Xiaoyi ZHOU
East and West Comparative Literature and Culture:
A Review Article of New Work by Lee and Collected Volumes by Lee and Syrokomla-Stefanowska

Katharine RODIER
Women Writing World War One:
A Review Article of New Work by Higonnet, Ouditt, and Tylee, Turner, and Cardinal

East and West Comparative Literature and Culture:
A Review Article of New Work by Lee and Collected Volumes by Lee and Syrokomla-Stefanowska

1. This review article is about volumes published in the University of Sydney World Literature Series (published by Wild Peony Press and distributed by the University of Hawaii Press), Sang-Kyong Lee, East Asia and America: Encounters in Drama and Theatre (2000), Mabel Lee and A.D. Syrokomla-Stefanowska, eds., Literary Intercrossings: East Asia and the West (1998), and Mabel Lee and Meng Hua, eds., Cultural Dialogue and Misreading (1997).

2. Cultural Dialogue and Misreading, the first of this new series of scholarship in comparative and world literature, is a wide-ranging collection of articles, selected papers from an international conference, "Cultural Dialogue and Cultural Misreading," held in October 1995 at the Resarch Institute for Comparative Literature, Peking University. The invitational conference was organized in conjunction with the annual meeting of the members of the executive council of the ICLA: International Comparative Literature Association. The volume is divided into three sections, "Dialogue," "Misreading," and "Identity," and the articles address a wide variety of topical issues in comparative literature and cultural studies including such as globalization and cultural identity in the Third World, cultural relativism and cultural universalism, postmodernism, translation studies, multiculturalism and multicultural literatures, and imagology. The general perspective of the papers is to suggest that as cultural interaction on a global scale grows, literary research must also expand its horizon; the traditional pursuits of literary research -- such as literary exegesis, the identification and evaluation of canonical texts, and translation -- must reposition themselves against this broader backdrop. The theme of cultural dialogue and exchange and cultural relativism is discussed by Gerald Gillespie, Paul Cornea, Eduardo F. Coutinho, Amiya Dev, Mario Valdés, Douwe Fokkema, Ersu Ding, Yue Daiyun, Han Jiaming, Gu Zhengkun, Qian Zhongwen, Z.I. Siaflekis; the theme of multicuralism and its problematics are discussed by Song Weije, Steven P. Sondrup, M. Szegedy-Maszák, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek; translation studies are discussed by Shen Dan, E.D. Blodgett, and Theresa Hyun; the theme of identity and literature and culture are discussed by Meng Hua, Holger Klein, Sylvie André, and Jean-Marc Moura; and the context of dialogue, exchange, and identity with regard to specific texts and authors is discussed by Raoul David Findeisen, Mabel Lee, Qin Haiying, Béatrice Didier, John Neubauer, Wang Yiman, Tanaka Takaaki, Manfred Schmeling, Maria Alzira Seixo, Jean Bessière, Tao Jie, Holger Klein, and Wade Kelson; theoretical perspectives in the context of culture, literature, and identity are discussed by John Boening, Walter F. Veit, Hendrik van Gorp, Zhang Yinde, Muriel Detrie, Margarida L. Losa, Anton Kaes, Svend Erik Larsen, Rien T. Segers, Maria Elena de Valdés, Tania Franco Carvalhal, Guo Hongan, and Cao Shunqing. Again, of importance is that all  contributions present a global, international, and/or comparative perspective.

3. Of particular interest to me are papers dealing with the problematics of the so-called "grand narrative" and the "petit narratives" of individual authors' works. Among these are the contributions of Mabel Lee, Meng Hua, and Raoul David Findeisen: Their essays are refreshingly original, offering new research and new perspectives. Mabel Lee's paper takes as its starting point the image of masks, using this theme to explore the concepts of reality developed in the poetics of Octavio Paz and Yang Lian. Meng's essay analyses the production and development of images of  the "West" in Chinese literature from the mid-nineteenth century. Through a dissection of the emergence and evolution of the Chinese stereotype of the "foreign devil" (yang guizi) Meng demonstrates how one country's images of foreign countries are a product of that country's own culture and politics. Findeisen also proceeds by exploring the bonds between apparently distant points: His article examines the internal bonds between Gabriele d'Annunzio and Xu Zhimo through the theme of flight. Their shared yearning for the experience of flight embodies, in Findeisen's view, the emergent surrealist tendency in modernist literature. In sum, the essays found in this volume are rich in ideas and traverse a broad intellectual and geographic territory.

