The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay by Graham Good (review)

116 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 point for modem developments than an inheritor of a tradition he largely rewrites'). With her focus primarily on the Renaissance, but glancing at a wide range of texts from the Bible to the twentieth century, Parker explores the relationships between rhetorical and political control, the links between gender and ideology, the significance of place as the ground of discourse. Especially in its emphasis on the trope of dilatio and in its concern with narrative syntax, this study develops several arguments from Inescapable Romance, but here further dilated in an exploration of the opening of a closed text and of the ways in which 'wayward women and wayward and copiously fattened texts continue to figure and refigure each other.' There are skilful and subtle readings of Comedy of Errors, Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, the Henriad, Othello, Troilus and Cressida, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The RapeofLucrece. Indeed the sections on Shakespeare are excellent, as is much of the Bronte material; the Spenser chapter is suggestive as well, but its emphasis on the Bower of Bliss as a predominantly female space notwithstanding, it is less connected to the central thematics of the book. Although the rhetorical focus is her own, Parker depends a great deal on the work of others, for example on Vickers, Kolodny, Franklin, Fabricant, and Sedgwick in her nuanced readings of New World texts, and on Nyquist both for textual citations and their implications in her discussion of Eve's 'coming second.' Literary Fat Ladies is a generous and inclusive study that engages much of the most interesting recent work on the Renaissance (with the odd omission of Lanham's The Motives of Eloquence, where the emphasis on the 'rhetorical ideal' has historical as well as formal implications). Yet precisely because it is so good in its parts, one wishes that it added up to more of a whole. (JUDITH SCHERER HERZ) Graham Good. The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay Routledge. xv, 208. $12.95 paper Despite its position as foundation of the academic pyramid, the essay has been the least studied of the literary forms. Drawing on the small critical tradition that does exist - primarily the writings of Max Bense, Walter Benjamin, and especially Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukacs - Graham Good sets out to 'rediscover' the basis and potential of the essay genre. The basis is the processes and manifold variations of the form itself; the potential is its political import, for Good sees the essay as a median between the extremes of journalism and academia, as a 'democratic form' 'vital to our educational, cultural, and political health.' Two critical chapters frame eight studies of individual writers who represent the English tradition of essay writing. In the preface to the 'historico-philosophical' introductory chapter, Good posits a working HUMANITIES 117 definition of the essay as a vernacular prose writing 'from one to a hundred pages' in length. Additional defining characteristics, some more useful than others, emerge later: 'the essay opposes doctrines and disciplines'; 'thought in the essay stays close to its objects and shares their space and atmosphere'; 'the essay is a highly "existentialist" form.' Ostensibly focusing on the English tradition, Good has chapters on Montaigne, Bacon, Johnson, Hazlitt, James, Woolf, Eliot, and Orwell, three of whom are not English. As the author notes, no selection would satisfy all expectations, but some readers will be disappointed by the exclusion ofmore contemporary essayists (Roland Barthes jumps to mind as a complement to Montaigne). Good's chapters are themselves strUctured as essays; scholarly apparatus (the mark of an article, as opposed to an essay) is relegated to concluding bibliographical notes. In each study Good gives historical context, a close reading of one or two essays, and a conclusion about the writer's essay style, often expressed in metaphor: e.g. Bacon's essays are treelike; Hazlitt's approach portraiture. Good's overriding conclusion would seem to be that the essay form may be manipulated in support of content - which is usually the reproduction of the thought process - to an extent not hitherto explored. In the case ofEliot, the actual rearrangement of the essays within the various editions of Selected Essays itself is seen...