offer a special instance of prophetic utterance. “The Lamb,” for exam ple, clearly portrays the adamic power of naming (though also, I suspect, the arguably “socio-political” mode of catechizing). Children are especially vulnerable to coercive and exploitative impositions from the socio-political sphere. The term “imposition,” a key word in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and elsewhere in Blake, becomes an important dimension of Esterhammer ’s theory in her analysis of the prophecies. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for example, Blake’s Isaiah claims the authority to impose upon his audience, and hence to effect changes in individuals and in society, through his sense of a “firm perswasion” and the voice of “honest indigna tion.” Blake’s sense of “imposition” enriches Esterhammer’s description of the tensions between the poet-prophet and society. In the final chapter on Jersualem, text and theory merge in a critical state ment that affirms, in a provocative reading of the final line of the poem, the authority of the visionary poet: “Jerusalem, as a social and spiritual entity, is brought into existence by the verbal pronouncement of the visionary poet” (216). The culminating integration of text and theory achieved in the final chapter leads me to comment on the structure of the entire book. Esterham mer’s study enacts the process of vision through its carefully orchestrated dialectic structure. The book also consists of seven chapters, the paradig matic number of vision. Esterhammer’s use of the structure and number of vision may show her debt to Northrop Frye, who used similar techniques and who is clearly an important influence on her work. If these assumptions are correct, then one can conclude with a metaphoric comparison of her work to the visionary prospects it examines: the way up the hill of vision in Esterhammer’s study is instructive, and the view of Jerusalem at the top is superb. d a v id g a y / University of Alberta W.R. Martin and Warren U. Ober, Henry James’s Apprenticeship (Toronto: P.D. Meany, 1994). xiv, 213. 2 illustr. $45.00 cloth. The task undertaken here by W.R. Martin and Warren U Ober may initially seem fairly clear and straightforward, but, as soon becomes evident, it is by no means without difficulty. They attempt not only to offer an analysis of each of the thirty-eight tales written in the first fifteen years of James’s career but also to show how these tales prepared for the writing of James’s first masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady. The most immediate problem is how to cope with those tales that James himself decided not to include in the New York Edition of his work. One, 349 “A Tragedy of Error,” was never even acknowledged by James as his (14); another, “Professor Fargo,” has been dismissed by Leon Edel as “one of James’s recurrent potboilers” (112); still another, “Rose-Agathe,” is cer tainly not done any injustice by Edel’s description of it as a “trifle.” 1 And there are other tales — many others — that could slow down the metabolism of any critical intelligence stubbornly plodding toward what would soon ap pear, with every additional page of dullness, as an impossibly distant finish line. What fortifies the reader for the journey is the sudden, and seemingly inexplicable, appearance of tales that are head and shoulders above the rest, tales like “The Madonna of the Future,” “Madame de Mauves,” and “An International Episode.” And, miraculously, towering above all these is the nouvelle that has gathered about it the mantle of greatness, “Daisy Miller.” But how does one trace the lines of development that accurately delineate this evolution? James himself obliquely hints that the nature of such a progression can indeed be traced. For James writes, in two separate passages quoted by Martin and Ober, that he was “ ‘the fond observer of the footsteps of genius’ ” (3), and that he would “ ‘follow in the footsteps’ of Stendhal and Balzac” (159); Leon Edel adds that, in James’s journey through Europe, James himself “knew ... there were moments when he distinctly felt as if he were following in the footsteps of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” 2...