4. The second volume in the series is Literary Intercrossings: East Asia and the West and it is also a collection of papers, volume five from the series of six volumes with selected papers presented at the XIVth Congress of the ICLA: International Comparative Literature Association held at the University of Alberta in August 1994 (see <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library/books.html>). Among the questions addressed in its pages are the dissemination and influence of Asian literatures in Europe and America, comparisons between Eastern and Western thought and literature: For example, comparisons of Wang Guowei with Kant (Liu Qingzhang), and of Taoism with Montaigne (Xiaojuan Wang), and concepts of the self in Chinese and Western literature (Xiaojuan Wang). A considerable number of the essays address this last issue. Linda Wong's paper examines the reception of Dante Rossetti's work by the modern Chinese poets and critics Xu Zhimo and Wen Yiduo. She argues that both Xu and Wen pursued a concept of the self which was modern, autonomous and self-controlling. Wong points out that in fact they borrowed from Western Romanticism to resist Chinese tradition and pursue a particular vision of modernity. Terry Siu-han Yip's paper also examines the impact of the Western concepts of self on Chinese modern thought, focusing on their questioning of the traditional Chinese concept of self dependent on set roles for members of societies and families. Other papers dealing with a variety of themes concerning Chinese, Japanese, and Korean texts and contexts, often in comparison with Western texts and contexts are by Christopher Gibbins, Nina Lluhi de Hasegawa, Huang Yuhuang, Maria Luisa Leal, Sang-Kyong Lee, Sangok Lee, Sang-Ran Lee, Midori Matsui, Etsuko Nakayama, Hiroko Odagiri, Yuzo Ota, Qian Linsen, Sugawara Katsuya, Jun'ichiro Takachi, Janet A. Walker, Terry Siu-han Yip, and Ho-Byeong Yoon.

5. The third book in this series, East Asia and America: Encounters in Drama and Theatre is a richly-documented and detailed monograph by Sang-Kyong Lee (University of Vienna). He focuses on the influence on American culture by the  Chinese and Japanese cultures, and, to a lesser degree, by Korean culture. Lee's focus is on drama but along the way he covers many other themes and perspectives in and of art. Lee first sets the scene with an introductory examination of the West's reception of Eastern culture. The author's command of a large volume of material in English, French, German, Korean, and Japanese makes this an impressively comprehensive overview of his topic. Lee covers the influence of Chinese philosophy and literature in Europe, the spread of Japanese painting techniques to the West, the influence of Japanese Noh drama on European and American theater, and performances by Korean musicians in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. The second part of East Asia and America: Encounters in Drama and Theatre is a series of studies of specific authors. Lee has chosen to focus on several dominant figures in twentieth-century American literature: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Eugene O'Neill, and Thornton Wilder, and he offers a detailed analysis of the Eastern cultural elements in their works. He describes the influence of the "spiritual world of the East" -- mysticism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism -- on the drama of  T.S. Eliot and Eugene O'Neill, and also the influence of Japanese haiku on Ezra Pound's "imagism." According to Lee's analysis, the principle of "poetry as picture" embodied in East Asian poetry played a crucial role in Pound's entire creative process. The third part of Lee's study examines the influence of Japanese culture on American drama, choreography, and music. For example, Lee highlights the painterly qualities in Robert Wilson's "Theater of Images" and their connections with Japanese theater. He points out Wilson's appreciation of Japanese gardens and of  "non-verbal communication" and points out Wilson's views of Japanese culture. Similarly, in his analysis of Stephen Sondheim's musical Pacific Overtures Lee argues that it "combines Western features with Eastern elements." A final section of the book then summarizes the history of teaching and research of Japanese theater in American academic institutions.

