SOURCE: “A Secular Liturgy: Hugh Hood's Aesthetics and Around the Mountain,” in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 10, Nos. 1–2, 1985, pp. 110–35.

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 Catholic ideology.

I

By means of a series of critical essays, letters, and interviews, Hugh Hood has sought to make his aesthetic intentions clearly understood by a wide readership. Two of the most instructive essays are “Sober Colouring: The Ontology of Super-Realism” and “Before the Flood,” the former written near the beginning of the 1970s and the latter towards the end of the decade. “Sober Colouring: The Onotology of Super-Realism” comments on the development of Hood's ideas about art during the fourteen years since his turning to fiction writing in January 1957, immediately after Robert Weaver rejected an essay by...