The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 13 No. 4

Authors

Preston M. Browning Jr.
Donald G. Baker
Alberta T. Turner
Margaret S. McCroskery
Ann B. Dobie
Carl Wooton
Neil Schmitz
Franklin Brainard
Edith Shiffert
Roger Camp
G. Polakow
Norman H. Russell
William D. Elliott
Robert Lax
Midwest Quarterly Editors

Contents

ARTICLES

Hester Prynne as Secular Saint

From Apartheid to Invisibility: Black Americans in Popular Fiction, 1900-1960

"Returner" Re-turned

Tristan and the Dionysian Sea: Passion and the Iterative Sea Motif in the Legends of Tristan and Isolde

Spark and Waugh: Similarities by Coincidence

Stephen Crane and the Colloquial Self

VERSE

The Stove Leaks Light

Storks

The Spectator

Harvest

the singing of the gods

View from the Third Street Cafe

Ten and Texan

St. Croix

Three Chinese Fables

• The Dancing Stork
• The Rabbit Tree
• The Phoenix

a music or a message

Abstract

in this issue. . .

THIS TENTH Summer Literary Number of ours has been a goodly while in the making. On a tour of our files we discover that some eighteen months ago we were discussing the present issue with Professor PRESTON M. BROWNING, JR., of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (but at that time, inconveniently for us, and somewhat to our envy, migrating between a base in France and another in the neighborhood of Oxford). The point was that we very much liked his study of "Hester Prynne as Secular Saint'' but could not promise publication earlier than this July, although we did commonly use an article or two on literary matters in our other three issues and would look hopefully for an earlier spot. His reply was that he would prefer to be among his peers in this Special Literary Issue, and so he is, and we are sure he will like his company. Professor Browning has the B. A. from Washington & Lee University, the M. A. from the University of North Carolina, and the Ph. D. in theology and literature from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of Missouri and Berea College and is at present an assistant professor of the University of Illinois. His publications and work in progress include articles on Flannery O'Connor for Adversity and Grace, ed. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (University of Chicago Press, 1968) and Studies in Short Fiction (1969) and a Flannery O'Connor volume to appear in the Crosscurrents Series of the University of Southern Illinois Press.

THE BESTSELLERS of the first sixty years of this century are the subject DONALD G. BAKER investigates to discover how literature works to perpetuate racist stereotypes. Perhaps one may take some comfort from his showing that a bad situation appears to be getting better. Now professor of political science and American studies at Southampton College, Long Island University, Dr. Baker has also taught at Syracuse, State University of New York at Albany, and Skidmore College, worked in civil rights and school desegregation projects, and served as consultant with the Peace Corps. His current research interests are analyses of racial stereotypes in American popular fiction in this century, from which he hopes a book-length study will emerge, and comparative studies of racism within the "Anglo" societies—the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Rhodesia.

THE TEMPTATION to welcome our next contributor as a Turner returned is one that we shall naturally resist, but we must point out that neither ALBERTA T. TURNER nor the poem she lent to Computer 360/50 is any stranger to our pages. Poems of hers appeared in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY in January, 1962, and January, 1967, and again—the very "Return" of the present ingenious study—in January, 1968. When we asked Professor Turner why she referred to Computer 360/50 as "she," we got no logical answer but only the regretful notice that "she (360/50) has already been replaced by a more recent model with, I'm sure, a saturnine masculine personalty.” Alberta Turner is an assistant professor of English at Cleveland State University (married to an Oberlin College English professor) and Director of the C. S. U. Poetry Center. She is an associate editor of the poetry journal Field published at Oberlin College and a member of the Ohio Poets' Association, which has readings and workshops throughout the state. Somehow she finds time to teach creative writing and the poetry of Milton, of the 17th century in general, and of our own day.

LOOKING rather more closely at the biographical material supplied by contributor MARGARET S. McCROSKERY, we were surprised to notice how young she is. But we shall be discreet and say only that she is old enough to have married and to have one child and young enough to write well about the Tristan legend and the enduring mysteries of love and the sea. She has the B. A. from Wheaton College, the M. A. and the Ph. D. from the University of Kentucky, and is now teaching in the English department of State University College of Oswego, New York. She has spoken and published on "The Sherlockian Mystique," has written on Melville's Pierre and Dickens's Hard Times, and has a book manuscript on the Tristan legend under review at a state university press.

