There were other war novels besides those set in the armed forces or at the front, novels that dealt with World War II more obliquely or were set on what was then called the home front. A number of these books anticipated the direction of postwar fiction more acutely than did the combat novels. Though ambitious young writers like Norman Mailer and James Jones dreamed that the war could provide material for the Great American Novel, the naturalist methods of the early war novels were discarded when American society, without reverting to isolationism, turned in upon itself during the Truman and Eisenhower years. The new writers were influenced less by the war than by rapid onset of the Cold War and of nuclear weapons so soon after the shooting war, which fostered anxieties that America’s victories abroad might otherwise have laid to rest, and by the new therapeutic culture of psychoanalysis, which gradually replaced the social consciousness that had driven much of American literature and visual art during the Depression. As American power and prestige expanded outward across the world, at home artists and writers looked inward, sometimes boastfully, often fearfully, to explore the existential dilemmas of selfhood. Europe had been broken as a dominant political and economic force, but strands of European culture, from modernism and surrealism to existentialism, had migrated to America. As America entered an era of prosperity and international dominance, American artists and writers grew pessimistic and introspective, like troubled prophets brooding darkly at the banquet of national celebration.

The united states emerged from the Second World War with a powerful economy, a restored faith in capitalism, and a society rededicated to national myths of material advancement and moral and ideological purity. It also emerged with three major dramatists, in Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, who appeared to dissent from this consensus.

There was a confidence about prewar theater that, for the most part, did not survive the conflict. The social dramas of Clifford Odets were predicated on the possibility of change; the comedies of Philip Barry and William Saroyan, largely on a contentment with the given. Thornton Wilder celebrated familiar pieties in Our Town, and although The Skin of Our Teeth suggested a more radical revisioning at the level of style, the ironies were never allowed to disturb a fundamental equanimity. Lillian Hellman’s plays relied on a disruption of the moral world finally contained by the structure of melodrama, and if Robert Sherwood, equally drawn to melodrama, offered a lament for the collapse of democratic and Christian values that brought him to the edge of an affecting paradox, he then turned with apparent relief to the banalities of plot for a reassurance that had no place in the logic of his drama. Indeed, his case became, in a sense, paradigmatic. Aware of the dislocations of social and moral purpose, he offered faith and a kind of desperate belief in human goodness that he could never adequately dramatize but only assert.

Early American dramatists worked within a set of dramatic forms and theatrical traditions inherited from England. The most important comedic forms were sentimental comedy, social comedy, comic opera, and satire. Among theatrical traditions transmitted from England was the acceptance of women as playwrights: comedies by English women writers were among the most popular works in the theatres of early America. Early in the history of the new nation, American writers began using and reshaping drama to represent specifically American identities, experiences, and perspectives. While the American context offered new opportunities, however, it also presented unique obstacles. Strong antitheatrical attitudes, based on religious opposition to acting and cultural opposition to elite art forms, combined with thinly populated cities and scarcity of resources to make establishment of theatre difficult in the United States. To counter antitheatricalism, or perhaps merely to address unsophisticated audiences, writers of early American comedies assume a highly didactic tone and focus closely on issues of national identity. They present incidents in American history, demonstrate the dimensions of American citizenship, and exhort the audience to feelings of patriotism.

As a young girl growing up in Brooklyn, and later in New York, Wendy Wasserstein experienced the conspicuous double standards between boys and girls that ignited her feminist instincts. While her brother received Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels - a travel guide to spectacular places around the world - for his Bar Mitzvah, she was reading Eloise and Madeline. And, to instill a sense of feminine etiquette in her daughter, her mother sent her to the Helena Rubinstein Charm School. Moreover, to make her well rounded, she enrolled her in the June Taylor School of Dance. If that were not bad enough, when Wendy showed up everyday in the same work shirt at the Calhoun School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the headmistress would call her mother to tell her that she should get dressed up and wear pink (Bennetts, “An Uncommon Dramatist,”). Indeed, she has always felt angry about the importance placed on women’s appearance.

