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Nephie Christodoulides, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, Motherhood in Sylvia Plath's Work. Rodopi, Costerus New Series 152); pgs. 264.

Nephie Christodoulides' project foregrounds the complex, and complicating, influences of the mother in Plath's work; the treatment of motherhood is handled both from the perspective of Plath's experience with motherhood as much as it explores the defining role of Aurelia Plath on her daughter's development as a poet. As Christodoulides states in the introduction, motherhood "must be seen as a plurality and intrinsically linked to the notion of daughterhood," (xii) that goes beyond the already well mined biography of Plath's unique career, to the theoretical underpinnings of gendered subject formation.

Julia Kristeva's discussions of the semiotic, her focus on discourses of crisis in "About Chinese Women," Black Sun and "Sabat Mater" in particular, serve as the theoretical backdrop (that include references to Freud, Klein, Torok and others) of Christodoulides' thesis. The fragility of Plath's sense of self in relation to varying archetypes of the mother from "the devouring" figure that surfaces in a poem like "Medusa" to the self-sacrificing or self-effacing personas of "Heavy Women" and "Mary's Song," suggest that the various roles of abjection are, in Christodoulides' words, "a means to subject formation" and offer a way of "transcending the loose boundaries of self and other" (9). The problem, or paradox, lies in how Plath must negotiate her investment in language, or a symbolic textual self to harness the regressions of her semiotic (maternally identified) impulses. In the extensive references to Jacqueline Rose's The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Christodoulides cites Rose to foreground how Plath continuously wagers the subjective/semiotic imaginary against the normative terms of the symbolic Law of the father. Whether it is in Plath's early juvenilia poems, or her exploration of fairytale paradigms or her fascination with shamanisms, "the call of the mother is there and cannot be eradicated" (61).

As has been often noted in Plath scholarship, Plath's use of strict meter and form and syllabic patterns, gives way in the latter Ariel poems to the uncanny enjambments and rhythmic incantations of her more experimental and haunting poems like "Lady Lazarus," "Gulliver" and "Purdah." What Christodoulides' contributes to this discussion is the reminder that Plath's uses of rhythms and forms becomes a "further manifestation of her wish to preserve the maternal semiotic in the paternal symbolic" (64). But this preservation of the maternal, or the attempt to do so, is fraught with an ultimately vain attempt to establish a foundation of autonomy, and (re)entraps the poet, and poem, as she endeavors to make her way, through language, into the realm of the symbolic. In considering the relinquishment of the maternal the poet, or her personae, experiences a failed subject-identity, and in re-presencing the loss of the mother as pure semiotic identification, the symbolic unravels itself precipitating Kristeva's much quoted notion in "About Chinese Women" that Plath, like Virginia Woolf and the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva "disillusioned with meanings and words […] took refuge in lights, rhythms and sounds: a refuge that already announces, for those who know how to read her, her silent departure from life" (Moi, The Kristeva Reader157).

Christodoulides cites poems and other writings of Plath as examples of "successful mourning," of the mother's loss or exclusion ("Parliament Hill Fields", for instance), and connects this to an empowered creativity, or the act of writing poems, Plath's the "blood jet is poetry" ("Kindness"). But there is also the issue of what Christodoulides calls "authentication," of legitimizing oneself within terms not necessarily dependent on the semiotic, and/or maternal; here Plath's obsessions with nurture and orality based on a "premature weaning [that] led to her precocious acquisition of language" (95) come into conflict with her need to master the language that will help signify her loss.

Christodoulides' investigation is ambitious in its scope beginning with Plath's early juvenilia through to her marriage to Ted Hughes, her pregnancies and miscarriages, and finally to her own experiences as a young mother. Throughout Christodoulides' focus illuminates how Plath's maternal dependencies and her uses of the semiotic tropes of motherhood complicated the extraordinary ambivalences she felt in her roles as a daughter, poet, and mother.

