An Annotated Bibliography. by Margery Fee and Ruth Cawker
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98 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada xvII CanadianLiterature Canadian Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography. By Margery Fee and Ruth Cawker. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1976. 170 p., paper, $8.95 IsBN 0-88778-I40-3; cloth, $15.oo IsBN 0-88778-I34-9 A Concise Bibliography of English-CanadianLiterature. By Michael Gnar- owski. Revised Edition. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978. 145 P-, paper, $6.95 IsBN o-77Io-3362-I The compilers of CanadianFiction: An Annotated Bibliography state that they began their book 'in a mood of incredulity'. I finished it in the same mood. The publishers claim coverage of 'all fiction titles - novels and story collections - by and about Canadians published to the end of 1974, including out-of-print titles, plus French- language Canadian titles in translation'; but the introduction reveals far more modest aims: 'only authors who had at least one work in print during 1973 or 1974 are listed' and 'only in-print works are annotated'. Thus, while twenty-seven titles by James De Mille (variously spelt Demille or De Mille in the book) are listed, only three of these are annotated, two of which are University of Toronto Press reprints available only to libraries, though the compilers do not give this information. For in-print titles, Fee and Cawker give the date of first publication, place and date of current publication and publisher's name, binding description (cloth or paper), price and IsmN, a brief indication of setting, and annotation in the form of plot summary. Eight other people are given acknowledgements for providing annotations, and these vary considerably from author to author. The annotations of Gabrielle Roy's works are very full, including comments on the translations, while those on Mordecai Richler's novels are poor, distorting the plots, and even discovering a new character in St. Urbain's Horseman (it should be Harry Stein, not Klein). Secondary sources are also annotated, and a useful list of short story anthologies is appended, as well as a title index and a subject guide. Of little interest to bibliographers, the subject guide is aimed at school teachers wishing to organize courses by theme. The categorization of some of the titles is bizarre, to say the least, with novels as diverse as Roy's The Cashier,Grove's Settlers of the Marsh, and Munro's Lives of Girls and Women grouped under the subject of marriage, a dubious theme in any of these. Michael Gnarowski's Concise Bibliography of English-Canadian Literature is a revised edition of the useful work that was reviewed in PBSC xmI (1974). The same format has been employed - authors listed alphabetically, works by and about each writer arranged chronologically - while the coverage has been extended to 1975, with four books published in 1976j also included, two of them edited by Gnarowski himself. This edition gives the compiler an opportunity to correct errors in the first edition and to incorporate part of the enormous volume of Canadian criticism which has appeared since 1972. Sadly, the new book not only fails to correct some past errors, but introduces new ones, and its coverage is more selective than in the first edition. One of the more intriguing changes is that The Charivariis no longer assigned to Levi Adams, although the articles discussing Adams' authorship of this work are retained. No indication is given of the new attribution. Reviews of Margaret Atwood's books have been updated, and the pagination for her first book, Double Persephone, is now 99 Bookts in Review given. A book on William 'Tiger' Dunlop published in 1963 has been added, as has G.H. Lomer's 1954 checklist of Leacock. But the errors and omissions are far more striking. Four items on Ernest Buckler included in the first edition have inexplicably been dropped from the revised version. Some names remain uncorrected (Noel-Bantley should read Noel-Bentley on p. 15, and Eelenbogen should be Ellenbogen, p. 39). New errors Iinclude Overbook for Overbrook (p. 123),and Iriving for Irving (p. 74), while inconsistencies abound. Gnarowski includes bibliographies of Birney and Layton pub- lished in West Coast Review, but not one of Ralph Gustafson that appeared in the same magazine. He includes the Klein Symposium (197 5), but not the Grove Symposium (I974). He fails to index an entire volume of the Journalof CanadianFiction, vol. In1 (1974-75), including articles on Davies, Richler, Grove, and many others, though he does cite articles from later issues of that journal. Also ignored are bibliographies by Ralph Curry on Leacock (Bulletin of Bibliography, 1958), Ruth MacDonald on Leonard Cohen (Bulletin of BibliographT! 1974), Glen Siebrasse on A.M. Klein (Jewish Dialog, 1973), and Robert Lecker on John Newlove (Essays on CanadianWriting, 1975). Admit- tedly, Gnarowski's bibliography is supposed to be concise, but too much of importance has been omitted. Another deficiency of the first edition was its sparse coverage of primary works by a number of writers. No attempt has been made to expand the bibliographies of James De Mille (seven titles), Susanna Moodie (three titles), or Martha Ostenso (one title). As well, users of the new edition might have expected some attention to writers who have come to prominence in thIe '70s, but no new writers have been added. Obscure and seldom-studied authors like Eldon Grier, Gwethalyn Graham, Ronald Hambleton, James Wreford Watson, Wilfred Watson, and David Wevill are included, but where are Daphne Marlatt, Clark Blaise, Audrey Thomas, Adele Wiseman, Victor Coleman, Matt Cohen, David McFadden, Joe Rosenblatt, and Sheila Watson? If McClelland and Stewart won't give Gnarowski more space for a subsequent edition - and the generally cramped appearance of this edition suggests that they will not - he should take a properly revised and updated bibliography to a different publisher. MICHAEL E. DARLING (Mr. Darling is a doctoral candidateat York University, specializingin Canadianlitera- ture. He is completing a descriptive bibliographyof the works of A.J.M. Smith.).