Review of Images of the West: Changing Perceptions of the Prairies, 1690-1960.

Over the past several years, Western Producer Prairie Books has published volumes that demonstrate-quite apart from the materials they offer and the arguments they advancethe enduring lure of the land felt by English-Canadians (both prairie dwellers and those living elsewhere) toward their prairie as an evocative and formative landscape. Ronald Rees\u27s Land of Earth and Sky: Landscape Painting of Western Canada (1984) and New and Naked Land: Making the Prairies Home (1988), from the same press, and now R. Douglas Francis\u27s Images of the West, suggest that Western Producer is tapping a general interest in the Canadian prairie landscape as subject broader than the scholarly audience presupposed by such works as Edward A. McCourt\u27s The Canadian West in Fiction (1947; revised 1970), Laurence Ricou\u27s Vertical Man/Horizontal World (1973), Dick Harrison\u27s Unnamed Country (1977), or my own The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (1989). Indeed, while drawing upon these and other antecedents, Francis-a Canadian intellectual historian teaching at the University of Calgary-aims primarily at the general reader [rather] than for the specialist in order to examine the changing images of the West over the entire three centuries of exploration and settlement by the white man (xvii, xvi)