Hugh Hood Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Douglas Ivison

Critical Essay by Douglas Ivison

SOURCE: “‘A Reader's Guide to the Intersection of Time and Space’: Urban Spatialization in Hugh Hood's Around the Mountain,” in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1998, pp. 238–49.

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 comprehensible.”

Criticism of Hugh Hood's 1967 sketch cycle, Around the Mountain: Scenes from Montréal Life, has mostly concentrated on the author's Romantic aesthetic strategies and has read the book as a religious and spiritual allegory deeply informed by Hood's Catholicism and his admiration of the Romantics.¹ In particular, critics have noted Hood's employment of Wordsworthian “spots of time” at a number of points in the collection, and have remarked upon the fact that the first six stories represent an ascent up the mountain and then, after the narrator's epiphanic...
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