Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American Literary Expressionism by Sherrill E. Grace (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 395 book, Buitenhuis analyzes the consequences of writing propaganda on the later fiction of such important pre-War literary giants as Kipling, Wells, Bennett and especially Ford, whose Parade's End is "probably the greatest English novel written about the Great War." For many of these men, Buitenhuis explains, writing became an act of commemoration for those who had died and an act of atonement for their own complicity in the war effort. Fiction was a way to set the record straight and to sound a warning that a writer who gets involved in propaganda runs the risk of losing his soul as well as his detachment. But the irony was that people no longer wanted to read the old men. Their works were pushed aside because they did not gibe with the literature of disillusionment produced by younger writers. If I have a complaint about this book it is that there should be more. I wish Buitenhuis had expanded his focus to include in greater detail the propaganda efforts of the Central Powers and to analyze the function of German-writers in the aftermath of the War. Robert Wahl's "collective biography," The Generation of 1914, offered this kind of multi-cultural sweep of the "lost generation." Perhaps Buitenhuis could provide the same treatment for his generation of older writers. Reassessing the work of these hoary old gents may not lead to redemption, but re-evaluation is surely better than neglect. Sandra Martin Toronto Sherrill E. Grace, Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American Literary E.xpressionism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. 318 pp. Illus. In this ambitious book Sherrill Grace develops a comparative analysis of Canadian and American literatures within the framework of the international development of Expressionism in the arts. This is a timely study, appearing at the end of a decade of neo-Expressionist painting. In her conclusion, Grace examines the implications of this second phase of Expressionism, mainly in the visual arts, within the context of the contemporary critical debate on the relative alignments of Modernism and Post-Modernism, to argue that Expressionist aesthetics constitute a "vital tradition and alternate vision" throughout twentieth-century art practices. 396 Shorter Book Reviews Drawing on a variety of North American dramatists and novelists-Eugene O'Neill, Herman Voaden, Djuna Barnes, Malcolm Lowry, Sheila Watson, Ralph Ellison--Grace effectively demonstrates the prevalence in their work of contradictory images of violence and transfiguration, atavism and utopia, figures of a vision of apocalyptic purgation or regression to oblivion. American literature, she tentatively suggests, tends to the apocalyptic and to abstraction while Canadian literature exhibits a preference for representation and empathy. But attempts at generalization are immediately undercut by the expressive abstraction of The Double Hook and the atavism of The Great God Brown. Although the chapters devoted to each author form the largest part of the book, its argument does not rest on the revelations of close reading alone. Grace selected for inclusion onlywriters with documented direct contact with Expressionist poetics, either through citations like Djuna Barnes's acknowledgement of Strindberg, or Watson's doctoral thesis on the British Expressionist, Wyndham Lewis. This makes all the more compelling the canonical challenge of Grace's study. As she comments, the writers she has selected have been outside the accepted "central tradition" in both countries. The coherent pattern of interrelationship she develops would suggest new alignments of the respective national literatures in which all these writers have had niches as innovative experimenters. Canadian literature will find this canonical challenge harder to assimilate in light of the critical refusal to recognize a modernist avant-garde, successfully ignoring such an "unCanadian " style. However, Grace's insightful reading of Nightwood makes claims for a change in evaluation of the status of Djuna Barnes, whose work within this international context would no longer appear that of a maverick. Grace also points out gender differences in Barnes's deployment of Expressionist conventions, a characteristic also of Sheila Watson's work. As this focus on documented influence implies, Grace's approach is that of the literary historian and critic. The discussion of North American developments of Expressionist poetics is grounded in an introductory analysis outlining...