emergence of the detective figure in the 19th century (using Foucault's Disciplineand Punish) provides an excellent historical and meoretical segue into the deconstruc-tive readings in the essays by Christianson, Birns and Birns, and Farrell.

This collection provides uniformly excellent readings of the "canonical" textsof detective fiction. As noted in the afterword, it certainly delves into the politicaland gendered ideologies embedded in detective fiction, perhaps more thoroughlyinto politics than gender. The absence of an essay using feminist narrative theoryto examine breakdowns, changes, or experiments in using forms other than thetraditional phallocentric narrative structure seems a significant absence. Anotherimportant absence is any significant discussion of racial or postcolonial ideologyin the genre. Perhaps the second best effect (after the revelations of the essays)of Cunning Craft is my desire for the quick appearance of a second volume thatdeals even more thoroughly with these two issues as well as other aspects of agenre more flexible and expansive than we ordinarily conceive.

LARRY D. HARRED

University of Wisconsin—River Falls

rrfrBarbara Lounsberry. The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction. Westport:

Greenwood, 1990. 232 pp. $39.95.

Despite the increasing number of writers who are turning to nonfiction, therehave only been half a dozen or so books on contemporary nonfiction prose.Lounsberry attempts to contribute to this slim corpus by providing a taxonomyfor dealing with the works of five writers: Gay Tálese, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee,Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer. The major merit of The Art of Fact is its ex-haustiveness. Lounsberry deals with all the nonfiction works of the five writersand also comments on thematic possibilities of works in progress. Compared withthe more sophisticated formal analyses of John Hellman in Fables of Fact andMas'Ud Zavarzadeh in The Mythopoeic Reality, however, The Art of Fact fails tosubstantially add to our understanding of nonfiction prose.

Part of the problem here lies in the simplistic nature of the categorizationoffered. Lounsberry calls nonfiction writers "realtors" and identifies fourcharacteristics of their works: "documentable subject matter" as opposed to "in-vented;" "exhaustive research"; the use of "scene" or recasting events in nar-rative form; and "fine writing: a literary prose style." Obviously, any attemptto deal with the formal aspects of nonfiction prose on these grounds is apt toflounder. The author not only maintains questionable distinctions between report-ing and narrating, popular and literary writing but also defines "fine writing"in a manner hardly useful for the stated purposes. Lounsberry's association of"fine writing" with the use of assonance, alliteration, and metaphor, for instance,can do little to accomplish the purpose of separating "literary nonfiction fromthe glut of nonfiction written in pedestrian prose."

There is potential in Lounsberry's attempt to link contemporary literary non-fiction to early prose narrative forms like the "news/novels" of the seventeenth

RECENT BOOKS—CRITICAL THEORY AND GENRE 349

and eighteenth centuries from which the novel emerged. Thus the most commend-able chapter in the book is the one on Tom Wolfe in which the author demonstratesWolfe's appropriation of the Puritan sermon and his effort to speak as a contem-porary Jeremiah single out "specific cultural forms for individual attack." Thiskind of sustained cultural and formal analysis is, however, missing from mostof the book. The attempt to read John McPhee as a contemporary version ofEmerson, for instance, is hampered by the author's literal analysis of images.The reader does not gain much cultural insight by knowing that McPhee's in-terest in Emersonian circles is evident in his choice of writing about basketballand oranges.

The Art of Fact does not provide us with an aesthetics of literary nonfictionbut with isolated moments of useful analysis. Readers will be quite interested inthe sustained analysis of the rite of passage in The Armies of the Night, the creationof the Whitmanian persona in Advertisements for Myself , and the use of the Jeremiahvoice by Wolfe but less so in image of light in Joan Didion's works or in thelisting of fathers and sons in Gay Talese's works.

MALINI SCHUELLER

University of Florida

OffOTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

Ahearn, Edward J. Marx and Modern Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991. 231 pp. $25.00cloth; pb. $11.95.

Altieri, Charles. Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals.Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1991. 370 pp. $36.95 cloth; pb. $14.95.

Behler, Ernst. Irony and the Discourse of Modernity. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1990. 154pp. $20.00.

Bleuer, Everett F. Science-Fiction: The Early Years. Kent: Kent State UP, 1991. 998 pp. $75.00.Claridge, Laura, and Elizabeth Langland. Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism.

Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990. 344 pp. No price given.DeConcini, Barbara. Narrative Remembering. Lanham: UP of America, 1990. 281 pp. $36.50.D'haen. Theo, and Hans Bertens. History and Post-war Writing: Postmodern Series 3. Amsterdam:

Rodopi, 1990. 279 pp. pb. $19.75.Derrida, Jacques. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia

UP, 1991. 625 pp. $65.00 cloth; pb. $19.50.Fischer, Hermann. Romantic Verse Narrative: The History of a Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 1991. 289 pp. No price given.Hilfer, Tony. The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990. 180 pp. $30.00.Kermode, Frank. The Uses of Error. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. 432 pp. $24.95.Levy, Anita. Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832-1898. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1991. 174 pp. $35.00 cloth; pb. $9.95.Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford

UP, 1990. 403 pp. $42.50.Wall, Barbara. The Narrator's Voice: The Dilemma of Children's Fiction. New York: St. Martin's,

1991. 292 pp. $39.95.

350 MODERN FICTION STUDIES