journalist Theodore Hittell, and promoter, P. T. Barnum – Adams successfully staged himself a generation before Cody and his primary mythmaker, Ned Buntline. Hunting paradigms also bring new nuance to the cultural meanings of Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, within and beyond entertainment arenas. At times, the power of the performance studies analysis falters. Some discussion of the hunt’s contributions to transnational imperialism, white masculinity, and quest narra- tives seems well-worn, adding little to the field’s rich scholarship from Richard Slotkin onwards. At other moments, the analysis travels too quickly to do full justice to its range of subjects. For all the gesture to Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, for example, the discussion does less with the agency of nonhuman “relational participants” (animals, landscapes, firearms) than it promises to (). Jones too glancingly suggests echoes with Indigenous cosmologies and parallels between trophy and lynching photographs (and between hunting and torture more generally) – all intriguing directions which need more development lest they be recontained within eurocentric frameworks. Nevertheless, this is a study full of provocative reconceptualizations, from the hunting guide as choreographer to the hunter as curator. Arguing that western hunting was centrally a “testimonial culture” () and tracing the “dramaturgy of the game trail” () in its constitution and ramifications, Jones pinpoints the embed- dedness of performance, the need to show and tell – that is, the need for an audience – at the heart of the ostensibly solitary frontier on which so much US mythology rests. C H R I S T I N E B O L DUniversity of Guelph Journal of American Studies,  (), . doi:./S Kathryn Cornell Dolan, Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature, – (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, , £.). Pp. . ISBN     . Over the past decade, cultural histories of US food and restaurant culture such as Cindy R. Lobel’s Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (), Andrew P. Haley’s Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class (), Harvey Levenstein’s Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (), and Pysche Williams-Forson’s Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food and Power (), and lit- erary studies such as Marie Drews and Monica Elbert’s Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (), Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (), and Allison Carruth’s Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (), have done much to reshape the alimentary landscape of nineteenth-century  Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Myth of the American Frontier, –  (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, ); Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, – (New York: Atheneum, ); Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ).  Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).  Reviews terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875817001529 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:00:03, subject to the Cambridge Core http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1017/S0021875817001529&domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875817001529 https://www.cambridge.org/core American literary study. Kathryn Cornell Dolan’s Beyond the Fruited Plain contrib- utes to this conversation by turning our attention from what, where, or why nine- teenth-century Americans ate to the shifting spaces and cultural as well as technological machinery that at once produced and transformed their food. Beyond the Fruited Plain centers on the period following the Mexican–American War through the Spanish–American War – on, in other words, a key moment of US territorial expansion and an underexplored era of what Dolan aptly terms “agri- expansion” (). It persuasively links the reformist impulses and literary critiques of this agricultural revolution in the nineteenth century to our contemporary concerns about agribusiness and industrial food apocalypse, and, most crucially, uncovers how nineteenth-century America’s technological and economic expansion was intertwined with – indeed, solidified by – the project of vastly industrializing and expanding US agricultural production. For as Dolan reminds us, “the national importance of the wheat trade [in the years following the Civil War] was so great that U.S. production and distribution of wheat was second only to Britain’s, and it significantly influenced the U.S. economy well into the twentieth century” (). Dolan focusses her study on five key literary figures who indexed, critiqued, and at times celebrated US “agri-expansion”: Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Frank Norris. Chapter , “Expanding Agriculture,” convincingly argues that Melville’s land-focussed writings challenge glo- balization as much as his sea-based ones do, and that in texts like Pierre he critiques feudal agriculture, modern reforms, and the effects of agribusiness in both the South Pacific and the Berkshires. Her second chapter, “Local Beans, Apples, Berries,” chronicles what might be described as locavorism avant la lettre by way of Henry David Thoreau’s dietary and local eating experiments in Walden (), arguing that Thoreau “realizes that the trend of excessive use of lands by the United States as part of an expanding agricultural, territorial, and political goal has a correlation in the national diet” (). In chapter , “Fruits of Regionalism,” Dolan turns to Stowe’s postbellum championing