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

254 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 perhaps to avoid controversy, deleted the crocodile in a second version of the picture. Turner=s obvious struggle with this detail well attests to his determination at once to paint historical landscapes and to modernize their basis. Atmospherics, climate, and the elements all fell to Turner=s attempt to sustain and expand landscape=s capacity for historical meaning and textual reference. Finlay devotes the concluding chapter of his erudite volume to Turner=s late deluge pictures, where light and colour find themselves assimilated to the drama of biblical origins. That Turner here sought to ground his account in the latest scientific findings only underscores his commitment to the painter=s mission to educate and instruct. Doubtless those practices don=t accord with a modernist account of Turner, or an account keyed to the emergence of landscape painting as the unmediated representation of pure nature. And yet, one comes away from Finley=s text with new and surprising insights into many of his best-known pictures. That a single text can so challenge our expectations in this respect is no small achievement. (MARC GOTLIEB) D.L. Macdonald. Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography University of Toronto Press. xvi, 312. $60.00 Matthew Gregory Lewis lived during those traumatic and repressive decades when Britain was at war first with the French Revolution and then with Napoleon. He died just three years after the Battle of Waterloo, stricken by yellow fever after his second visit to his Jamaica plantations. It was a life that saw little peace, beginning in the dissensions of incompatible parents and ending with the dangerous uncertainties of long sea voyages and tropical fevers. The great strength of this biography lies in its presentation of The Monk. It investigates a variety of personal and literary contexts to further our understanding of Lewis=s most famous work: his studies of the German Schauerromane; the tedium of diplomatic duties in The Hague; the threats of an advancing revolutionary army in 1794; his careful reading of Ann Radcliffe=s Mysteries of Udolpho and William Godwin=s Caleb Williams. Macdonald assesses the novel=s strengths and peculiarities: the patterns behind its use of supernatural appearances; the ontological ambiguities of Matilda; the careful management of plot and subplot. It offers a full account of its reception, especially the opprobrium it attracted for appearing to advocate the bowdlerization of the Bible and for its graphic accounts of the power of sexual desire that motivates most of the characters, male and female, and lends the novel its pervasive eroticism. Our understanding is enriched by the coherence and detail of D.L. Macdonald=s account of Lewis=s novel and of the Gothic generally. HUMANITIES 255 Lewis=s punishment for including so much sex in The Monk was to be made the victim of two hundred years of lively speculation regarding his own sexuality. Writers of our times feel compelled to discover homosexual inclinations in people who kept their desires secret during times that did not encourage confidences. In chapter 4 Macdonald begins with a firm statement: >Lewis never married, and he left no records of any sexual relationship.= Undeterred by this acknowledgment, Macdonald first finds Lewis to be homosocial, not surprising in a society that separated the sexes from childhood. He assembles a case from Lewis=s smallness of stature, his male friendships, the motifs of forbidden love (all heterosexual) in The Monk to pronounce Lewis, sotto voce, a homosexual. While he never states his conclusion, he assumes it has been stated when, in the next chapter, he comments on the >violence that threatened him as a homosexual.= The assumption informs the rest of the biography. But it is the biography of an enigma and cannot avoid being speculative. We can disagree with some of Macdonald=s conclusions without thinking the less of his book. Although Lewis does not come vividly before our eyes, we close this richly documented book having learned much of the personality and careers of this intense, irascible, puzzling, and capable man. (KENNETH W. GRAHAM) James Reid. The Diary of A Country Clergyman, 1848B1851. Edited by M.E. Reisner McGill-Queen=s University Press. lxxxviii, 394. $65.00 The...

pdf

Share