Eva Darias-Beautell, Ed.: Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada

Eva Darias-Beautell, ed. Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. 243 pp. Black and White Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $85.00 hc. This edited collection of essays derives from an international research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education with the participation of Canadian literature specialists from Spain, Canada, and the UK. The project explores innovative approaches the cultural and literary contexts of English Canada over the last forty years (2). These approaches include multiculturalism, environmentalism, cultural studies, queer theory, feminism, and post-colonialism. Each essay handles different set of questions, which, taken together, offer, in the editor's words, a tapestry of approaches that Penelopian process of simultaneous dismantling and reconstruction of the Canadian (3). Penelope in Homer's Odyssey put off her suitors during her husband's long absence by daily weaving shroud, which she dismantled each night, so that her task was never finished. This loosely deconstructive approach, here described as Penelopian, in its oscillation between present and past, memory and forgetting, presence and absence, lends itself framing within the perspectives set by Derridean hauntology (6), thus explaining the book's evocative title: Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts. Eight essays follow the editor's overview, with the final essay on Criticism and Indigenous Literature in the by Michele Lacombe, doing double duty as conclusion that points the need for further rethinking. Lacombe follows indigenous educational theorists in arguing that [T]he university has crucial role play in that complex process of epistemological transformation for which indigenous writers are calling (221). This fine essay focusses on literary history, criticism, and fiction by Indigenous writers in the 1990s, discussing work by wide range of indigenous creators. In her introduction, the editor notes that this final essay is designed talk back the first, by Howells, acting as Derridean supplement it (13-14). Coral Ann Howell's opening essay, Rewriting Tradition: Literature, History, and Changing Narratives in English Canada since the 1970s, provides the book with its time frame, useful chronological survey, and thoughtful analysis of the ways in which Canadian literary histories and critical introductions, including her own important work, have addressed the challenge of how to situate the diversity of the contemporary Canadian literary scene (20). The rest of the book addresses dimensions of that diversity, celebrated here as unruly in relation the kinds of white civility critiqued by Daniel Coleman in his 2006 White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada, and considered within contemporary preoccupations with immigration, ethnicity, race, and urbanism. Bookended by these wide-ranging introductions different ways of approaching tradition and thinking about Canadian history and national identity in globalizing times are six essays that consider dimensions of Asian Canadian Studies (Smaro Kamboureli); mixed race subjectivity (Ana Maria Fraile); speculative fantasy (Belen Martin-Lucas); Vancouver's urban imaginary (Eva Darias-Beautell); Jane Rule's queer fictions (Richard Cavell); and confessional historical fiction (Maria Jesus Hernaez Lerena). …

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