Adrianne Kalfopoulou
The American College of Greece

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Ada Savin, ed., Journey Into Otherness: Essays in North American History, Culture and Literature. Series: European Contributions to American Studies. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2005. ISBN: 90 5383 955 0 (ECAS no 61)

Journey Into Otherness collects some of the papers presented at the international conference entitled "Regarding the 'Other': Inter-ethnic Dynamics in North America," which was held at the University of Versailles in 2003. The essays in the volume focus on the complex dynamics of inter-ethnic and inter-racial contacts in American history, culture and literature. The interdisciplinary nature of the volume allows readers to view the topic of the ever-changing relations between ethnic communities on the North American continent from different, intersecting and complementary, viewpoints. Importantly, rather than dwell on the traditional opposition between mainstream U.S. culture and minorities, the authors in the volume adopt a trans-ethnic, trans-national perspective that sheds light on various forms of interaction-alliances as well as conflicts-between racial and ethnic groups in North America.

The volume is divided into four sections-"Southern 'Others'," "Canadian 'Others'," "The Mexican Borderlands," and "Crossing Boundaries"-and opens with a brief introduction that outlines its conceptual and theoretical framework. In the introduction, Ada Savin explains that the time has come to pay attention to the American inter-ethnic scene and, alluding to the work of William Boelhower, specifies the ethnic kinesis in American society as the common thread among the seventeen essays in the volume. The editor acknowledges that ethnic groups in the U.S. and Canada are becoming increasingly transnational and that racial blurring-whether biological or symbolical-constitutes a widely accepted norm. Savin concludes her introduction to the volume with an open-ended question about whether or not ethnic identity will become a matter of subjective choice in the future.

Section 1, entitled "Southern Others," includes four essays. The first essay by Bernard Vincent constitutes a historical investigation into the institution of slavery among Indians. Vincent employs the Cherokee nation as a case study and traces the evolution of the institution of slavery in this tribe since the period that preceded the arrival of European settlers. Importantly, the critic discusses slave trade among the Cherokees not only as a social practice that involved economics, but also as a culturally significant and politically motivated practice. The second essay by Nathalie Dessen concentrates on American Louisiana and uses the region as an example to illustrate the elaboration of cultural identities in North America through the interaction of the various "Others" that peopled it. Dessen's essay focuses on the main ethnic groups that composed the Louisiana population in the early nineteenth century, and tries to assess the conflicts that opposed them and to detect the influences they exerted on each other. Ultimately, it attempts to analyze the interaction between these various ethnic groups which, the author claims, gave birth to a syncretic culture through a slow process of Creolization. Rodger Payne's essay also makes the Louisiana region its subject, but focuses on the "Italian Other" in south Louisiana. Payne's discussion offers a vivid picture of the cultural context that informed Italian immigrant life in rural south Louisiana when Tony Musco entertained a saint and began a devotion. Payne uses the example of Musco to illustrate the ways in which immigrants of Italian origin used traditional forms of Italian folk Catholicism to respond to the rhetoric of "Otherness" that marked them as an in-between people. As Payne insightfully observes, the agency of an obscure patron (through devotional activity) not only instigated the immigrants' self-definition but also subsequently led to "race mixing," as Americans of Italian ancestry began to claim their place within the larger social fabric. The last essay in this section, Susan Koshy's, is framed within whiteness and ethnic studies and examines the complex and ambivalent racial strategies of the Chinese in Mississippi in the period between 1870 and 1950. Koshy's brief but extremely suggestive essay emphasizes the dialectical relationship between whiteness, blackness and Asianness, thereby critiquing the dependence on the black/white binary. The author describes the emergence of Asian Americans as an intermediary minority group as a complex process of resistance and complicity-a process that involved mimicry, dissimulation, opposition, challenge and evasion.

