Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Margaret Laurence ed. by Colin Nicholson (review)

164 LETTERS IN CANADA 1990 attention to these often ignored expressionist practices in Barnes's novel and for her suggestion that by reading Nightwood as an expressionist text, one can uncover the motivation for the tension between diegesis and discourse in Barnes's discourse. In the final section of Regression and Apocalypse, Grace addresses the expressionist legacy in postmodernist fiction. Grace's discussion here is brief, and the real focus of her study is her discussion of the North American modernist appropriation of expressionism. In its tracing of this appropriation and its implications,SherrillGrace's RegressionandApocalypse is both an ambitious survey of the expressionist aesthetic in North Americanmodemismand a welcomeaccount of the distinctive expressionist difference within the modernist project. (THOMAS CARMICHAEL) Colin Nicholson, editor. Critical Approaches to the Fiction ofMargaret lAurence University of British Columbia Press. xviii, 250 Never one to complain about the way she was treated, Margaret Laurence occasionally confided to friends some regret that, while her bookssold well in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States and did well in translation in severalcountries, critics outside Canada paid little attention to her work. In all her years in England, she was never made to feel part of the literary community. With, at most, one or two exceptions per volume, Canadians provided all the essays in the collections edited by William New (1977), John R. Sorfleet (1980), George Woodcock (1983), Christl Verduyn (1988), and Kristjana Gunnars (1988). Significant monographs and books on Laurence have been by Canadians. The presentcollection,edited and printed in Great Britain,and published there by Macmillan and in Canada by UllC Press, is different. Five of the fifteen contributors are Canadians who have written on Laurence before, including Clara Thomas, Michael Peterman, Elizabeth Waterston, and Nancy Bailey, and two are Americans (one ofwhom, Greta Coger, wasborn in Manitoba and grew up there), but one is French, five are English, and two (including the editor)are Scottish. Without condescension, withoutthe embarrassingignorance that imperialists ofmany stripes have occaSionally exhibited when dealing with 'colonials: the non-Canadian contributors to this collection prove to be thoroughly knowledgeable, sensitive, respectful, . skilful, and illuminating. Several of these essays merit repeated readings, and having revealed new levels of artistry and significance in thoroughly well-known texts, send the reader back to the texts for fresh experience. That is good criticism. In the fifteen essays and the thoughtful preface that attempts to make of them a coherent whole, there is a spectrum of critical approaches and also HUMANITIES 165 ofquality. Even theweakestessaycontributessomethingworth having,but the volume is not flawless. There are too many typographical errors (e.g., on pages 67, 83, 159, 187, 220, 221, 224, 225). Quotations are sometimes inexact; the page reference on page 211 should be 71, not 7; opening quotation marks (inverted commas, to the editor) are missing at times (e.g., page 213); italics are added to a quotation without acknowledgment on page 215 and omitted on page 232; on the latter page a word change alters the meaning of the quotation. In some essays the jargon ofsemiotics or deconstruction, or other critical approaches, is obtrusive,and occasionallysentencesare almost unreadable (e.g., on pages 208 and 213). Neither Barbara Godard nor her editor seems to have noticed that what are assumed to be Miranda's words to Prospero (Tempest V.i.183?) are Hamlet's words to Rosencrantz (Hamlet n.ii.314) (page 211). Slips such as this are unnerving, as is Godard's complete ignoring of four paragraphs of details of Winnipeg winter, the coldness of Morag's room, the 'steel-cold tub: and Morag's flu (Diviners 144).when she cites Morag's 'Reads Paradise Lost, sneezing: as a '''resisting'' reading' of the 'Milton intertext.' Blemishes there are, but also gems, so many that it may seem invidious to mention the brilliance of some. The reader who can leap the hurdle of technical jargon in Simone Vauthier's 'Images in Stones, Images in Words: Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel' is blessed with a sensitive, rewarding close reading that reveals a density of texture and a coherence in the text of The Stone Angel that many readers have sensed but few have articulated so convincingly. Laurence...