CRONIN, JAN and SIMONE DRICHEL, eds. Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame. Cross/Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures in English (Crossc): 110. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 227 pp. $75.00. Edited by Jan Cronin and Simone Drichel, Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame proposes fresh or refreshed angles of approach to Janet Frame's oeuvre which, in their accumulation, work less to frame than to unframe Frame from smothering bag of unself-critical (biographical, nationalist, social-realist) criticism. The volume consists of nine essays organized into three sections: Meta-Critical Frame(s), which contains Cronin's and Lawn's essays; Metaphysical Frame(s), to which Wevers, Smaill, Baisnee, and Michell have contributed; and Beyond Frame(s) of Representation, which is made up of essays by Delrez, Prentice, and Drichel. Considering that titles of all three subsections contain word (or prefix meta), one may do worse than to chart interpretations of in different contributions to provide a quick overview of volume and, possibly, point to discussions that are likely to surface in next few years. Starting with Cronin's perception that author regularly recycles parable of (15) and with Delrez's argument that conquered surfaces of our reality are signposted with markers of an external dimension felt to exist beyond frame of representation (141), we could easily imagine that, in Frame, those who live by rules of conquered surfaces dwell in shadow world, Plato's cave. It is at this juncture that contemporary Janet Frame criticism subdivides into two discrete schools of thought. The transcendentalists (or Delrezian school, as I call them), all seem to agree that Frame's remedial scale is, by definition, (Delrez 143) so that self who attempts to peep at the transcendent Good (Drichel 202) is necessarily seeing mere reflections of his [or her] own representations (Cronin 17). In transcendental readings, Frame's humanity is left to contend with a shadow from which it is impossible to escape. Equally aware of insulation of self, proponents of second school, whom I call existentialists, consider that beyond cave is outside world. Whether this outside is, in turn, fitted with a transcendent beyond is, for most part, not these readers' concern. In Smaill's analysis, then, our neo-Platonist cave is refuge of self who seeks to escape from extreme facticity (79) of things, and from contingencies of Time and Death in the objective world (86), whereas authentic life is an existential synthesis between one's subjectivity and the possibility of an externalized, objective point of view (80). Frame's condemnation of self-willed retreat into pure subjectivity (Smaill 82) is but at a stone's throw from her deconstruction of full-fledged narcissism, as shown by Lawn, and intimations that an encounter with other is integration of two seasons under one sky (Lawn 43). Lawn's use of Freud connects well with Prentice's argument that seduction constitutes/is constituted by cycles of reciprocity (157) and with her Freudian slippage of pen where Frame's Violet Pansy Proudlock is dubbed Violent Pansy Proudlock (164), which may well be a subliminal reminder of violence associated with un-hybridized subjectivities. From parallel that is established between Smaill's conclusion and Lawn's or Prentice's interpretations, emerges idea that, in his or her rejection of world, self excludes not just objective but also any foreign subjectivity, which means, in other words, that each self is utterly alone in his or her own narrow cave. …