Margaret Laurence is justly famous for her Manawaka cycle of Canadian novels, but her work extends from Canada to Africa and includes poetry and prose, children's and adult literature, memoir and travel-writing.

Margaret Laurence is justly famous for her Manawaka cycle of Canadian novels, but her work extends from Canada to Africa and includes poetry and prose, children's and adult literature, memoir and travel-writing.

This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields’s experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her fiction. Shields’s essays clarify her iconoclastic approach to rules of narrative and illuminate her revisionist policies, elucidating the development of her fiction, both novels and stories, as her writing gradually becomes more explicitly feminist, as well as more daringly postmodernist. The dozen essays by the eminent Canadianists included in this edition throw fresh light on Shields’s writing, inviting us to read it with new eyes by revealing how...