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Writer in Motion: The Major Fiction of Stephen Crane: Collected Critical Essays, by Donald Pizer. New York: ams Press, 2013. xiv + 153 pp. Cloth, $76.50.
Over the years a number of scholars have attempted to find a common theme or stylistic approach running throughout Crane's work. He has variously been called, for example, a realist, a naturalist, an impressionist, and a pre-modernist. A number of these categorizations have led to excellent readings of Crane's fiction because he employed all of these perspectives, sometimes using several of them in the same work. Rather than using a single interpretative lens through which to view the fiction, however, Donald Pizer argues for its "fundamental instability." As a result, Crane is "a writer in motion," a depiction that captures the sense that Crane's understanding of the human condition grew as he matured as an artist. No single work, Pizer argues persuasively, captures Crane's worldview. In response to the conventional opinion that Crane replaced the environmental determinism of Maggie and George's Mother with other themes in his work as...