Rezensionen 344 ing emotional power are less convincing, and seem much less relevant to the technologically transformed world of contemporary pop music that provides little shared experience for its listeners. Given the apparent trends of pop music cultures, it seems unlikely that the “new” narrative strategies of musicalized texts will prove an enduring shift in popular literary representation Louis J. Kern History Department Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY Brenda Hollweg, Ausgestellte Welt: Formationsprozesse kultureller Identität in den Texten zur Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2001. Louis J. Kern Recently, the World’s Columbian Exposition has enjoyed renewed attention in American popular literary texts. Robert Bloch’s American Gothic appeared in 1974, and more recently Alec Michod published The White City: A Novel (2003), followed by Erik Larson’s bestselling The Devil in White City: A Saga of Magic and Murder at the Fair that Changed America (2004). Interestingly, in all three novels Chicago and the Exposition grounds serve as the backdrop for the fictionalized homicidal career of H.H. Holmes [Herman Webster Mudgett (1861-96)]. The Holmes cult was further evidenced by the release of a documentary film, H.H. Holmes: America’s First Serial Killer (2004), directed by John Borowski. The Exposition has also figured in a recent computer game - “1893: A World’s Fair Mystery,” revolving around a jewel heist, and an ongoing virtual reality project directed by Lisa Sunder of UCLA’s Urban Simulation Team, which is developing an on-line Virtual Columbian Exposition. It is in the context of this renewed and heightened interest in the Fair that Hollweg’s Ausgestellte Welt has been published. Hollweg’s work provides a reading of the textual representations of the Exposition in the context of the crisis of identity - national and personal - that characterized the transition to modernity. Her focus on identity formation affords a new scholarly reading of the Fair. Sources for the study are drawn from a wide range of contemporary popular cultural expressions - official and unofficial guidebooks, newspaper accounts, magazine articles, personal accounts, humorous reflections, poetry, novels, and detective stories. From these diverse texts, voices and perspectives, Hollweg sketches a complex system of discourse that enabled an America in transition to address both the reinterpretation of national foundation principles and their contestation by marginalized groups. AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2 Rezensionen 345 The overall goal of Hollweg’s study is to demonstrate how the symbolic realm of literature, in its concentration on matters relating to the Exposition, proposed solutions for the social anomie of fin-de-siècle America as a means of furthering processes of social renewal. To the extent that the literary representations of the Fair and the personal experience of visitors can be read as a response to official representations, these texts also provide an insight into the diversity of public reception and evaluation of the Exposition, and into a counter-discourse on the meanings of American nationality and culture. The World’s Fair as primary text (the literary texts being secondary) afforded both representation of established forms of collective identity and a site for the active production of new identities. It served as a trans-temporal site of representation, linking tradition and memory with renewal and the future. As a popular cultural site it also expressed ambivalence about national identity. Despite its avowed purpose of bringing all the world together in a single exhibition space, its basic ideological thrust reinforced American exceptionalism; in the disjuncture between the exhibition halls and the midway, the stark contrast between modernization (the Ferris wheel and massive electrification of the White City) and the sensationalist and exploitative “primitive” and freak shows mirroring existing class, gender, and social stereotypes and disparities (the fruits of the past), the Fair was expressive of uncertainty about the future direction of the nation. Hollweg subsumes the literary representation of the Fair under the phrase “Narrating the Nation” (20), signifying the verbal representation that complemented the physical forms of the museums and exhibits of the Fair itself. The work is especially effective in its use of humorous, detective, and utopian forms to convey the perspectives of those marginalized by virtue of race, gender, or class. William Dean Howells’ “Letters of an Altrurian Traveller” (1893), later expanded into the novel A Traveller From Altruria (1894), serves as the primary utopian text, starkly contrasting the symmetry, cleanliness, and security of the White City with the realities of contemporary Chicago, the “Black City.” This discussion is brief and overlooks the impact of Edward Bellamy’s much more popular Looking Backward (1888) on the visions of the ideal city planned for the Fair. Elisabeth Harrison’s “The Fair White City; or, a Story of Past, Present, and Future” (1895) more effectively makes Hollweg’s point about alternative voices in the Fair discourse. It proposes a future national model emphasizing equality for Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and the burgeoning immigrant population of the cities. The social dynamics of the Fair as experienced by African Americans are accurately described by Hollweg, but are confined to a footnote (#83, 89-90). The full title of the protest pamphlet authored by African-American leaders, Reason Why the Colored Americans is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition: The African American Contribution to Columbian Literature (1893) is given neither in the footnote nor the bibliographic reference. Nor does Hollweg note the fact that President Harrison quite purposively excluded African Americans from both the U.S. National Commission and the Board of Lady Managers tasked with planning the Fair. She correctly notes the role of the Hampton Institute in mounting the only African-American exhibit, and the general relegation of Blacks to service and menial positions. Recently, the latter point has been challenged in the perhaps overly sanguine work of Christopher Reed, All Rezensionen 346 the World’s Here! : The Black Presence at White City (2002), which is not addressed by Hollweg. It should also be noted that China refused to officially participate in the Fair in protest against the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and that a privately-funded group of Chicago’s Chinese-American community organized the Chinese exhibit. Native Americans were present in the midway (but not the exhibition area) in Col. Cody’s Camp of the Nations. Hollweg considers gender in relation to the Fair through detective novels and humorous pieces. Cross-dressing, masquerading, and role inversion figure prominently in her discussion of criminal novels, e.g., E.M. Van Deventer’s Against Odds (1894), which features a female detective. In contrast, Marietta Holley’s Samantha at the World’s Fair (1893) offers a feminist critique of society. Since Holley was the most popular female humorist of the late nineteenth century, it would have been effective to briefly discuss another of her books, Samantha on the Race Problem (1892) to underscore the links between the diverse elements of the Schattengeschichte (226) that expressed the critical viewpoints of the excluded and powerless. Hollweg’s book provides a challenging and innovative critical approach to the popular texts of the Exposition that should prove useful to both scholars and students and, in its concluding passages, provides grounds for further research into the effects of the Disneyfication of culture (worldwide) and the internet on the prospects of future world’s fairs and international cultural expositions. Louis J. Kern History Department Hofstra University Hempstead, NY Thomas Claviez, Ulla Haselstein, Sieglinde Lemke. Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature. Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg, 2006. Stipe Grgas Most of the papers gathered in this collection were presented at a conference of the John F. Kennedy Institute which was held to celebrate Winfried Fluck’s 60th birthday. As such the book is a gesture of recognition that pays homage to a deserving scholar whose work, amongst other things, has dealt with the function of literature and aesthetics, and who, more particularly, has in various ways exemplified the significant contributions Europeans have made to the field of American studies. Mapped onto these coordinates, the book has a theoretical focus: it addresses a growing concern within the field of literary studies, it marks a juncture within the discipline and sets up a possible agenda for future research. AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2