6. Lee's study applies research techniques largely similar to the ones used in the two preceding books -- traditional comparative literature techniques for studying influence. But we also need to ask the question of how this influence and interaction is produced. In his discussion of Pacific Overtures, Lee addresses not only the Eastern elements in their artistry, but also the question of cultural identity in East Asian countries. Pacific Overtures expresses, Lee proposes, the contradictions between Japan's Westernization and modernization and its national cultural identity. This implies a dichotomy between tradition and modernity and between backwardness and progress. In this theoretical framework the impact of the West on the East is explained in these terms: Western culture was expanded into, disseminated in, and spread throughout East Asian countries as an accompaniment to modernization. Consequently, traditional culture underwent a painful process of transmutation in the wake of the break-up of pre-modern society. I should like to point out that this argumentation is presented also in most of the papers in Cultural Dialogue and Misreading and Literary Intercrossings: East Asia and the West, for example in the various discussion of the concept of self. But this model is also problematic, in theory as well as when judged from historical facts. Theoretically, it is a symptom of Western-centrism in comparative literary research because it examines modernization as an endogenous product of the West. But without the opening of communication and dialogue between East and West, without the markets of the East, and without the silver of Latin America or the cheap labour and resources in many parts of the non-Western parts of the world, the West's modernization and industrial revolution would likely not have occurred. In comparative literature, the tradition/modernization model can partially explain the impact of Western culture on Eastern culture but it can offer no persuasive explanation for the influence of Eastern culture on Western culture. For instance, how can the dichotomous model of tradition and the East versus modernity and the West explain the crucial influence of Confucianism on  eighteenth-century French enlightenment? How can it explain the formative influence of traditional Japanese art on the rise of aestheticism in late nineteenth century France and England, or the influence of Eastern literatures on twentieth-century American modernist poetry and drama? Thus, these dichotomous models are themselves in need of interrogation and their ideological character should also be noted.

7. Yet, setting aside these question of methodology and models, all of these studies of interaction between Eastern and Western culture have a major social significance: Their significance transcends the content of the research itself. Just as a quotation from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cited in Christopher Gibbins' paper in Literary Intercrossings: East Asia and the West puts it, in minor and exile literatures cross-cultural expressions provide certain "lines of escape" (1). That is, these studies offer a broad understanding of interactions between different cultures, and, more importantly, they illuminate the cultural hegemony of mainstream literature, and they constitute a subversion of and challenge to the uniform ideology derived from this mainstream literature and its processes. Although some of the papers in the collected volumes are in need of both substance and style in my opinion, they at the same time raise many issues for further attention and elaboration. In sum, all volumes of the University of Sydney World Literature Series demonstrate the importance and value of the field of comparative literature and culture and represent an encouraging sign to both scholars studying non-Western literatures and cultures and scholars working in non-Western cultures.

Reviewer's Profile: Xiaoyi Zhou teaches English literature at Peking University. He received his Ph.D. from Lancaster University in 1993 and was Research Fellow at the University of Hong Kong between 1997 and 2000. He is the author of Beyond Aestheticism: Oscar Wilde and Consumer Society (1996). Zhou has published widely on English and comparative literature, literary theory, and cultural studies. E-mail: <xyzhou@pku.edu.cn>.

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Women Writing World War One:
A Review Article of New Work by Higonnet, Ouditt, and Tylee, Turner, and Cardinal

