To anyone who has crossed the Canadian prairies, the title of thisbook, Vertical Man/Horizontal World, will strike a responsive chord --man stands alone in seemingly limitless landscape "as empty asnightmare".

The stark isolation of man against the prairie's landscape is"so obvious" the author says, "that except for passingcomments [in two studies of Canadian prairie fiction] no one has made asustained analysis of the use of the prairie in Canadian fiction, orargued at any length for what most immediately unifies the literatureof the prairie region."

Author Ricou argues that man is intimidated by the vastness which sosurrounds him, and "he will almost certainly wish to meet thechallenge of this land, to say 'Look, look!' in whatever way hecan, by raising a crop or a monument, by interpreting his experience inpaint or words."

Ricou traces this recurrent theme in prairie fiction from writerssuch as Frederick Philip Grove and Wallce Stegner, Edward McCourt andW.O. Mitchell, to Margaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch.

In tracing the relationship of man and land from the earliestwriters of prairie fiction to the most recent, Ricou shows how the calmand benign relationship of man and land as exemplified, for instance,in the fiction of Robert Stead and W.O. Mitchell has changed in recentnovels to a more dramatic confrontation. "[The novelists] find in[the landscape] an ideal mirror for the dilemma (and often thestrength) of existential man."

Critic Henry Keisel once wrote: "To conquer a piece of thecontinent, to put one's imprint upon virgin land, to say 'HereI am, for that I came", is as much a way of proving one'sexistence, as is Descartes' "cogito, ergo sum."Vertical Man/Horizontal World is an affirmation ofKreisel's statement. Slowly and cumulatively Ricou traces the imageof man leaving his mark on the empty, sometimes nightmarish land of theCanadian prairie. "How do we fit our time and our place?" isa question posed by all the writers Ricou examines. "Theanswer," he says, "at this point in the evolution of Canadianprairie fiction, delivered with conviction . . . is: abruptly anduneasily, but brazenly and delightedly."

This book is a sustained and penetrating look at theinterrelationship of man and landscape in Canadian prairie fiction.