Wilfred Owen

31:1, Book Reviews dictum and its history are not explained. Numerous similar examples could be quoted (cf. especially 48 nl7; 100 n3 with its vague generalizing). Summing up, then, one has to state an ambivalent reaction. Unreserved admiration for the compilation of a splendid source book (complete with exhaustive bibliography and two useful indices—names and terms, from "accuracy" to "zoology ") is countered by some disappointment, because the editors failed to enlarge on the subject of naturalism in any new way. This disappointing result comes from Greiner and Stilz raising too many expectations in their introduction . They point out, for instance, how necessary it is to make a distinction between realism and naturalism (2), they even give a number of characteristics of naturalism (23-27), but what realism is, at least in their opinion, we are never told. Add to this that Walter Greiner (together with Fritz Kemmler) had edited another source book, called Realismustheorien in England (1692-1912) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979), in which some texts, reprinted in Naturalismus, put in an appearance as well, but then as documents of realism. Thus, a marked characteristic of naturalism (and, possibly, the reason why the English, always content with operating within their literary heritage, were never keen on this school of aesthetics) has been overlooked. Whereas realism is basically a conventional literary technique and whereas the reader of a realist text has no problem in appreciating this sort of literature, naturalism wants to do away, radically, with established techniques of representing reality . One of the main ingredients—if not the main ingredient—in the mixture of beliefs which make up the naturalist's creed is a programme of what the Russian formalists called "the de-automatization of writing," i.e. the disposing of all the strategies which make for a well-done, aesthetically pleasing— or at least aesthetically tolerable—work of art. "The naturalistic novel," Zola exclaimed, "no longer interests itself in the ingenuity of a well-invented story, developed according to certain rules" (41-42). Selecting documents under the heading "De-automatization," however, would have resulted in quite a different anthology, dealing with efforts at naturalistic writing in most periods of literary history. But this, of course, would be asking the wrong thing from a book which states clearly in its subtitle that it will restrict its scope to the years 1880-1920. Stephan Kohl University of Bayreuth WILFRED OWEN Dominic Hibberd. Owen the Poet. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. $30.00 Early in the first chapter of Owen the Poet, Dominic Hibberd, while describing Owen's library, parenthetically reminds us of the state of English studies in 96 31:1, Book Reviews Owen's youth: "There was little demand for criticism in those days before the emergence of English as a major academic subject, so that books [such as those that dominated Owen's collection] about poets tended to be 'lives' rather than critical studies" (4). While somewhat more sophisticated than works in those popular "men of letters" series, Hibberd's own book has still not been able to solve the problem of the "critical biography." That a problem does indeed persist is evident from the "Preface" where he opens with the claim that "This book is a study of what Wilfred Owen called his 'poethood.' It examines his origins and growth as a poet, his understanding of his poetic role, and the unity of this imaginative life, and it assesses his achievement" (ix), but follows this claim a page later with the disclaimer that he has not attempted "to offer close 'evaluative' criticism of most of his poetry." The achievement then, we have to conclude, is not the body of verse but a unified imaginative life. To prove that the poetic concerns do not substantially change, that the "war poems were in embryo long before he ever guessed at the nightmare of the trenches" (4), that the imagery especially is continuous from the apprentice pieces of 1911 to the "mature" poems of 1918, is (for Hibberd) to prove Owen a great and "significant" poet. This effort is allowed, I suppose, because of a modernist distinction, which Hibberd invokes: "My subject is the poet and his work...