1. In Woman's Home Companion for September 1919, Edith Wharton, by then well-known for her fiction, published "Writing a War Story," a short tale which ironizes the efforts of Ivy Spang, Wharton's expatriate protagonist, to depict in prose her impressions of World War I. Directed to compose for a new publication a "rattling war story ... to bring joy to the wounded and disabled in British hospitals," a made-to-order cliché which the editor outlines for her, Ivy is dazzled by the assignment: She, Ivy Spang of Cornwall-on-Hudson, had been asked to write a war story for the opening number of  The-Man-at-Arms, to which Queens and Archbishops and Field Marshals were to contribute poetry and photographs and patriotic sentiment in autograph! And her full-length photograph in nurse's dress was to precede her prose.... Deftly, Wharton juxtaposes Ivy's apparent naiveté with her dedication to the task, of which the narrator archly inquires: "Was it any wonder that she took it seriously?" (Higonnet 392). Yet Ivy struggles not just with her high-toned impressions of her craft but with the subject matter. Having doubted whether she can even write a story in the first place, Ivy Spang embodies larger questions for Wharton: Can any woman tell a tale of war? Must she have "seen" war to write it -- and does "seeing" war strictly mean seeing combat, or seeing oneself as a combatant, traditionally male perspectives? Does seeing in such a case equal knowing, and does such vision confer authority -- even upon a woman -- to relate the experience? Ultimately, Ivy embellishes into "heart interest" one of the soldiers' accounts that her former governess had recorded while she had worked in a military hospital (Higonnet 396). When "His Letter Home," complete with author's photo, appears in print, Ivy to her dismay becomes a proto-pin-up-girl for the soldiers in the clinic where she pours tea once a week -- her only firsthand involvement with the war. To seal Ivy's devastation, the Noted Author who happens to be on her ward explains that her subject is strong but her treatment is laughable -- and then he asks the pretty girl if he may have his own souvenir photograph of her.

2. Simultaneously mocking her heroine and sympathizing with her ingenuous zeal, Wharton -- in fact a well-to-do philanthropist and relief worker in France during World War I -- portrays the precarious position of woman as would-be war writer, a role at which Wharton herself, despite her published efforts in that direction, would be judged less than effectual: "She and the war passed one another by, as frequently happens for noncombatants who are not pressed upon as war fighters are" (Elshtain 215). Wharton's story recasts but does not resolve a version of the dilemma that Walt Whitman articulated after attempting to render an earlier conflict, the United States Civil War: "The real war will never get in the books" (802). The ostensible impossibility of the effort had not deterred Whitman from trying, just as authors, both male and female, have continued to attempt since the first known poet, Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, circa 2300 B.C., lamented to the Spirit of War, "Who can fathom you?" (Gioseffi 198). The collections here under review further attest to the vexed history of trying to write war, focusing in particular on women's efforts to commemorate, celebrate, mourn, protest, document, fictionalize, re-create, and/or fight World War I, a conflict whose very name has eternalized its relative immensity. As Margaret R. Higonnet writes in the Introduction to Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I: "A violent introduction to the twentieth century, it eventually involved thirty-eight nations, killed roughly ten million men, wounded twenty million (including six million mutilated), and cost $330 billion in direct and indirect costs. The number of civilian deaths in unknown: One historian cites estimates ranging from two to thirteen million dead. Among Armenians alone, perhaps one million died. The further twenty million victims of the influenza epidemic in 1918-19, the majority of them women and children, attest to the vulnerability of populations weakened by wartime shortages of food and fuel. The costs to women, however, direct and indirect, have never been comprehensively calculated" (xix).