The marginalization of women also became apparent to her in the television shows she was watching as a girl in the fifties. Her favorite television show, Bachelor Father, depicting a debonair, suave small screen “Cary Grant,”convinced her that she would “rather wear a dinner jacket than perform the routine housewife duties of Mrs. Danny Thomas, Mrs. Father Know Best, or especially June Cleaver.”She felt compelled to find a female counterpart for the bachelor father, “a woman who possessed all the vitality of a Broadway musical, whose charms would beguile even Helena Rubinstein, and who never closed herself off from the possibility of adventure”(Wasserstein, Bachelor Girls, 6). Consequently, she became fascinated by Doris Day films, films about bright, self-motivated, charming, willful women, who approached life with guts and gusto.

Much of our little information on Zeno's life comes from the prologue of Plato's Parmenides. Most scholars accept Plato's statement that when Socrates was “very young” (though old enough to engage in philosophical debate) Zeno was forty and Parmenides was sixty-five (Parm. 127a-b). The setting of the Parmenides is the quadrennial Great Athenaia, and the best guesses for its dramatic date are 454 B.C. when Socrates was 15 and 450 B.C. when he was 19. Also, Plato's statement that “Zeno was of a good height and handsome to see; the story goes that he had been Parmenides' young lover” (127b) is perfectly possible, though not otherwise attested. Even if the setting of the Parmenides is historically plausible, the notorious unreliability of Plato's reports on earlier philosophers makes it unwise to take much else of what he says on trust. The conversation in the Parmenides certainly did not take place, and we may fairly doubt that Socrates met the philosophers from Elea. Further, Plato indicates that Zeno's treatise was unknown in Athens prior to the dramatic date of the Parmenides (127c), but he also implies that it was written many years earlier, and he says it had been circulated (apparently soon after its writing) without Zeno's authorization (I28d) – claims that although not actually contradictory are hard to reconcile.

In 1970, The writing disease had been diagnosed as exhaustion, and practitioners were busily at work to find a cure. One approach was to analyze the condition itself, to explore the various symptoms and subtleties of the postmodern state. The “High Postmodernism” usually identified with Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut was the result, and the investigations of these writers in many respects coincided. What was wrong with the novel, they concluded, was its rootedness in modernism, an ideology that fetishizes the work of art. A revitalized novel would be a novel written and received not as a neurotic fetish à la Freud or a commodified fetish à la Marx but as an opening, a doorway to communication.

The use of fetish here is prompted by postmodern novelists themselves, several of whom refer specifically to the formulations of the term in Freud or, less directly, in Marx. Marx took the term fetish from religion, where it refers to a statue or other cult object to which believers attribute the same powers as those of the spirits that the fetish object represents. Accordingly, Marx characterized the commodity fetish as a bourgeois attempt to make a religion out of mere material objects, noting the peculiar fact that we speak and act as if commodities “had” value. In the commodity, “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour.”

In N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, the Native American protagonist, Abel, is brutally beaten without provocation by a Chicano policeman named Martinez. Richard Rubbio, the Chicano protagonist of José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho first learns about racism by observing the way his friends discriminate against a Japanese boy named Thomas. Midway through John Okada’s No-No Boy, a young Japanese American veteran named Kenji realizes that instead of finding ways to unite to achieve common goals, America’s minority cultures continually find ways to discriminate against one another and even against their own members:

Kenji tries to find a “pattern” that can be “studied” so that “answers” can be “deduced,” but all he is able to conclude is that “the world was full of hatred.” What he does not manage to articulate is the fact that the disunity of America’s marginalized cultures, evident in these three novels, is no accident.

MARGARET WALKER’S JUBILEE

Margaret Walker’s original claim to fame was as the first African American woman to win the Yale Younger Poets prize, for For My People in 1942. Much later, after a career as a professor at Jackson State University in Mississippi (Walker, with Ernest Gaines, is one of the few major African American writers to make her career in the South), she published Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1980), a controversial, very unsympathetic biography of Richard Wright, who was a former friend of hers. Her most durable reputation, however, is for Jubilee (1966), a thoroughly researched novel about slavery and Reconstruction, partly based on the recollections of her own maternal great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown.

Tangled feelings are rife in Jubilee. The protagonist, Vyry, is the daughter of her master, John Morris Dutton, of Dawson, Georgia, and his slave Sis Hetta, who later dies in childbirth bearing another of Dutton’s children. Dutton maintains a relationship of false heartiness and cheer with Jake, Hetta’s husband, who is not fond of Vyry. After Hetta’s death, Vyry is sent to the Big House, both to learn to cook under the tutelage of Aunt Sally and to serve as a playmate for her half sister, Lillian. Dutton is a feckless and irresponsible man who does not acknowledge Vyry, although finally he seems to be less the villainous tyrant than a bluff, rather foolish squire. In fact, because he is more interested in state politics, he does not even pay close attention to the workings of his plantation.

As the introduction to this volume makes clear, the task of the current Cambridge History of American Literature differs significantly from that of its predecessors. Rather than seeking to identify, consolidate, and canonize an American literary tradition, this history arises from a cultural moment marked not by consensus but “dissensus.” Its task, therefore, is to “redraw the boundaries of the field” of American literary scholarship, opening up the canon to expansion and redefinition by acknowledging that literary history must be “a multivocal, multifaceted scholarly, critical, and pedagogic enterprise” driven by “the energies of heterogeneity.” The recognition that the American literary tradition must necessarily be conceived as heterogeneous has dictated one of the ways in which this Cambridge History differs from previous efforts: namely, its inclusion of this section’s comparative approach to emergent American literatures.

When the next multivolume literary history of the United States is written sometime during the next century, it will no doubt still need to include a section or set of sections on emergent literatures, because it seems unlikely that American culture will, in the intervening years, cease to marginalize nonwhites and nonheterosexuals. What we learn from Raymond Williams’s analysis of cultural dynamics is that human culture has always been the product of conflict and has always depended for its coherence on the identification of certain peoples, ideas, and practices as Other.

Any attempt to chart the early history of the cello, in whatever genre, inevitably founders on ambiguity of terminology. We accept that bass violins were widespread in Italy throughout the seventeenth century and that they existed in various sizes, the smallest tuned a fifth higher than the modern cello, but when was a violone, violoncino, basso da brazzo, bassetto di viola, violone piccolo or whatever a cello? This problem is inevitably aired elsewhere in this volume, but its most direct relevance is to the ensemble sonata for two or more melodic instruments, since by the time collections of solo compositions for a stringed bass and continuo appeared in print, composers (or at least publishers) had mainly settled on ‘violoncello’; there are no solo collections for violoncino. It would seem that ‘violoncello’ was first used with some frequency by Bolognese composers from Giulio Cesare Arresti's Sonate a 2, & a Tre. con la parte del violoncello a beneplacido (1665), but others in his immediate circle were still far from consistent. Giovanni Battista Vitali described himself as ‘suonatore di violone da brazzo’ on the title-pages of his publications but is referred to variously as a player of the ‘violoncino’ and ‘violonlino’ in the records of the Bolognese basilica of San Petronio; yet, after his appointment to the Court of Modena in 1674, the Church authorities advertised for a replacement, ‘being vacant the position of violoncello through the departure of Gio. Batt. Vitali’. Ten years later, the title-page of Domenico Gabrielli's Balletti reveals that he was ‘Sonatore di Violoncello in S. Petronio di Bologna’, even though the part-book is labelled ‘violone’.

Edward Albee had his roots in Off-Broadway. With Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he moved to Broadway. Despite the deserved success of that play, it was not where he belonged. It is arguable that his work would have found a more receptive audience elsewhere. Certainly, an increasing number of writers turned not to the large-scale and increasingly expensive midtown theaters but to the Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway venues that sprang up, from the early 1960s onward. In a decade that privileged youth, that increasingly saw a challenge to conventional social structures, that witnessed social fragmentation along lines of race and gender, and that was defined by political and aesthetic revolt, the theater, as image and fact, seemed the natural focus of change. It was to be a theater that challenged the distinction between performer and audience, that stepped outside Cartesian logic and tapped into the unconscious as it rediscovered the expressive power of the body. Groups such as the Living Theatre, under the direction of Judith Malina and Julian Beck, and the Open Theatre, whose director was Joseph Chaikin, set themselves to explore the potential of the theater by deconstructing it into its component elements — movement, sound, the dialectics of performance. Their emphasis was on the actor. They were interested in liberating the voice, stressing physicality, generating powerful images, improvising, transgressing the supposed limits of theatrical expression. The audience they addressed was not one that attended Broadway plays.

