In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

244 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Dennis Duffy. A World under Sentence: John Richardson and the Interior ECW Press. 182. $20.00 When Carl F. Klinck introduced an abridged fifth Canadian edition ofJolm Richardson's Wacousta in 1967, he observed that 'the autobiographical nature of the book grows upon the reader.' Not surprisingly, as Klinck's successors considered the self-designated 'first Canadian novelist,' studies with titles citing the Wacousta 'factor/ 'syndrome,' or 'nightmare' extrapolated national templates from the psychomachia of Richardson's fiction. Despite the suggestions of its title, Dennis Duffy's A World under Sentence: John Richardson and the Interior is less interested in representing Wacousta as a source for grand narratives of national or regional identities. Instead, Duffy places his emphasis on specific historical contexts for Richardson's fiction, thereby complementing studies more likely to stress literary influences from Gothic, sentimental, or historical romance. Duffy's title plays on multiple meanings for both 'sentence' and 'interior' as he attempts 'a kind of commentary other than the typical literary monograph.' Rather than pursuing the 'naming' and 'coming to voice' arguments characteristic of progressivist nationalist readings, Duffy emphasizes the place of Richardson's sentences in a frontier world unfettered by closed systems of literacy. Concomitantly, he is less interested in Richardson's psychological journeys to the interior than in the details of the historical and cultural discourses mediated on the frontier in which Richardson struggled with both selfhood and systems. While beginning like many of its predecessors with a chapter locating Richardson in relation to James Fenimore Cooper, A World under Sentence moves in its four central chapters to speculate on the relevance of extraliterary contexts for Richardson's fiction. The fur trade offers images to the young Richardson of an apparent equilibrium between cultures which would disintegrate into genocidebefore his death. Inthis nexus ofstruggles for power and control arising from conflicting social, cultural, and economic codes, Duffy finds historical analogues for the indeterminacy and disequilibrium more commonly linked to the borderland ofromance. Similarly , in the social landscape of Richardson's North America, Duffy finds instances of disguises, asswned identities, and conflations of dream and history which anticipate the pervasiveness of such motifs in Wacousta. His argtunent'is that 'the intensities of the frontier, the inevitability of dramatic confrontation with the other, offered a theatre for radical shifts in selfhood and its social dimensions.' By delineating some of these extra-literary contexts, Duffy attempts to show that 'what functions in the literary world as artistic convention - the stuff of adventure and romance - flourishes as sober fact in Richardson's frontier one.' Thus, when A World under Sentence returns in its final chapters to questions of Richardson's contribution to the HUMANITIES 245 popular novel of the North American frontier, and to the late novel Westbrook as an exemplary text in the literary representation of southwestern Ontario, Duffy insists on the.importance of stressing folklore over fiction, history over romance. . A World under Sentence is Dennis Duffy's third monograph considering Richardson's work, its predecessors both having been written within the constraints of the ECW Press series, Canadian Writers and Their Works and Canadian Fiction Studies. Although the title ofthe latter volume, A Tale ofSad Reality. John Richardson's 'Wacousta' hints at his interest in coming to terms with Richardson's claims for the realism of his fiction, A World under Sentence offers Duffy the opportunity to return to research findings underlying, but not developed in, his earlier studies, and the chance to pursue particular points of interest within a loose structure of his own devising. Surviving as a legacy of the introductory predecessors is a twopage precis of Wacousta in the notes of A World under Sentence, a superfluous inclusion in a study that can only be of interest to serious students of Richardson's career and fiction. Duffy's historicizing is not pursued through any rigorous adherence to materialist theory, nor does he break new ground in theories of canon formation as he attempts to place Richardson's novels in the context ofAmerican fiction oftheir time. Instead, the book's primary interest stems from its usefulness as a supplement to the seminal studies of David Beasley, Michael Hurley...

pdf

Share