Section 2, "Canadian 'Others'," opens with Jean-Michel Lacroix's essay which, as its title suggests, questions whether there can be a new Canada/Quanada partnership. Lacroix's essay outlines the characteristics of Canada's multicultural society and examines the challenges cultural diversity poses to national unity. Lacroix resists simplistic interpretations of Canada's ethno-cultural pluralism and contends that it is neither a uniform concept nor a monolithic reality but one that remains to be constructed and that is continuously interpreted and reinterpreted as common values are negotiated. The challenges of multiculturalism also surface in Sandrine Ferré-Rode's essay that examines Frederick Philip Grove as a champion for Canada, whose views on immigration challenged Canadian society's xenophobic sentiments at the time. Ferré-Rode stresses Grove's comparison between Canada and the U.S., but also illustrates, through a close reading of Grove's lectures, the ways in which he presented the U.S. as a foil to Canada. As Ferré-Rode concludes, Grove's vision of French Canada as a federation, although sketchy and idealistic, is, nonetheless, historically and culturally appropriate. The third essay in this section, Greg Robinson's discussion of the historical encounters between Japanese Canadians and French Canadians, picks up on some of the observations Ferré-Rode makes and traces the modern development of Canada, posing several questions on the "essence" of Canadian society. Robinson's essay does not offer a definitive answer to the question of whether the presence of Japanese Canadians in Quebec has fostered a special relationship between them and the French Canadian majority. Instead, the critic concludes that while the two communities remain fairly separate they also gravitate toward each other, thus holding the promise of an entente cordiale that could potentially terminate racial tension. Last, Mathieu Besmier's essay on Canada's capital-Ottawa-relates the issue of the "Other"-at the core of Ottawa's history-with the issue of "Otherness" in Canada at large and with the construction of Canadian identity. Besmier is highly critical of the physical (geographic), linguistic and religious separation of the English- and French-speaking populations of Ottawa and views Ottawa as emblematic of the Canadian confederation's quest for identity. Besmier's final remarks problematize the view of Ottawa and, by extension, Canada as multi-ethnic, multicultural, and open to the world.

Part 3, "The Mexican Borderlands," begins with an essay by Anne-Marie Brenot on the genre of casta painting and the way in which it represented various types of métissage in the New World (New Spain). In addition to Brenot's detailed discussion of three casta paintings by Miguel Cabrera (De Espanol y d'India, Mestiza; De Chino cambujo y d'India, Loba; and De Negro y d'India, China cambuja), the essay's important contribution is the argument it makes about the social, political, and cultural role these paintings played in the New World colonial societies. The author contends that casta painting was not merely about depicting social reality. In Brenot's words, casta paintings reflected the de facto existence of a multi-racial society that was aware of its distinctiveness with respect to the societies of the Old World. The second essay in this section by Lisbeth Haas views the California borderlands from the perspective of indigenous ethnic and interethnic groups whose interactions enabled things Spanish, like the borderlands missions, to be infused with a strong indigenous content. Haas' essay offers a rather convincing explanation for the way in which Catholicism and the missions became known through the multiple translations of words and concepts and through the interpretations attempted by native scholars, authorities, and common people. Haas particularly focuses on the Chumash revolt (1824) which, she argues, illustrates the crucial role ethnic and interethnic relations played in sustaining an extraordinary act of resistance to conquest. The third contributor in this section, Mel Fearon, turns his attention to the Irish experience in Texas-in particular, their encounters with Mexicans. The author specifically focuses on the pre-famine Irish who settled in Mexico in the colonies of San Patricio and Refugio in the Province of Texas in the late 1820s and, by paying close attention to both state policies and local community responses, he re-tells the story of how Mexico's Far North became the American Southwest. Even though the essay is well grounded on (and often highly critical of) recent historical scholarship on the matter of cross-cultural and cross-class alliances, the concluding remarks the author makes in referring to the Irish immigrant experience in the U.S. leave unanswered important questions as to the different national projects Irish immigrants embraced. Last, the essay by Ramón A. Gutiérrez provides a historical genealogy for the theory of internal colonialism, traces the theory's origins in Latin American theories of dependency and underdevelopment, and examines its extension, diffusion, and transformation among Chicanos and Blacks. Gutiérrez explains the reasons because of which racial minorities in the U.S. found the theory of internal colonialism compelling, and traces the theory's relevance to economics, sociology, and political economy, as well as its significance for African American and Chicano studies.

