A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

matic and textual insights. Chapter 1 introducesAtwood's life, the multiple representationsof "Canadian" and "feminist" in herwork, and her concerns with textuality andgenre—reflexivity, re-visionism, and intertextuality.These themes are expanded in the nextthree chapters. In Chapter 2, with "wilderness"as the key signature, Howells demonstratesAtwood's shift from the nationalistwritings of Surfacing and Survival to thepostcolonial interrogation of traditionalnarratives in "Wilderness Tips." Chapter 3reverses Toril Moi's terms to indicate theprogress of Atwood's "Feminine, Female,Feminist" themes. Howells reads The EdibleWoman through the lens of Betty Friedan'sThe Feminine Mystique in contrast to "TheFemale Body" (from Good Bones) whosegendered representations suggest parallelswith Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous.Chapter 4 examines Atwood's "reworkingof traditional Gothic motifs within theframes of realistic fiction" in Lady Oracleand The Robber Bride as exempla of her revisioningof cultural mythologies.The second half of the book devotes achapter each to detailed readings of fourlater novels. Life Before Man represents (inHomi Bhabha's vocabulary) a site of heterogeneousdiscourses within the "slippages"between genres. Similarly, BodilyHarm rewrites the female body "from thatborderline territory between fantasy andreality." The Handmaid's Tale, a feministdystopia, also interrogates gender andgenre and calls the reader to moral responsibility.Finally, Cat's Eye, Atwood's "lifewritingin the feminine," expands on Paulde Man, exposing the limits of female subjectivity.The conclusion summarizes withoutbringing artificial closure to a studywhich is both an intelligent introduction toAtwood and a worthy addition to the manycritical texts on her which Howell lists inher bibliography.MasqueradesBob PerelmanThe Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, foyce,Stein and Zukofsky. U of California PUS$40. oo/$i6.00Gerald NicosiaMemory Babe: A Critical Biography of JackKerouac. U California P US$18.00Reviewed by Christopher Brayshaw"In a critical context, genius is anembarassment," admits Bob Perelman onthe first page of The Trouble With Genius,his study of four very different modernistwriters: two with well-established criticalindustries founded on the explication anddissemination of their work (Pound,Joyce), and two who have only recently metwith sustained critical attention (Stein,Zukofsky). According to Perelman, whatdistinguishes the writings of these fourfrom those of other modernists likeWilliams, HD, and Marianne Moore, is anencyclopedic inclusiveness which tends "toresolve into a record of the writer's mind atwork (or play), and hence into a kind ofongoing autobiography."Pound, Joyce, Stein and Zukofsky all conceivedof their sprawling works as "masterpieces—bibles,permanent maps or X raysof society, blueprints for a new civilizationor demonstrations of the essence of thehuman mind." But paradoxically, theseworks, which were meant by their creatorsto be practically useful to non-specialists,are stylistically challenging and deliberatelyobscure. Their social value has been consequentlymediated through a body of criticalwritings which legitimate the authority ofthe masterworks themselves. But asPerelman argues, the accessibility offeredby critical mediation often comes at theexpense of its value to anything but criticalor scholarly interests: "[I]n many cases thevalue that is asserted to inhere in [critical]reading is only at the service of narratives167