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Because the newsletter is going to press late in the year and because the fall of 2005 has seen significant contributions to Porter scholarship, I include in this essay scholarship from 2004 and scholarship from this year, 2005. The publication of a new biography makes 2005 a notable year in Porter scholarship. In addition, 2005 has brought us a new full-length study of Porter's work. As the end of the year approaches, Porter scholars have much to celebrate.

Books

Many years in the making, Darlene Harbour Unrue's Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, published by the University of Mississippi Press in 2005, is a major contribution to Porter scholarship. Required reading for all Porter scholars, the biography offers revelations concerning Porter's family background, marriages, romances, and reproductive history. It may be tempting for some readers to read the biography primarily in pursuit of its more spectacular revelations. However, the value of the biography is in its narrative of Porter's life, a narrative that helps us to see Porter's life freshly. Porter scholars may find that the biography answers questions that they had not realized had gone unanswered. For example, Unrue's discussion of the family of Mary Alice Jones Porter, Porter's mother, reveals how much discussions of Porter's ancestry have focused on the Cat Porter family. Unrue's rich description of Porter's Texas years particularly exposes the gaps heretofore in our knowledge of her life before 1914. The biography offers then not only the life of the artist that its subtitle promises but also the portrait of the artist in development, and readers can appreciate the degree to which the experiences of her childhood and young womanhood shaped the artist that Porter became. Unrue's biography is the product of extensive mining of public records and exhaustive study of Porter's personal papers. She also builds on prior work, and it is exciting that the record of Porter's life, as it should be, continues to be updated, deepened, and refined.

Mary Titus has contributed to our understanding of Porter's work through a number of important articles over the years. These articles have reflected her interest in Porter as a woman artist, and her new book, The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2005, reflects this interest as well. As Titus argues in the book, Porter studies have been greatly enriched in recent years by the publication of many previously unpublished works, and scholars have easy access now to a number of new and exciting texts that deepen our understanding of the entire body of Porter's work. She singles out one of these texts, the unfinished story "The Princess," as a representative text that supports her argument about the ambivalent nature of Porter's art. As she writes, "Throughout her long career, Porter repeatedly probed cultural arguments about female creativity, a woman's maternal legacy, romantic love, and sexual identity, always with startling acuity, and often with painful ambivalence." Titus has in the past written perceptively on "Holiday," "The Fig Tree," "The Grave," and Porter's Mexican fiction. In The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter, Titus extends her reach to include Porter's early fairy tales and Ship of Fools, among other works. In a notable chapter, Titus emphasizes Porter's gender performance and studies the photographs taken of her by George Platt Lynes. In sum, Titus makes a valuable contribution to Porter scholarship.

Chapters in Books

Although William Pratt asserts that there "have not been many full-fledged literary studies of Katherine Anne Porter's work," one could argue that the Miranda stories have received extensive scrutiny. Pratt does not use scholarship on the Miranda stories in his chapter "Place in Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda Stories: Portrait of the Artist as a Rebellious Texas Belle" in Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations, edited by H .L. Weatherby and George Core and published by the University of Missouri Press in 2004. He offers his own assessment of Porter as a writer and provides an introduction to the Old Order stories, "Old Mortality" and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider." Pratt makes an interesting comparison of Porter and William Faulkner, writing that Porter "is even, in a sense, more southern than Faulkner, for her regional accent was never as idiosyncratic as his," and expressing admiration for Porter's "ear for southern speech."

Articles

Although some critics have argued that Sophia Jane, the Grandmother in the Miranda stories, both perpetuates the patriarchy of the old order and, in her independence and assumption of male responsibilities, undermines it, Andrea K. Frankwitz argues that Sophia Jane "remains consistent in her adherence to the traditional patriarchal ideology." In "Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda Stories: A Commentary on the Cultural Ideologies of Gender Identity," Mississippi Quarterly 57.3 (2004): 473-489, Frankwitz argues that Sophia Jane as a result of her "passive acceptance of patriarchal culture" and Aunt Amy and Cousin Eva as a result of their "paradoxical rebellion against it" are all defined by their relation to patriarchy, whereas Miranda seeks other alternatives.

