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Reviews 317 educated in France. Tavernier-Courbin, professor ofEnglish at the University of Ottawa, edited CriticalEssays onJackLondon (1983) and TheHumorofJackLondon (1992). Published asNo. 142 ofTwayne’sMasterworkSeries, thisvolume contains asuccinct assessment of London’s literary and historical context followed by interpretive readings of the novel as naturalistic, mythical, archetypal, and romantic. Tavernier-Courbin ar­ gues that the novel provides intellectual and rational satisfaction because ofits successful Naturalism while also offering the reader psychological and emotional gratification through complete identification with Buck at the level ofmyth andjungian archetypes. The volume includes a partiallyannotated bibliography, a chronology, and illustra­ tions of London and of the Bond Dawson cabin with dog Jack (the model for Buck). While Tavernier-Courbin writeswith zestand treats London asaseriouswriter, she relies on dated sources in her discussion of London’s international reputation and, perhaps inadvertently, neglects to include several keyworksin the listofbibliographical materials. Nevertheless, this volume signals a reawakening of interest in The Call of Wild and no better reading of this classic exists in English. SUSAN M. NUERNBERG University ofWisconsin-Oshkosh Jack London. RevisedEdition. ByEarle Labor andJeanne Campbell Reesman. (New York: Tawyne Publishers, 1994. 197 pages, $21.95.) This version ofJack London both surpasses and complements Earle Labor’s original study published in 1974. Itgives more attention to stories initiallyneglected such as ‘The Night-Born,” “Samuel,” and “All Gold Canyon,” and contains updated bibliographic material. The work forms an interesting contrast to the earlier edition’s apologetic defense ofjack London, and itisavaluable introductorywork,with new readings of texts such as TheValley OJTheMoonand TheLittleLady oftheBigHouse. However, the book is heavily biased towards the solipsistic,Jungian view of London and is less understanding towards key works such as ThePeople oftheAbyssand TheIron Heel. Further explorations of materialistic elements within the supposedly exclusive Jungian domains of the South Sea works are needed. Furthermore, London’s “protests against the enormities perpetrated bycapitalist overlords may [not] sound as foreign to modem America”as the authors believe. TONY WILLIAMS SouthernIllinois University A Reader's Companion to theFiction of Willa Cather. ByJohn March. Edited by Marilyn Arnold, with Debra Lynn Thornton. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993. 880 pages, $99.50.) Thousandsofentriescontained in thisdelightful literaryreference workrange from “A” (a French town visited by Claude Wheeler and David Gerhardt in One of Ours) to “Zuni”(the Southwestern Indian pueblo and site of a tale of mission revolt told in Death Comesfor theArchbishop).Along the waycharacters and historic figures found in her work 318 Western American Literature as well as numerous allusions to literature, art, music, architecture, and vernacular culture that make up Cather’sfictional and historical worlds are identified, indexed, and discussed in enlightening amplification. This engaging encyclopedic entry into the imaginative space of her fiction began with more than four decades ofJohn March’s exhaustive traditional bibliographic and archival research into the material and historic backgrounds for narrative details found in Cather’s “kingdom of art” and was completed through the contemporary computer-assisted fact-checking, indexing, and editorial scholarship of Arnold and Thornton. In the transformation ofMarch’sinitial manuscriptfor a “Handbook ofWilla Cather” into A Reader’s Companion to the Fiction of Willa Cather, Thornton and Arnold separated entries for Cather’s essays and poems for a projected second volume of the Companion, brought March’sgendered references into keeping with contemporary criti­ cal perspectives, and added detail from March’s own notes to enlarge entries for signifi­ cant characters. In theirgreatest contribution for current readers, Arnold andThornton added indexing of every entry in March’s manuscriptwith the fictional workfrom which it is drawn. Where March presumed readers would only come to his handbook directly from Cather’s fiction, the added indexing has made the Companion a reference book reward­ ing to readfor itself. Read separately, the editors suggest, the Companionshould provide a productive point of departure and accompaniment for further Cather scholarship. As such, it is “a true reader’scompanion and inherently more than a reference guide to the fiction.”As a result of this approach, the Companion feels somewhat more like a lively dialogue, a complex conversation involving innumerable interconnections between Cather’s short stories and novels and the continuing curiosities and concerns of her committed readership, than an alphabetically ordered dictionary. MARKSCHLENZ University ofCalifornia...

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