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William M. O'Barr, Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1994, £43.95 cloth, £11.95 paper). Pp. 212. ISBN 0 8133 2196 4, 0 8133 2197 2.

As a former co-editor of the Columbia L,iterary History of the United States, David Minter has already produced one grand synthesis. This book originated from his contribution to another, the Cambridge Literary History of the United States, but Minter claims for it a different and more directed mission. Minter hopes to demonstrate relationships not only between novels written between 1890 and 1940, but between those novels and contemporary "cultural events." Minter divides the period up into three parts: the "Lyric Years" of hope and experimentation before the First World War, the national paranoia, violence and frenetic partying of the Twenties, and the Depression, when he sees material poverty generating a new political engagement in literature which simultaneously focussed and defused real dissent. It also provided the context for the Southern Renaissance, which leads Minter to the work of William Faulkner, which he suggests holds traces of the characteristics of all three tendencies of the period. His book conceives of literary history as " a cultural drama in which authors, texts, and nonliterary events enter into multivalent relationships with readers." In practice this means juxtaposing phenomena like Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, The Chicago World Exposition and the New York Armory Show with novels whose themes correlate with impulses he also sees at work in these events. This approach can produce fascinating insights. He finds, for instance, Frederick Jackson Turner, Willa Cather and Henry Adams all dealing, in different ways, with the promise and destructiveness of the economic and demographic expansions of the 1890s. He finds a similar combination of economic ambitions and ethnic exclusions encapsulated in the "White City" Daniel Burnham designed for the Chicago World Exposition. Despite forays into detective and cowboy fiction, Minter's selection of novels is as he admits, fairly "canonical." This does sit a little oddly with the writing of a cultural history. Neglecting not only authors, but whole movements, like the Harlem Renaissance for example, surely leads to a very partial picture of the literature of the period, let alone the culture it belonged to. Minter's analyses of the writing and of events do not always integrate smoothly, and as he admits in his Preface, his narrative is episodic and often jerky, as he shifts in focus between the two. A sign perhaps that despite his success in playing them off against each other, both " history " and " literature " remain firmly independent in his account.