Rezensionen 363 Heike Schaefer, Mary Austin’s Regionalism. Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography. Charlottesville and London: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2004. Arno Heller Mary Austin (1868-1934) was one of the most prolific regional writers and cultural critics in the US in the first three decades of the 20th century. As a feminist and environmentalist writer and expert in Native American and Hispanic cultures in the Southwest she published about 30 books during her lifetime - novels, short stories, poems, essays, plays, an autobiography - and more than 200 articles. Moreover, she lectured extensively at American universities and in women’s clubs. She participated in Mable Dodge Luhan’s legendary artists’ colony in Taos in the 1920s and ‘30s and became engaged in organizing a revival of Native American and Hispanic arts in New Mexico. Despite all these achievements her fame declined after her death in 1934, and many of her books went out of print. During the last two decades, however, Austin’s work has experienced an amazing comeback in the wake of a renewed interest in regional and environmental literature. Heike Schaefer’s comprehensive and penetrating study of Austin’s regionalist aesthetics and politics is an important contribution to this revival. In her introduction Schaefer outlines her intention to investigate the various interrelated themes and practices in Austin’s works, such as feminism, literary regionalism and multicultural reformism. Moreover, by placing Austin’s thinking and writing in the context of the ecocritical and new regionalist debate of today she attributes to it a new topicality and relevance. Austin was deeply involved in cultural geography, or more specifically, in the American Southwest as a region of ethnocultural pluralism and intense environmental engagement, which she linked up with her own social, personal, and spiritual explorations. The focus of Schaefer’s investigations lies on Austin’s responses to the three main traditions of American environmental literature of her time: nature writing, women’s 19 th -century (local color) regionalism, and wilderness narratives. Schaefer analyzes representative instances in Austin’s works where these traditions meet, also including her unpublished letters, journals, essays and lectures. The first chapter, “The Land Sets the Limit”, defines the diverse aspects of Austin’s concept of regionalism in order to provide a basis for the ensuing in-depth studies of her individual works. As Schaefer shows, Austin’s cultural identity and aesthetic practice were geographically and regionally determined, but in a surprisingly contemporary way. Like the biocentric ecocriticism of today, Austin insisted “that the nonhuman environment not only invites and provokes human readings but also escapes, resists, and exceeds the comprehension of human readers” (43). With reference to Sue Ellen Campbell’s “The Land and Language of Desire” Schaefer, in view of Austin’s work, rejects the poststructural definition of empirical reality as a network of intertexts exclusively dependent on subjective human interpreters. To Austin “the nonhuman world also has an existence apart from human signifying systems” (43). In the next chapter she elucidates this by directing her AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2 Rezensionen 364 critical attention to the interplay between regional and nature writing traditions in Austin’s environmental non-fiction. A comparison of her desert essays in Land of Little Rain with Thoreau’s nature writing illustrates her indebtedness to the specifically Thoreauvian tradition of regional nature writing. Her constant blending of scientific, philosophical and biocentric perspectives sets her apart from the anthropocentric nature writers of her own time as well as from 19 th century women’s regionalism. Moreover, Austin’s insistence on the democratic purpose of science and the use of her own regional Southwestern experience for a strong social, ecological, and political engagement make her a forerunner of later environmental writers such as Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey. The third chapter, “Sense of Place”, focuses on Austin’s narrators and characters, whose strong sense of place defines their regional identities. The sense of selfhood they develop in long-lasting processes of acculturation allows them to “live into their environment” (85). They have learned to adapt to a harsh and tragic desert environment by observing animals and plants (e.g. lizards and juniper trees) and thus have acquired a conceptual framework that is appropriate to their environment. In order to understand humanity’s place in a world that extends beyond the human, Austin applies a non-dualistic model in which the physical encounter with the environment and its aesthetic rendering are intricately interwoven. John Dewey’s Art as Experience serves Schaefer as a theoretical framework for this approach. She understands Dewey’s model of the interconnection of aesthetic experience and experimental art as an alternative to “the either/ or logic of both essentialist and radical constructivist explanations of the relationship between subject and world” (89). The narrator in The Land of Little Rain corresponds to this kind of aesthetic perception in her mystical awareness of nonhuman otherness. It is an experience that, as Schaefer concludes, distinguishes Austin from Emersonian transcendentalism and 19 th century romanticism. Austin’s narrators do not transcend nonhuman nature by means of intuition, but keep a close yet respectfully sustainable relation to it. The next chapter deals with Austin’s cultural feminism, tracing environmental degradation, human alienation from nature, war, sexism and racism to “masculinity run amuck” (113). In contrast to this, Austin identifies the feminine with a sense of natural order and balance and by this proposes an essentialist reversal of the dominant gender code of her time. The way Austin applies this gender aspect to regional and environmental politics once more sets her apart from nineteenth-century women’s regionalism. Austin’s novels Lost Borders and Cactus Thorn are basically feminist rejections of the male-oriented wilderness and frontier cult of the Progressive Era. The rebellious female characters in both novels advocate the insertion of female selfdetermination into a predominantly male domain. The two Paiute women characters in Austin’s stories “The Basket Maker” and “The Walking Woman”, whose strong sense of self-reliance, skilled craftsmanship, and environmental competence enables them to