OF THE TEAM that prepared the current study of some remarkably coincidental works by Muriel Spark and Evelyn Waugh, ANN B. DOBIE is a newcomer to our journal and CARL WOOTON returns after an absence of three years. Mrs. Dobie has taught in the English department at the University of Southwestern Louisiana for the past two years and has published articles on Muriel Spark in Critique and Arizona Quarterly and essays in Southern Speech Journal, Modern Drama, Dramatics, and others. Back in July, 1969, we noted that Carl Wooton was "far-ranging," a native Kansan with a Ph. D. from the University of Oregon, who now teaches way down in Lafayette, on the English staff of the University of Southern Louisiana. He continues to write about the work of Evelyn Waugh and other authors.

DESPITE a slender, uneven production Stephen Crane persistently nags at our interest and curiosity, and we welcome another contribution to our understanding. The author of this study, NEIL SCHMITZ, is a member of the English department and director of the Humanities Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Dr. Schmitz has published several essays on Mark Twain, an article on Henry Adams, a critical introduction to a reissue of the 19th century political novel The Money-Makers by Henry Francis Keenan, and most recently an essay on Donald Barthelme.

AMONG our poets, FRANKLIN BRAINARD is making his third appearance in the QUARTERLY. He writes that in consequence of an article in Today's Health (June, 1971) describing his life on borrowed time, a victim of leukemia, he has appeared on two TV shows and one radio show. He continues to write distinguished poetry, as shown by the selection in this issue. . . . ROBERT LAX, who returns to our pages with three delightful "Chinese Fables," continues to live and write poetry in his distant island home on Kalymnos (Dodecanese), Greece. . . . NORMAN H. RUSSELL, our botanist friend and poet at Central State College, Edmond, Oklahoma, concludes in this issue a notable series of his Indian poems which we began publishing last January. . . . EDITH SHIFFERT returns from faraway Kyoto, Japan, with her poem about "Storks" which is about far voyaging. We reviewed a new collection of her poems in the recent April issue.

NEWCOMERS are ROGER CAMP, WILLIAM D. ELLIOTT, and GREGORY POLAKOW. Like so many present day poets, Roger Camp has been a member of the academic world, with a B. A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara and an M. A. from the University of Texas, and he has been an English instructor at Eastern Illinois University. Now working independently on photography, he expects to return to graduate school in the fall to work on an M. F. A. His poems and photographs have appeared in such journals as Kansas Quarterly, Ann Arbor Review, Wisconsin Review, Forum, Foxfire, English Record, and Aspect. . . . WILLIAM D. ELLIOTT studied writing at Miami University of Ohio, took an M. A. in English at the University of Michigan (where he received Hopwood Awards in creative writing), attended the 1961 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference on a working scholarship, then returned to his native Minnesota as an associate professor of English at Bemidji State College. His poems, short stories, and critical articles have appeared in such journals as Epoch, Southern Humanities Review, New Orleans Review, Kansas Quarterly, Studies in the Novel, Ann Arbor Review, Minnesota English Journal, and many others. . . . Gregory Polakow is a graduate of the University of Boston and has begun work on the M. F. A. program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A newcomer to poetry as well as our pages, he reports that his only other published work appeared in Quabbin. We think his poem in this journal augurs well.

THE BRIEF REVIEW in this issue is by Poetry Editor MICHAEL HEFFERNAN.

Recommended Citation

Browning, Preston M. Jr.; Baker, Donald G.; Turner, Alberta T.; McCroskery, Margaret S.; Dobie, Ann B.; Wooton, Carl; Schmitz, Neil; Brainard, Franklin; Shiffert, Edith; Camp, Roger; Polakow, G.; Russell, Norman H.; Elliott, William D.; Lax, Robert; and Midwest Quarterly Editors (1972) "The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 13 No. 4," The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 13: Iss. 4, Article 1.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol13/iss4/1