Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative.

Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative. By Jacob F. Rivers III. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2002. Pp. xviii, 165. $29.95, ISBN 1-57003-483-4.)

Jacob F. Rivers III's Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative is a study of the literary use of hunting and fishing stories by white southern authors. These range from the antebellum writer William Elliott to the late-twentieth-century figure James Kilgo. Along the way Rivers examines works by William Gilmore Simms, Archibald Rutledge, Caroline Gordon, and William Faulkner. As Rivers shows, sporting narratives played an important role in the ways all these writers envisioned the South. He both explores the mythic qualities of those narratives and delineates the cultural values they represent.

Rivers's examination of sporting narratives leads him to several conclusions. First, he finds a persistent regionalism and a continuing representation of southern distinctiveness through literary images of field and stream. Underlying this regionalism is an enduring discomfort with changes wrought by such forces as industrialization and urbanization, both in and outside the region. From a theoretical perspective drawing heavily on the work of Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, Rivers suggests that southern sporting narratives evoke a more elemental life and, especially, an intimacy with nature missing from the modern world.

No less important to his analysis, however, are what Rivers describes as southern "moral continuities of honor, fair play, and noblesse oblige" (p. ix). Presenting these ideals as elements in a southern aristocratic ethos, he suggests they provide the moral foundation for the narratives he studies. Southern writers, he says, have either dramatized the fulfillment of such ideals through stories of field and stream or, through those stories, have evoked them to define and confront the problems of a changing world.

Rivers often seems somewhat celebratory in his presentation of his subjects and rather uncritical of their attitudes. As a result, many

historians will find his analyses incomplete. In discussing the issue of slavery in the writings of William Elliott, he ignores the deeper connections among race, status, and sport delineated so well by Kenneth S. Greenberg in Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton, 1996), a book unaccountably missing from Rivers's bibliography. As Greenberg shows, race was a major part of elite white southerners' efforts to define themselves and assert their place in society through their hunting and fishing tales.

Related to this, Rivers could have paid greater attention to the pervasive role of gender in shaping southern sporting narratives. How else are we to understand, for example, the suggestion of twentieth-century scholar and sportsman Archibald Rutledge, recounted by Rivers, that hunting could provide an antidote to modern society's tendency to create what Rutledge termed "little lisping men" and "lazy effeminates" (p. 87)?

DICKSON D. BRUCE JR.

University of California, Irvine