Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form by W.H. New (review)

464 letters in canada 1999 As Ira B. Nadel, the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, says in the opening of his lucid introduction, `Understanding Ezra Pound has never been easy. His erudition and experimentation, not to say his orneriness, have constantly challenged readers.' Over the years Pound has attracted his share of essay collections, and there are certainly numerous introductory monographs on specific aspects of his work. The Cambridge Companion differs from earlier collections and most monographs in that it purports to be a critical introduction to Pound the man and his entire œuvre. As such, it deals with Pound the man, poet, critic, editor, anthologist , literary propagandist, patron of the arts, translator, dramatist, librettist, political and economic thinker, fascist, and anti-Semite. Edited with energy and imagination, this volume achieves considerable staying power because it gathers sound essays by an international all-star cast of Pound scholars. The collection is anchored by Nadel's subtle and satisfying introductory exposition of several topoi central to the poet's work. Nadel takes us quickly through the biography; the early poetics and poetry; the history and importance of The Cantos; the poet's influence and the critical tradition and reception of his work; and finally, a sensible and reliable overview of the collection. After reading a book like this, one could always complain about omissions (for example, why are there no chapters on Pound and religion or Pound's prosody), or about the choice of contributors (was Hugh Kenner asked to write an essay or Leon Surette?), or about the consistency of documentation methods, or about the handling of foreign phrases in Pound's poetry. One could also complain about scattered proofreading problems. To be fair to the editor, however, he has managed to bring together a series of sound, representative, and well-written accounts of Pound the man and poet. These essays were especially commissioned, and the challenge for most of the contributors appears to be twofold: first, how to avoid repeating what they've said elsewhere and at more length; and second, how in the pursuit of the introductory to avoid offering paraphrase and plot exposition. The editor and his contributors succeed in satisfying the aims of the Cambridge series by offering readable essays that are free of technical jargon and avoid going over too much ground already covered and, at the same time, provide a cogent and comprehensive primer by which discerning students may come to begin to understand the complexities of Pound's world. (DEMETRES P. TRYPHONOPOULOS) W.H. New. Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form McGill-Queen's University Press. xxii, 216. $55.00 In his earlier study of Canadian and New Zealand short fiction, Dreams of humanities 465 Speech and Violence, W.H. New succinctly asserted that `form is meaning in a Mansfield story.' In his latest monograph, he gives expanded and extensive evidence to support his claim. Although this book follows New's earlier line, the publisher's dustjacket asserts that his work is an`innovative reassessment of Mansfield's literary significance,' rectifying the small amount of critical attention that Mansfield has received and establishing her as `a modernist writer of great importance.' While critical articles on Mansfield are at a healthy level (the MLA bibliography alone renders up nearly three hundred to date), monograph-length studies are indeed still a relative rarity. Yet Mansfield's importance as a modernist B and to modernism B has had several recent advocates (whom New himself does acknowledge). New's general sense of Mansfield's thematic preoccupations is largely in accord with the major current lines of critical (and indeed creative) inquiry into her work; that her fiction is focused on the processes of victimization, or social codes of control: that it attempts to articulate experience on behalf of those whose lives exist at the edges, or within the ignored inner-urban pockets, of society. Where his study differs most markedly from other critical approaches is in its shift in emphasis from the `political and emotional sensibilities' of the fiction, to a concentration on `the controlled effects of stylistic detail.' The ongoing motif in his work is that the social and psychological content of Mansfield...