3. Higonnet clarifies further the dominant tendency to write this war as male -- if not from a male perspective, then by privileging male experience: "The argument about men's inclusion in war and women's exclusion tacitly relies on a model identifying the battlefront as a place where women and other civilians are not. That women have been omitted from histories of World War I is particularly ironic, since it was a 'total' war, in which civilian populations from around the world were caught, one in which terror (Schreckenskrieg) was deliberately waged against civilian populations. Airplanes, zeppelins, long-range artillery like the German Big Bertha, submarines, and gunboats carried the 'line of fire' into cities far from the front. The tidy division of landscape into battlefront and home front may be a convenient one for purposes of military and political strategy. But as women's writing reveals, the assumption that female populations stood outside the line of fire is false" (xxii). Nonetheless, literary history has tended to sweep aside women's accounts of war, even this world war, as Wharton's Ivy Spang exemplifies, discredited by her literal distance from combat, but also by her apparent inability to delineate a "real war" that only a "real" warrior could authenticate -- heretofore a masculinist but also a romanticized undertaking, as Paul Fussell indicates in his landmark study, The Great War and Modern Memory (21-22). However, defining a male-inflected mode of irony as the means to evoke a "modern mass war" (28) moves scholars such as Fussell away from equally important questions subsequently investigated by feminist scholars like Higonnet, Sharon Ouditt, Claire Tylee, and others: How has the literature of wars and warfare advocated, recorded, idealized, marginalized, or effaced women's involvement? How does a female commentator's distance -- geographically, historically, politically, philosophically, vocationally -- from the actual lines of battle shape her own recorded responses to the crisis as well as the reception of her chronicles? How has the discourse of earlier wars -- and its constructions of women within it -- influenced later reflections upon women's participation in national conflicts? How can we reconcile the traditional image of woman as "the gentler sex" or as Hegel's "Beautiful Soul" with the experiential evidence of women as ruthless killers in wartime? Compilations such as Higonnet's Lines of Fire, Tylee, Turner, and Cardinal's War Plays by Women, and Ouditt's Women Writers of the First World War expand the study of writing war onto such less-explored terrain, enlarging a prevalent vantage like Fussell's, creating for contemporary readers an even more multi-dimensional image of World War I as a type of recorded "real war."

4. Touted as "the first detailed bibliography of its kind" (i), Sharon Ouditt's Women Writers of the First World War annotates primary materials on the war, excluding drama or poetry, mostly written by British women from 1914-1939.  To further its claim to be a "starting point" from which to compare form, voice, genre, and experience of the war (2-3), this compilation also includes what Ouditt identifies as a highly selective group of secondary sources: Literary criticism, social and cultural history, biographies, bibliographies, and reference works. Challenging the persistent view that women did not or could not write about World War I because "they weren't in it" (1), Ouditt categorizes her annotations by genre: Fiction, both novels and short fiction; contemporary accounts ranging from books and articles to official publications by the civil service, domestic employment and munitions offices, and other reporting agencies; diaries, letters, and autobiographies; journals and magazines; and references to two primary archives, the Imperial War Museum in London and the Liddle Collection in Leeds, with additional short descriptions of holdings in the Birmingham Central Library, the Trades Union Congress Library, The Fawcett Library, and the British Red Cross Museum. By documenting such a wealth of women's responses to the war, Ouditt affirms her stated purpose: "I have no wish to underestimate the suffering of ... men, nor the effect of their loss. I do wish, however, to invite consideration of the roles played by women in the conflict: Consideration of their activities -- domestic, political, professional, voluntary -- and of their own reflections" (8). In short, Ouditt's approach further interrogates the "topsy-turvey theory" which she quotes from Mrs. Alec-Tweedie's contemporary account, Women and Soldiers: Thanks to the War: "the world has discovered women, and women have found themselves. And a new world has been created" (52-53).

5. The materials that Ouditt assesses begin to suggest the truths that may lie behind such hyperbole, despite its hollow overstatement. While not comparative in its scope and contents, as Ouditt points out, the book does include helpful cross-references, honest admissions of her editorial intentions or omissions, and witty impressions of the texts under scrutiny, particularly of works of fiction. Of Dorota Flatau's 1918 Yellow English, Ouditt writes: "Her son, however, betrays the English, and is hurled from a cliff by the wives of drowned sailors, whom he helped to kill, when his espionage is discovered.... The novel end with an unpleasantly robust invocation to the people of England to show no mercy for his kind" (21). Ouditt's irrepressible wit helps make this collection readable as well as informative.  However, her sometimes comic or impatient summaries of what she implies are sentimental, predictable, or overblown texts tend to prove her own disclaimer: "I have not set out to provide critical evaluations lest my own values obscure the merits of particular writings. I am aware, however, that objectivity might be aspired to, but is rarely achieved" (3). Presumably, this editor could make short work of an Ivy Spang, regardless of the informing ideological tensions that such an author's overwrought creations might betray.

