nourish writing while remaining distinct from a received “Canadian intel lectual tradition (with the highest reaches of its firmament blazing with the glow of the Innis-McLuhan-Grant-Frye constellation)” (Smart, 17). These essays, and the writers they care passionately about, seem rather to be ex ploring the Canada of Marlene Nourbese Philip’s epigraph to Frontiers: “For Canada, in the effort of becoming a space of true true be/longing” (Fron tiers; cited in Rudy Dorscht, 150). And if a certain tension exists between Lee Maracle’s shake-down of academic discourse — “Words are not objects to be wasted. They represent the accumulated knowledge, cultural values, the vision of an entire people or peoples. We believe the proof of a thing or idea is in the doing” (7) — and the undeniably academic essays that follow, it is nonetheless clearly a fruitful tension, as essay after essay pays careful and necessary attention to places and people and real relations of power. susan lynne k n u tso n / Université Sainte-Anne David Staines, Beyond the Provinces: Literary Canada at Century’s End (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). x, 92. $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper. As the second millennium of the Common Era draws to a close, we can expect to read summaries of one sort or another of its meaning in various fields of endeavour. Beyond the Provinces, three essays delivered in March of 1994 as part of the continuing F.E.L. Priestley Lectures in the History of Ideas at the University of Toronto, is David Staines’s contribution. In Staines’s case, the assessment concerns the journey travelled by “Literary Canada” from colonial beginnings to the global-village present. Each of the essays addresses a different issue: the first tracing the maturation of novelistic fiction, the second identifying the essential Canadian position in the North American literary context, and the third adumbrating the critical landscape. “The Old Countries Recede” is the title of the first essay, and in it Staines adopts the metaphor of steps, or stages, in literary development, a reliable, if predictable, metaphor used by other commentators such as Frye and Rashley . The first step, Staines tells us, comprises that movement in which the works are coloured by their relationship to their European models. In effect, Canadian writers of the colonial period located their values, literary as well as social, elsewhere. Three writers, the almost-forgotten Ralph Connor, the again-fashionable L.M. Montgomery, and the still-popular Stephen Leacock, are chosen as exemplary of this early period in which the provincial here of Canada is always seen as marginalized and on the periphery of the more exotic, urbane, and central there. Canada, in other words, cannot, and does 230 not, exist in these writings except as defined by the external other. Inter estingly, Hugh MacLennan is perceived by Staines as the ne plus ultra of the colonial writers. “To define Canada,” Staines writes, “MacLennan could use only other nations. There, in other words, was still the basis for any understanding of here” (15). The movement from the colonial position toward the postcolonial begins, claims Staines, with the publication in 1959 of Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. This book, breathing its regional identity in every word of every line, is, maintains Staines, “an anti-regional novel, rejecting the colonial implica tions of regionalism, and denying any difference in the life lived in the local community and the life lived at the centre” (17). At virtually the same time that The Double Hook sounded the centrality of here in the Canadian con sciousness, voices of those other than the dominant voices of British heritage began to be heard. And those voices were, maintains Staines, those which declared the centrality of their ethnic here. The list of novelists who thus con tributed to the Canadian mosaic — Adele Wiseman, John Marlyn, Mordecai Richler among them — leads to a consideration of the Kunstlerroman, the novel which details the maturation of the artist figure in his or her particular here, and a form with which “Canada has been obsessed ... since the early 1960s” (21). Again the novelists cited — Richler, Cohen, Nowlan, Munro, Fraser, Atwood — are merely exemplary, and...