A Checklist of Scholarship on Southern Literature for 1995

Mississippi Quarterly, The, Mid-Summer, 1996 by Jerry T. Williams

This checklist, published by The Society for the Study of Southern Literature, was prepared by the Society's Committee on Bibliography: George C. Longest, Chairman (Virginia Commonwealth University), R. Bruce Bickley, Jr. (Florida State University), Rebecca Butler (Dalton College), J. Lasley Dameron (Memphis State University), Thomas E. Dasher (Valdosta State College), Ruel E. Foster (West Virginia University), Linda M. Garner (David Lipscomb University), W. Bert Hitchcock (Auburn University), Susan Peters (Emory University), Verbie L. Prevost (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga), Anne E. Rowe (Florida State University), Welford D. Taylor (University of Richmond), Charles S. Watson (University of Alabama), Mary Louise Weaks (Rockford College), Jerry T. Williams (Mississippi State University), Annette Woodlief (Virginia Commonwealth University), Yasahiro Yoshizaki (Krtakyushu University), Waldemar Zacharasiewicz (Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik der Universitat Wien).

Special thanks to James E. Kibler for furnishing the Simms Review, and to Thomas Tenney for the Mark Twain Journal.

The checklists for 1968-1987 appeared in the spring issues of the Quarterly for the following years. Beginning with the list of 1988 publications, the checklist has appeared in a supplementary issue of the Quarterly. The first eight are conflated and supplemented in Southern Literature 1968-1975: A Checklist of Scholarship, ed. Jerry T. Williams (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978). Scholarship published prior to 1968 may be found in A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969). Items which carry the 1995 date but appeared too late for this list will appear in next year's.

The symbols and abbreviations used are those of the MLA International Bibliography. A key to abbreviations not included there appears at the end of this checklist, followed by a listing of cross-references for Southern subjects without individual sections. An index of authors of works listed in the checklist, keyed by entry numbers, appears at the very end.

Items for the checklist should be sent to the chairman of the committee: George C. Longest, Department of English, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond VA 23284, who would like to thank all who have contributed during the past year.--G. C. L.

I. COLONIAL (1607-1809)

1. [BARTRAM, WILLIAM] Bellin, Joshua David. "Wicked Instruments: William Bartram and the Dispossession of the Southern Indians." ArQ, 51 (Autumn 1995), 1-23.

Bartram's Travels' "arises from a period of acute racial conflict" and "can be read as negotiation[] among the multiple imaginative and literal configurations the land embraces." By dealing with "an Indian relationship to the land, Bartram's text registers doubts about the absoluteness of Euro-American conceptions of, and claims to the continent."

2. [BOLLING, ROBERT] Stabile, Susan. "A Circumstantial Account; or, The Rake's Design: Robert Bolling's Epistolary Novel." AL, 67 (March 1995), 1-22.

By taking on the personality of the rake, Bolling turned his journal into "a highly crafted literary work, much like an eighteenth-century epistolary novel," but "[w]hereas novelists such as Samuel Richardson used the popular epistle to make fiction seem like reality, Robert Bolling used it to make reality seem like fiction." Stabile defines various types of rakes and points out ways in which Bolling's persona does not replicate each.

3. [HARRIOT, THOMAS] Dasenbrock, Reed Way. "Truth and Methods." CE, 57 (September 1995), 546-561.

In discussing the thesis that "the emergence and hegemony of literary theory over the past generation has led to an attenuation of methodological debate," Dasenbrock devotes a few paragraphs to Stephen Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets," which "is structured around an analogy between Thomas Harriot's A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia and Shakespeare's Henry IV plays," and is an example of "methodological insouciance."

4. [JEFFERSON, THOMAS] Boulton, Alexander O. "The American Paradox: Jeffersonian Equality and Racial Science." AQ, 47 (September 1995), 467-492.

Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia was among "the earliest explications of [a] new world view" in which "[t]he more Americans relied on a philosophy of freedom as a doctrine of rights for each individual to better his or her situation, the more apt they were to use the conceptions of natural differences to explain the persistent causes of inequality."

5. Buckley, Thomas E. "After Disestablishment: Thomas Jefferson's Wall of Separation in Antebellum Virginia." JSH, 61 (August 1995), 445-480.

Studies Jefferson and the effects of his statute on freedom of religion.

6. Burstein, Andrew. "A Very Human Portrait." VQR, 71 (Winter 1995), 180-184.

An essay-review of George Green Shackelford's Jefferson's Adoptive Son: The Life of William Short, 1759-1848--"a compact and very readable document." Shackelford offers "the narrative of an appealing young diplomat's half-successful search for wider acceptance on the strength of his proven intelligence, candor, and conviviality." His relationship with Jefferson "is most curious, and not always what one expected."