6. Ouditt's treatments of critical or historical texts are more even-handed. Regarding Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, she notes, "The authors compile a great deal of (published) evidence to make their case. They have, however, been criticised for presenting a limited view of women's war writing" (173). She offers an equally balanced and concise overview of Jean Bethke Elshtain's 1987 Women and War, a work of political philosophy that explores diverse discourses and the political claims and social identities that they sustain. The aim is to analyse the Just-Warrior/Beautiful-Soul formulation that separates masculine from feminine, and forms the basis of narratives of conflict. The existence of female belligerence and male compassion clearly undermines the above dichotomy and initiates the analysis of ambivalences and complexities that are the subject-matter of the study. Resources include political works, first-person war narratives, poetry, novels, anthropology, myth. The study moves towards a reconceptualising of citizenship, informed by feminist thought (190). Invaluable as a beginning reference, Women Writers of the First World War sets an important precedent in the unfolding study of women and warfare.

7. Moving outside Ouditt's primarily nationalistic scope, Claire Tylee, with Elaine Turner and Agnès Cardinal, assembles in War Plays by Women: An International Anthology another composite of the varied faces of war, seen in each case by a female gaze, but in these instances transformed as drama. Also envisaged as a challenge to the nominally masculine purview of knowing and telling war, this collection assembles not only war plays from the time of World War I, but subsequent treatments and revisions of that conflict and its impact. In summary, Tylee's anthology purports to cross national boundaries, to showcase alternative viewpoints, and to confront accepted gender norms, both male and female.  Compounding these intentions for Tylee is the question of how -- or whether -- women writers may use traditional dramatic structures or conceptions if they seek to contest or subvert issues of force (4). The Table of Contents for War Plays by Women includes Marion Craig Wentworth's War Brides (USA, 1915), a one-act play, later a film, decrying
the fates of war brides who marry in service to the fatherland; Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Mine Eyes Have Seen (USA, 1918), another one-act play, in this case asking if African Americans should take arms for a country where they have been terrorized because of their race; and two short works by Gertrude Stein, Please Do Not Suffer (USA, 1916), a verbal collage that satirizes bourgeois complacency, and the "anti-play" (6), Accents in Alsace: A Reasonable Tragedy (1919). The international roster adds Marie Lenéru's four-act Peace (France, 1918); Berta Lask's "huge street pageant" (7) Liberation: 16 Tableaux from the Lives of German and Russian Women, 1914-20 (Germany, 1924); Muriel Box's three-act Angels of War (UK, 1935), concerning British women ambulance drivers during the conflict; Dorothy Hewett's two-act musical, The Man from Mukinupin (Australia, 1979); Wendy Lill's two-act The Fighting Days (Canada, 1984), which focuses on Canadian suffragist Francis Marion Beynon; and Christina Reid's one-act radio play, My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name (N. Ireland, 1988), linking World War I with an ongoing contemporary conflict, the Troubles.

8. Following a general introduction to the collection which lucidly contextualizes the plays in terms of history, women's studies and gender studies, literature, and drama, each play commands its own introduction with fascinating production information and a list of primary and secondary texts for further reading. Thoughtfully illustrated with production stills, poster reproductions, and photos of women in war efforts, the book concludes with a checklist of published plays by women relevant to World War I, 1915-1939. Overall, War Plays by Women bespeaks a holistic rather than a casual conception, "suggest[ing] various ways in which these war plays by women might be related to one another and positioned within cultural networks" (1). Of her collection, Tylee asserts, most strikingly, it provokes us to consider whether if, as Fussell argues, men's war plays tend to demonstrate irony and to have a dynamic of hope abridged (33-35), women's war plays by contrast reveal tentative optimism. Despite their confrontation with the facts of random violence, cruelty, and genocide, do they suggest the possibility of change? (4). While some contemporary critics might contend that even raising such a question betrays the interrogator as a irreclaimable innocent, others might see it as activist, if not revolutionary, in intent -- a political gesture geared toward an outcome more than simply a sentimental, plaintive wish. Similarly, Margaret R. Higonnet argues that to counter "popular misconceptions" (xxiii), Lines Of Fire:  Women Writers of World War I presents with a three-fold revisionary purpose its international cast of authors and multiple types of writing.

