Modern English-Canadian Prose: A Guide to Information Sources by Helen Hoy (review)

HUMANITIES 445 out, and it remains a force to be reckoned with. Duffy does so splendidly, conducting a lively reading of text, and demonstrating that 'the Richardsonian world remains ultimately amorphous, a cascade of experience in which the chief meaning lies in this: the resolute observance of chaos by a party seeking to overcome it or, at least, to view it without flinching: Catharine Parr Traill is also liable to be treated as a one-book author, but Carl Ballstadt's essay about her repudiates the limitations of such a focus, examining in some detail her entire canon, including her journals. Bal1stadt maintains that the elegant style and structure of The Backwoods of Canada are reasons for its abiding reputation: he shows that the principal formal aspects of the text are 'balance' and 'antithesis: and he explains their relation to the book's content. He discovers similar shapeliness in her late works, too - in Pearls and Pebbles, especially. In 'Three Writers of Victorian Canada' Carole Gerson deals not with authors with lopsided, one-book reputations, but with writers whose reputations have almost vanished into the tides of time: Rosanna Leprohon, James De Mille, Agnes Maule Machar. Yet these three were acknowledged figures in their own era. Indeed, Machar - 'almost unknown today' - was the most widely read of the three. How is it that writers who so successfully addressed the readers of their own time can have become nearly negligible figures a century later? As Gerson explains, for these three writing served purposes other than artistic ones: moral, social, and financial ends, mainly. Their writings were extensions of their sociallives in a moment of culture, and when that moment passed, so did their writings. Wisely, Gerson doesn't try to revive languishing reputations perhaps best left alone. Rather, she inquires into their vanished context, and its associated conventions, pointing out some of the virtues and weaknesses of the principal works of these writers. The essays in this volume are substantial additions to Canadian scholarship, thorough and ample in their presentation of data, and often stimulating in the new directions they suggest. (JANET GILTROW) Helen Hoy. Modern English-Canadian Prose: A Guide to Information Sources Gale Research. xxiv, 605. $48.00 Notes from a user's diary. November 8: I immediately check the index for Miriam Waddington, a writer whose comprehensive bibliography I am just completing. Three entries are correct; a fourth (number 556) mistakenly cites the Journal of Canadian Fiction rather than the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Hoy lists the main reviews of the works of her seventy-eight authors, but they appear in abbreviated form, without author's name, so it's lmpossible to check, here, on Waddington as reviewer. 446 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 November 17: Planning a paper on the indigenous voice in literature in British Columbia; 'General Reference Sources' directs me to two bibliographies of books in BC and a National Library publication, Indian-Inuit Authors. November 18: What new perspective could I bring to classes on Sheila Watson's The Double Hook? Hoy lists two interviews (Capilano Review), and an article by Dorothy Livesay, that I had not read. Scrupulous crosslistings and occasional deSCriptive annotations ofarticles are very helpful. But Hoy's cut-off date - 1980 - means George Bowering's shrewd piece, 'Coyote, Trickster: is not listed. December 5: Back to the paper on Be. Two years ago a student mentioned finding an article touching on shamanism in Emily Carr (a writer not included in MECP); the name, Ithink, is Ross, but I can't recall the title or journal. Hoy's index points out the title immediately (Catherine Ross, Atlantis, 1978). There is no entry for Robert Harlow, but Stephen Vizinczey is in. Some one-novel writers - Ondaatje, Howard O'Haganare included, but there's no Keith Maillard or George Bowering. Farley Mowat and Grey Owl are here, but not Roderick Haig-Brown. January 10: A graduate student is drawing up a Directed Reading course on the emergence of realism and modernism in Canadian fiction of the 1920S. His proposed authors are Stead, Grove, Callaghan, Knister, and de la Roche. MECP provides compact, convenient primary and secondary bibliographies immediately. The subject index alerts us to...