Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada 1760-2000 by Faye Hammill Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction by Edward Eden , Dee Goertz (review)

240 Reviews Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada 1760-2000. By Faye Hammill. (Cross/Cultures, 63) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2003. xxiv + 245 pp. ?54; $64 (pbk?28; $33). ISBN 90-420-0915-2 (pbk 90-420-0905-5). Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and thePossibilities ofFiction. Ed. by Edward Eden and Dee Goertz. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2003. x + 323 pp. $60; ?40 (pbk $27-95;?i8). ISBN 0-8020-3660-0 (pbk 0-8020-8489-3). In Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada IJ60-2000 Faye Hammill reconsiders six canonical women writers: Frances Brooke, Susanna Moodie, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Carol Shields, and Margaret Atwood. While 1760-2000 may seem a broad spectrum of time, the writers and works have been selected to reveal the conditions of their respective socio-literary contexts, and the increasingly self-conscious development of a Canadian canon. Like all HammiU's criticism, the argument is lucid, well structured, and carefully researched, provid? ing an overview of the prevailing critical trends on these authors. HammiU's close readings pay attention to the specific situation of each writer, while also illuminat? ing commonalities and continuities between them. Arranged chronologically by date of birth, each chapter focuses on the individual, but concludes with reflections that position the writer in relation to the other subjects of the study. This makes for a coherent cumulative argument. (The only exception to this pattern occurs in the final chapter, where Hammill compares Atwood's and Shields's projections of the iconic Susanna Moodie in their works.) At the same time, each section could be read as a free-standing essay, thanks to explanatory footnotes and cross-references. This will facilitate accessibility for readers interested in only one of the figures examined. This study succeeds within the limits of its chosen focus, and will prove a valu? able contribution for students and teachers engaging with Canada's most established women writers. Contemporary students will no doubt find the last third of the text most interesting, for its analysis and comparison of the prominent trio of Shields, Atwood, and the foremother/textual construct Moodie. But Hammill is equally to be commended for her consideration of the often neglected or marginalized figures of Brooke, Duncan, and Montgomery. Her chapters on the latter two in particular re? flectupon the workings of Canadian canon formation and the academy. Montgomery represents those writers of popular or children's literature automatically denigrated and excluded from consideration as serious literature or objects of intellectual study. Duncan, a writer who rarely chose 'Canadian' settings or content and who focused on social and political commentary, was inevitably excluded by the dominant nationa? list discourse emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. The strategic pairings of six women writers make visible the shifting preoccupations of Canadian literary criticism. The book's main strength, its tightness of focus, may also be viewed as a weakness by some readers. All the writers are white, middle-class, heterosexual. In one brief passage in the introduction Hammill does evince a momentary awareness of race and class, alongside region and gender, as 'missing' factors in Canada's racist and exclusionary construction of cultural nationalism (pp. xviii-xix). It would be unfair to criticize a book for failure to include material clearly not intended as part of its remit. But the close focus on these authors makes it easy to forgetthat they represent only the most canonical and well-established heritage of Canadian female authorship. A more self-conscious foregrounding of their privilege and the changing shape of recent Canadian publishing might have served to remind readers of this fact. HammiU's work also appears twice in Edward Eden and Dee Goertz's collection on Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and thePossibilities ofFiction. The volume is divided into four sections. The firstis a lecture by Shields, 'Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard', given in 1996 at Hanover College. Shields's address becomes a MLR, ioi.i, 2006 241 touchstone for her critics in the discussions that follow. The lecture sums up many key facets of Shields's career: her focus on the quotidian; her awareness of the multitude of lost...

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