Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Canadian

Sinclair Ross (1908-1996), best known for his canonical novel As for Me and My House (1941), and for such familiar short stories as "The Lamp at Noon" and "The Painted Door," is an elusive figure in Canadian literature. A master at portraying the hardships and harsh beauty of the Prairies during the Great Depression, Ross nevertheless received only modest attention from the public during his lifetime. His reluctance to give readings or interviews further contributed to this faint public perception of the man.

In As for Sinclair Ross, David Stouck tells the...

An inveterate notebook keeper, Northrop Frye continually jotted down his ideas and thoughts as he worked through the complex schemes of his criticism. Volumes 5 and 6 of the Collected Works are the notebooks that he kept while writing his two final books, "Words with Power" and "The Double Vision." They provide a record of what he was reading and thinking as he struggled with the implications of those projects. In a sense they are the workshops out of which the books were constructed.

While focusing on the works-in-progress, the 3684 entries presented here range over diverse...

An inveterate notebook keeper, Northrop Frye continually jotted down his ideas and thoughts as he worked through the complex schemes of his criticism. Volumes 5 and 6 of the Collected Works are the notebooks that he kept while writing his two final books, "Words with Power" and "The Double Vision." They provide a record of what he was reading and thinking as he struggled with the implications of those projects. In a sense they are the workshops out of which the books were constructed.

While focusing on the works-in-progress, the 3684 entries presented here range over diverse...

Sinclair Ross's novel As For Me and My House was by all publishing standards a failure for the first thirty years of its life. Now, exactly a half-century after it first appeared in 1941, it has become a Canadian classic, the subject of more critical discussion and debate than any other single work of Canadian fiction. David Stouck has brought together some of the most important contributions of the vast body of critical writing on Ross's novel. The collection charts the fortunes of one work of fiction and in the process sheds much light on the development of English-Canadian literature as...

Since its appearance in 1990, The Spenser Encyclopedia has become the reference book for scholarship on Edmund Spenser (1552-99), offering a detailed, literary guide to his life, works, and influence. Comprehensive in scope and international in outlook, the encyclopedia contains some 700 entries by 422 contributors in 20 countries. An index provides access to material not obvious at first glance through the main body of the book, and all works cited more than once in the encyclopedia are included in an extensive bibliography. A brief historical preface and a guide to using the...

Why have so many of this century's prominent political and literary critics wanted to find a single metaphor to describe the character of Canada? Why do so many use land-based metaphors to ask about the divisions between centres and margins, colony and empire, wealth and power? W.H. New, in Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing, investigates this established paradigm by examining why so many writers have accepted the land as a comprehensive image of nationhood. Is there in fact, he questions, a landscape which is 'natural, ' unmediated by social...

Following Northrop Frye's death in 1991, a large archive of his correspondence, unpublished criticism, and notebooks was deposited with the Victoria University Library at the University of Toronto. This collection of essays, written by a distinguished group of Frye experts, begins the process of reassessing Frye's thought and writings in light of the extraordinary material contained in this archive.

The eight essays included here illuminate in new and significant ways both Frye's critical theories and their philosophical underpinnings. They show that Frye's was a many-sided and yet...

The search for the 'Great Canadian Novel' has long continued throughout our history. Controversially, to say the least, Gerald Lynch maintains that a version of it may already have been written - as a great Canadian short story cycle. In this unique text, the author launches into a fascinating literary-historical survey and genre study of the English-Canadian short story cycle - the literary form that occupies the middle ground between short stories and novels. This wide-ranging volume has much to say about the continuing relationship between place and identity in Canadian literature and...

One of the few books on contemporary Native writing in Canada, Helen Hoy's absorbing and provocative work raises and addresses questions around 'difference' and the locations of cultural insider and outsider in relation to texts by contemporary Native women prose writers in Canada. Drawing on post-colonial, feminist, post-structuralist and First Nations theory, it explores the problems involved in reading and teaching a variety of works by Native women writers from the perspective of a cultural outsider. In each chapter, Hoy examines a particular author and text in order to address some of...

Since the publication of Anne of Green Gables in 1908, L.M. Montgomery and the world of Anne have propelled themselves into a global cultural phenomenon, popular not only in Canada, but in places as diverse as Japan, the United States, and Iran. Making Avonlea, the first study to focus on Montgomery and her characters as popular cultural icons, brings together twenty-three scholars from around the world to examine Montgomery's work, its place in our imagination, and more specifically its myriad spin-offs including musicals, films, television series, t-shirts, dolls, and a tourist...