9. By juxtaposing familiar with less well-known texts, negotiating an interdisciplinary scope, and representing women writers from Europe, Central and East Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand, Higonnet directs attention not just to cultural differences and similarities, but to the impact of economics and political alignments on the citizens, including women, of a world at war. Further, through skilled translations of varied texts she enlarges in subject and in style the canon of World War I literature beyond the work of the so-called English soldier-poets, precluding in the process any simplistic understanding of her key metaphor, "lines of fire": Whether nationalist or antimilitarist, women's vision of the war was thought to be tainted by the fact that they did not do military service. That women volunteered on the Eastern front has been forgotten. That Rupert Brooke, usually thought to be a "war poet," died of disease before he ever saw combat was also forgotten. That women and children were used as human shields in Belgium and eastern France was forgotten or denied as mere propaganda. Inadequate concepts of "real" wartime experience and of its relationship to "real" or powerful writing have kept us from publishing or reading women's texts (xxiii). For Higonnet, "lines of fire," literary or representational as well as literal, can mark a woman's involvement in as much as her apparent separation from the multivalent experience of war, as this anthology amply testifies.

10. Besides her detailed introduction to the collection as a whole, Higonnet supplies concise introductions to each of her subsections, as well as to the work of each featured writer. Artwork by Käthe Kollwitz, Olive Mudie-Cooke, and others, photographs of posters, memorials, war artifacts and participants, and Marie Curie's X-ray of a shell fragment embedded in a soldier's hand comprise a center section of the book. Artists' biographies appear at the end of the volume, and a calendar of related events from 1901 to 1920 also augments the rich assortment of primary material that forms the body of the text. The titles of the subsections attest to the variety of the book's content and the acute vision behind its execution, as well as to the more complete extent of women's involvement in the war and in war efforts: Political Writing;  Journalism: Home Front Reports / Battle Reports; Testimonial: Diaries, Memoirs, Letters, Interviews -- Battlefront / Medicine / Home Front, War Work; Short Fiction: Medicine / Home Front, War Work / Postwar Convalescence, Mourning; and Poems. Starting from a political perspective to orient her readers, Higonnet touches on women's contributions to debates over declarations of war, their reactions to mobilization through conscription, and their calls for ways to end the conflict. The writers here include German Clara Zelkin on "Proletarian Women, Be Prepared"; British Emmeline Pankhurst on "Votes for Women"; and Russian/Italian Anna Kuliscioff on "While Brother Kills Brother." Moving on to journalists like Colette, Ivanova, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Marcelle Capy, Higonnet amplifies the offering of eyewitness accounts with autobiographical writings by combatants like Captain Flora Sandes, who fought with the Serbian Army; Turkish Armenian rebel Zabel Bournazian; and Maria Leont'evna Botchkareva, the Russian known as Yashka, who remembered her comrades-in-arms: "In the dark it seemed to me that I saw their faces, the familiar faces of Ivan and Peter and Sergei and Mitia, the good fellows who had taken such tender care of me, making a comfortable place for me in that crowded teplushka, or taking off their overcoats in cold weather and spreading them on the muddy road to provide a dry seat for Yashka. They called me. I  could see their hands outstretched in my direction, their wide-open eyes straining in the night in expectation of rescue, the deathly pallor of their countenances. Could I remain indifferent to their pleas? Wasn't it my bounden duty as a soldier, as important as that of fighting the enemy, to render aid to stricken comrades?" (161)

11. Further testimonial entries disclose Swiss-born Maria Naepflin's morphine addiction; the notebook confidences that Mireille Dupouey wrote for her soldier-husband, killed five months into the war; the YMCA-sponsored mission of Addie D. Waite Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson, who co-wrote Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (1920); and Virginia Woolf's diary entry on Peace Day. The Short Fiction section that includes Wharton's "Writing a War Story" opens with yet another revisionary stance, reconsidering once again Fussell's preferred ironic mode as something available, after all, to women, if distinct for such writers in subject, conflict, or tone, as Wharton's story itself illustrates. As Higonnet puts it, irony itself is a way to find a telling distance from local experience, and as these works of fiction demonstrate, women have deployed irony to express a lively sense of the illogicality and "backwash" of war, understood as a systemic phenomenon. Nurses' sketches expose the cognitive dissonance of attempting to heal mean who want to die -- or whom military commanders will simply send back out to their deaths.  A colonial writer notes the paradox of an empire mobilizing its colonies on behalf of the "mother nation." A socialist points to the eruption of a second "front" within a nation like Germany, when a government allied with industrialists assaults workers who strike for bread and peace (344).

