Rezensionen 198 Richard Gray and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz (eds.), Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in Europe - Europe in the American South. Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2007. Todd K. Bender In September 2006, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Cultural Office of the City of Vienna, the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, and the University of Vienna sponsored an International Colloquium from which the papers are here edited by Richard Gray and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. Gray and Zacharasiewicz are to be complimented on guiding such a weighty and useful scholarly production to completion and for their long standing leadership in the study of the American South in a global context. Needless to say, the essays, all written in English, are of a uniformly high intellectual quality, and the editors’ work is a model of care and thoughtfulness. Following a short introduction by the editors, the essays are grouped under eleven headings: “Faulkner and Wolfe”, “European Reception and Perspectives”, “African American Perspectives”, “Reimagining the South from a European Perspective”, “Welty and Percy”, “The French Connection”, “Nineteenth Century Relations”, “Faulkner”, “Cultural and Capital Exchange”, “Mountain and Folk Culture”, and “Postwar Fictions”. The thirtyfour scholars whose essays are published represent twelve institutions of higher learning in the United States, eleven in the United Kingdom, ten in Continental Europe, and one in Japan. Each of the topical groups of papers tells the reader something new and interesting about the literature and culture of the former Confederate States of America and their borderlands. All serious students of the English language in a global context will want to examine this work closely. The general importance of the overarching project for this collection, the colloquium from which it develops, and the years of preparation leading up to the colloquium itself, should not be overlooked. For too long in the United States the focus of university studies of literature has been mainly on New England and its heritage. Even the great, statesponsored universities located in places like Wisconsin or Arizona seldom feature in their departments of English regional research into the French, German, or Hispanic roots and interconnections with their local cultures, and even less often into their more recent interactions with China, India, or South East Asia, although in recent decades there has been an acknowledgment of the obvious importance of the African dimension to American cultural history. The work of Gray and Zacharasiewicz lights the path toward a new and fruitful way to reorganize and expand the academic study of English literature and American culture along lines more inclusive of regional identity and global connections. Simply to list the major American authors discussed in this collection of essays provides a fair idea of its wide scope: Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, May Sarton, Walker Percy, Hannah Croft, William Styron, Shay Youngblood, James Baldwin, William Demby. As Zacharasiewicz explains in his general “Introduction” to the collection, from the early captivity narrative that is the memoir of Cabeza de Vaca AAA Band 34 (2009), Heft 1 Rezensionen 199 published in 1542 to the post World War II fiction of Styron, Baldwin, or Demby, the American South has been a borderland in which the old world and the new, the self and the other, black and white, male and female, encounter and redefine themselves in a transatlantic dialogue. Americanists have long recognized the French face of Edgar Allen Poe, but Peter Lurie’s essay on the French Faulkner reminds us of Faulkner’s debts to French ideas of film noir, to Jean-Paul Sartre, and to Andre Malraux, while Nahem Yousaf points more specifically to Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon. Owen Robinson’s essay discusses French Louisiana and the Creole culture centered in New Orleans as depicted by Cable. Helen Taylor points out that the sex trade of The Big Easy claims descent from libertine France. Karl F. Zender links Faulkner, and creolization in New Orleans. The French Resistance in World War II under Charles De Gaulle was the subject of a film script by Faulkner and Jacques Pothier points to ambivalent parallels between Reconstruction and the situation in France as a defeated, although unvanquished, nation. Barbara Ladd, too, highlights the French subject of Faulkner’s A Fable, which Noel Polk, in his weighty contribution, expands to apply to the entire language of Modernism in art generally, in works by Pound, Eliot, Picasso, Braque, Stravinsky, Cezanne, and Gaudier Brzeska. In post-World War II fiction, there is often a link in the author’s biography between France and the American South, as Suzanne W. Jones’s essay on Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris and A. Robert Lee’s argument that Demby’s Beetlecreek is the huis clos of the American South, demonstrate. With reference to the Germanic north of Europe, Lothar Honnighausen underlines romantic nostalgia and wanderlust connecting Wolfe and Goethe. Dieter Meindle explores the Germanic roots of the modernist novella and the tradition of the grotesque in the American South. Peter Nicolaison traces Thomas Jefferson’s ambivalence toward Europe. Robert Brinkmeyer’s essay on Styron’s Sophie’s Choice suggests underlying parallels between territories under Nazi occupation and the sensibility generated by the experience of slavery and civil war in the American South. Southern literature had rather more influence on Scandinavia than the reverse, yet Ibsen left a mark, says Hans Skei. Zacharasiewicz gives the reader one of the weightier essays on Flannery O’Connor and Carson Mc Cullers and the Southern Grotesque. On the African connection, Paul Giles suggests that the work of Zora Neal Hurston should be placed in a more variegated context than our customary geographical Southland. Sharon Monteith makes the French connection between Richard Wright and Boris Vian, while Charles Reagan Wilson treats Wright’s experience of Spain. Richard J. Ellis examines the bondswoman’s narrative as created by Hannah Croft to the novels of Dickens. Theo D’Haen asks, could Mark Twain have developed his binocular vision of the south without Cervantes’s model of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote? Did Mark Twain’s experience of travelling in Europe generate his split view, simultaneously juxtaposing the ideal myth versus the gritty reality, suggests Jan Norden Gretlund. Where would Mark Twain be without Sir Walter Scott as an antagonist, and where would Conan Doyle’s idea of colonization, or Henry James’s contrast between the new and the old worlds be without the underlying myth of the antebellum South, ask Susan-Mary Grant and Rosella Mamoli Zorzi. Richard Gray points to the issue of the European fairy tale at the foundation of so many Southern ideas and stories, for example in Eudora Welty, whereas Dawn Trouard Rezensionen 200 points to the biographical connection of Welty and Elizabeth Bowen. Surprisingly, Arno Heller is able to link Walker Percy’s world view to Eric Vogelin’s opposition to Nazism from a Catholic and conservative position. Essays dealing with economic and political issues outside usual literary topics include James C. Cobb’s study of the opposed stereotypes of cavalier versus capitalist, as well as the development from mercantilism to contemporary international trade between the South and Europe. Foreign relations of the Confederate States and the impact of King Cotton on British public opinion during the Civil War are the topics of Martin Crawford, while the economic and cultural importance of South Carolina is outlined by Walter Edgar, as is Confederate nationalism by Don H. Doyle. Jill Terry traces recent transatlantic folk exchanges, while Barbara Ching discusses the traditional transatlantic ballad, and Sarah Robertson points out the affinity between Appalachia and the mining country of Wales. Excellent as these separate essays are, taken together their sum is greater, for they demonstrate how academic study can define the diversity and integrity of a regional culture within the United States which has its own internal logic and coherence. The main point of contact for ideas and attitudes from across the ocean into the United States is not limited to Boston, New York, or Washington, D.C., but may as well be through Charleston, Atlanta, or New Orleans, or a host of other places. Formal academic programs in American universities need to heed this demonstration that the boundaries of cultural units do not necessarily correspond with the political boundaries of our fifty states, but cluster in interlocking configurations of former Confederate States and their adjacent territory, the basin of the Great Lakes, Appalachia, the Mississippi Valley, the territory formerly settled and governed by Hispanics, and so on. Each of these domains has lines connecting it intellectually to global trading partners, homelands of its immigrant population, religious affiliations, and historical affinities world wide, which short-circuit national identity. Programs of study which suggest that American culture is homogenized from Atlantic to Pacific coasts and from the Canadian to the Mexican border, and that American literature once produced in New England is its adequate representation, do a disservice to our students. It is time to reorganize the pedagogy of American Studies at institutions of higher learning so as to account for the diversity and global interconnections transcending national identity, as demonstrated by this set of papers. Todd K. Bender University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A.