Artigo Revisado por pares

George Woodcock’s Introduction to Canadian Fiction by George Woodcock, and: ECW’s Biographical Guide to Canadian Novelists, and: Canadian Writers and Their Works: Cumulated Index, Fiction Series ed. by Donald W. McLeod

1996; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1996.0066

ISSN

1913-4835

Autores

Barbara Pell,

Tópico(s)

Short Stories in Global Literature

Resumo

such as Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, Cobley argues, “exhibit a political unconscious which is clearly also a patriarchal unconscious” (181). In spite of—and, in some ways, because of—its virtues as a sophisticated theoretical reading, Representing War has its problems. Privileging a few literary texts as canonical, Cobley accepts their primacy in cultural history without discussion. (It would have been interesting ifshe had included as an ideological comparison some ofthe best-sellers ofthe war, such as Ian Hay’s The First Hundred-Thousand, or Ernest Raymond’s Tell England.) And she has chosen not to historicize her literary examples, which diminishes her thesis and allows the reader to feel at times that any texts would yield the same ideological points. Her bibliography reflects this over-theorized em­ phasis: nine-tenths of the more than two hundred entries are theoretical or critical studies. Again, her treatment of discursive practices, such as it is, is delivered in a contextual vacuum, and a reader might learn more from Paul Fussell’s list of “high diction” (The Great War and Modern Memory, 21-22) than from the wholeofCobley’schapter on descriptive language. Ide­ ology remains abstract: “Enlightenment values,” “the bourgeois-capitalist industrial complex,” or the “patriarchal order ofthings” are named, but not described, documented, or analyzed. Evelyn Cobley has written a dense ana­ lytical study for the theoretically-educated reader, but it is one that seems far removed from either the experiences or the myths of the Western Front. Robert h. macdonald / Carleton University George Woodcock, George Woodcock’s Introduction to Canadian Fiction (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993). ix, 170. $25.00 paper. ECW’s Biographical Guide to Canadian Novelists (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993). 252. Donald W. McLeod, ed., Canadian Writers and Their Works: Cumulated Index, Fiction Series (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993). 102. $20.00 paper. ECW Press is to be congratulated on being one of the foremost publishers of Canadian literary criticism. Perhaps as a corollary, it has also taken academic recycling to new lengths in its need for revenue. These three books are all by-products ofthe ten volumes in ECW’s Canadian Writers and Their Works: Fiction Series (each book also has a counterpart drawn from the ten-volume Poetry Series). The CWTWseries has been justly praised for its contribution to Canadian criticism, and these collections reflect its generally 104 high standards. The weaknesses within them are a result ofthe limited and artificial nature of the recycling project. In George Woodcock’s Introduction to Canadian Fiction, one ofthe coun­ try’s finest and most prolific critics provides his personal literary history of Canada’smajor novelists. However, since this is a collection ofthe ten “uni­ fying introductions” (vii) he provided for the ten CWTW fiction volumes, the structure of this survey was determined by the ECW editors who “jux­ taposed, by editorial fiat” (106) the original groups of four or five novelists per volume. Consequently, Woodcock spends considerable time rationalizing their choices, not always convincingly. As he admits, in trying to decipher the “common elements or the significant contrasts” among the authors in each of his prescribed chapters, “sometimes the pattern has emerged with felicitous clarity; sometimes I have had to search hard to find it” (117). The strained generalizations are obvious in some chapters such as “Equations and Discordances,” which awkwardly embraces Gallant, Levine, Thomas, Rooke, and Findley and inaccurately groups Findley with Gallant and Levine as writers who “have lived most of their writing lives in Europe” (117). Woodcock begins each chapter with a socio-critical survey, placing the five authors within the development of Canadian literature. Some of the earlier analyses (for example, “The Rural Realists”) are lengthy historical essays; others are brief and personal testimonies (for example, against post­ modernism and deconstructionism in chapter 10). The surveys are followed by comments on individual authors, some superficial but others remark­ ably detailed (for example, on Grove, Garner, and Richler), and all are characterized by Woodcock’sintelligence, remarkable breadth ofknowledge, and stimulating, idiosyncratic judgment. Rather than merely precising the CWTW essays he is introducing, Woodcock provides his own assessment of fifty Canadian novelists, responding to the essayists with praise, criticism, or caution against overevaluation of a minor author. Woodcock...

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