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Bood, out of a kinship with Nathanael West, Edgar Allan Poe, and the then-current existential voices of Camus and Sartre. Asals finds 'many nightmares but no sacramental visions' (p 53) in Wise Blood. Its Christian hero, Hazel Motes, is the 'dangling man' in a world without answers. The emptiness of Wise Blood, made fascinating by its dark humour and 'aesthetic exuberance,' slowly, however, gives way in her writing to the possibility of sacramental vision until in her final stories, like 'Judgment Day,' O'Connor suggests the beginnings of a mellower phase. Yet, even with this evolution, Flannery O'Connor is a severe, unempathetic writer, a writer finally of medieval austerity. When Hazel Motes blinds and wounds himself, his landlady protests, 'It's something that people have quit doing - like boiling in oil or being a saint.' Asals links such Visionary, extremist activity to aspects of O'Connor's own temperament . 'In the ordinary sense of the word,' he writes, 'she was lacking compassion and knew it' (p 158). She sensed 'a central wildness' at man's core and allowed that energy, usually in some Christ-haunted form, to shape her stories and especially her novels. Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity is a deeply probing, challenging treatment of a complex, difficult writer. The Augustinian reading will probably disturb numerous O'Connorites, but it will not disappoint readers interested in well-written, insightful critical commentary . The book is a major study, the very kind of effort Friedman called for in 1977. (MICHAEL PETERMAN) Kunstmann, Pierre and Martin Dub€!. Concordance analytique de La Mort Ie roi Artu University of Ottawa Medieval Texts and Studies 11 Editions de l'Universite d'Ottawa. 2 vols. $60.00 The concordance is based upon the standard edition by Jean Frappier, La Mort Ie roi Artu, roman du XIII' siecle (Geneva/Paris 1964). In view of the considerable printing expense, it is reasonable to expect that only very important or representative ones will be chosen for such processing, at least until a less expensive mode of publication is developed (microfiche, magnetic tape, disc). La Mort Ie roi Artu is clearly worthy of the honours of concordance, since it may be considered representative of the whole Lancelot-Grail prose cycle, immensely popular and influential through the later medieval period. The choice of text is judicious, as well, because of its representative use by Jean Rychner in Formes et structures de la prose franfaise medievale. L'articulation des phrases narratives dans La Mort Artu (Neuchatel 1970). The format of presentation represents, as do all concordances, a compromise between raw computer output and the innumerable refinements 452 LEITERS IN CANADA 1982 made possible by modern technology. Words are listed in a modified KWIC format (Key Word In Context), that is, with the headword centred on the page, the context being supplied by 34 spaces to the left and 44 spaces to the right, with paragraph and line references at the extreme right. Entries are arranged chronologically within groups, that is, in order of their occurrence in the text (rather than being alphabetized according to what follows the key word, as in Joseph Duggan's 1969 concordance of the Chanson de Roland). The usefulness of Duggan's format lies in the ease with which it permits the study of formulaic patterns in the language . One wonders whether anything would have been sacrificed by choosing this format rather than the chronological one, since a chronological index is easily established if required. The straightforward KWIC format strikes me as being more flexible. Three useful lists are added: an index of forms, giving reference to the appropriate lemma; a frequency of lemmata; a reverse alphabetical list of forms. The text has been processed in a number of stages. The basic alphabetized concordance has been lemmatized, then each lemmatized group has undergone grammatical analysis and is listed according to a standardized logical ordering. Thus Ie (article) is separated from Ie (pronoun), and within the Ie (article) paragraph, for example, are listed separately the various functioning forms: masculine, feminine, subject, object, singular , plural, as well as the combined forms: au, del, etc. These manipulations of the basic listings are very helpful for certain users...

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