The story "Magic" receives due attention in Darlene Harbour Unrue's "'Magic': Levels of Meaning in a Neglected Masterpiece,'" Southern Quarterly 42.3 (2004): 55-63. Unrue applies her insights into Porter's life to a reading of the story in order to point to its "Jamesian subtleties and layers of meaning." She reviews Porter's first-hand knowledge of New Orleans, the setting of the story, and points to evidence in Porter's personal papers of her interest in "black magic." Unrue highlights various aspects of Porter's life that allow her to identify with three of the story's characters: Ninette, the prostitute; Madame Blanchard, the woman of privilege; and especially the maid, the storyteller. According to Unrue, "The most enduring theme of the story is that art–storytelling in this instance–is the true magic."

Emron Esplin's study of twentieth-century Latin American literature and theory enriches his article "Magic Realism in 'Flowering Judas' and the Dual Realities of Katherine Anne Porter's Time in Mexico," Southern Studies 12.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2005): 23-46. He argues that although Porter's "Flowering Judas" predates the period of magic realism in Latin American literature, its portrayal of dual realities and its reflections on death and time invite a "magic realist" reading of the story. Esplin encourages the reader to "study Porter's text in its Mexican, Southern, and Anglo-American contexts as New-World fiction, a choice example of literature of the plural Americas."

In a brief article, "Porter's 'Rope': The Symbolic Catalyst for Self-Strangulation," Notes on Contemporary Literature 35.2 (March 2005): 6-7, John V. McDermott argues that the husband and wife in the story "Rope" know their partner's faults well but know little about themselves. The story exposes the consequences of a lack of self-knowledge. McDermott considers the number of coils in the rope purchased in the story, twenty-four, significant.

Dissertations

Melanie R. Benson, in "Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Southern Identity," DAI 65.08A (2005): AAI3142365, completed at Boston University, uses postcolonial theory and the concept of the "narcissism of mastery" to explain the impact of slavery's "legacy of human quantification" on Southern identity. A chapter brings together James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Frances Newman, and Porter in order to discuss the authors' efforts to "locate personal value beyond the needs and abuses of the dominant group" and "seek reparation . . . by repeating the language of narcissistic desire and calculation."

Ellen Margaret Crowell, in "Aristocratic Drag: The Dandy in Irish and Southern Fiction," DAI 65.08A (2004): AAI3143677, completed at University of Texas at Austin, describes the dandy as a character "whose strategic gentility masks a destructive modernity." She uses the character of the dandy to explore connections between the "ruling-class literatures of Protestant Ireland and the Anglo-American South." One chapter brings together the work of William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, and Porter in order to discuss the influence of the dandy figure on their works.

Each of the dissertations above devotes a part of a chapter to discussing Porter's work. According to Dissertation Abstracts, no dissertations focused on Porter's work appeared in 2004 or have appeared so far in 2005. However, I am happy to include two non-U.S. dissertations not listed in Dissertation Abstracts, both focused on Porter. By the way, I encourage international Porter scholars to inform me of dissertations or other scholarship on Porter that I might otherwise overlook. Jan Bloemendaal, makes extensive use of Porter's personal papers in "Constructing Identities: Ethnicity and Race in Katherine Anne Porter," completed in 2005 at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Employing theories of race and ethnicity found in the works of Werner Sollors, Stephen Cornell, and Douglas Hartman, Bloemendaal argues that despite changes in Porter's political views, her "insistence on freedom, her social engagement, her liberalism, and her fear of political power" remain constant in her writings. Over the course of several chapters, he studies Porter's representations of indigenous Mexicans, Chinese, Germans, Jews, and African Americans, and in a chapter entitled "Porter and the Law," he spotlights Porter's ideas about justice. Ananta Lakshmi, in "Quest Motif in the Works of Katherine Anne Porter–A Critical Study," completed in 2005 at JNT University, Hyderabad, in India, explores a variety of topics addressed by Porter–including relations between children and parents, romantic and marital relationships, attitudes toward nature, and views on religion, politics, and death–in order to present Porter's "philosophy of humanism." Lakshmi also makes recommendations for further research on Porter. Please send information on any additions that need to be made to this essay to me at mailto:chrishait@colacoll.edu so that I may include the information in next year's essay.