Introduction

The cello sonata forged three avenues of development in the eighteenth century. The late seventeenth-century form, for cello and continuo, involving a cello as the principal melodist, persisted well into the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Harmonic support in the form of semi-improvised chords or the realisation of a prescribed figured bass was provided by a keyboard instrument (normally an organ or harpsichord), which could be joined or replaced by a plucked instrument (chitarrone or archlute); in addition, the bass line could be sustained, normally by another cello or, possibly, a gamba. The nomenclature for such works ranged from ‘sonata’ to ‘sinfonia’, ‘solo’, ‘trattenimento’, ‘divertimento’, ‘concertino’ and other such terms.

The sonata's second avenue of development, the so-called ‘accompanied sonata’, involved the cellist in a subordinate role to an obbligato keyboard. This type, which challenged the dominance of the sonata with continuo and eventually superseded it, began and ended essentially with the early sonatas of Beethoven and his contemporaries, giving way to the third avenue, the true duo sonata for two equal protagonists.

The Baroque

The cello sonata evolved first in northern Italy towards the end of the seventeenth century. Two different types emerged: the sonata da camera (‘chamber sonata’), which is essentially a suite of stylised dances; and the sonata da chiesa (‘church sonata’), the movements of which have no dance allegiances.

The preceding evaluations speak to the ever-present issue faced by those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cellists who sought recognition as virtuosos: could their performances be as pleasing and acceptable to audiences as those of violinists? The accomplishments of such artists as Lanzetti, Jean-Pierre and Jean-Louis Duport, Romberg, Servais, Davidoff and Casals repeatedly proved that, indeed, the cello could easily match its smaller confrère in providing musical gratification. Yet to do so they, and other innovative and artistically creative players, had continually to recast themselves as the architects of modernisation as they searched for idiomatic performance techniques which allowed their music, in tandem with that of violinists, to be stretched, moulded, and refitted to conform with ever-changing stylistic requirements and regional preferences.

POETIC PESSIMISM AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPTIMISM

The Greek philosophers were not the first to reflect on the nature and limits of human knowledge; that distinction belongs to the poets of archaic Greece. In Book XVIII of the Odyssey, for example, the failure of Penelope's suitors to sense the disaster awaiting them prompts some famous remarks on the mental capacities of the species from the disguised Odysseus:

Here, as on other occasions in the Homeric poems, the thoughts of mortals reflect only their present experiences,- the events that lie ahead lie also beyond their powers of comprehension. Conversely, when the gods choose to endow an individual with superhuman powers of insight, his knowledge is distinguished by its vast range:

Until recently, most standard accounts of twentieth-century American theatre have virtually ignored Sophie Treadwell. At most, Treadwell’s bestknown play, the explosive 1928 drama Machinal, receives mention as a last gasp example of 1920s expressionism on the commercial Broadway stage. With a renewed attention to Machinal, however, first with its reappearance in print in an anthology in 1981 and then in prominent revivals by the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1990 and the Royal National Theatre in London in 1993, Treadwell has begun to attract more scholarly and artistic interest. With her theatre career spanning six decades, including the writing of forty plays in a variety of styles and subjects, as well as acting in, directing, and producing her own works for the Broadway stage, Treadwell may be viewed as one of America’s pioneering, early twentieth-century women dramatists. Her writings consistently examine the conditions of modern society which inhibit women’s personal struggles for independence and equality. Especially in her most experimental works, Machinal and For Saxophone, Treadwell may also be seen as one of the first American women playwrights to utilize non-realistic innovations in style and narrative to create a decidedly feminist aesthetic in the theatre.

Sophie Treadwell was born in Stockton, California in 1885. Her mother, Nettie Fairchild Treadwell, was part of a ranching family which helped settle the Stockton area. Her father, Alfred B. Treadwell, was of Mexican and European descent. His desertion of the family in favor of a career as a lawyer and elected judge in San Francisco severely disrupted Sophie’s formative years. Despite the fact that she would often spend summers in San Francisco with her father, Sophie frequently experienced embarrassment and humiliation over her mother’s persistent attempts to follow and reunite with Alfred.