The last section, "Crossing Boundaries," is the longest one in the volume and, as its title suggests, it transgresses the spatial and corresponding cultural boundaries the thematic divisions among the other sections in the volume purposefully maintain. The first essay by Fabienne Quennet focuses on the literary representation of adopted captive figures in Robson's Ride with the Wind (1982) and Blake's Dances with Wolves (1988). Brief though it may be, the essay, nevertheless, begins with a long theoretical introduction to the topic of transculturation in the Western frontier; then, it proceeds to specific commentary on the two movies. Quennet observes that the process of adopting captives constitutes an act of identity change and boundary crossing, and explains that the only means of surviving Indian captivity was transculturation-a practice punished by white settlers. The critic subsequently turns her attention to the topic of white-native intermarriage and discusses it as a personal process determined by feelings rather than as a shocking phenomenon. Ultimately, Quennet concludes that the adopted captivity motif mirrors the ambiguity inherent in white-native relationships and presents an undesirable otherness that white dominant culture both needs and needs to eradicate. The second essay in this section examines another case of border crossing by discussing Gayl Jones' Mosquito, a novel centered on African-American and Chicano interaction. The author, Heiner Bus, mainly focuses on the main character's (Mosquito) involvement in the "new Underground Railroad" and illustrates the ways in which Jones exploits some of the highly mythologized features of the historical Underground Railroad. Overall, Bus' essay is an insightful close reading of Jones' novel that interprets individual cases of ethnic interaction (between Mosquito and Delgadina) as a productive movement within and beyond the stereotypes of individual and group identities. Matthew Briones' essay on Charles Kikuchi also contributes to the discussion of ethnic interaction by examining the representation of African Americans in the diaries of Kikuchi, a second-generation (Nisei) son of Japanese immigrants. Briones closely reads Kikuchi's diaries that record his World War II experiences to illustrate the common points of intersection and the discrete boundaries of exclusion in the experiences of Blacks and Japanese in America. For Kikuchi, as Briones explains, the "American Dilemma" could be the "Negro question" as much as the "Japanese question"-a dilemma that could not be automatically solved by assimilating non-Whites. Similarly to Briones, Jelena Sesnic delineates some of the possible implications of the cultural exchange between "Asian America" and "African America," but her essay aims at offering a synoptic overview of some junctures in the Asian American literary canon. Sesnic explores the workings of the ethnic masculine self-creation-whether through confrontational or cooperative modes of engagement with African American cultural elements. The critic's close reading of Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1943), Okada's No-No Boy (1957), and Chin's play The Chickencoop Chinaman suggests that male Asian American characters attempt to construe an alternative masculinity through a significant blend of strategies prompted by social coercion and by voluntary choices and exchanges with African American characters. Finally, Ada Savin concludes the volume's exploration of inter-racial identities and contacts by discussing James McBride's The Color of Water, focusing in particular on the dialectics of Black-Jewish inter-personal relationships. As the critic reveals, The Color of Water debunks some widely circulated myths about Black and Jewish group identity, as well as collective and individual memory. In Savin's view, the uniqueness of the specific autobiographical narrative is that it suggests the possibility of bridging racial identities, thus transcending deeply embedded racial divides.

Overall, Journey Into Otherness is an important contribution to the exploration of inter-ethnicity. Responding to the dialogue initiated by such works as Boelhower's Through a Glass Darkly (1987), Budick's Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (1999), Biale's Insider/Outsider (1998), and Sollors' Neither Black nor White yet Both (1997), the seventeen essays in the volume offer keen insights into a relatively untapped and challenging domain. Ultimately, by considering the dialectics between ethnic and mainstream America from the perspective of inter-ethnic and inter-racial contacts, Journey Into Otherness points to new directions in the study of the North American ethno-racial scene.

