Review of 'A Choice of Critics: Selections from 'Canadian Literature''. Edited by George Woodcock. Toronto and London: Oxford University Press. 1966. xxii + 247 pp. 32s. 6d.

Abstract

Although only seven years of 'Canadian Literature' have appeared to date, this selection therefrom, like a reading of the correspondingly youthful 'Australian Literary Studies', makes it clear that one journal with correct editorial policy can do much towards the focusing of literary activity in a country on the brink of cultural maturity. This volume is a selection of articles from the journal which is itself edited by George Woodcock, but the chosen pieces have the aim of producing a unified pattern, and charting the terrain inhabited by the writer in modern Canada. They also illustrate that the activities of Canadian writers prove an ever-widening field of discussion. Another feature of the book is the illustration it affords of the complex inter-relationships of cultural Canada, since all the contributors are attached to some university; seven of the twelve critics are writers of some stature, and there are the risks of the whole becoming an in-game, a literary world of incestuous Can. Lit.