The Spree

Frank Kermode

• The Feminisation of American Culture by Ann Douglas
  Papermac, 403 pp, £10.00, February 1996, ISBN 0 333 65421 8
• Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the Twenties by Ann Douglas
  Picador, 606 pp, £20.00, February 1996, ISBN 0 330 34683 0

Ann Douglas’s The Feminisation of American Culture, first published in 1977, now appears in Britain at the same moment as its long-delayed successor, Terrible Honesty. Looking back at the earlier book, Douglas remarks that her ‘excavation and re-evaluation of American feminine 19th-century literature’ has been continued by many other historians, mostly women, who have rebelled against what she calls, in tones more civil than those of some of her successors, a literary canon consisting ‘of almost exclusively male-authored, conspicuously shaped and achieved works’. She herself merely wants to give to other books (not necessarily all by women) the same measure of attention accorded to those more celebrated achievements. In her new book she claims to have taken another emancipatory step, for she will henceforth consider examples of ‘mass’ as well as of ‘élite’ art, thus admitting into the discussion many more writers and performers, male and female, black and white.