A Spectrum of Literary Approaches

A Spectrum of Literary Approaches THE ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CANADA'S MAJOR AUTHORS, VOLUME FIVE. Ed. Robert Leeker and Jack David. Downsview, Ontario: ECW Press, 1984. 480 pp. IN THEIR WORDS: INTERVIEWS WITH FOURTEEN CANADIAN WRITERS. Bruce Meyer and Brian O'Riordan. Toronto: Anansi, 1984. 211 pp. A CLIMATE CHARGED: ESSAYS ON CANADIAN WRITERS. B. W Powe. Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1984. 196 pp. GAINING GROUND: EUROPEAN CRITICS ON CANADIAN LITERATURE . Ed. Robert Kraetsch and Reingard M. Nischik. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1985. 303 pp. The four books under review here accumulated in somewhat random fashion. As it happens, however, they combine usefully in terms of the variety of material now available in the field of Canadian literary studies. One is a bibliographical aid, one a collection of interviews , one an exercise in literary criticism, and one an unusual example of academic scholarship. Together, they touch most of the bases for current literary approaches in this country. Bibliography The first publication in the Annotated Bibliography ofCanada's Major Authors series appeared in 1979. The present volume is the fifth, and is devoted to the writings of Morley Callaghan, Mavis Gallant, Hugh Hood, Alice Munro, and Ethel Wilson. Clearly designed for practising scholars and research students, the series isn't a bibliography in the purest sense, since it offers no details concerning the physical make-up and bindings of the books in question and no listings of 154 reissues as distinct from new editions. On the other hand, it goes beyond the conventions of standard bibliography in providing helpful notes on many entries (mainly secondary materials), including briefaccounts of the arguments ofcritical articles and selected reviews. The practical usefulness of the system can hardly be questioned. Let us suppose, for example, that I wish to undertake some scholarly research on Mavis Gallant. This bibliography lists in chronological order the articles she has contributed over the years to the Montreal Standard and other periodicals. These are not annotated, but a glance at their titles will indicate their probable relevance. Thus, if I am interested·in Gallant's relations to Canadian literary tradition, I discover that she has written articles on Maria Chapdelaine, Sara Jeannette Duncan and Hugh MacLennan, Bonheur d'occasion, and Sarah Binks, and that she contributed an article with the intriguing title "What is Style?" to Canadian Forum. (There is also an article entitled "The Book I'm Writing," and it's a pity the editors didn't help us by identifying the book in question.) However , if I'm interested in some of the dominant thematic preoccupations in her .fiction, I would be wise to look up an account of a Canadian airman's experience in a German prison-camp, two articles on war-brides, and others on the society of French Canada and on marriage and divorce. The entries for each author are reasonably uniform, though inevitably variations reveal themselves. Individual bibliographers tend to give detailed break-downs of manuscript holdings if descriptions are.already available, but are vague (as in the case of Hood) when material is uncatalogued. There are some inconsistencies of presentation where volumes of collected essays are concerned . Each contribution to The Callaghan Symposium and The Ethel Wilson Symposium is individually numbered, described, and annotated, while a similar collection devoted to Hood is merely listed in a long single Revue detudes canadiennes Vol. 21, No. I (Printemps 1986 Spring) entry. Again, we learn from Michel Fabre's essay in Gaining Ground (reviewed later) that Gallant revised a story like "Orphans' Progress" between magazine and book publication; this fact does not show up here, though similar instances in the Munro bibliography are duly noted as "revised." I note these discrepancies not as serious criticisms uniformity can be overrated - but mere1y as observations for the general editors to consider. Volume Five is a worthy continuation of a series that is proving itself invaluable to the serious student of Canadian literature. Interviews Bruce Meyer and Brian O'Riordan report that their book arose out of a sense "that there wasn't enough recent source material in which English Canadian authors discussed what they intended their work to say, why it took shape the way it did, and why...