Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Canadian

"The Remnants of Nation" is a ground breaking book that introduces a new genre called 'poverty narratives' to study literature and popular culture in the larger context of economic and literary disenfranchisement. While issues of race, gender, and sexuality are now circulating in literary studies and their 'constructedness' is being debated, the relations of class, poverty, and narrative have not been thoroughly examined until now. Here, poverty is treated not simply as a theme in literature but as a force that in fact shapes the texts themselves.

Rimstead adopts the notion of a...

Sandra Djwa has provided readers with a fascinating artifact: a cultural biography with a human face. Roy Daniells (1902-1979), an English professor who finished his career at the University of British Columbia, and an outstanding scholar, teacher and poet, influenced at least four generations of students and is the subject of Professing English. Once established as a professor, Daniells was a key figure - a cultural catalyst - in the consolidation of English as a discipline and the development of Canadian literature as a recognised body of writing and a legitimate focus of scholarship,...

In Ragas of Longing, Sam Solecki offers the first book-length study of Michael Ondaatje's poetry and its place in his body of work. Relating the poetry to various poetic traditions from classical Tamil to postmodern, Solecki presents a chronological critical reading of Ondaatje's six volumes of poems. Among the study's concerns are the relationship between the poet's life and work, his poetic debts and development, his theory of poetry, and his central themes. Also present are close readings of Ondaatje's monographs on Leonard Cohen and Edwin Muir, the Scots' poet and...

In this introduction to the diversity and scope of the writing by women in England from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Patricia Demers discusses the creative realities of women writers' accomplishments and the cultural conditions under which they wrote.

There were deep suspicions and restrictions surrounding the education of women during this period, and thus the contributions of women to literature, and to the print industry itself, are largely unknown. This wide-ranging examination of the genres of early modern women's writing...

Published in 1947, Fearful Symmetry was Northrop Frye's first book and the product of over a decade of intense labour. Drawing readers into the imaginative world of William Blake, Frye succeeded in making Blake's voice and vision intelligible to the wider public. Distinguished by its range of reference, elegance of expression, comprehensiveness of coverage, coherence of argument, and sympathy to its subject, Fearful Symmetry was immediately recognized as a landmark of Blake criticism. Fifty years later, it is still recognized as having ensured the acceptance of Blake as a...

James Clifford tells us that modernism has become a -traveling culture- because it reflects the -discrepant cosmopolitanism- of the twentieth century - that is, a world in which people are paradoxically migratory yet rooted, international yet local. Perhaps modernism has traveled so well because it has been transformed by its journey; this is the suggestion Charles Pollard makes in New World Modernisms, a fascinating first step in mapping the migration of modernism.

Pollard looks to recent Caribbean poetry as a means of reassessing modernism's cosmopolitanism; in particular, his book...

Building on previous scholarship, and drawing on fresh sources, Dr. Vickers biography of T. S. Stribling makes accessible one of the most important, and hitherto neglected, figures in our national literature. The reader will find that here, at last, is a Stribling biography anchored in fact and uncluttered by personal bias. Howard Bahr, Author, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War
Kenneth Vickers has produced a remarkable book, one long overdue. I know of no other work that even approaches its thoroughness and accuracy. The author has captured the essence of T. S. Stribling:...

Long before she became the renowned author of the best-selling Schmecks cookbooks, an award-winning journalist for magazines such as Macleans, and a creative non-fiction mentor, Edna Staebler was a writer of a different sort. Staebler began serious diary writing at the age of sixteen and continued to write for over eighty years. Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries draws from these diaries selections that map Staebler's construction of herself as a writer and documents her frustrations and struggles, along with her desire to express herself, in writing. She felt she...

This volume features thirty-five of Don McKay's best poems, which are selected with a contextualizing introduction by Meira Cook that probes wilderness and representation in McKay, and the canny, quirky, thoughtful, and sometimes comic self-consciousness the poems adumbrate. Included is McKay's afterword written especially for this volume in which McKay reflects on his own writing process--its relationship to the earth and to metamorphosis.

Don McKay has published eight books of poetry. He won the Governor General's Award in 1991 (for Night Field) and in 2000 (for Another...

Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt introduces the reader to the lyric power and political urgency of the poetry of Di Brandt, providing an overview of her poetry written during a prolific and revolutionary twenty-year period.

Beginning with her early poetic inquiries into the dynamics of gender, religion, and the politics of language, Brandt examines the use and abuse of power as a cultural issue, emphasizing cross-cultural and domestic relationships. Particularly engaged with questions of motherhood, the land, violence and reparation, feminism, and spirituality,...

A four-time Governor General's-award nominee for both poetry and non-fiction, Christopher Dewdney is celebrated internationally as a writer and a visionary and is best known for his particular imagining of place and memory. Beginning with Paleozoic fossil formations in southwestern Ontario and moving through eons of natural history to cityscapes and the digital present, Dewdney's poetics encapsulate often surreal experiences from radical and epiphenomenal perspectives. His writing vibrates in a standing wave between science and art, reason and myth--embedding geology, neurophysiology,...

The essays in Home Words explore the complexity of the idea of home through various theoretical lenses and groupings of texts. One focus of this collection is the relation between the discourses of nation, which often represent the nation as home, and the discourses of home in children's literature, which variously picture home as a dwelling, family, town or region, psychological comfort, and a place to start from and return to. These essays consider the myriad ways in which discourses of home underwrite both children's and national literatures.

Home Words...

When Pier Giorgio Di Cicco first appeared on the Canadian literary scene in the early 1980s, he was immediately recognized as one of the most compelling voices of his generation. The Last Effort of Dreams is the first critical collection on Pier Giorgio Di Cicco and traces the steps of his career from different perspectives. The contributors, fellow poets and academics alike, ponder Di Cicco's poetry in diverse ways: through reminiscence, by taking stock, and by focusing on individual texts and specific themes. What emerges is an intriguing composite picture of Di Cicco's complex...

Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography explores some of the latest developments in the literary and cultural practices of Canadians of Asian heritage. While earlier work by ethnic, multicultural, or minority writers in Canada was often concerned with immigration, the moment of arrival, issues of assimilation, and conflicts between generations, literary and cultural production in the new millennium no longer focuses solely on the conflict between the Old World and the New or the clashes between culture of origin and adopted culture. No longer are minority authors identifying...