survive in a harsh desert reality, serve Schaefer as models for her ecofeminist perspective. Chapter 5, “Who Owns their Place”, discusses Austin’s regionalism as a political agenda and sociopolitical program. Many of her essays, novels and short stories Rezensionen 365 center around ecologically sustainable regional communities which derive their economic survival from a communal and collective effort. On a larger scale they project the vision of a regionalized and decentralized “Amerindian” (220) nation whose manifold regional cultures are rooted in their natural environments. The Southwest with its integration of Native American, Hispanic and Euro-American cultures and, more specifically, the “native village socialism” (148) of the Pueblo cultures, served Austin as a learning model for her regionalist utopia, paving the way to the “next great and fructifying world culture (190).” Unfortunately, Schaefer dedicates only half a page (149) to the influence of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s utopian artist colony in Taos, where the construction of a multiethnic Southwestern myth was intensively discussed by artists, writers, and intellectuals such as Willa Cather, Frank Waters, John Collier, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, C.G. Jung, Robinson Jeffers, Anselm Adams, Laura Gilpin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and many others. A more detailed inclusion of this intellectual background could have given the book an even wider cultural-historical and cosmopolitan scope. Like Luhan and her famous guests, Austin rejected the forced assimilation of Native Americans in the Southwest and the rape of their land and natural environment. She supported the self-determination and cultural autonomy of the Pueblo Indians and later extended her multicultural and folkloristic activities by establishing the Indian Arts Fund and the Spanish Colonial Arts Society. The chapter ends with a discussion of Austin’s bildungsroman The Ford, whose protagonist, after going through a difficult learning process, finally accepts a communitarian regionalist concept. The last chapter, “Regionalist Conversations”, also traces Austin’s regionalist sense of place and communal ideas, though in a rather encyclopedic and repetitive way, recapitulating many of the aesthetic, feminist, environmentalist and multicultural “conversations” discussed earlier in the book. The chapter culminates in a discussion of Austin’s kaleidoscopic essays in her regional manifesto Land of Journey’s Ending, and of her folkloristic narratives in One-Smoke Stories and Lost Border Stories. In the “Conclusion”, however, Schaefer offers an excellent synopsis of her previous investigations: Austin’s future-oriented redefinition of regionalism as a participatory, environmentally grounded folk culture leaves behind earlier forms of regionalism and their often nostalgic and provincial reminiscences of a lost rural golden age. Austin recommends cultural regeneration, political transformation and socioeconomic change in the direction of a culturally and geographically diversified, ethnically pluralist America. In view of this Schaefer takes issue with the poststructural reduction of regionalism to a merely systemic and separatist understanding (e.g. Philip Fisher) at the cost of concrete geographic locations and place-based relations. By carefully working out the aesthetic complexities and practices in Austin’s work Heike Schaefer has achieved a very topical re-evaluation of a writer who has been unjustly underestimated and misinterpreted for too long. Schaefer’s final summary of Austin’s concept of regionalism almost reads like an outline of the New Regionalist endeavors of today: For Austin the regionalization of America involves the negotiation of diverse social positionalities, including regional, national, ethnic, gender, and class identities. The objective of Austin’s regionalist project, then, exceeds identity politics or the lobbying of particularized interests. In other words, Austin’s Rezensionen 366 1 Mit der chronologischen Gruppierung der Gedichte folgt die Herausgeberin einem auch in vielen anderen literarischen London-Führern herangezogenen und für den Leser/ die Leserin gut nachvollziehbaren Schema der Textreihung. Thematische Kriterien der Reihung hingegen werden etwa im Faber Book of London (Wilson 1993) herangezogen. regionalism is not regional in Fisher’s separatist sense. Moreover, the regionalism that Austin promoted has not only an egalitarian impetus but also an environmentalist agenda. She conceived of regionalism as a form of cultural practice and social organization that would redefine American culture in relation to its land base (213). Arno Heller Institut für Amerikanistik Universität Innsbruck Silvia Mergenthal (Hrsg.), Poetischer London-Führer. Englischdeutsch. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006. Maria Löschnigg Die Faszination, die London seit dem ausgehenden Mittelalter auf Dichter ausgeübt hat, ist in zahlreichen Anthologien und literarischen Stadtführern eindrucksvoll dokumentiert worden. Diesen gesellt sich nun mit Silvia Mergenthals Poetischem London-Führer eine weitere kommentierte Sammlung London-bezogener Texte hinzu. Was aber macht den vorliegenden Band trotz der beträchtlichen Zahl verwandter Vorgänger zu einer besonderen Bereicherung des literarischen London-Diskurses? Zunächst hebt sich der Band schon durch seine Zweisprachigkeit von anderen literarischen London-Führern ab. Mergenthal übersetzt 19 der insgesamt 28 in der Sammlung enthaltenen Gedichte und Gedichtausschnitte selbst, wobei es ihr insgesamt sehr gut gelingt, die Diktion der jeweiligen Epoche sowie inhaltliche Komponenten und Stimmungen der poetischen Texte nachzuempfinden. Sehr ansprechend sind vor allem die Übersetzungen der zeitgenössischen Gedichte im letzen Teil des Bandes, der den semantisch stark beladenen Titel “Das Imperium schreibt zurück: Multikulturelle Identitäten im London der Gegenwart” trägt. Von den übrigen neun ebenfalls mit großer literarischer Sensibilität ins Deutsche übertragenen Gedichten sollen vor allem Horst Mellers beeindruckende Übersetzungen von John Betjemans satirischem Gedicht “In Westminster Abbey” sowie von Dylan Thomas’ Anti-Kriegsgedicht “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” hervorgehoben werden. Die 28 Texte erscheinen in sechs Abschnitte gegliedert, die wichtige soziale und historische Phänomene markieren, und “in der Abfolge ihrer Entstehung wiedergegeben [sind] 1 , um Traditionslinien englischsprachiger Lyrik nachzuzeichnen und AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2