<i>Elvis After Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend</i> (review)
1997; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/bio.2010.0194
ISSN1529-1456
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoReviews 495 beHeved in moderation, she would not support the extremist position of Frances WiUard or Susan B. Anthony. Perhaps her years among sophisticated diners in Europe had moderated any American Puritanism she may have had. Enjoying a glass of wine, she would never have attacked saloons with a hatchet. Perhaps the major reason for her undeserved neglect, however, is the lack of a defining achievement. After a few moderate successes, she eventuaUy faUed as an actress. Her one major business adventure, The Ladies' Cooperative Dress Association, ended in financial disaster. Though her Washington newspaper was successful, she gave it up after four years to pursue political activity in Utah and Hawai'i, where she conferred with President Sanford B. Dole and visited several islands. This activity was helpful to the Cleveland administration, but her health failed, and after a swift decline, she died of pneumonia in Honolulu on May 19,1896. Now that we have Kate Field's letters, what next? Certainly a full biography, but what general readers need first are new editions of her writing. At present none of the publications are readily available. In an appendix Moss lists two theatre biographies of Adelaide Ristori and Charles Fechter; two travel books; six general volumes, including her once very popular Pen Photographs of Charles Di^us's Readings; six plays, including a number of comediettas; and many short stories and chapters in books. Though not Hsted individually, Moss estimates that Field wrote over three thousand magazine and newspaper articles. For historic reasons if no other, Fields's 1878 booklet The History of Bell's Telephone should be republished—Field not only advertised BeU's invention by receiving a phone caU from Stratford-onAvon while on stage in London, but also demonstrated the phone at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight for Queen Victoria. At the very least, some press should publish a selection from Kate Field's works. In this volume, Carolyn J. Moss has done a great service. Ideally she will continue the project of restoring "one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century." Donald J. Winslow Gilbert B. Rodman, Elvis After Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend. New York: Routledge, 1996.231 pp. $17.95, ISBN 0-415-11002-5. Students of music and popular culture are pretty much in agreement these days that Elvis Presley is dead. Despite almost twenty years of wishful sightings and visions on the part of the faithful, he is probably not holed up in or near a Burger King in Kalamazoo, Michigan 496 Biography 20.4 (Fall 1997) preparing a triumphant comeback. Greil Marcus told us as much in his 1991 Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (Doubleday). Lest lingering doubts remain, however, Gilbert Rodman confirms the salient facts of Presley's 1977 demise in Elvis After Elvis. But Rodman also suggests reasons for the ongoing presence of Elvis in the national imagination. In those domains, Elvis Presley is sometimes little more than a shared national joke. A couple of years ago, for example, I took a vanload of European visitors on a search for the source of the Mississippi River in the streams and spring-fed ponds of northern Minnesota. We stopped along the way to take in a variety of local tourist attractions: an abandoned mineshaft, a new casino operated by Native Americans, a museum devoted to the history of the interstate bus. But wherever we stopped, there was Elvis, as a decorative motif, a marker on a time Une, a cheery, welcoming, famiHar presence. "Give us this day our daily Elvis!" became the motto of the trip. As Mojo Nixon once observed in the lyric to the best Elvis tribute song ever written, "Elvis is everywhere." This is so, says Rodman, for three reasons. First, Elvis has become a mythic figure who speaks to ongoing problems and issues in American culture. Although he may have been just what startled parents all across the nation believed him to be when they applauded Ed Sullivan for showing the gyrating young phenomenon only from the waist up on a 1957 TV show, Elvis was also the subject of a mock election mounted in...
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