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Reviewed by:
  • Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canadaed. by Eva Darias-Beautell
  • Diana Brydon
Eva Darias-Beautell, ed. Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. 243 pp. Black and White Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $85.00 hc.

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This edited collection of essays derives from an international research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education with the participation of Canadian literature specialists from Spain, Canada, and the UK. The project explores “innovative approaches to the cultural and literary contexts of English Canada over the last forty years” (2). These approaches include multiculturalism, environmentalism, cultural studies, queer theory, feminism, and post-colonialism. Each essay handles a different set of questions, which, taken together, offer, in the editor’s words, “a tapestry of approaches to that Penelopianprocess of simultaneous dismantling and reconstruction of the Canadian tradition” (3). Penelope in Homer’s Odysseyput off her suitors during her husband’s long absence by daily weaving a shroud, which she dismantled each night, so that her task was never finished. This loosely deconstructive approach, here described as Penelopian, in its oscillation between present and past, memory and forgetting, presence and absence, lends itself to framing within the perspectives set by Derridean hauntology(6), thus explaining the book’s evocative title: Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts.

Eight essays follow the editor’s overview, with the final essay on “Indigenous Criticism and Indigenous Literature in the 1990s,” by Michèle Lacombe, doing double duty as a conclusion that points to the need for further rethinking. Lacombe follows indigenous educational theorists in arguing that “[T]he university has a crucial role to play in that complex process of epistemological transformation” for which indigenous writers are calling (221). This fine essay focusses on literary history, criticism, and fiction by Indigenous writers in the 1990s, discussing work by a wide range of indigenous creators. In her introduction, the editor notes that “this final essay is designed to talk back to the first, by Howells, acting as a Derridean supplement to it” (13-14). Coral Ann Howell’s opening essay, “Rewriting Tradition: Literature, History, and Changing Narratives in English Canada since the 1970s,” provides the book with its time frame, a useful chronological survey, and thoughtful analysis of the ways in which Canadian literary histories and critical introductions, including her own important work, have addressed the challenge of how “to situate the diversity of the contemporary Canadian literary scene” (20). The rest of the book addresses dimensions of that diversity, celebrated here as “unruly” in relation to the kinds of “white civility” critiqued by Daniel Coleman in his 2006 White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada, and considered within contemporary preoccupations with immigration, ethnicity, race, and urbanism.

Bookended by these wide-ranging introductions to different ways of approaching tradition and thinking about Canadian history and national identity in globalizing times are six essays that consider dimensions of Asian Canadian Studies (Smaro Kamboureli); mixed race subjectivity (Ana Maria Fraile); speculative fantasy (Belén Martín-Lucas); Vancouver’s urban imaginary (Eva Darias-Beautell); Jane Rule’s [End Page 153]queer fictions (Richard Cavell); and confessional historical fiction (María Jesús Hernáez Lerena). Kamboureli’s contribution is notable for its close reading of a few influential essays through which she traces the paradigm shifts that have characterized the institutionalization of Asian Canadian studies (45). In calling for more such “slow reading,” she demonstrates the value of affording critical essays a kind of attention usually reserved for fiction alone. Fraile interprets two contemporary African-Canadian novels (by Lawrence Hill and Kim Barry Brunhuber) through the lens of a “zebra poetics” (11), George Elliott Clarke’s term for mixed race subjectivity. Martin-Lucas examines recent speculative fictions by Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai, Nalo Hopkinson and Suzette Mayr to consider their employment of shape-shifters “as a poetical and political strategy that allegorizes the ‘flexible citizen’ model theorized by Ong (1999)” (109). Darias-Beautell uses representations of Vancouver by writers and artists as varied as Jin-min Yoon, Douglas Coupland, Madeleine Thien, George Bowering, Rebecca Belmore, Lee Maracle, and Bernie Miller and Alan Tregebov, to...

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