The vast majority of Canadians live in cities, yet for the most part, discussions of Canadian literature have failed to actively engage with the country's urban experience. Canada's prevalent myths continue to be about nordicity and the wilderness, and, stereotypically at least, its literature is often perceived as being about small towns, rural areas, and 'roughing it in the bush.'

Downtown Canada is a collection of essays that addresses Canada as an urban place. The contributors focus their attention on the writing of Canada's cities - including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver,...

Who ultimately is L.M. Montgomery, and why was there such an obsession with secrecy, hiding, and encoding in her life and fiction? Delving into the hidden life of Canada's most enigmatic writer, The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery answers these questions. The eleven essays illuminate Montgomery's personal writings and photographic self-portraits and probe the ways in which she actively shaped her life as a work of art. This is the first book to investigate Montgomery's personal writings, which filled thousands of pages in journals and a memoir, correspondence, scrapbooks, and...

Rapt in Plaid combines reflection, criticism and memoir to illustrate a curious and long-lasting connection between Scottish and Canadian literary traditions. Examples drawn from genres including lyric poetry, narrative romance, war fiction, children's literature, sentimental fiction, thrillers, domestic novels and short stories link Canadian writers such as John Richardson, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Sinclair Ross, Hugh MacLennan, Margaret Laurence and W.O. Mitchell to Scottish writers such as Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, J.M. Barrie, Robert Louis Stevenson John...

More than a dozen years in the making, Reference Sources for Canadian Literary Studies offers the first full-scale bibliography of writing on and in the field of Canadian literary studies. Approximately one thousand annotated entries are arranged by reference genre (for example, encyclopedias, bibliographies, indexes), with sub-groupings related to literary genre (e.g. poetry, fiction, drama). The text is comprehensive, covering related material found in special collections and archives, periodicals, dissertations and theses, anthologies, literary histories, biography, directories,...

Engaging current debates within the studies of life writing and of the nation-state, Writing the Roaming Subject focuses on a group of Canadian writers who pose questions about cultural difference and national identity while writing about their own lives and their own experiences of displacement. Joanne Saul uses the term 'biotext' to describe the unique form of writing that challenges critical practices regarding both life writing and immigrant and ethnic minority writing by blurring the borders of biography, autobiography, history, fiction and theory, as well as poetry, prose, and...

This volume, the twenty-second in the acclaimed Collected Works of Northrop Frye series, presents Frye's most influential work, Anatomy of Criticism (1957). In four stylish and sweeping essays, Frye attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope, principles, and techniques of literary criticism and the conventions of literature - its modes, symbols, archetypes, and genres. He makes the case for criticism as a legitimate and structured science, a science that he would go on to wield with great influence over the course of his distinguished career.

Robert D. Denham's...

It might surprise some to know that internationally beloved Canadian writer L.M. Montgomery (1874-1942), author of the Anne of Green Gables series, among other novels, and hundreds of short stories and poems, also fuelled a passion for photography. For forty years, Montgomery photographed her favourite places and people, using many of these photographs to illustrate the hand-written journals she left as a record of her life. Artistically inclined, and possessing a strong visual memory, Montgomery created scenes and settings in her fiction that are closely linked to the carefully...

Since her untimely death in 1975, the life and work of the Vancouver poet Pat Lowther have often been referred to as 'the Lowther legacy.' In The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther, Christine Wiesenthal seeks to convey what that legacy actually entails.

Combining biography with an analysis of literary and cultural history, Wiesenthal examines the critical legacy of a writer whose remarkable life and poetry have remained overshadowed by her notorious death. Working within a new form of biography, which employs multiple narrative arcs - or 'half-lives' - that interpret Lowther's life and...

Canadian literature was born in New York City. It began not in the backwoods of Ontario or the salt flats of New Brunswick, but in the caf?s, publishing offices, and boarding houses of late nineteenth-century New York, where writing developed as a profession and where the groundwork for the Canadian canon was laid. So argues Nick Mount in When Canadian Literature Moved to New York.

The last decades of the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary exodus from English Canada, draining the country of half its writers and all but a few of its contemporary and future literary...

Even the casual reader will notice a strong preoccupation with religion in the work of Northrop Frye. In his latest book, however, the esteemed Frye scholar Robert Denham shows that it played a far greater role than has been assumed--religion was in fact central to practically everything Frye wrote. Denham's focus shifts the emphasis from Anatomy of Criticism, Frye's most famous work, and places it on those works with which Frye began and ended his career--the early Fearful Symmetry and, fifty years later, his two studies of the Bible and The Double Vision. This...