The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

lecture "Excursion to Canada." Nonetheless,
the detailed index shows that five references
to Canada still survive.) In that same entry,
for November 16,1850, Thoreau writes his
own manifesto for an ecopoetics: "A truly
good book is something as wildly natural
and primitive—mysterious and marvellous,
ambrosial and fertile—as a fungus or a
lichen—suppose the muskrat or beaver
were to turn his views to literature what
fresh views of nature would be present. The
fault of our books and other deeds is that
they are too humane, I want something
speaking in some measure to the condition
of muskrats and skunk cabbage as well as of
men—not merely to a pining and complaining
coterie of philanthropists." L.R.
Robert L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces:
The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920-
1945, U. North Carolina P./Scholarly Book
Services distr., $62.95 Cdn. According to
Dorman's argument, during the interwar
period a generation of Americans born
rural found themselves growing up and
then growing old in an inescapably urban
world. As secularism seemed to replace
Christianity, and the bureaucratic supplanted
the participatory, a continent-wide
regional revolt emerged. Fundamental to
this movement was a vision of a society
founded and re-established on the basis of
folk traditions which are distinctive to particular
regions. Extending this notion of
decentering the centre, the regionalists
developed a political agenda based on an
organic synthesis of geological region, flora
and fauna, and culture. It was a 1920s version
of the ecological movement. Although
Dorman is a historian, and his emphasis is
on regionalism as a 'political' movement, it
is clear everywhere in this dense and diligently
documented study that the regional
revolt was at its heart an aesthetic movement,
not only in its being lead by writers
and artists, such as John Crowe Ransom,
Allen Tate, Mary Austin, Lewis Mumford,
and Henry Nash Smith, but also in its ultimate
emphasis on the creative artist inherent
in each person. For students of Canada,
the thoroughly American intellectual history
reconstucted here will be, perhaps,
only intermittently applicable. But regionalism,
literary, cultural or political, is not a
subject which has been very extensively
effectively theorized—in Canada or elsewhere.
This book provides a thoughtful,
challenging history of ideas of regionalism
which could be a great benefit to Canadian
study of the subject, L.R.