of the orange as a form of culinary regionalism aimed at reuniting a fractured nation and boosting tourism while simul- taneously supporting local rather than global forms of agricultural trade. Her fourth chapter, “Sweet Fruits of Empire,” intriguingly charts Twain’s increasing (if not exactly linear) anti-imperialist sentiments through his uneasy evocations of sugar in his Autobiography () and Tom Sawyer (), his initially laudatory views of the global expansion of US sugar plantations to Hawaii, and his eventual concerns over coolie labor exploitation and the parallels between US expansion and the British Empire in Following the Equator (). And her fifth chapter, “The Wheat Strikes Back,” unsettles traditional readings of Frank Norris as simply a pro- ponent of the agri-expansion he chronicles in The Octopus () and The Pit () by detailing the way these novels turn their attention to “the potential conse- quences of capitalist forces becoming exploitative of the natural world and those people who work the land” () and thus enact what Dolan compellingly identifies as “an early form of second-wave eco-criticism” (). Ultimately, Beyond the Fruited Plain asks us to rethink the role of agriculture in nineteenth-century American literature and culture and to question how writers we might not initially have thought of as eco-critical might speak to the “agri-expansion” of our own day. This study would have been enriched by situating this discussion within the broader recent conversation begun by Tompkins on dietary reform as a nineteenth-century technology of racial formation and, more recently, by Carruth Reviews  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875817001529 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:00:03, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875817001529 https://www.cambridge.org/core on the global power dynamics of US food culture, as well as by drawing on the ongoing critical conversation on postbellum regional reconciliation begun by the work of Nina Silber in The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, – () and more recently continued by Jennifer Greeson in Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature () in its analysis of Stowe’s work “to use diet and agriculture, the production and consumption of regional U.S. foods, to make the South and the North ‘friends’ once again” (). Its readings would also have benefited from greater attention to the wider cultural rhetoric of food and agricultural expansion against which its chosen authors wrestled. This is, nevertheless, a fascinating and much-needed book, and one that will surely broker important further avenues of study in the fields of both food studies and the environmental humanities. J . M I C H E L L E C O G H L A NUniversity of Manchester Journal of American Studies,  (), . doi:./S Georg Rable, Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, , $. hardback, $. epub). Pp. . ISBN     ,     . The strength of this monograph resides in its extensive quotation of primary sources. The author, a chaired professor of southern history at the University of Alabama, has combed through extensive materials both public and private, creating a sort of anatomy of official and media propaganda and private rhetoric with which the Confederacy whipped up warfever inthe years immediately leading up to, bolstered morale and solidarity during the war years, and tried to explain away defeat afterwards. The rhetorical purposes of the language amply quoted here are predictable. Like all wartime propagandists the writers seek to demonize the enemy, to justify their own side’s actions and to mobilize society for the pain and sacrifice exacted by a war fought on an enormous scale. Nor is there anything unexpected about the verbal tech- niques employed. Hyperbole and distortion surely head this list, as in this description of “the Puritan” Yankee created by a Georgia newspaperman: “More cruel than the Spaniard, more treacherous than the Italian, more blood-thirsty than the Turk, there is no wrong or humiliation, however atrocious, that his malignant ingenuity would not devise, and in which his savage nature, would not find diabolical pleasure” (). Theauthor catalogues theinconsistentandeven contradictoryusages foundin anti-nor- therndiscourse. In the run-up to the war, Yankeeswere weak and militarily inept, cowardly by nature and by upbringing alike. Yankees might go to war for mercenary reasons, but had no deeper motivations upon which to draw martial resolve. “This race of sharpers … have less fight in them than any white race now on the globe,” opined the Charleston Mercury, a source that frequents the monograph. When they came, northern successes could be explained away by the aforementioned “Puritan” diabolism that disdained the valorous rules of conduct adhered to by the “Cavalier” southern soldier. As the war ground on, the image of northern weakness (we’ll whip the cowardly Yankees, and quick) gave way to depictions of northern wickedness (the devils will stop at nothing to win). Confederate vituperation expanded to include the treatment of civilians and POWs. Rape, pillage, plunder, and murder – again and again, wartime southern accounts emphasize the categorical wickedness of northern conduct. The Union use of black troops was alternatively depicted as both ludicrous (imagine a society so addled as to  Reviews terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875817001529 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:00:03, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875817001529 https://www.cambridge.org/core