of the market for commodity-books. To the extent, on the other hand, that she conformed to those market structures she was producing a commodity-book. (49) There is, however, no real evidence, as there seems to be for Pickwick and Esmond, that this particular format interpellated a particular audience. True, Eliot’s insistence on the format she had chosen can be seen as a result of “ the historical project of professionalization” (49), but the specific format might have been anything. A second difficulty with this text has to do with terminology. As the paragraph above demonstrates, the flow of argument is often needlessly clogged by jargon. One acknowledges that in a study of this sort, a certain amount of technical language is unavoidable, but it is also true that a much greater proportion of the book than there is at present might have been expressed in ordinary English with no loss of precision and a considerable gain in clarity. Ultimately, one perseveres with this book, in spite of its opacity, because the research is solid and the insights are genuinely illu minating. NOTE 1 This term, which is not a misspelling for interpolates, comes from Althusser, 182, and is glossed by Feltes as “ invok[ing] its willing reader as a (free) subject” (x). W O R K S CITED Althusser, Louis. “ Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. B. Brewster. London: N LB, 19 71. Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-igoo. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957. Ford, George H. Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel Criticism Since 1836. New York: Norton, 19 65: 1955. Gettmann, Royal A. A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers. Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, i960. Griest, Guinevere L. M udie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel. Blooming ton: Indiana University Press, 1970. Patten, Robert L. Charles Dickens and his Publishers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Sutherland, John A. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. London: Athlone Press, 1976. J u d i t h p r e s c o t t f l y n n / University of Manitoba Hallvard Dahlie, Varieties of Exile: The Canadian Experience (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986). 216. $22.50 Varieties of Exile: The Canadian Experience, by Hallvard Dahlie, opens unexpectedly with Ovid but closes more manageably with Josef Skvorecky to distinguish the manifestation of exile in its Canadian context from its Old World counterparts. 480 Beginning with the characteristics of an exile in the year a .d . 8 , Varieties samples English-Canadian exile literature of the past 200 years or so, written in prose, with emphasis on the twentieth century. It fails, however, to truly distinguish Canadian from Old World exile literature, by making little attempt to examine the latter in any depth. Inevitably, as well, the book lacks a thesis and the intrinsic organization normally flowing from sound argu ment. Acknowledging that “genuine exile is a permanent condition characterized by dislocation, alienation, and dispossession” (4), Dahlie examines the work of selected writers who have “physically moved to or from Canada, as long as they have communicated a substantial imaginative or artistic perception of the realities and/or myths about Canada” (6). Later we learn that Varieties’ “major concern is more to demonstrate that the phenomenon of exile has been a frequently recurring element in Cana dian literature, than it is to attempt a discussion of all the works that exploit this component” (9). Subsequent reading reveals that the 202 pages of text are basically an eclectic comparison/contrast of the work of some 20 writers, from Frances Brooke in Emily Montague (1769) to Skvorecky in The Engineer of Human Souls (1984), arbitrarily chosen for their bearing on an unmanageably wide definition of exile. Dahlie’s groping for a more precise thesis produces a side glance at Cana dian existentialism with recurring nods to familiar historical notions of the Canadian “garrison mentality” and the artist as exile in his own society. Accordingly, Dahlie rehearses the colonial experiences of Brooke, Moodie, Traill, Galt, Duncan, only to make a strange jump forward to Frederick Niven’s novels of the thirties and forties and to...