The Study of American Literary Naturalism: A Personal Retrospective

Donald Pizer’s personal retrospective also embraces history of American literary naturalism studies from the early1950s up to nowadays. From his earliest seminar in American literature D. Pizer was deeply drawn to the writers of the 1890s. As a student he was assured by the standard historical and critical studies of the period that naturalists had failed in this effort to apply a scientific accuracy and detachment to fictional representation, their novels were therefore both untrue and inept and naturalism was in effect a regrettable false step in the "development" of American literature. Since the 1960s being engaged in close study of the early naturalists — Norris, Crane, Garland, Dreiser — Pizer had to confront these conventional attitudes. When looked at closely as a fictional representation of beliefs about human nature and experience, the naturalistic novel appeared to be far more complex than it was believed to be. Pizer sought in a series of books and essays to describe and thus to redefine American naturalism as a whole. Rather than a mindless adoption and crude dramatization of deterministic formulas, he found in naturalistic fiction the conflict between old values and new experience, which usually resulted in a vital thematic ambivalence. It was this very ambivalence, rather than the certainties of the convinced determinist, which was the source of the fictional strength of the naturalistic novel of the period. There has been much recent interest in the American naturalist movement and its texts. It seems, as long as American writers respond deeply to the disparity between the ideal and the actual in our national experience, naturalism will remain one of the major means for the registering of this shock of discovery.

Classics revisited: “Mammals on mountaintops: nonequilibrium insular biology” (The American Naturalist, 105: 467–478, 1971), by James H. Brown

James H. Brown’s “Mammals on mountaintops: nonequilibrium insular biogeography,” published in 1971 in The American Naturalist, documented distributional patterns of small mammal species in the mountaintop islands of the Great Basin, USA. Distributional patterns suggested that this island-like system was not in equilibrium and represented some of the first evidence contradicting the seminal Theory of Island Biogeography. Brown’s findings suggested that ecological and historical mechanisms were integral to community assembly and maintenance in island-like systems, broadening the focus of research related to biogeographical patterns in islands. The work further highlighted the importance of species traits on distributional patterns. Here, I review the paper and its contributions.

Carl Milles: Master of Fountains An Interview With Kent Ullberg

This past June, I had the opportunity to participate in the National Sculpture Society Annual Meeting in Brookgreen Gardens, and attended a fountain-side talk on Carl Milles’ Fountain of the Muses. It was given by Swedish/American naturalist and sculptor Kent Ullberg FNSS. After returning to Washington, I decided to revisit Milles’ Fountain of Faith just outside Washington. I realized after seeing these two important fountains, which were Milles’ last two major installations, that it would be an important opportunity to interview Kent on his personal insights and experience with Milles’ work, as well as the influence Milles had on his own growth as a sculptor. It is also an opportunity to reflect how important this giant of fountain design was to public art in this country and how much influence he still has on fountain design.

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Phalangiinae of Illinois

The great majority of the American species of those familiar creatures commonly known as ''harvest-men " or "daddy-long-legs" (not to be confounded with the crane-flies— Tipulida'—which go by by the latter name in Europe) belong to the subfamily PJialangiind' of the family Phalangi(Ja> of the suborder Opilonea and order Arthrogastra. Though abundant and widely distributed, these arachnids have as yet received comparatively little attention in this country. The first American descriptions were published by Thomas Say in 1821 (Jour. Phil. Acad. Nat. Sci., Vol. IT., pp. 65-68), when four species were characterized under the genus Phalangium. Besides the above the only descriptive paper that has appeared is that by Dr. Horatio C. Wood, Jr., entitled "On the Phalangese of the United States of America," which was published in 1868 in the Communications of the Essex Institute (Vol. VI., pp. 10-40). In 1885, Prof. L. M. Underwood published a list of the described species (Canadian Entomologist, Vol. XVI., pp. 167-160), but added nothing to our knowledge of the group. Finally, in the "American Naturalist" for October, 1887 (Vol. XXL, p. 935), the present writer published a brief note calling attention to the proper generic position of several species hitherto retained in the old genus Phalangium.