Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice ed. by Alan Heuser, and: A. M. Klein: Literary Essays and Reviews ed. by Usher Caplan and M. W. Steinberg

Abstract

both as a rescue mission which will liberate Watson from the restrictive mold in which he has been cast by Canadian art historians and cultural institutions and, on a broader level, as a means of providing “insights into the development of art in the colony of Canada and into the interplay between Canada’s changing self-image and the new concepts of art and nature in the national psyche.” A similar desire to explore the relationship between cultural history and life-writing (in this case, the letter) lies behind Marlene Kadar’s examination of Frida Kahlo’s letters to Ella Wolfe, previously overlooked, Kadar claims, because of the dominant public roles of their husbands. In a close reading of a letter from Kahlo to Wolfe, Kadar reveals just how much cultural history can be embedded in a private text. However, since Kadar is involved in a full-length study of Kahlo’s letters, her challenge will be to establish how such documents — unquestionably a valuable resource for the compilation of cul­ tural history — can go beyond being periodic acts of self-reflection and intro­ spection to become sustained attempts at self-definition. In her introduction, Evelyn J. Hinz, acknowledging the difficulty of per­ ceiving a unity in the critical approaches of these essays, points to the presence of conflict as a shared characteristic. This observation is developed into the valuable theory that drama rather than prose fiction provides the most appro­ priate generic touchstone to life-writing. After an astute and imaginative outline of some key points at which they overlap, Hinz decides that a fuller pursuit of her argument must await another opportunity. Thus, while the essays, directly or indirectly, deal with many of the theoretical questions in­ evitably raised in any discussion of life-writing, no comprehensive poetics of the genre emerges. The great value of this collection, however, is the manner in which it illuminates a disparate range of texts and simultaneously con­ tributes to the ongoing critical dialogue on life-writing. m ig h a el k e n n e a l l y / Marianopolis College Alan Heuser, ed., Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). xxiii, 279. $58.50 Usher Caplan and M. W. Steinberg, eds., A. M. Klein: Literary Essays and Reviews (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). xxix, 424. $40.00 cloth; $19.95 paper One of the ironies of the post-structuralist critical debate is manifested by the two collections of essays under review: in emphasizing that literature is a construct, the post-structuralist position has shifted literary scholarship’s focus from the text as autonomous to the text as inter-text. In so doing, literary scholarship is returning to some of its more traditional activities that have to do with re-creating the literary, cultural, and political circumstances of a text’s production. Students of modem poetry and modernism, most of whom lack ready access to either MacNeice’s or Klein’s manuscript collections, will wel­ come these two collections of essays, not only for their reflection of the individ­ ual author’s ideas on literature and society, but also for their re-creation of the writers’ milieus. While speculation about national differences in the develop­ ment of modernism might be invited by considering Anglo-Irish and JewishCanadian poets’ essays in one review, I will resist the temptation, thereby resisting that temptation to use “every book received . . . [as] a point of de­ parture, a springboard, in a sense an inspiration to write your own” (Klein, “Book Reviewing, in Seven Easy Lessons” 193). Instead, I will begin with Klein’s second lesson, adopting the guise of “ the table-of-contents authority” (193). The books differ in their organization. Caplan and Steinberg divide Klein’s literary essays into seven sections, each of which is arranged chronologically: (1) Jewish Literature and Culture; (2) Jewish Folk Culture; (3) The Bible; (4) Literature and the Arts; (5) Canadian Literature; (6) American, European, and English Literature; and (7) James Joyce’s Ulysses. Heuser organizes MacNeice’s essays chrono­ logically, but he informs his readers that the essays included may be divided into three categories: classical reviews; articles on and reviews of poetry, especially...