Mick Gidley

University of Leeds · School of English

Emil Otto Hoppé established himself as the leading producer of photographic portraits in Edwardian London, a position he augmented until the mid-1920s. Particular aesthetic, psychological and philosophical ideas undergirded his practices – practices which, in some respects, were then unconventional. His portrait work helped him to achieve some cele...

Emil Otto Hoppé enjoyed an extraordinary photographic career, first as a maker of portraits but later in many other genres. He was also something of a celebrity, a status that both advanced his photographic work and gave him entrée into other aspects of culture. He fostered his fame by publishing a variety of autobiographical texts illustrated by h...

The first words of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, those of the title itself, sound—indeed, resound—a note of irony. We know they are a quotation, an echo from beyond the text, and because they are coupled with what seems at this initial point the book’s subtitle, “Three Tenant Families,” if we do not recognize their origin we nevertheless feel a fri...

RaeburnJohn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006, £21.99). Pp. xxii+372. isbn0 252 07322 3. - Volume 42 Issue 1 - MICK GIDLEY

The South was the South Before it Became the SouthNative Experience and Representation in the Post-Conquest SouthNative Southern – and National – Myths (1): RoanokeNative Southern – and National – Myths (2): PocahontasNative Histories (1): The Earliest SouthernersNative Histories (2): Contact Episodes in the Southeast Culture AreaNative Histories (...

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David J. Wishart (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, £60.00). Pp. 940. ISBN 0 803 24787 7. - - Volume 40 Issue 3 - MICK GIDLEY

Marcus Cunliffe (1922-1990) was incontestably an important figure in American studies. In the early part of his academic career he helped to found the subject area in Britain, and he was later both awarded professorial appointments at the Universities of Manchester and Sussex and elected to the chairmanship of the British Association for American S...

This essay addresses some of the ambiguities of the western portrait project conducted by Richard Avedon (1923–2004) between 1978 and 1984, a project that resulted in both a major exhibition, initially mounted at the Anion Carter Museum of Western Art in Fort Worth, Texas, and the portfolio-sized book In the American West (1985). The book version,...

Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002, £28). Pp. xiv+402. ISBN 0 300 09522 8. - - Volume 38 Issue 1 - MICK GIDLEY

In Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field, Mick Gidley provides an intimate and informative glimpse of Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) and his associates as they undertook their work in the early decades of the twentieth century. Photographer Curtis embarked on an epic quest to document through word and picture the traditi...

Phillip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998, £11.50 cloth, £8.95 paper). Pp. 249. ISBN 0 300 07111 6, 0 300 08067 0. - - Volume 35 Issue 2 - MICK GIDLEY

A. D. Coleman, Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings 1968–1978 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998, £18.95). Pp. 309. ISBN 1 8263 1667 0. A. D. Coleman, Depth of Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media, and Lens Culture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998, £18.95). Pp. 197. ISBN 0 8263 1815 0, 0 8263 1816 9...

Spirit Capture, unlike all too many of the proliferating collections of photographs of American Indians, is a rich, attractively designed book with several distinguishing features. First, it acts as a showcase for a judicious selection of images from the enormous archive of some 90,000 photographs held by the National Museum of the American Indian...

Richard Godden, Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, £37.50, $59.95). Pp. 288. ISBN 0 521 56142 6. - - Volume 33 Issue 3 - MICK GIDLEY

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Foreword Leo Marx Acknowledgements 1. Introduction Mick Gidley and Robert Lawson-Peebles Part I. Prospects: 2. 'Gilded backgrounds': reflections on the perception of space and landscape in America Clive Bush 3. The impermanent sublime: nature, photography and the Petrarchan tradition Olaf Hansen 4. Americ...

HönnighausenLothar, William Faulkner: The Art of Stylization in his Early Graphic and Literary Work (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, £27.50). Pp. 215. ISBN 0 521 33280 X - Volume 23 Issue 3 - Mick Gidley

On November 19, 1911, Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952), the “photohistorian” of American Indians, wrote to his friend Edmond S. Meany, Professor of History at the University of Washington, about his latest triumphs. “Dear Brother Meany,” he began, “I think we can say that my lecture entertainment ‘arrived’. I wish you could have been present at the Car...

ConradPeter, The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, £15.00). Pp. 329. ISBN 0 19 503408 2. - Volume 20 Issue 2 - Mick Gidley

ScheickWilliam J., The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in 19th-Century American Fiction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979, $9.75). Pp. xii, 113. - Volume 16 Issue 1 - Mick Gidley

HarringtonEvans and AbadieAnn J. (eds.), Faulkner, Modernism, and Film: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1978 (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1979, $12.50 [cloth], $6.95 [paper]). Pp. xv, 200. KartiganerDonald M., The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faukner's Novels (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Pres...

1. "Address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature" in Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 120. 2. William Faulkner (New York: Twayne, 2nd ed., 1966), p. 105. 3. "William Faulkner's Marionettes," MissQ, 26 (1973), 277-78. Polk's study includes an interesting, if too brief, discussio...

Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) 1 Biographical information here is based on an amalgam of research into Curtis' correspondence and other primary materials with items on Curtis published since 1962, several of which are cited in notes below. View all notes was born in Wisconsin and grew to early manhood there and in Minnesota, where he may have wo...

Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), is slightly taken aback by some of his host's remarks in the course of an otherwise bantering conversation during his first visit to the Buchanans' East Egg residence: ‘Civilization's going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things....

Carvel Collins's collection of Faulkner's Early Prose and Poetry, containing mainly material written between 1919 and 1922, with one or two items from 1925, introduces the reader to a young author who is not only concerned with questions of his craft but also engaged by several of the dominant aesthetic, intellectual and critical arguments of his d...