In Kitchen Economics Thomas Strychacz seeks to extricate American women's regionalist texts from the critical quarrel that posits them either as a counterworld to the hegemonic values of the latter half of the nineteenth century or as deeply complicit in them. He does this by situating regionalist writers within the discourse of political economic theory. Strychacz argues that Stowe, Cooke, Jewett, Freeman and Dunbar-Nelson have a complex and sophisticated understanding of the economic discourses of their time and, from a perspective that is at once engaged and critical, they seek to open up space for alternative models of economic theory and behavior based on bonnets and gingerbread. In a word, they become “counterparts of, not counterworlds to, modernity” (9). From our current postmodern position of ecological collapse, recovering this space gains new urgency. “Green economics accords new legitimacy to key principles of economics gingerbread style” (170) and, I might add, Green Island style, and Jewett's way of thinking about economics offers all of us a “better chance of survival” (172).

This is heady stuff and, as an advocate for the value of regionalist writers to contemporary readers, music to my ears. I appreciate Strychacz's respect for the literary, political, and intellectual sophistication of regionalist writers and am convinced by his argument that they have a complex engagement with their historical moment which in turn speaks to ours. It is rewarding as well to discover in Kitchen Economics references to a rich body of commentary on these writers and their tradition, though I note with some acerbity that the series in which it appears still does not read “Studies in American Literary Realism, Regionalism, and Naturalism.” Surely by now The Country of the Pointed Firs has achieved a status equal to McTeague.

Strychacz builds his case for the economic significance of regionalist writers by pointing out that, in the nineteenth century, discourse about homo economicus frequently proceeded by way of story. If economics proceeded by way of story, then story can be the vehicle for economics. Strychacz adopts the term “cultural fable” as a way of conceptualizing “how political economic thought penetrated a variety of cultural registers,” including that of literary regionalism (19). He structures his book around three such fables: stage theory or stadialism, which charts how societies do or should evolve over time; the fabulous island commonwealth; and the body politic in which the literal body politics of food production, distribution, and consumption become a metaphor for the polity. The first fable generates his analysis of Freeman's “The Revolt of Mother” and “A Mistaken Charity.” The second undergirds his analysis of Stowe's The Pearl of Orr's Island and the Green Island section of Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs. The third allows him to consider the discourse of fruit in Dunbar-Nelson's “Mr. Baptiste,” and to “talk turkey” with Stowe and Cooke as he focusses on their Thanksgiving “feast fables.”

Strychacz proceeds by way of taking a particular strand of text and tugging on it until more simplistic readings unravel and a more complex reading emerges. Presumably, Miss Beulah's pleasure at the end of her story extends to her appreciation of the style and aesthetics of the new bonnet sent to her from Chicago, and both her appreciation and the gift itself imbricate the story in the realities of “new market economies” (1). Dunbar-Nelson makes not knowing central to her text by beginning her story, “He might have had another name; we never knew,” and so urges us to “recoup knowledge that has been pushed into the interstices of history” (137). Once we acknowledge that the “home” that Charlotte and Harriet return to in “A Mistaken Charity” is one they used to own but do not any longer, we recognize that the story places the very logic of stages theory under scrutiny.

The apotheosis of Strychacz's strategy occurs in his analysis of The Pearl of Orr's Island. Focussing on the chapters which contain the Reverend Sewell's much-delayed revelation of Moses’s origins, chapters which connect Maine to the Caribbean and reveal Dolores as a model of “femina economica,” he contends that they destabilize any simple reading of Stowe's text and thrust us into the realm of heterotopia, where “several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible,” can be juxtaposed but need not be adjudicated (15). This Foucauldian concept gives Strychacz an additional conceptual framework for his complex readings. At times, however, complexity becomes convolution and the reader is left to wonder, like Adoniram in “The Revolt of Mother,” “What on airth does this mean, mother?”

Strychacz is at his best in his reading of The Pearl of Orr's Island, in his analysis of the economics of Jewett's Green Island and Bowden family reunion, and in his amassing of the discourse he labels “the fruit sublime.” He is at his weakest when he talks turkey, and his analysis of “How Celia Changed Her Mind” is his least convincing reading. Nevertheless, Kitchen Economics constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of American women regionalists and makes a strong case for promoting regionalism to the status it deserves in American literary history.