Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture ed. by Irene Gammel (review)

264 letters in canada 2002 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 Editions= set out to do. To limit the selection to contemporary reviews smacks of historical pedantry, although it does reprint material not otherwise easily available. Appendix E, >Sunshine in Mariposa: A Play in Four Acts,= is the script of an unperformed play by Leacock (>hardly a masterpiece of any kind,= in Spadoni=s words), based on material from Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. This seventy-two-page appendix does not belong in such an edition and certainly cannot tell us much about the earlier prose work. Appendices F and G deal with textual variants in the manuscript and in the Montreal Daily Star versions; these sections are a step towards a >Variorum= edition, but suggest that there is not much to learn from Leacock=s variants. Appendix H is a list of a few changes made by Spadoni to his copy-text. The volume ends with a select bibliography; the list of primary texts duplicates entries in Spadoni=s A Bibliography of Stephen Leacock (ECW 1998), and the comprehensive listing of secondary literature will be useful to students, instructors, and scholars alike. Although a good deal of useful information, some of it new or not otherwise easily accessible, is made available here, this lengthy volume creates the impression of a certain amount of busy-work. A more rigorous distinction between the significant and the incidental, and between the new and the familiar, in this edition would have allowed its contribution to our understanding of Leacock=s work to stand out more clearly. (FRANCIS ZICHY) Irene Gammel, editor. Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture University of Toronto Press. xii, 348. $70.00, $27.50 Today=s child is more likely initially to encounter L.M. Montgomery=s characters through films and TV series B not to mention dolls and licence plates B than through the witty prose of their creator. Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture, a collection of well-written essays edited by Irene Gammel, addresses how multimedia has transformed Montgomery=s world, allowing for various interpretations. This volume would primarily interest teachers of children=s literature, as it provides many interesting details and perspectives in language that does not exclude the upper-level undergraduate, and yet remains sophisticated scholarship. It complements Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly=s former volume, L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture (1999), the third section of which discusses Anne as a cultural icon. Making Avonlea does what studies of popular culture should do: show how communities are formed through the mutual enjoyment of art. Gammel=s collection arises from a community of scholars interested in Montgomery and popular culture, most of whom participated in the International L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture Symposium (2000). humanities 265 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 Contributors read each other=s papers, and this cross-pollination and debate is everywhere evident in the volume. It makes it the work of a community rather than a number of essays thrown together. This is impressive when dealing with twenty-four authors. Making Avonlea is divided into three sections. The first, >Mapping Avonlea: Cultural Value and Iconography,= ranges from the traditional English essay to the personal essay. The feeling of an academic community working on Montgomery is given statistical treatment by Carole Gerson. Cecily Devereux analyses how the media reported on an essay dealing with lesbian desire in the Anne books, revealing their attitudes about homosexuality , iconography, and academia. Juliet McMaster=s essay on hair is, as expected, a delight to read. The second section, >Viewing Avonlea: Film, Television, Drama and Musical,= contains the most debate. Kevin Sullivan is a touchstone for this section: in his films and TV series, is he defiling Montgomery=s works, or offering a valid, progressive spin on them? The writers in this section tend to view film and TV as texts in their own right. Particularly interesting in this section are two essays dealing with nationalism. Benjamin Lefebvre discusses how Disney erases the Canadian identity of Montgomery=s works. By contrast, Christopher Gittings shows how Marlene Matthews has emphasized the setting...