Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology ed. by Germaine Warkentin (review)

HUMANITIES 177 West Indies with which few will disagree. Chamberlin's non-West Indian critical and theoretical perspective is a welcome contribution to West Indian literary and cultural studies. Some readers will inevitably raise the dubious issue of cultural appropriation. To draw accurate conclusions about individuals it is necessary to consult both autobiographies and biographies; to draw accurate conclusions about cultures and societies should require similar subjective and objective, internal and external considerations. Come Back to Me My Language provides a valuable non-West Indian assessment of West Indian poetry that c:omplements such earlier West Indian studies as Edward Baugh's West Indian Poetry 1900-1970: A Study in Cultural Colonization (1971) and Lloyd W. Brown's West Indian Poetry (1978). (VICTOR J. RAMRAJ) Germaine Warkentin, editor. Canadian Exploration Literature: An AlIthology Oxford University Press. 464. $24.95 paper University courses surveying early Canadian prose generally begin with Wacousta (1832) and other nineteenth-century fiction, yet Canada possesses a literary history stretching over two hundred years before this period. The explorers, fur traders, and settlers who brought from Europe a variety of imperialist and capitalist goals produced many fascinating narratives which document the dissemination of European culture over the new territory. The annotated bibliography The Travellers: Canada to 1900 (University of Guelph 1989) lists over 250 exploration and travel books published from 1577 to the middle of the nineteenth century, and these works are an important intellectual and historical resource. However, it has been difficult to conduct research and to develop university courses in this area because many manuscripts are out of print and, of those that can be located, many suffer from uneven editing. Germaine Warkentin's Canadian Exploration Literature is an important scholarly work which contains twenty-five clearly presented texts, beginning with Pierre-Esprit Radisson in 1660 and ending with Captain John Palliser in 1859. Warkentin has taught and researched Renaissance and early Canadian literature for several years and has included a variety of narratives from both well-known and minor historical figures, including two women (Frances Simpson and Letitia Hargrave) and the Piegan chief Saukamapee (as transcribed by David Thompson). This anthology can be used for teaching purposes, and scholars who have already researched some of these authors will find much helpful contextual material; the diverse selection should also appeal to any casual reader interested in Canadian history. Canadian Exploration Literature is divided chronologically into five parts, the titles of which summarize the different intentions and projects of 178 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 explorers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries: 'Discovery or Contact?'; 'The Great North-West in the Eighteenth Century'; ILife and Letters among the Explorers'; 'An Imperial Enterprise'; 'Prelude to Settlement.' These titles delineate a historical progression from initial contact, through the long period of the fur trade's economic hegemony, to the nineteenth century, where politics diversified and explorers like John Palliser were also civil servants, surveying the land for its agricultural and settlement potential. While titles such as these are inevitably provisional (for instance, in almost all the texts exploration is an 'Imperial Enterprise'), they succeed in characterizing general themes regarding how and why Canada became, to quote the title Richard Ruggles's 1991 book, A Country So interesting. One of the most sensible aspects of Canadian Exploration Literature is its layout: each narrative is prefaced by a concise and intelligent introduction , and by a small map illustrating the geography and place names about which the explorer wrote. These maps reinforce the fact that each text describes a territory -it has helped inscribe into our culture. An example of this territory is 'Rupert's Land' with its 'vague, immense boundaries/ which Warkentin describes as a metaphor for the whole of Canadian life, for its history since the beginning, for its abiding relationship with the land both in its 'pastoral' (David Thompson 's word) and its agricultural phases, and for its intransigent social complexity , so at odds with the exclusionary principles by which societies of whatever sort announce their difference from other societies. No master narrative of the kind Americans have devised to account for their own social complexity has been possible in Canada, and in this respect the vast enigma...