In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

458 LETTERS IN CANADA 1976 Testing the annotations reveals the major deficiency of this otherwise useful book. No guide, particularly one which seems directed at the library market, should contain anything but the most objective annotative notes. Dorothy E. Ryder's Canadian Reference Sources is a good example of just such a work. However, in the Moyles book the literary value judgments in Chapter 2, 'Literary Histories and Criticism: will prove misleading to Canadian students and to users in other countries. This Guide is after all 'Volume 6 in the American Literature, English Literature, and World Literatures in English Information Guide Series: A simple expedient would have been to provide the table of contents for Pacey, Logan and French, and others, or to publish excerpts from their prefaces orforewords, thus allowing the authors to speak for themselves. Following chapters on 'Anthologies: 'Major Authors: and 'Minor Authors: the compilation includes almost sixty pages of the 'Literature of Exploration, Travel and Description: This is an important segment of the book and Moyles provides a useful sketch of the whole body of travel literature with largely objective annotations. It would have been helpful, however, if the paging of individual volumes in this and other sections throughout the book had been included in the rather terse entries. The foreign reader has no idea of the size of Hearne's monumental work A Journey ... to the Northern Ocean nor, in the literature section, of Roberts's Orion, two classics of their kind. English-Canadian Literature to 1900: A Guide to Information Sources concludes with a chapter devoted to selected literary periodicals. The whole book is a worthwhile introduction to our pre-twentieth-century literature . Its arrangement of material is logical and it is equipped with author and title indexes. One must point once again to the annotations which contain the opinions of the compiler. In bibliographies and guides it is better to leave out rather than to insert personal judgments. Unless objectivity is achieved such comments quickly damage the book's possible role as a reputable work of reference. (DOUGLAS LOCHHEAD) Canadian Fiction, an annotated bibliography. Edited by Margery Fee and Ruth Cawker. Peter Martin. xiii, 170. $15.00 cloth, $8.95 paper Canadian Book Review Annual 1975. Edited by Dean Tudor, Nancy Tudor, and Linda Biesenthal. Peter Martin. viii, )04. $27-5° John Robert Colombo. Colombo's Canadian References. Oxford University Press. viii, 576. $14.95 Now, in the seventies, cultural nationalism, no less naive for being industrious, settles into its underlying liberal assumptions in the urge to HUMANITIES 459 clarify experience by taking inventory, producing three reference books. Canadian Fiction annotates novel and short-story collections in print in 1974, including translations of French-Canadian titles, some children's books, animal stories from Seton to Mowat, pioneer journals, and other non-fiction with classroom appeal. Each author entry also gives bibliographic data for out-of-print titles, together with selected critical studies, biographies, and multimedia material. The ordering and bibliographical information is complete except for a collation entry. All of this is good, aptly servicing 'Lit. Canada.' The chief weakness of the book lies in the annotations, whose one- to three-sentence descriptions achieve little more than content-analysis of a dust-jacket sort, in which, for example, the term 'surreal' is used too freely to denote anything non-representational or formally self-conscious. No attempt is made to offer a generic identification of the kind that would separate serious fiction from Rohmer's political fantasies or Scott Young's hockey juveniles, let along make an evaluative or even placing comment on an item of the tradition. Instead, the reader is referred by means of a system of abbreviations after an entry to other reference books and secondary sources, each described in capsule in the introduction. Separate mention of each book's 'setting' and a theme index, grouping books by such categories as 'regions,' 'death,' 'poverty,' 'pioneers,' 'human sexuality,' are also features of a positivistic undertaking that suffers from a schoolroom conception of fiction as 'books about' in league with what I feel to be a dangerously time-serving bias towards didactic realism. The bibliography was put together by the 'Canlit' organization to...

pdf

Share