Hugh Hood is recognized as one of Canada's most versatile, sophisticated, and aesthetically selfconscious fiction writers. His short stories, sketches, and novels demonstrate an encyclopedic knowledge...
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Critical Essay by Ernest Buckler
"Whoever heard any talk about painting that made sense?" asks a character in ["White Figure, White Ground"]. One might answer, "Hug...
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Critical Essay by Alden Nowlan
[The Camera Always Lies] reminds me of the novels that used to be circulated by the Doubleday Dollar Book Club and the Literary Guild—books that were neither qui...
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Critical Essay by Kent Thompson
Hugh Hood is an intellectual writer. Moreover, he's a very ambitious one. In blunt terms: he's a mind-stretcher. In fact, Hood attempts dimensions in his...
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Critical Essay by Pierre Cloutier
[A] growing realization that White Figure, White Ground is one of the good ones can be justified if you consider the relationship of this self-portrait of the creati...
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Critical Essay by William H. New
The sustained work of Hugh Hood … provides a connection between the realistic and stylistically experimental…. [White Figure, White Ground] is imbued wi...
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Critical Essay by Robert Lecker
Each time I read The Swing in the Garden I become more convinced that the novel marks an innovative high point in Canadian fiction. But in what sense is it innovative?...
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Critical Essay by Kildare Dobbs
[It's] evident from the stories in [Hood's] first book, Flying A Red Kite, that he has knocked about a good deal in the world outside the universities...
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Critical Essay by David Latham
[Dark Glasses contains] three or four of the best examples in all of literature of how the short story works. The weaker of the twelve stories could be dismissed on the...
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Critical Essay by Hallvard Dahlie
The opening paragraph of [A New Athens] reflects what has come to be a Hood trademark: the transformation of circumstantial detail and self into a kind of mystical e...
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Critical Essay by Louis K. Mackendrick
Most of the 16 stories here (drawn from Hugh Hood's previous collections) don't appear in general anthologies. Since this seems to be the purpose ...
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Critical Essay by John Orange
Hugh Hood's style, including diction, characterization, symbolism, and tone, is very difficult to deal with in a general way. He is a very eclectic stylist and he...
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Critical Essay by W. J. Keith
If sensitivity is the hallmark of the artist, one wonders how he can be anything but an outsider in a crassly insensitive age.
In this new volume of interrelated shor...
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Critical Essay by Michael Bliss
Most readers have passed judgement on Hugh Hood's great work-in-progress, The New Age/Le nouveau siècle, on the basis of the first three novels, The Swin...
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Critical Essay by Robert Fulford
This man is French Canadian, unmarried, middle-aged, rich, attractive, intellectual. He's a professor at the University of Montreal, and he drives fast, expens...
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Critical Essay by Anthony Robertson
Around the Mountain is subtitled, 'Scenes from Montreal Life'. A collection of essays, some of them apparently non-fiction fiction, about the varied ...
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Critical Essay by Kent Thompson
That Hugh Hood is a serious and accomplished Canadian artist of considerable significance is a fact that ought to be more widely known than it is…. [Some] of th...
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Critical Essay by Eugene Mcnamara
[The Fruit Man, the Meat Man & the Manager] shows that [Hood] knows perfectly well where he is and what he is doing. The stories are carefully varied, like a bon...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
[You Can't Get There From Here] is the story of Leofrica, an "emergent" African nation, living at or below subsistence level. Ther...
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Critical Essay by Patricia A. Morley
You Can't Get There From Here … [focuses on] the freedom of societies, and the problematic survival of indigenous cultures assaulted by Western tech...
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Critical Essay by Patricia Morley
The Swing in the Garden is the first of a projected series of twelve novels, a roman fleuve in the manner of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Prous...
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Critical Essay by J. R. (tim) Struthers
In his imagination Hugh Hood has outlined a twelve-book epic on Canadian life entitled The New Age/Le nouveau siècle, which he intends to complete by th...
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In the following essay, Godfrey offers a mixed assessment of the stories comprising Flying a Red Kite.
Mr. Hood, with three degrees from the University of Toronto and a position at the University o...
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In the following excerpt, Garebian surveys the critical reaction to Hood's short fiction as well as the defining characteristics of his fiction and nonfiction.
Tradition and Milieu
George Wo...
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In the following essay, Struthers examines the diverse characters, settings, and thematic concerns of the stories of Around the Mountain, contending that the pieces are connected by a strong Roman Cat...
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In the following essay, Copoloff-Mechanic explores the influence of a Romantic aesthetic on Hood's work, especially the stories comprising Flying a Red Kite.
When Hood's first collect...
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In the following essay, Horton offers a mixed review of You'll Catch Your Death.
Let's get the minor kvetching out of the way right at the start. You'll Catch Your Death featur...
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In the following assessment of The Isolation Booth, Mills maintains that although the collection contains “a fair amount of interesting and diverting material, it is, generally speaking, of low...
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In the following essay, Ivison analyzes the manner in which Hood utilizes space and setting in Around the Mountain in order to “render the dispersed urbanism of Montreal visible and comprehensi...
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In the following review of Flying a Red Kite, Lane deems the stories in the collection uneven and awkward.
It's hard to know just how to judge this collection of short stories and other pros...
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In the following essay on The Fruit Man, the Meat Man, and the Manager, Grosskurth traces the influence of the writer Morley Callaghan on Hood's short fiction.
Hugh Hood's short stori...
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In the following essay, Latham provides a mixed review of Dark Glasses.
Oscar Wilde warned that “all art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril....
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In the following interview, which was conducted in 1978, Hood discusses the major influences on his writing as well as his major stylistic and thematic concerns.
[Struthers]: The stories in your fi...
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In the following essay, Mathews explores the “Christian aspect” of Hood's short fiction and the novel A New Athens.
In an exchange of correspondence with John Mills published i...
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In the following essay, Owen offers a favorable review of None Genuine Without This Signature.
In this one [None Genuine Without This Signature], there is as always enough entertainment and interes...
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In the following review, Keith maintains that None Genuine Without This Signature offers precision of detail, delicacy of nuance, and firmness of structure.
Is Hugh Hood important? If so, why?
T...
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In the following excerpt, Garebian provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Hood's short fiction, in particular his use of allegory.
As a Catholic, Hood cannot help making the redemptio...
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