i82 Reviews person-second childhood. They refine thisby stressing how deeply the child we were is still actively present in our older self. Senescent sexuality is no more amazing or shocking than its infantileversion. More soberingly, these authors cite reports con demning the institutionalization inwhat the French chillingly call unmouroir that shrinks senior citizens to helplessly dependent infants.The old, whether founts of sagacity or bogeypersons, doomily symbolize for the dominant young and middle aged what awaits them all. If theold want sometimes to turnback the clock, theyoung might prefer to stop it. Most of the coverage embraces the West. Do theyorder things differentlyeast of Suez? Only one paper, by Cecile Sakai, tackles this issue by analysing two Japanese writers, Tanizaki and Kawabata. They comment on the traditional high status (at itsextreme: ancestor worship) accorded the old inChina and, derivatively, in Japan. For them, old age is biologically reduced enough without having to sufferothers' reductionism, thatpsychosocial headshrinking. The proportion ofwomen tomen in this collection is i9 to 8,which might explain the efforts to tenderize the topic while staring ithard in the face. The fact remains that the bulk of thepapers centre on old men rather than old women, as ifthese had said goodbye toEros. Finally, a pagan prayer: letus go out with a bang, not awhimper. Or at leastwith a laugh, for,asAlexandre Dumas commonsensically said: 'Il est dur de vieillir,mais on n'a pas trouve d'autre moyen de vivre longtemps' (quoted on p. 7). UNIVERSITY OF READING WALTER REDFERN White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. By DANIEL COLEMAN. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. zoo6. x+320 pp. /35. ISBN 987 0-8020-3707-7. Much recent criticism on Canadian literature concentrates on theways inwhich li terary texts resist both White normativity and the privileging of British ancestry. Daniel Coleman takes a step back from this,asking: 'How did thisnormative concept of (English) Canadianness come tobe established in the firstplace? What are its ele ments? What is itsgenealogy? And how might an understanding of the process of its establishment enable twenty-first century Canadians toanticipate and resist itsconti nuing coercive power?' (p. 5). It is rather surprising thatno one has thought ofwriting a book like thisbefore, considering how important and fascinating its subject is. Coleman notes that multiculturalism iswidely held to representCanada's progres siveness, but suggests that this is only themost recentmanifestation of an ongoing ideal of Canadian civilitywhose definition and borders have shifted over time.He points out that, 'at the same time that civility involves the creation of justice and equality, it simultaneously creates borders to the sphere inwhich justice and equa lity are maintained' (p. 9), and that thework ofmaintaining the civil ideal while policing its borders is performed, in differentways, by a whole variety of literary texts.Coleman concentrates primarily on popular fictions,poems, and journalism, because such writing can reveal 'theunstable dynamics between the official symbolic history of thenation and its fantasmic repressed histories' (p. 35). He analyses texts published between I850 and I950, a period inwhich monocultural nationalist dis course firstflourished and thenwas challenged bymass immigration, and inwhich, he suggests, Canadian literaturewas 'overwhelmingly characterized by allegorical or formulaic representations' (p. 37). This view of early Canadian writing is crucial to his argument, and has to some extent determined his choice ofwriters. They include William Kirby, Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspe, Thomas Raddall, Gilbert Parker, MLR, 103. I, 2oo8 I83 Ralph Connor, Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Margaret Murray Robertson, Robert Stead, Frederick Philip Grove, and Hugh MacLennan. Since the discussion covers numerous books which have been rejected in recent decades as excessively romantic or too conservative formodern tastes, a certain amount of recoverywork has been necessary. This includes summarizing plots,which can be tedious but isunavoidable since the argument isoften predicated on the pat terning of plots and thepairing or contrasting of character types.The detailed close readings are organized around four allegorical figureswho were repeatedly used to personify theCanadian nation: theLoyalist brother, theenterprising Scottish orphan, themuscular Christian, and the maturing colonial son. All of these,Coleman argues, contributed to theprivileging of White Britishness in 'English' Canada, but this racial ideal did not correspond to the supposedly degenerate Britishness...