Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays ed. by Colin Nicholson (review)

226 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 frequently alluded to various Canadian classics. With the NCLS a canon of Canadian literature was delineated.' The series pre-dated by some six years similar projects by Macmillan, Clarke Irwin, and the University of Toronto Press. Throughout his career, Jack McClelland showed dedication and panache, undertaking ingenious publicity stunts and nationalist stands that contributed to M & S's growing reputation as Canada's ~literary flagship.' McClelland's 1971 proposal to sell the company prompted 'national outcries': 'The sale was said to be the book world's equivalent to the disbanding of the CBC or the transfer of the Toronto Maple Leafs' franchise to Pasadena, California.' "'1 publish authors, not books'" was Jack McClelland's motto, and Margaret Laurence applauded him for having done more for Canadian publishing than any other Canadian publisher . This bibliography provides an essential resource for those undertaking research into any area of the history of Canadian publishing or into the convoluted interrelations between authors, publishers, and readers. Specifically, it documents M & S's role in the 'growth of a distinctly Canadian literature.' In the words of the compilers, this is the story 'of an emerging nation, formerly in the shadows of a mother country and a giant to the south, that broke away and celebrated its cultural diversity and literary vitality.' It is also the story of one firm's active role in constructing and promulgating that national identity, a definition of Canada marked by an accompanying sense of cultural national unity. (CYNTHIA SUGARS) Colin Nicholson, editor. Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays Macmillan. x, 272. $22.99 Survival, Margaret Atwood's study of Canadian literature, like Virginia Woolf's study of women writers, A Room of One's Own, is a foundational text to which subsequent writers repeatedly return to attack, to elaborate, to define, and to clarify. Both Atwood and Woolf define their subject matter as the textual productions of a colonized group. Written with such a matrix, Canadian and women's texts both reflect a marginalized status and contain the possibility of challenging or subverting the colonizers' positions. In the introduction to this essay collection, Colin Nicholson situates Survival in the Canadian critical context, and suggests that the essays collected here will explore Atwood's fictional and poetic texts in terms of the framework she articulated in Survival. Starting with the poetry, the essays move roughly chronologically through Atwood's texts. Colin Nicholson's essay 'Living on the Edges: Constructions of Post- HUMANITIES 227 Colonial Subjectivity in Atwood's Early Poetry' continues along the trajectory established by the introduction. Nicholson reads the poems in light of feminist and post-colonial politics, and finds that Atwood's work is skilful and many-layered, incorporating postmodern theories of subjectivity and ironic cornmentary on American cultural and political hegemony as well as on the divisions of francophone and anglophone culture within Canada. Particularly useful is Nicholson's reading of Atwood's dialogical exchanges with Walt Whitman. In a genealogical study of Atwood's manuscripts, Judith McCombs traces the evolution of Atwood's 'first real book of poetry,' The Circle Game, from an earlier unpublished manuscript. McCombs finds that the original draft, an uneven collection of poems about land journeys, metamorphosed into a 'powerfully centred, symmetric, mirroring structure.' Rounding off the discussion of the poetry, Dennis Cooley analyses the linguistic structures that establish the narrative of Power Politics. He finds a powerful female narrator using rhetorical questions and other discursive strategies to judge and control the male antagonist. David Ward notes in his essay on Surfacing that the title may not only indicate rising above the level of water, but 'it may also mean the making of surfaces,' the elaboration of the superficial to which the book's narrator repeatedly points. Ward's essay is grounded in comparative ethnology, but ranges from Plato to Jung, Lacan, and Kristeva as it explores and contextualizes linguistic and psychological transformations in Surfacing. In 'Margaret Atwood's Surfacing: Strange Familiarity,' Peter Quartermaine explores the process by which the narrator's self-discovery is performed through interrelated inner and outer journeys. 'The narrator's memory domain of childhood, marriage and abortion is contrasted with, and finally comprehended through, an...