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442 LETTERS IN CANADA 19B1 tral metaphors of her spiritual seeing. Mark Levine on Richler teaches a student that it is all right to talk sensitively about voice, narrative rhythm, tone, and the othernuances ofmoral vision. MagdaleneRedekop onWiebe also catches issues of voice, theme, and cultural dilemma in one critical style. Tim Struthers on Hood demonstrates how to speak persuasively about the task of rooting memory and personal experience in the confines of the short story, though I feel the critic is too close to his author here. Frank Davey's piece on Atwood's habitual organizing metaphors in story, poem, and novel is impressively concise. Russell Brown, like Kroetsch his subject, may seem too clever by half to a high-school reader, but then Kroetsch is a challenge to explain. The other profiles tend to serve the publishing concept too easily, pinning Davies to lung, Laurence to survival - more myths - except where an idiosyncratic pedagogical condescension, visible to any high-school student, intrudes with advice about how to 'come to terms' with the author in question. I hope our students won't emulate the mechanical work-by-work expository method of several of these discussions, or that 'theme-and-technique' school of explication with its debased nineteenth-century organicism and its even older assumption about literature as a kind of rhetoric which, I suppose, represents 'literary rather than historical or sociological' perspective. And the over-use of the pronoun 'we' to establishcommunity (in the classroom as in the nation) will trouble the sensitive reader. It troubles me too - so much that I can't help wondering about the cultural trait that links classroom, country, and commerce so easilyin this project. There is something familiar here in the large type, the heavy section titles, the missing hyphens and accents inserted by rapidograph, the signs ofscissors and paste. It is some nineteenth-century conjuncture of artificial nationalism and mass education - solemn, industrious, earnest, progressive, naive, and bland. I know what it is. Itis posthumous embalmed Ryersonianism. This series is a gussied-up Methodist primer. Beneath the computeri2ed typesetting and divide-to-rule layout the ghost of the Superintendent of Education for Ontario is still working long hours in our culture, carefully placing imaginative awe under museum-case glass, substituting 'study aids' for sparkling criticism, and quietly, efficiently turning literature in Canada into a knowledge industry. (SEAN KANE) Mary Elizabeth Smith. Too Soon the Curtain Fell: A History of Theatre in Saint John, '789-'900 Brunswick Press. 244, iIlus. $12.95 paper With Mary Smith's story of the theatre in SaintJohn we enter a new age of theatre-history writing in Canada. Not only is Too Soon the Curtain Fell our HUMANITIES 443 first civic history, but it is a model ofits kind. Inspired by her University of New Brunswick drama classes, Smith has painstakingly explored miles of microfilmed newspapers to separate out both the stage events and the political, social, and economic backdrop against which they were played. Her desire to produce 'a narrative history that would be ... readable, as complete as space allowed, reliable and amply documented' succeeds on all four counts. Smith wisely threads her survey around the theatre spaces ofSaintJohn and in documenting their rise and fall gives us a microcosm of theatre in Canada during the British colonial regime. From Loyalist beginnings in a tavern in 1789, she traces the Garrison amateurs, the first specifically designed playhouses, the coming of the professionals, the touring stars, and, finally, with James Lanergan's resident stock companies at the Dramatic Lyceum, a golden stretch of uninterrupted performance. The Great Fire of 1877 levelled most of the theatres and two-thirds of the city. However, the century ended optimistically with the new Saint John Opera House, thriving as a link in the remarkable syndicated theatre chains of North America. On this framework Smith hangs a wealth of lively anecdotal adventure: items like the bizarre 1830 death of a soldier onstage; the riot occasioned by 'a quiet satire' from local author Tom Hill; orthe hilarious 'battleofthe theatre seats,' when workmen from an unpaid upholstery firm ran the gauntlet to remove their chairs while cultural vigilantes defended the Academy of Music. Inevitably...

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