Eleftheria Arapoglou.
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

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Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.
662 pp. ISBN 0-674-01942-3

Eric J. Sundquist's Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America is a fascinating exploration of the cultural history of the relationship between African Americans and American Jews in the second half of the twentieth century. This exploration is both extensive and intensive: it not only provides a thorough description of the social, economic and cultural context in which the relationships between blacks and Jews were formed, developed and finally severed, including the most important and relevant events in Jewish and African American history after WWII; it also presents the reader with detailed analyses of specific and representative novels, in particular Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer, Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, and Bernard Malamud's The Tenants.

Strangers in the Land focuses primarily on African Americans' perceptions of Jews and Jewish history, describing the profound and sometimes unexpected effects of the Holocaust on the relationship between blacks and Jews. But the central premise of this study is that the evolution of these perceptions and of the relationship between blacks and Jews sheds an illuminating light on American culture and cultural politics. All Americans need to understand the complex relationship between these "strangers in the land" not only because of the essential contribution of blacks and Jews to the definition of American intellectual and cultural life, but also because of what the conflicts between blacks and Jews reveal about the promises and failures of American society.

Eric J. Sundquist demonstrates that two main paradigms define African Americans' perceptions of Jews and Jewish history: the biblical Exodus and the Holocaust. In the symbol of the biblical Exodus, African Americans have found the vital expression of their longing for freedom in America. But the example of the Holocaust turns out to be more problematic. Eric J. Sundquist explains that, on the one hand, the lens of the Holocaust can be seen as a means of knowing, of remembering the experience and trauma of the Middle Passage and slavery, as in Derek Walcott's poems. On the other hand, the comparison between slavery and the Holocaust sometimes leads to a futile and absurd competition for the recognition of slavery and black suffering as the worst, the most horrendous "holocaust". As the Holocaust became a metaphor and a means of establishing one's identity through vicarious suffering in American culture, the problems of comparability and incommensurability raised by the comparison with the genocide of the Jews were compounded by the risk of the trivialization of both the traumatic experience of slavery and the Holocaust. Although these comparisons were fuelled in part by jealousy and resentment, they represent an attempt to find a compelling and meaningful form of language (image, metaphor or symbol) in the American cultural context in order to obtain the recognition and memorialization of black suffering. However such comparisons fail and backfire when they are not made and developed with nuance and care. Because of these failures and distortions, the Jewish models often aggravated the tensions and conflicts between blacks and Jews, instead of inciting blacks to find affinities with Jews. Thus, Strangers in the Land explores the problematic role of the Jewish models in the search for African American identity and memory, in particular when emulation generates frustration, envy, and resentment.

Eric J. Sundquist also examines the literary expression of the relationships between black and Jews in his perceptive analysis and contextualization of a certain number of representative novels. His illuminating interpretation of Bernard Malamud's The Tenants demonstrates that this novel cannot be understood without a thorough understanding of the historical, political, social and cultural context in which the text was written and published. He then identifies and explains the literary context: the literary tradition and genre of the novel, the numerous allusions to a certain number of literary works and to the literary debates or quarrels between blacks and Jews in the sixties, including the relations between The Tenants and Bernard Malamud's earlier stories.

Although Jews and blacks went their separate ways in the eighties and nineties, Strangers in the Land suggests that the memory of their shared history (of the black-Jewish civil rights alliance), of their "ambiguous brotherhood," in Eric J. Sundquist's phrase, still defines American society and culture. Philip Roth's The Human Stain illustrates this relation and ironically suggests the persistent similarities between the experiences of blacks and Jews: according to Sundquist, the death of Coleman Silk reveals the precarious "whiteness" of the Jew who is never white enough to escape anti-Semitic violence; conversely, African Americans can still be seen as "America's Jews", the most disadvantaged outsiders.

These similarities cannot obscure the undeniable differences between the two groups (in terms of social and economic success) or their still intense disagreements. However, the reader may feel that the image of the parallel lines, which Sundquist evokes in his concluding remarks to crystallize these similarities presently incompatible with convergence or communion, materializes a peculiar form of togetherness, which could serve as the basis for new forms of collaboration and alliance.