12. Alongside works by Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Radclyffe Hall, and Mary Borden, Higonnet sets the lesser-known but no less remarkable "The Man Whose Heart They Could See" by Romanian Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, and "Mutiny (A True Story)" by Svarnakumari Devi of India. The anthology concludes with selected poems, usually only one or two poems per poet represented, who include Anna Akhmatova, Amy Lowell, Ricarda Huch, Vera Brittain, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Gertrud Kolmar, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Isolde Kurz, Henriette Charasson, Vida Jeraj, and Marianne Moore, with many in new translations. Not contrived to suggest a poet's complete oeuvre, the careful choice and layout of these poems invites the reader to consider how each text crystallizes a particular insight on the vast war to which all of these women share some bond.  In effect, as Higonnet points out, each poet inscribes a unique response to the sentiment that closes the last poem in the book, an anonymous Malawi Song: "Why did people die?" (556). Brilliantly theorized, scrupulously researched and documented, imaginatively conceived, cogently organized, and emotionally resonant, the collection Lines of Fire stands as a model of innovative inquiry, accessible to the general or the casual reader, but also enlightening to more advanced scholars in literary, political, and cultural studies, and to their students.

13. Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I, War Plays by Women: An International Anthology, and Women Writers of the First World War: An Annotated Bibliography all contribute crucially to the literature of a significantly burgeoning field. Margaret R. Higonnet's comment on the texts that she incorporates into her own stunning anthology could as well refer to the collective project of these three volumes under review: The texts here challenge the normative restriction of the history and literature of war to accounts of the battlefield. The narrow focus of traditional history tends to obscure from view the endemic, even epidemic, effects of war in many countries: Disrupted agriculture, forced labor, food shortages, inflation up to 120 percent or 200 percent, disease, and the destruction of homes and monuments.  The distinguishing feature of "total" war is its engulfment of entire populations and its undiscriminating distribution of death, suffering, and hunger across class lines, from urban women to tribal women.... "Combat" is not the total sum of "war" (xx-xxi). Recognizing that so many texts and visions may constitute the necessarily fragmented recounting of any "real war," the insightful and much-needed work of these three volumes grants room in the study of World War I literature even for an Ivy Spang -- or an Edith Wharton -- alongside a Yashka, a Mata Hari, a Berta Lask, the Beti women of Cameroon, or an already-canonized male soldier-poet.

Works Cited

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Women and War. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.
Gioseffi, Daniela, ed. Women on War.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.
Higonnet, Margaret R., ed. Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I. New York: Penguin/Plume, 1999.
Ouditt, Sharon. Women Writers of the First World War: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Tylee, Claire M., with Elaine Turner and Agnès Cardinal, eds. War Plays by Women: An International Anthology. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Whitman, Walt. "The Real War Will Never Get in the Books." Specimen Days. By Walt Whitman. New York: Penguin/Library of America, 1996.

Reviewer's Profile: Katharine Rodier teaches American literature at Marshall University. A co-editor of American Women Prose Writers, 1820-1870, a forthcoming volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, she has also contributed essays and reviews to American Literature (March 1994), The Emily Dickinson Journal (Fall 1995),  Review (UP of Virginia, 1995), Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction (U of Massachusetts P, 1995), The Novel's Seductions:  Corinne, or Italy in Critical Interpretations (Bucknell UP, 1999); and Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930 (U of Alabama P, 2000). In addition to her scholarship, Rodier is also a poet and her work appeared in Poetry (November 1984), The Antioch Review (Summer 1985), Poetry East (Spring 1995), The Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1995), as well as other journals. E-mail: <rodier@marshall.edu>.

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