The new issue of Studies in American Naturalism is available at  http://muse.jhu.edu/issue/36848.  In addition to fine articles, it includes Linda Kornasky’s fine review of Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing (thanks, Linda!) and my review of Anne Boyd Rioux’s Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist.  There’s also a great review by Sheila Liming of Meredith Goldsmith and Emily Orlando’s Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism (for which I wrote the Foreword).

I don’t think SAN would mind if I posted a few samples from a couple of them:

Kornasky on Bitter Tastes:

Donna Campbell’s substantial new study introduces a unique perspective on American women writers of literary naturalism. Campbell proposes that “placing women’s naturalism at the center rather than the periphery of the [naturalist] movement reveals an ‘unruly’ counterpart to the rules of classic naturalism” by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, etc., which, she contends, “expresses an interest less in philosophical consistency in its treatment of determinism than in the complex, sometimes uneven workings of social forces that operate on female characters constrained with the extra complications of women’s biological and social functioning” (4). This alternative, re-orienting perspective suggests, nonetheless, that new attention should be paid not only to “unruly” naturalism written by women often overlooked in naturalism studies, but also to texts written by men usually not included there. Moreover, Campbell brings turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century film into her study, paralleling naturalism and early film’s emphasis on visual “authenticity” (11).

My review of Rioux’s Constance Fenimore Woolson:

Anne Boyd Rioux opens her excellent new biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson with two indelible images that are the sum total of what most readers know about the author: in the first, “a woman jumps from the third-story window of her Venetian palazzo”; in the second, weeks later, a distraught Henry James sits in a boat in the middle of a Venetian lagoon, trying helplessly to submerge both the dresses and the record of their friendship, but the dresses “billow up like black balloons” (xiii). Unlike the dresses, Woolson’s critical reputation has been less than buoyant in the century since her death, although an edition of her complete letters (Complete [End Page 88] Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson, 2012), numerous book-length critical studies and articles employing feminist approaches, and Rioux’s new collection of Woolson’s stories should do much to restore her reputation.

Rioux’s carefully chosen title, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, signals this revival and Woolson’s struggle for acceptance, for it echoes James’s Portrait of a Lady, the work of an author whose reputation has shaded if not entirely effaced Woolson’s own in literary history. “Lady,” too, is particularly apposite, for Rioux’s running theme is what the literary world might have made of Woolson had they treated her as simply a “novelist” without the diminishing modifier “lady.” The book is thus a twofold portrait, not only of Woolson but of the literary world of high-culture magazines and publishers in which she found success but struggled to create a kind of writing that relied neither on the prosaic lack of idealism, as she saw it, in Howellsian realism, or the bloodless analytics of Jamesian psychology.