Choice 评论
These 17 essays--written by diverse voices and covering especially gender, ethnicity, and race--attest to the importance of Calvinism in modern American literature and film. The preface identifies several themes, e.g., Calvinism as a sociopolitical force, and characterizes three relationships American writers have had with it--continuity, independence, and convergence. The editors use these concepts to divide the collection. The essays in the first section examine writers such as Pound, Eliot, Berryman, and Cather who carried Calvinism into the 20th century. For example, Jeredith Merrin's "Sites of Struggle: Marianne Moore and American Calvinism" focuses on the Puritan struggle revealed in Moore's "The Fish" and "New York." The second grouping includes essays about writers who questioned their Calvinist inheritance. Cynthia Griffin Wolff looks at feminine sexuality in Kate Chopin's "The Awakening," and Milton J. Bates examines Coppola's Apocalypse Now and its debt to Puritanism. Other writers discussed in this section include Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton. Section 3 looks at writers who forged their independence from Calvinism. Jane Morris details Toni Morrison's Beloved, which retraces and corrects Hawthorne's ambivalence toward Hester as a redemptive figure. Michael Manson's essay discusses Gary Soto, Frost, and Robert Hass; Rocco Marinaccio considers proletarian poetry of the 1930s. A unified "works cited" is included. Recommended for undergraduate libraries. J. C. Kohl; emeritus, Dutchess Community College