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humanities 471 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 simply reinforces traditional values. Karr is masterful at compressing large amounts of complex information into succinct, readable prose. His overview of the tangled international copyright situation during this period is exceptionally clear. He blends overview and detail with grace throughout the 220 pages of analysis and the nearly 100 pages of explanatory endnotes which draw on a huge array of archival and library resources. (Maddeningly, there is no overall bibliography of sources consulted). We did not check for factual accuracy in the text, but we did note one error in the Montgomery section: Karr states that Montgomery=s lawsuit against L.C. Page cost her $75,000, but in fact, this figure was what it cost Page. Though small errors may always creep into massive projects like this one, what is valuable here is the sweep of information and the sense made of it. Karr=s interdisciplinary approach and the ways in which he turns technical material and remarkable scholarly insight make for a highly readable story of Canada in the period leading up to the Great War. (BENJAMIN LEFEBVRE) Diane McGee. Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Eartly Twentieth-Century Women Writers University of Toronto Press. viii, 222. $60.00 Much like the character in a recent popular trade paperback who gets her PhD in physics by studying soap bubbles, scholars who study food run the risk of having their work seen as somewhat frivolous, a summer-cottage interest in a world of disciplinary weight. This although the last ten years have seen an explosion of interest in food studies, a field that encompasses anthropology, sociology, literary and cinema studies, nutrition, history, and just about every discipline there is. But as food scholars back to Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes have always known, food offers a sort of vestibular entry into much larger social and cultural issues. In >deciphering a meal,= as Mary Douglas famously put it, we are offered insight into the quotidian. It is, indeed, a >dense transfer point= of meaning in which we find enacted microdramas of gender, class and power, social ritual, and aesthetic pleasure. Diane McGee argues that in studying the social ritual of the meal, we find insight into the aesthetic and social problems that her authors, modernists like Mansfield, Woolf, Stein, and Wharton, struggle with. In their portrayals of the dinner meal, says McGee, we find ourselves on the cusp between >an understanding of the power and imaginative resonance of dinner and a more prosaic perspective on meals as part of women=s domestic work.= Domestic work, in other words, functions both as a site of creative potential and as the burden of a femininity that these writers are struggling 472 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 to redefine. For Kate Chopin=s Edna Pontellier, for instance, meals are >beckoning, erotic, sensual, liberating ... and a part of the patriarchal structure which Edna is trying to escape.= For Katharine Mansfield and Edith Wharton, inclusion and exclusion from dinner rituals signal a sort of social homelessness, a mark of belonging or exile from class and family structures, that is also about the author=s liminal relationship to the Victorian era, whose passing their writing marks. McGee=s book offers a series of chapters on each author, in which she deftly and elegantly offers close and structural readings of the place of dining, entertaining, and domestic work in modernist women=s fiction. The dining-room, she points out, >may form the central focus of an architectural model or metaphor that is used as a primary structuring device of the novel.= Writing about food, she says, is >an exploration of what it means to be a woman, and beneath that, of the tension between the woman and the artist.= While this is indeed apparent, McGee fails to demonstrate why food and eating, more than anything else, is a marker of these thematics. Feminist interpretation of Woolf and Mansfield has demonstrated repeatedly the centrality of these issues to their work. Dining, as one more quotidian activity in novels about the grind of early...

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