Eric J. Sundquist does not reach such an optimistic conclusion: such conjectures, when the sense of irretrievable loss is still palpable, would be inappropriate in a work clearly devoted to the rigorous and thorough study of the cultural and literary facts which illuminate the relationship between blacks and Jews. Rather than indulging in unjustified (and politically correct) optimism, Strangers in the Land presents the readers with the precision, erudition, intelligence and a sense of balance which fulfil all the pleasures of reading and signal an indispensable work of literary criticism and cultural history.

Michaël Taugis
Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Poitiers

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Jan Nordby Gretlund, ed. Madison Jones' Garden of Innocence. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2005. 207pp. ISBN: 87-7674-001-3

This collection of essays is an important contribution to Madison Jones studies. Madison Jones, who was born in Tennessee in 1925 and taught most of his life at Auburn University, is the author of eleven novels. Curiously enough he is not very well known and this is the first book-length study of his achievement. Steeped into the literary heritage of the Agrarians, Jones is deeply concerned with the presence of the past in our lives, innocence and guilt, the impact of the New South on traditional values. Place, community, and history have a primary role in his fiction. His novels tend to be pessimistic and often reveal a dark view of the human condition; moreover, violence and the presence of evil are characteristics of his work.

The format of the book consists of an introductory essay by the editor, nine essays (each focusing on one novel), one section consisting of five interviews and a bibliography of primary and secondary texts. Jan Nordby Gretlund has done an excellent job in putting together a book that not only offers perceptive critical readings of the novels themselves, but also provides the biographical and bibliographical background necessary to any new scholar approaching Jones'work for the first time.

In the introductory essay Gretlund argues that Jones is the only writer of the Nashville Agrarians still alive today and refers to the paradox of his not being very well known even though a central figure in American literature. "A Return to the Garden of Innocence: Upon Receiving the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing" is Madison Jones' acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the T.S. Eliot Award. The author claims that in his youth he was interested in becoming a farmer and explains how the years he spent on the family farm furnished preparatory experience for his later development as a writer (In fact, his first novel The Innocent was based on his life on the farm). He also talks about the two influential teachers he had, the Agrarians Donald Davidson and Andrew Lytle who encouraged him to write. His speech ends with the comment that agrarian ideas still remain valid for the criticism of modern industrial society. In "The Uncanny World of The Innocent," Lewis A. Lawson provides a psychoanalytic reading of Jones' first novel. The essay is primarily informed by Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny" even though it does not claim that Jones was influenced by it. Through an analytical step-by-step process, Lawson illustrates the overwhelming role of the uncanny in Duncan Welsh's life: he concludes that the overall pattern of the protagonist's life is ruled by the return of the repressed, which originates in his relationship with his mother.

In "A Declaration of Independence: Forest of the Night" George Garrett examines Madison Jones' second published novel and argues against the author's view that it was his least successful novel. He underlines the fact that both critics and reviewers have indicated the close connections among all his works -- similarities in theme and technique. Moreover, he comments on the similarity of his protagonists and the wound of Original Sin. After a short analysis of the novel, Garrett speculates on the reasons that Jones has not been appropriately recognized and rewarded for his literary contribution. In the next essay, "Cleansing the House: Race and Culture in A Cry of Absence," Jewel Spears Brooker traces the effect of the Civil War upon the culture and psyche of the southerners as the theme of Jones' novel. Using Rene Girard's works Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat, she makes some insightful comments regarding the nature of violence. Moreover, she explains that the controlling image in the novel is a ruined house and suggests the connection of the image to the Old Testament and Greek drama. The house echoes the decadent state of the South, especially the "New" South of the 1950s and 1960s while the scene is set in the Deep South in 1957 after the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. Brooker explains that the conflict of the brothers is exemplified in the Civil War background, the town's controversy over integrating schools and most clearly in the antagonism between the two sons of the Cameron/Glenn family. Brooker also focuses on the psychological depth through which Jones explores Hester's (the mother's) consciousness. According to Brooker, the novel succeeds in combining a criticism of the South for recurrent racism and a projection of genuine love for the region.

