To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Book
Notes
together much information not readily
available elsewhere, and involves Dionne
Brand, Tony Boxill, and others with a
Canada-based perspective.
Anthologies also fall sometimes into the
"Reference" category, as do reprints and
other related texts. Recent books include
Stewart Brown, éd., Caribbean Poetry Now,
2nd ed. (Routledge, $13.95), a collection of
works on 10 themes, in which it would have
been good to see more poems by Lorna
Goodison and other contemporary women;
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, éd., The Oxford
India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian
Poets (Oxford, $15.50), including works by
Eunice de Souza and Agha Shahid Ali as
well as the more familiar Seth, Moraes,
Ezekiel, and Kolatkar; Michael Ackland's
The Penguin Book of 19th Century
Australian Literature (Penguin, $17.95),
which rediscovers 19th-century Australian
women, and reads Clarke, Lawson, and
Kendall beside Louisa Lawson, Baynton,
and Ada Cambridge, against a broad range
of themes including landscape, sex roles,
and the past; Yolande Grisé and Jeanne
d'Arc Lortie's ed. of Les Textes Poétiques du
Canada Français 1606-186/ (vol. 6:1856-
1858): a massive, 320-poem selection from
various sources, dutifully edited for textual
variants; and René Dionne's Anthologie de
la poésie franco-ontarienne (Prise de Parole,
n.p.), which includes work by William
Chapman, Alfred Garneau, Simone Routier,
Pierre Trottier, and Cécile Cloutier, among
others, who are often treated purely as
Quebeckers. Reprints include Samuel de
Champlain's Des Sauvages, ed. and annot.
by Alain Beaulieu and Real Ouellet (Editions
TYPO, n.p.), Champlain's first book,
adapted to contemporary French, with
index, bibliography, appendices on the economics
of the time and other subjects, and
some illustrations, though these are not as
clear as might have been hoped for.
Another group of works is primarily critical.
Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn
subtitle their Redrawing the Boundaries
(MLA, n.p.) "The Transformation of
English and American Literary Studies";
this process takes place, apparently (the
boundaries are theirs after all, in the first
place, not mine), by inviting a bunch of
U.K.-&-U.S.-based theorists to review the
literature on Feminism, Gender Criticism,
African-American Criticism, Deconstruction,
and Composition Studies; the most useful
article is Homi Bhabha's on "Postcolonial
Criticism" (pp. 437-65), discussing cultural
difference, social authority, and political
discrimination in order to show the "antagonistic"
and "ambivalent" moments in
structures of modernity (a useful, if familiar,
bibliography is attached). Other collections
include Colby Quarterly 19.2 (1993), a
special issue on the American presence in
Canadian literature, Canadian and
American painting, Mavis Gallant, and
George Bowering on Vancouver; Gordon
Collier, ed., Us/Them: Translations,
Transcriptions and Identity in Post-Colonial
Literary Cultures (Rodopi, n.p.), an anthology
of European conference papers on
prairie literature, Findley, Dub Poetry, Eliza
Fraser, Foe, Rushdie, and multiculturalism
(including two papers by Michael Batts and
Smaro Kamboureli); and Balz Engler, ed.,
Writing & Culture (Gunter Narr Verlag,
DM 48—), vol. 6 in the Swiss Papers in
English Language and Literature series, with
a wide embrace of topics, from Literacy in
Papua New Guinea to Margery Kempe,
Melville, and Native American culture. A
Survey of Modern English (Routledge,
$31.50), by Stephan Gramley and Kurt-
Michael Patzold, includes general articles
on English pronunciation, grammar, gender,
and (of special interest) language variations
around the Commonwealth.
Visual books also furnish valuable reference
data. Land Spirit Power: First Nations
at the National Gallery of Canada (National
Gallery, n.p.) is a critical history of the
gallery's exhibitions, with essays on spiritual
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