R eviews 283

a substantially altered political economy analysis. Notwithstanding these limitations,

Producing Canada will be of interest to those interested in how the Canadian literary
marketplace works and is an excellent, original contribution to the field.
Lyle de Souza, Birkbeck College, University of London

Cinda Gault, National and Female Identity in Canadian Literature, 19651980: The Fiction of
Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Marian Engel (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press,
2012), 332 pp. Paper. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-7734-2622-1.
In 1976 the Globe & Mail critic William French commented, the surge of women writers
coincided with the nationalist revival of the late 1960s (p. 38). It is that close connection
between issues of national and gender identities that Cinda Gault examines in her study of
novels by the three most significant Anglo-Canadian women writers of the decade when
cultural nationalism and second-wave feminism were at the top of the political agenda.
Her approach is historical, as she treats these novels and the contemporary criticism
related to them as phenomena to be reassessed in a radically changed sociocultural context
nearly fifty years later.
Questions of identity individual and collective are central as she challenges the
notion of unified identities and of critical interpretations which read these novels as
versions of romance able to achieve solutions that could not in the real world be so
readily resolved (p. iv). She proposes reading from a different angle through conventions
of realism, arguing that such a reading reveals more sustained questioning of female and
national identities than has been conventionally assumed (p. 3). The book is structured
as an in-depth analysis of five novels by each of her three writers, Laurence, Atwood and
Engel, using parallel chapter designs to highlight her thesis: Contradictions of female
identity, Contradictions of national identity and Contradictions between female and
national identities. That analysis is supplemented by detailed accounts of contemporary
critical responses and debates as she rehearses questions of alternative reading strategies
which highlight different aspects of the fictions. With Laurence for example, Gault
suggests that readers expectations of romance patterns simplified her texts, whereas
the realistic reading offered here emphasises irresolvable tensions in Laurences female
protagonists between personal and national identities. She adopts a similar strategy with
Atwood and Engel, preferring to focus on their female protagonists engagement with
historical and gendered circumstances which militate against any triumphant resolutions
of identity crises.
Certainly Gault persuades us to look carefully again at these novels, but my problem
with this study is that her critical lens, focused as it is on thematics and generic differences
between romance and realism, is too restrictive. It neglects considerations of language
and narratology, which would nuance the differences she notes in these three writers
treatment of identity issues. And though she points to the necessary link between literary
criticism and prevailing ideologies, there is no mention of current critical discourses of
postcolonialism and feminism which have reshaped concepts of identity and nationhood.
It is, as the author acknowledges, only a beginning step in re-reading Canadian fiction
for its relevance to new generations of readers (p. 251); as such it usefully indicates
directions for future revisionist readings.
Coral Ann Howells, University of London/University of Reading
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