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HUMANITIES 145 single work from a poetic canon and interpreting it outside that context. When MacDiarmid refers to 'the tyranny of facts: he is clearly alluding to his own struggle, in his self-styled 'poetry of facts: to come at the problem of modern fragmentation from another angle. Unhappy with the results of visionary inspiration which informed his earlier work, but which failed to lead to certainty, MacDiarmid turned to the 'facts: hoping in their multiplicity to find a unifying pattern. In the poem Alldritt has selected, MacDiarmid is escapingmomentarilyfrom the stern task he has set himself, as well as from the war. In general, Alldritt overstates his case when he claims that the four poems cited are 'the principle [sic] artifacts of high modernism in poetry in English: and he fails to establish, at least in my view, the validity of 'high modernism' as a concept. Is, for example, the heightened intensity he finds in this period a product solely of the war, or does it reflect the maturity of the poets in question? Nevertheless, we are given a provocative analysis of four wartime poems by four major twentieth-century poets, and their common concerns with language and meaning,accentuated by the war, are soundlyestablished. Without acceptingAlldritt's thesis in its entirety, then, one can still find much in this study to admire. (JOHN BAGLOW) Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte, editors. Modes ofNarrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction: Presented to Helmut Bonheim Konigshausen und Neumann. 213_ OM 68 paper .Modes ofNarrative was put together on the occasion of the sixtieth birthday of Helmut Bonheim, professor of English and American literature at the University of Cologne, and contains twenty-two essays by scholars from Britain, France, Canada, the USA, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. As diverse as the contributors' national origins is the range of topics discussed in the essays. As the Introduction declares, the book 'unites contributions on some of Professor Bonheim's favourite topics - Chaucer, the early English novel, Joyce and the short story - as well as more recent interests like Canadian literature or poststructuralist theory. There does not appear to be a particular order to the arrangement of essays, so someone who reads the book from cover to cover experiences an interesting sequenceoftopics. Forexample, one moves from'An Approach to Jack Hodgins' The Barclay Family Theatre' via essays about Troilus and Criseyde and John Fowles to 'Robinson Crusoe and the Problem of Coherence : Hardly anybody will proceed in this manner, however, but consult the book for one or several individual essays. All essays are concerned, in one way or another, with questions of narrative strategy. The volume begins with an essay on 'Metaphor in the 146 LEITERS IN CANADA 1990 Twentieth-Century Novel' which focuses on the ground that modern theory opens for the interpretation of metaphors and then applies these insights to some high modernist texts. The essay suffers, however, from a lack of space. The same problem is evident in the book's final article, a study of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. The essay appears to be a highly condensed version ofa longer work, so that the text is occaSionally difficult to follow, particularly for a reader not very familiar with Richardson's works. Far more successful is, for example, Konrad Gross's study on 'Survival of Orality in a Literate Culture: Leslie Silko's Novel Ceremony.' In this very informed essay, the author examines a novel that makes Significant use of traditional Native forms of narrative within the novel form and successfully combines two radically distinct concepts of narration. Also noteworthy are Walter Pache's essay on the British short story of the 189OS, Ulrich Suerbaum'sstudyofDefoe'searly writing, and PaulGoetsch's examination of Robinson Crusoe's first day on his island. Six of the book's twenty-two essays discuss texts from Canadian literature. In 'The Search for Autonomous Voices: Intertextuality and Revision in Modern Fiction: Waldemar Zacharasiewicz examines the drafting of the respective first novels by William Styron and Jack Hodgins with regard to the texts' diminishing indebtedness to the model provided by William Faulkner. Also concerned with a Hodgins text is Simone Vauthier's 'Reader's Squint: which examines...

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