Imagining Culture: New World Narrative and the Writing of Canada by Margaret E. Turner (review)

358 LETTERS IN CANADA 1995 ofPaul Kane,' and they demonstrate that the individual explorer's aesthetic responses to an Arctic landscape and environment radically different from Europe could be much more flexible than the 'official' volumes would indicate. , Critical Issues in Editing Exploration Texts and Arctic Artist serve to highlight a series of complex issues concerning the production and editing of exploration narratives. It is unfortunate that the few reviews Arctic Artist has received in newspapers and journals tend to discuss the book through the cliched perspective of the romantic explorer battling the landscape and ignore the 'Commentary' altogether. The work of Houston and MacLaren deserves more recognition than this, because they have gone beyond the superficial aspects of 'exploration as adventure' and provided a balanced set of perspectives (the supplementary material is as long as Back's narrative itself). ArcticArtist will endure as one of the most comprehensive single volumes to present the British explorer's place within nineteenthcentury culture. (EDWARD PARKINSON) Margaret E. Turner. Imagining Culture: New World Narrative and the Writing ofCanada McGill-Queen's University Press. viii, 134· $44·95, $15.95 Recent work on the cultural construction of Canada has opened up resonant questions about our understanding of the relationship between language, identity, and representation, and has made clear the need to confront and to interrogate our assumptions about the processes and politics of identity-formation in settler-invader societies. Drawing on the insights of some of the key theorists of postcolonial discourse analysis and new historicism, Margaret Turner's Imagining Culture is a welcome addition to the evolving body of critical work that reads Canadian cultural history throughitsinvolvementwith and perpetuation ofself-representational acts that define, legitimize, and naturalize relations between self and other. Turner's focus is the New World, 'the Americas that Europeans invented for themselves and colonized,' andspecifically, thepredicamentofthe New World writer as expressed in anglophone Canadian literary texts from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (her examples range from John . Richardson's Wacousta to Jane Urquhart's The Whirlpool). These texts, Turner argues, illustrate the ways in which New World writers create the very world they inhabit; indeed, they invite us to recognize the extent to which the 'European discovery of the new world ... is ... an act ofperception and imagination.' Turner's analysiS of the discursive nature of New World cultures, of the New World as an object of European desire and a construct of European imaginative processes, is carefully argued through the course of the book, and the individual chapters on each of the writers discussed (Richardson, HUMANITIES 359 Frederick Philip Grove, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, and Urquhart) show genuine engagement with the complexities of the texts in question. At times it would appear that some of the texts chosen seem more appropriate and effective in substantiating and advancing the book's argument than others: the chapters on Richardson and Grove seem more convincing and more relevant than, say, the section on Watson, which seems to me perhaps a little forced in its attempt to accommodate The Double Hook within the theoretical framework of the overall argument. Although Turner, for example, tells us that Watson's 'determination to stretch and break the cormectionbetween language and referent makes her linguistic practice teeter in the gap between old and new world discourse,' the relations between Watson's modernist linguistic strategies and her involvement with articulating the New World discourse ofa settler society aren't mapped out as convincingly and as rigorouslyas discussions ofother works are here. Similarly, although Turner attends to what she calls the historical and cultural ambiguities of white settler societies, her treatment of the tension between the emancipatory potential and the hegemonizing effects of New World discourse in a Canadian context remains somewhat brusque. If, on the one hand, New World writers have been engaged in the construction of a postcolonial discursive space, if they have participated in an attempt to create an independent local identity separate from their inherited colonial cultures, then they have, on the other, also consolidated structures of oppression in relation to indigenous cultures. Turner, clearly, is aware of this ambivalence, but still I am left wondering whether the discriminating focus that gives this book...