent Cambridge paperbacks. The poet was Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose work is analyzed and discussed by John Robinson in In Extremity [$7.95]. The novelist was Joseph Conrad, and the sources of some of his novels are examined by Norman Sherry in Conrad’s Western World [$16.95]. Another Cambridge paperback is E. S. Shaffer’s “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem, an examination of the mythological school in Biblical criticism and literature between 1770 and 1880 [$14.95]. Harold Bloom’s Poetry and Repression, a reinterpretation of the full sweep of English and American romantic poetry, offering close readings of poems by Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Yeats, and Stevens, has been reprinted by Yale [$17.50 cloth, $6.95 paper]. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has a new hardback edition of Lionel Trilling’s E. M. Forster, one of the latest volumes in HBJ’s series of the works of the noted American critic who died in 1975 [$12.95].
As one of the first volumes in its handsome new Landmarks in Art History series, Cornell has published a paperback edition of C. R. Leslie’s Memoirs of the Life of John Constable [$9.95]. Leslie (1794—1859), an expatriate American author and painter with a London studio, became a close friend of Constable and published his biography of England’s greatest landscapist in 1843, with an expanded version appearing in 1845. Pantheon Books is offering a paperback edition of French scholar Maxime Rodinson’s Muhammad, which was translated into English by Anne Carter [$5.95]. Critic Edward W. Said considers Professor Rodison’s book to be “the major contemporary Occidental work on the Prophet.” Among recent Bantam Books are Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out in the Thirties, the autobiographical predecessor of New York Jew [$3.75]; Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust, the “sometimes tragic, sometimes triumphant stories of sons and daughters” of those who survived Hitler’s hell [$2.95]; Barbara Gordon’s I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can, a TV producer’s account of her battle against drugs and other personal disasters [$2.75]; and Michael Freedland’s The Two Lives of Errol Flynn, a biography of the screen swashbuckler and his off-the-screen escapades [$2.50].
James (Jan) Morris’ three-volume epic of empire, the “Pax Britannica Trilogy,” has been reprinted as a set by Harvest/ HBJ Books [$6.95 each]. The volumes are, respectively: Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire, which captures the British Empire at its height, the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897; Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress, tracing the rise of the British Empire from Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837; and Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat, recounting the sunset of “the empire upon whom the sun never sets.” Cornell has a paperback edition of Francis Haskell’s Rediscoveries in Art: Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France, a work which won the 1977 Mitchell Prize ($10,000) in Art History. Also available as Cornell paperbacks in the Landmarks in Art History Series are Henri Focillon’s two-volume work, The Art of the West, Volume I being Romanesque and Volume II Gothic [$9.95 each], and Heinrich Wöfflin’s Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance [$9.95].
