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558 DENNlS DUFFY and Fletcher proved sufficiently rich and challenging to maintain a prospering generic institution.' Brian Corman has made a significant contribution to Restoration studies in writing this book. Fictions of the Canadian West DENNIS DUFFY Arnold E. Davidson. Coyote Country Fictions ofthe Canadian West Duke University Press 1994. 223. us $32.95 cloth, 12.95 paper As stated on its back cover, this study deals with 'a number of Canada's most interesting and experimental Western writers [who] parody, reverse, or otherwise defuse the paraphernalia of the classic u.s. Western.' The confusion in that statement is not confined to the jacket of the book. The first time used geographically , the second time generically, the tenn 'Western' forms a cognate, rather than a synonym, when shifted from Canadian to American discourse. The author takes pains to establish the difference between Canada's and the United States' occupation of their respective 'Wests.' It seems somewhat inconsistent, therefore, to compare one nation's 'serious' with another's 'popular' writing, as if Canadian writers read with sophistication what Americans understood naIvely. The Double Hook, Badlands, The Tent Peg: these and other canonized Canadian texts in Davidson's account in fact parody, reverse, and defuse classic American Westerns. So also do such non-classic American Westerns as Evan Connell's Son of the Morning Star, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Tony Hillerman's A ThiefofTime, and Thomas Berger's Little Big Man. Indeed, the box-office success of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven demonstrates how widespread is the interest in the antiWestern . What we like to think of as postcolonial and postmodern fiction has in fact been covered under NAFl"A; and flows freely between borders. Wallace Stegner's classic Wolf Willow erased a number of distinctions essential to doctrinaire nationalism. Neither author nor title of this genre-breaking text earns a mention in this study, which prefers to praise its own texts at the expense of a straw cowboy. Implicit is a sense that the Western is written only by the likes of Luke Short and Louis L'AmourinAmerica, while a group ofhighbrow Canadians keep sending the fonn up. A more precise way of stating the focus of Davidson's study is to remark that it concentrates upon 'serious' writers from Western Canada whose narratives undermine the categories of Western discourse established by the Enlightenment. .Chronological sequence, linearity, rationality, univocality: these are the targets for the writers whom Davidson and the academy currently esteem. His study, unimpeachable in its selection of poststructuralist criticism, wittily written in the terminology of that enterprise, glories in its discernment of the self-reflexive, the subversive, and the culturally deconstructive. These preoccupations abound, if not always in the authors, at least in the works that Davidson selects. Thus The FICTIONS OF lliE CANADIAN WEST 559 Temptations ojBig Bear is treated, but not The Blue Mountains ofChina or My Lovely Enemy. The horses of instruction are left to plod their way into other studies. The trickster figure of Coyote rules here. He is no less valorizing in his pursuits, however, than his competitor gods. Certain in its grasp of Coyote's cultural project, the study is at its best when discussing 'Canadian Westems: New Forms' and 'Feminist Revisions.' Its hold on 'Native Affairs' in the book's final section at times wobbles, as when it annexes Peter Such's Riverrun, on the extinction of the Beothuk of Newfoundland, to its study ofWestems. Any readerwillbenefit from Coyote Country's many insights into the texts thatit scrutinizes. Some mayhesitate at a mode of readingliterature which engages with a work because it is 'an ideologically paradigmatic text rather than an aesthetically exemplary one.' All will agree that no Canadian critic wishing to be considered au courant can ignore it. ...

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