“Herbert leads the reader to see that building the human temple spiritually requires our sense of physical space in which objects are made to fit” [77], my emphasis.) Sherwood without apology seeks to recover Herbert’s central consciousness and intentions (even beyond history). Thus, though Sherwood writes as an avowedly secular critic of a religious subject, a more complete identification of critic with subject would be difficult to imagine. Such a straightforward procedure is polemical in its own right these days. Different readers (even Christian readers) will have differing responses to Herbert both in the seventeenth century and today. Readers will also have differing responses to Sherwood’s method and argument. The searching historical scholarship and detailed evidence adduced go far to allay skepticism, but a more rigorously and cautiously consistent perspective on the subject would also assist conviction. Sherwood generally writes with marked precision but at the cost of some abstractness and qualification that make reading difficult, as illustrated in some of the passages cited above. A further illustration of such difficulty is the choice of the rare verb “prevene” (123, line 12, and 177, note 18) — not recorded, for example, in the unabridged Random House Dictionary. Students will have to work to get at the many rewards of this book. The book is beautifully produced, with useful end notes and a detailed index of names and topics, though at the regrettably high cost reflected in the price. lindsay a . mann / Carleton University Judith Scherer Herz, The Short Narratives of E.M. Forster (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). ix, 168. $29.95 (U.S.) cloth. Herz’s deftly crafted monograph opens with definitions and a concise state ment of aim: the term narrative is elastically and persuasively defined to include both Forster’s short fiction and essays, and the study’s forthrightly stated polemical intention is to assist in recovering Forster’s reputation, which has slid considerably since his death in 1970. A theoretical chap ter on “Writing between the Genres” provides a firm foundation for the analyses that follow. Two chapters on the short stories precede an extended examination of Pharos and Pharillon, which also takes up the question of “Stracheyism.” A chapter on The Commonplace Book and on essays that enact a collision between the “private self and public text” hones in on the crucial topic of the allegiances of a self-confessed believer in non-belief, and a concluding chapter deals with Forster’s essays and lectures on literature, 357 drawing distinctions between his essayistic practice and interests and those of Virginia Woolf, and investigating aspects of their disagreement over the art of fiction. The two chapters on Forster’s short fiction eschew systematic exegesis and chronological arrangement for purposeful argument, focussing first on demonstrating the operations of a central mythologizing impulse variously voiced in “essayistic story” and then on complex narrative techniques that reveal (and conceal) a preoccupation with the problematics of narrative and history. Sensitive to stylistic nuance and informed by original scholarship in the Forster Archives at King’s College, Cambridge, Herz’s account offers fresh perspectives on material that is often enough either dismissively con sidered “minor” or prosaically thematized. The case for the stories as an essential key to understanding Forsterian narrative methods has nowhere been more forcefully argued, and the observations on the centrality of myth also illuminates the major fiction. Pharos and PhariUon, the result of Forster’s sojourn in Alexandria during the First World War, is posited as a useful and suggestive text for further establishing and exploring his tendency to generic hybridism. Turning to her second large topic, “story-like essay,” Herz argues that these short and occasional pieces form a coherent book united by a characteristic voice and reechoing concerns if not by prior intention. In Herz’s reading the collection is held together by the poignant contrast between prosaic Alexandria present and glorious Alexandria past, and the insistent tensions between the writer’s personal experience and his varied attempts to comprehend and fix historical events and individuals, the necessarily fluid, only partially apprehended, and ever-elusive matrices of existence. Her insightful commentary, further informed by references to Forster’s enthusiasm for the poetry...