In "Nobody Is Innocent: Season of the Strangler and the Short Story Sequence" Hans Skei suggests that the genres of both the short story sequence and the novel inform Season of the Strangler, which is a hybrid published in 1982. Skei explains that all twelve stories may be viewed as relatively autonomous and yet they share a narrative core and are organized around the structural device of the five stranglings of women in a small town. After referring to scholars who have dealt with the genre of the short story cycle, he offers a synopsis of each of the stories. All the events take place in the fictive town of Okaloosa, Alabama in the summer of 1969. Time, place, and the strangler, as well as the omniscient narrator bind all the stories together. The author concludes that notwithstanding the pervasive darkness of the book, it is not pessimistic.

In "Country Innocence: To the Winds," Jan Gretlund, the editor of the volume, analyzes the novel To the Winds and claims that it is an elegy for the farmer's way of living. The clash between the vanishing world of the farm and the intruding modern world is a central issue as well as the loss of the old values and the sense of community. The author explains that To the Winds is the initiation story of a young boy named Chester Moss who, like another Huck Finn is forced to grow up too fast. Gretlund concludes that Jones raises "existential issues that transcend his own time and place." It is basically a tragic novel with humorous incidents embedded in it, which echo antebellum humorous tales.

David Madden, the author of the next essay, titled "The Innocent Stare at the Civil War: Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light" begins his discussion of Jones' Civil war novel by commenting that the relationship between a young boy and his slave which is at the core of the novel points to similarities with Faulkner's The Unvanquished, Allen Tate's The Fathers, and Madden's Sharpshooter. Madden is critical of Jones' novel because, in his view, it fails to develop the relationship between the white boy and his young slave: even though it ends with the slave's death midway in the book, it holds a lot of potential which is only partly developed. Except for the black slave Dink, the characters are one-dimensional. The author of the chapter also claims that Jones' novel lacks a fresh perspective or vision of the war that might contribute to a reinterpretation of the body of Jones' work. Madden is also critical of the style of the novel and accuses it for being neo-Confederate in attitude and performance. In the response essay that follows titled "A Response to David Madden's Essay," Madison Jones claims that Malden's scathing criticism is due to political correctness. He defends the author's right to agree or disagree with his protagonist's opinions and explains that he and his fictional creations are not necessarily one and the same. Concluding, he accuses the politically correct for absence of moral standards and self-righteousness.

In "Sympathy for the Devil: A Reading of Herod's Wife," Richard Gray offers an insightful analysis of Jones' novel and states that even though on the surface the novel appears to be about domestic crisis, there is always something dark that "threatens to surface from below." The narrative combines the social and the personal, political anxiety and domestic tension. Violence is ever-present in the novel as illustrated in the arson attacks and the murder of the young boy Eddie Quals. Gray suggests a similarity between Henry James's short story "The Turn of the Screw" and Jones' novel in the way they both allow different readings. Regardless of which reading one selects, the general inference is that it is a story about the revenge of the repressed: denial of one's origins, the past, and the condition of their spirit eventually lead to destruction. Gray provides examples of the diabolical behavior of the heroine, Nora Helton, who is driven to destruction by her own furies. He concludes that at the end the novel turns into a psychological thriller and then into tragedy with a redeeming trace among the rubble that allows the characters to go on.

The last chapter of the collection is titled "'Out of the Garden Forever:' Interviews with Madison Jones" and it includes five interviews of the author that were conducted by Jan Nordby Gretlund. The topics discussed include Jones as a regional writer, the influence of the Old Testament on his work, the presence of evil in his characters, the Agrarians, and specific issues related to the individual novels. The bibliography at the end of the collection is compiled by the editor of the volume and Thomas Aervold Bjerre and includes Madison Jones' novels, short stories and reviews, essays and biographical work done so far.

Madison Jones' Garden of Innocence is a valuable contribution to scholarship on a rather neglected literary figure. The essays attempt not only to introduce Jones to his audience but also to interpret and assess his works. Jan Nordby Gretlund has done readers and scholars a service by providing a book-length study on Jones' work.

Youli Theodosiadou
Associate Professor at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki