Esther Eidinow's "Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth"

Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol; she has also taught at Newman University and Nottingham University. Her research explores ancient Greek culture, especially ancient religion, magic, ritual, and belief, drawing on theories from different disciplines, including anthropology and cognitive science, and she has published widely on these topics and their intersections with the history of emotions, gender, women's histories, and environmental humanities. Her latest project, funded by the AHRC, co-created (with teachers) is an accessible virtual reality experience of visiting the ancient Greek oracle of Zeus at Dodona in the fifth century BCE, for use in classrooms.

Eidinow applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth, and shared the following:

On page 99, the reader plunges into the chapter headed ‘Air’, that is, myths of metamorphosis that culminate in the body of a man or woman changing into a form related to this element. The three other chapters in the book cover myths that describe metamorphoses related to 'Earth', 'Fire', and 'Water'.

The page opens with reflection on different versions of the Greek myth of Prokne and Philomela: in the canonical version, they are sisters who have suffered terribly at the hands of Tereus, Prokne’s husband. Before they flee him, the sisters kill Itys, Prokne’s son by Tereus, cook him, and serve him to Tereus as a meal. At this point, the gods turn Prokne into a nightingale, Philomela into a swallow, and Tereus into a hoopoe. This is just one version of the myth, but as page 99 elaborates, myth is both mutable and unchanging. Even the very different versions by other ancient writers maintain the key narrative thread of the rape of a sister and the killing and cannibalism of a son.

The discussion then turns to an overview of the other stories of transformations into birds studied in this chapter—and how they depict men and women in the most extreme of situations, removed from human society. Many of these stories portray the breakdown of family order; and one argument suggests that metamorphosis is prompted by the need to exclude from a community those who have committed dreadful crimes, lest they bring down the anger of the gods.

Alongside that perspective, page 99 offers another way of reading these myths—that is, that they relate metamorphosis to the experience of intense and unbearable emotions. This chapter highlights the emotions of grief, pride, excessive and misplaced desire, and the trauma of fear and anger provoked by sexual assault.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book: page 99 includes a number of its key themes, including the nature of myths and myth-telling and how myths of metamorphosis reinforce cultural conventions and religious beliefs. But, above all, page 99 incorporates the book’s main argument—that myths of metamorphosis evoke human experiences of extreme emotion or trauma, which we now discuss in medicalised terms as fight or flight, freeze, faint and flop.

In this book, I suggest that ancient Greek men and women also experienced these physiological responses, but since they lacked our medical knowledge, they evoked these experiences through stories about bodies literally changing. For example, in the chapter ‘Air’, rather than depicting a traumatic ‘faint’ response, or describing an experience of dissociation, these stories portray men and women falling, and/or turning into birds, being snatched by winds and/or changing into stars.

As the rest of the book argues, in the ancient Greek mind, transformations like this made a sort of sense. Ancient Greek philosophical and scientific writings suggest that the elements, air, earth, fire and water, were understood to be the building blocks of everything—including humans. In ancient stories of metamorphosis, the human body’s elements are forced into another form, in moments of extreme and violent emotion; they become part of the surrounding landscape. Both men and women undergo these changes, but it is women who are the primary protagonists, deeply vulnerable both to the violence of gods and men; and to profound emotions, especially grief.

The book’s other chapters explore the mythic relationship of emotions and elements. We have all at some point talked about being so frightened that we are rooted to the spot, or turned to stone with fear. We might now understand this as a traumatic ‘freeze’ response, but in the stories described in the chapter ‘Earth’, men and women literally turn into stone, or are rooted in the earth as plants or trees. Stories in the chapter ‘Fire’ describe the power of rage at secrets revealed. Finally, the stories explored in the chapter ‘Water’ evoke the ceaseless flow of traumatic memory, and a repeating story pattern of violent separation, change and rebirth.

These myths of metamorphosis are specific to the ancient contexts in which they were told and heard, but they can also, I argue, offer insights into embodied experiences that are shared across cultures, including our own.

Learn more about Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Burstein's "Being Thomas Jefferson"

Andrew Burstein recently retired as the Charles P. Manship Professor of History at Louisiana State University. He is the author of The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Jefferson's Secrets, and several other books on early American politics and culture. He is the coauthor (with Nancy Isenberg) of Madison and Jefferson and The Problem of Democracy. Burstein’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Salon.com He advised Ken Burns’ production “Thomas Jefferson,” and was featured on C-SPAN’s American Presidents Series and Booknotes, and numerous NPR programs. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Burstein applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, with the following results:

On page 99, as he is preparing his draft of the Declaration of Independence in June 1776, Jefferson is thinking of his text as a divorce petition, casting King George III as an abusive husband:

The divorce analogy makes sense for a number of reasons. In 1772, at the high point of his career as a practicing attorney, Jefferson took extensive notes in preparing the case of a client who wished to divorce his wife. At the time it was virtually unheard of for a husband or wife to succeed in a divorce suit as we understand it, even in cases of adultery.

The rest of page 99 details attorney Jefferson’s objective in the 1772 suit, demonstrating his familiarity with legal precedent, while at the same time protecting the reputation of his client, a recently deceased physician who left no will, and whose wife had “refused his conjugal rights,” yet demanded the bulk of his estate.

It happens that the content on page 99 is a tempting snippet of the book’s themes. As “intimate history,” it speaks to Jefferson’s willingness to acknowledge the centrality of male-female relations in all facets of life. I can say that the Page 99 Test works for my book, both because it engages directly with my interpretation of the most celebrated piece of writing in American history, and it comports nicely with the book’s humanization of a historical figure whose loves and losses shaped the kind of politician he became. The two main threads I follow in this biography are fame and vulnerability, which are at the very least hinted at on page 99.

Learn more about Being Thomas Jefferson at the Bloomsbury website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina Schwenkel's "Sonic Socialism"

Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi the reader encounters a discussion of social distancing not merely as a public health measure, but as an ethical gesture— a public expression of care that shaped how people interacted with one another within reconfigured sensory environments. Marking the beginning of Act 3, this page explores the careful calibration of the relationship between “safe” distance and proximity, particularly through heightened attention to the sonic dimensions of epidemiological risk. It outlines how listening itself changed, as people attuned more deeply to coughs and sneezes that provoked new registers of anxiety, transforming connections to both the urban environment and the bodies moving through it.

This discussion emerges at a pivotal transition in the book. The chapter shifts from the end of a three-week lockdown in Hanoi (Act 2) to a different form of pandemic governance, from enforced isolation to cautious social reintegration with an emphasis on spatial distancing, as it was called in Vietnam. This also marked a reopening of the domestic economy following containment of the virus by April 2020, while much of the world remained closed. Page 99 examines how this shift in governance materialized in daily life, transforming everyday sensory experience through both spatial and sonic interventions. For example, outside commercial establishments, material markings on the ground designated two-meter distances (“stand here”), while bullhorns provided auditory reminders to keep apart. People also created their own protective boundaries to mitigate the risk of viral transmission. Market vendors—particularly women—used tape to cordon off their stalls to ensure customers transacted from a safe distance. Though a photograph of this practice originally appeared on page 99, I removed it when the tape proved too faint to see clearly.

Page 99 thus captures a particular moment in pandemic time when anxieties about viral transmission in Hanoi ran high. A COVID poem featured here reflects concerns about cross-contamination, as well as the dread of being publicly identified through contact tracing in the press. This vigilance would soon wane, however. Later in Act 3, with no reported contagion, people began to lose their fear and test the boundaries of state control. In this way, page 99 marks a specific point in the acoustic and affective rhythms at the heart of this sensory autoethnography, as they ebbed and flowed across 2020.

Visit Christina Schwenkel's website.

The Page 99 Test: The American War in Contemporary Vietnam.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeff Roche's "The Conservative Frontier"

Jeff Roche is a professor of American history at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. He is the author and editor of several books and essays on American politics and the conservative movement, including Restructured Resistance, The Conservative Sixties, and The Political Culture of the New West.

Roche applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right, and shared the following:

Page 99 is early in the book’s fifth chapter in a section that describes the conflict over prohibition in Amarillo Texas in 1907. The brutal murder of a young man in the Bowery (the city’s Red Light District) had created an uproar and a demand among citizens that the city prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol. On one side were a group of people we would now call social conservatives, who believed that eliminating liquor was not just a step in creating a more righteous community, but also a signal that the city had emerged from its rough and tumble frontier phase to become a modern and moral city. On the other side were folks who we would recognize as more libertarian, who did not believe nor support any efforts to legislate morality. It also describes the violent corruption that surrounded the election to go “dry” and begins the tale of the bloody chaos of an Amarillo that was dry in name only, a time when local police and Texas Rangers fought each other in the streets and a local deputy assassinated a Ranger at the city courthouse.

Page 99 is possibly as good an indicator of the tone and style of the book as any other random page I suppose. It demonstrates the kinds of political conflicts that serve as the foundation of the book’s narrative structure and central premise – that it was local struggles over national issues that helped mold West Texas’s cowboy conservatism. It also describes an ongoing ideological conflict between the live-and-let-live libertarianism of a cattle culture and the demands for civic conformity of a small-town elite determined to see their communities grow.

The book itself covers roughly a century of West Texas history as it explains how the region became the most conservative and the most reliably Republican section of the United States. The story unfolds across dozens of vignettes (like the conflict over prohibition in turn of the century Amarillo) organized in shortish chapters written in an accessible style. The first third of the book describes the politics, culture, and economy of what I call the Agricultural Wonderland, a modern, forward-looking society, based on commercial family farming and designed as an alternative to a rapidly changing America. A place literally advertised as a white, Christian homeland on the Texas prairies. The second part of the book traces the origins of the modern Texas right-wing as it moved from a broadly conceived pro-business and anti-labor lobby to a paranoid and conspiratorially minded movement whose members believed that communists were secretly plotting to brainwash American children through subtle messaging in schoolbooks. The last third of the book describes and explains how the far-right took control of the Texas Republican Party over the course of the 1960s and turned it into a vehicle for the expression of their ideology, a project that was all but complete when the book ends with Ronald Reagan sweeping the Texas Republican Primary in 1976.

Visit Jeff Roche's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Flannery Burke's "Back East"

Flannery Burke is associate professor of American studies at Saint Louis University. She is author of A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century and From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's.

Burke applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region, with the following results:

Page 99 appears in the center section of Back East and reveals a mainstream opinion of the eastern United States held by many westerners in the twentieth century. The page begins with a complete sentence: “As it had in ‘The Plundered Province,’ Wall Street, once again, played the role of the East.” The author of the article “The Plundered Province” was Bernard DeVoto, a writer for Harper’s Magazine, a Harvard graduate, and an ardent conservationist originally from Ogden, Utah. In “The Plundered Province” and again in later articles referenced on page 99, DeVoto excoriated eastern corporations who extracted natural resources and labor from the American West and westerners who accepted and even encouraged such economic exploitation. As a westerner who had succeeded in the East, DeVoto considered himself an expert on both regions. As I write on page 99, DeVoto identified himself in the eastern press as a man who was “informed by a western sensibility but understood eastern culture.”

A browser who opened Back East to page 99 would receive an excellent introduction to the book’s primary themes. The book addresses how westerners imagined the eastern United States in the twentieth century, and DeVoto, as one of the most prolific and authoritative writers on the American West in the American East, well encapsulates the ways in which westerners both accepted and countered eastern expectations in their presentations of their home region. That these expectations influenced the material lives of westerners as much as it did their cultural and intellectual ones – from mining to forestry, ranching, farming, and tourism – is an important finding of the book and one foreshadowed by DeVoto’s articles of the 1930s and 1940s.

Page 99 also well reflects the structure of Back East, which is divided into three parts. Parts 1 and 3 explore western views of the American East from the margins of American culture. Part 1 addresses midwestern presentations of the East that non-midwesterners frequently overlooked or overshadowed while demonstrating that Chicago appeared as both a western and an eastern city in twentieth-century American culture. Part 3 examines the outlooks of westerners marginalized by their race, their status as citizens of Native nations, their language, or their efforts to farm on the arid Plains. Although such westerners’ perceptions of the American East appeared less frequently in magazines like Harper’s and universities like Harvard, they illustrate the ways in which regional narratives opened and foreclosed opportunities for greater national understanding. Part 2, in which page 99 appears, describes popular, well-published authors like DeVoto and his dear friend Wallace Stegner, whose views of the American West and the American East were often consistent with the mythology of the frontier. Page 99 illustrates how DeVoto and Stegner furthered that mythology even as they endeavored to undo its harms.

Visit Flannery Burke's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kimberley Johnson's "Dark Concrete"

Kimberley S. Johnson is a political scientist and urban studies scholar whose work examines governance, institutions, and the spatial organization of power in the United States. She is also a spatial storyteller, using history, maps, and urban form to interpret cities, suburbs, and metropolitan change.

Johnson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Dark Concrete introduces one of the central tensions of Black power urbanism (BPU): how to build a just and emancipatory city within political and institutional configurations that worked against these aspirations. Page 99 captures this tension playing out in Newark during the city’s second teacher’s strike in 1971. Black and Puerto Rican activists, parents, students and educators were struggling over the control of education, and by extension the future of the city. In this sense, page 99 serves as an illuminating snapshot of the book as a whole, as similar conflicts recur across the multiple cities and policy areas, including housing and policing.

For proponents of BPU like Amiri Baraka, control over the Newark’s education system was not simply about jobs or contracts (the traditional terrain of machine politics). Instead, it was a struggle over who should teach, what knowledge should be centered, and the kinds of spaces that a new system of education could take place. Newark’s BPU activists believed that the city’s teachers and administrators were indifferent if not hostile to the needs of a now majority-Black and Puerto Rican student body trapped in crumbling underfunded schools, even as White residents (including the family of Chris Christie a future governor) and much of the teaching force, left for the suburbs. Although Newark’s education conflicts emerged in the mid-1960s, the movement for community control of schools would be epitomized in the explosive Ocean Hill-Brownsville Teacher’s Strike of 1968 in New York City, and would find its echo in Newark during the 1971 strike.

The election of Kenneth Gibson’s in 1970 as Newark’s first Black mayor appeared to create new political opening. Gibson empowered BPU activists to demand more community control and to condemn the teacher’s strike as a power grab. Yet Gibson’s political influence proved limited in effecting transformative change on the scale desired by BPU activists. Ongoing conflict with Italian American city council members and resistance from White ethnic neighborhood groups constrained Gibson’s capacity to govern. As a result, emancipatory ambitions, as well as tensions inherent in Black Power urbanism– the struggle to create just “new forms” of governance – clashed with precariousness of formal Black electoral power. Ultimately, Gibson pursued greater centralization of the school system (and more leverage over political opponents) rather than the neighborhood-based and alternative pedagogical models advocated by BPU activists. This outcome fostered decades of distrust between parents, activists and teachers on the other, stalling reform and paving the way for the state’s takeover of Newark’s schools in 1995.

At its core, BPU sought to develop “new forms,” a concept articulated by Charles Hamilton and Kwame Ture in their book Black Power (1967). Community control of education, along with ideas around housing and policing, were the most visible of these experiments taking place across the nation’s increasingly majority-Black and Brown majority cities. Dark Concrete traces this struggle not only in Newark, but also in Oakland, East Orange, and East Palo Alto, showing how efforts to reimagine urban life unfolded through experimentation, conflict and constraints. As page 99 demonstrates, Black Power urbanism ultimately reshaped the terrain of urban governance leaving legacies that continue to shape debates over democracy, equity and the right to the city.

Visit Kimberley Johnson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oscar Winberg's "Archie Bunker for President"

Oscar Winberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and the John Morton Center for North American Studies at the University of Turku.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics, and shared the following:

From page 99:

In the minds of many television viewers Carroll O’Connor was Archie Bunker, and so the campaign leaned into the conservative angle – intentionally blending the two personas. Media interest in celebrity and entertainment helped. “Archie Bunker,” the press reported, “is casting his vote for McGovern.” An Associated Press headline read “Archie Bunker Backs McGovern.” Associated Press political reporter Walter Mears, one of the most respected journalists on the campaign beat, even highlighted the support of Archie Bunker before that of the former vice president (and McGovern rival in the primaries) Hubert Humphrey. The coverage made it clear that the strategy of presenting O’Connor as a representative of working-class Queens, rather than another embodiment of Hollywood, was working.

In television advertisements for McGovern, O’Connor went even further than he had in Lindsay’s ads to present himself in character. Thus, he presented himself as a conservative man for McGovern, not as the lifelong liberal that he actually was. Outtakes from the recording reveal the importance of having the conservative Archie Bunker back McGovern. “Never mind,” O’Connor exclaimed in frustration in the middle of one of the takes when he forgot the most important line. “I got to get the conservative in.” Indeed, in one of the sixty-second ads he recorded, O’Connor described himself as conservative no less than three times, while repeatedly describing the Nixon administration as an example of radicalism.

This Page 99 Test sounded like such a fun and quirky experiment when I first heard about it, and I turned to page 99 in my own book with excitement. Turns out that page 99, part of a chapter titled “Archie Bunker on the Campaign Trail,” is, indeed, a rather good representation of the book.

First, it makes clear that Archie Bunker for President is a work of both media and political history. Second, it references one of my favorite archival finds – the television ads Carroll O’Connor recorded for George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election (I spent over a year looking for these ads and in a leap of faith paid to digitize old reels in an archive without knowing what was actually on them – it paid off!). Third – and best of all – the page engages and argues a key point of my book: that entertainment television became a part of political life because politicians and the political press believed it mattered. On page 99 we see both politicians turning to the stars of the television show All in the Family and the media focusing on the star power of the character of Archie Bunker. This is a story driven by political interests.

Of course, one page alone cannot capture all aspects of Archie Bunker for President and the reader would not, based only on page 99, expect to find chapters on civil rights organizations, the women’s movement, or congressional censorship campaigns. Still, with references to other chapters and sections dealing with the campaigns of President Nixon and John Lindsay, I hope it leaves readers eager to find out more about the role of entertainment television in political life and, as the subtitle of my book suggests, how one television show remade American politics.

Visit Oscar Winberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua B. Freeman's "Garden Apartments"

Joshua B. Freeman is distinguished professor of history emeritus at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000; Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World; and Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II.

Freeman applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia, with the following results:

Page 99 of Garden Apartments describes two residential complexes built by the United States government during World War II. During the war, all civilian housing production was suspended, except for projects for war workers. For some of these, the government hired inventive, modernist architects, who during the postwar years would become architectural stars. Discussed on this page are Aluminum City Terrace, in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, for workers at a nearby aluminum plant (with a photograph of it), and the Centerline Defense Housing Project, outside of Detroit, designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen and their partner Robert Swanson, for workers at a nearby tank plant and naval armory (with photographs on the next page).

Page 99 does, and does not, give a good sense of this book as a whole. It examines what were in effect exceptions that illuminate the norm. Garden Apartments traces the origins of the two- and three-story apartment complexes, set on large landscaped sites, that are common across the United States, to early twentieth-century efforts to provide affordable housing to European workers and their families. In shows how, when brought to the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, such residential complexes generally were stripped of their most radical and innovative social and design features. During World War II, however, there was a moment when a convergence of progressive New Deal officials, left-leaning labor unions, and modernist architects led to a short burst of construction of brilliantly-designed, affordable, pathbreaking projects for ordinary working people, like the two described on page 99. The moment was short-lived. When, after the war, garden apartment construction resumed, with government assistance, on a mass scale, much more conventional, even banal, designs became near-universal. Garden Apartments recounts how these buildings nonetheless served their residents well. Many still do (as do the page 99 projects). Page 99 thus suggests mostly unrealized possibilities for a form of housing which, even when dumbed-down, represented a significant social achievement.

Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia is the first history of a widespread form of housing almost completely ignored by scholars and policymakers. It is simultaneously a political, architectural, and social history, with the text complimented by extensive illustrations. Written at a time of an intense crisis of housing affordability, it argues that we might learn something about how to address it by looking at our past.

Learn more about Garden Apartments at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Gorup's "The Counterrevolutionary Shadow"

Michael Gorup is assistant professor of politics at Ithaca College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Counterrevolutionary Shadow begins with a section break. The heading atop the page reads: “Abolition, Reparation, and the Politics of People-making.” What follows is the final substantive section of the book’s third chapter.

Chapter three traces a distinctive current of abolitionist political thought that emerged in the 19th century U.S., which I call “abolition as people-making.” Here is how I explain the political content of this current on page 99:

Abolition was not a negative demand that aimed only to eliminate the old world of slavery. It also expressed a desire to create a new world: one in which those who had been historically oppressed could be made a free and politically empowered people. This would necessarily entail social transformation at significant scale. The system of slavery could not be uprooted simply by granting legal independence to the formerly enslaved. The United States would remain, in its basic relations, a slave society, wherein one portion of the population (Blacks) continued to live at the mercy of another (whites).

The preceding parts of the chapter focus on the origins of this political vision in the life and work of the antebellum Black abolitionists David Walker and Hosea Easton. On page 99, readers find me arguing for two propositions: 1. Walker and Easton were early proponents of the demand for reparations for slavery, and 2. Their conception of reparations aspired to more than just repair. For them, reparations was just as much a project that aimed to create the conditions for a collective freedom to come as it was a response to freedoms long denied. On subsequent pages I will argue that this positive conception of reparations later resurfaced among abolitionists and Radical Republicans in the Reconstruction era who called for the confiscation of plantation lands and their redistribution to formerly enslaved people.

The central claim of my book is that racism is a distinctively democratic technology of counterrevolutionary politics. Unlike other traditions of counterrevolutionary politics, racism doesn’t reject the idea of popular rule. Instead, it sutures the contradiction between democracy and despotism by enclosing who can be said to belong to “the people.” Page 99 offers a succinct representation of one of the political visions that has emerged to challenge the politics of racialized enclosure. It thus offers readers a glimpse of a revolutionary, rather than counterrevolutionary, politics of peoplehood.

Learn more about The Counterrevolutionary Shadow at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ralph Pite's "Edward Thomas's Prose"

Ralph Pite is Professor of English at the University of Bristol.

Before moving to Bristol in 2007, he held a chair at Cardiff University. He completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge where he was Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College and Teaching Fellow at Corpus Christi. Pite was Director of Bristol's Institute for Advanced Study (2013-17). His research focusses on literature's contribution to addressing the environmental emergency, both contemporary poetry in the European languages and writing from the past. His new book, Edward Thomas's Prose: Truth, Mystery, and the Natural World, and his study of Frost are part of that inquiry. He is now developing a reading of Romantic period literature and water-based industrial development.

Pite applied the “Page 99 Test” to Edward Thomas's Prose and shared the following:

On page 99 you find the conclusion to my book’s discussion of Beautiful Wales, written by Thomas in 1905, followed by just the first few sentences introducing his next publication, The Heart of England.

My analysis of Beautiful Wales ends by looking at the book’s closing passage – a landscape set at night in a graveyard beside a river, which runs beside an unnamed Welsh town. (The setting is evidently based on Pontarddulais, which stands on the coast of South Wales between Swansea and Carmarthen). Thomas was making his living at the time through journalism, and he'd written about this graveyard in a review two years before. So, as elsewhere in the study, I compare Thomas’s writing in a book with an earlier newspaper article.

According to Beautiful Wales, the past does endure in the country’s landscapes – Welsh identity has not been erased by English power (whether industrial, cultural, or linguistic). Its presence is muted, however — and much more so than it appears to be in the review. Hence, the Welsh Revival, taking place when Thomas was writing, cannot straightforwardly bring the past back to life. The past is definitely there but it's not necessarily recoverable. In a sense, it resists appropriation. This perception and the perspective it leads to are, I suggest, the distinctive achievements of Beautiful Wales.

The Heart of England (I then go on to say) seeks the same discovery of the mysterious and elusive but genuine past that lies within the English countryside. England, though, is for Thomas a different proposition from Wales because the past you will find there, if you search truthfully, will be at odds with the image of stability and order which you are probably looking for – which the ‘Englishness’ of the time and its highly patriotic 'nature writing' were seeking to affirm.

Does page 99 give a reader a good sense of the book as a whole?

I’m not sure it’s the page I would choose when introducing a reader to the book because it builds on a run of examples from the preceding few pages. What I’m trying to say about Beautiful Wales might be hard to be sure of, in isolation and out of context. The page does, on the other hand, give a good flavour of the study : it shows that I’m interested in Thomas’s prose work (which is, to most readers, only marginal to his poetry) and that I’m making claims for its sophistication and subtlety. The page indicates too the chronological structure of the work – that I’m looking for continuity and development across Thomas’s career as a prose writer (which lasted very nearly twenty years, whereas he wrote poems for little more than twenty months). And, thirdly (most helpfully I think), the page brings to the fore Thomas’s loyalty to Wales.

Thomas was born in London, lived in southern England all his life, and he did not speak any Welsh. His reputation is very much as a writer of England and Englishness. Both Thomas’s parents were Welsh, however, and Thomas visited cousins in Pontarddulais many times. His tutor in Oxford was a significant figure in the Welsh Revival. Beautiful Wales is, to my mind, such a considerable achievement because Thomas may bring to the project both his knowledge and his love of the country. Furthermore, he looks to establish through his prose in the book a balance – and a relationship – between knowledge and love, between objective fact and subjective experience. Discriminating between good and bad versions of that relationship formed a central aim of his work as a literary critic; finding the best version of it became the task he set himself as a creative writer.

So, in these ways, page 99 does open the door to key interests and concerns in my book. And, as often with concluding paragraphs, the writing is more ambitious than elsewhere – something like a peroration. I would rather someone came across that first, rather than a passage of bread-and-butter, expository academic writing. More than anything, since this is the underlying aim of the whole enterprise, I hope readers who know of Thomas as a poet might come away from the page encouraged to look again at his prose. His writing in this mode is full of riches and interest — and especially now. Our relationship to the natural world, which needs to be based on both love and knowledge combined, is in danger of breaking down. Thomas's prose, focussed as it is on the natural world and humanity's place in it, can help us find ways to restore that connection.

Learn more about Edward Thomas's Prose at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue