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"Selected papers from the sixth biennial conference of the International Council for Canadian Studies held in Ottawa in May 2008"--Introd.
In White Civility Daniel Coleman breaks the long silence in Canadian literary and cultural studies around Canadian whiteness and examines its roots as a literary project of early colonials and nation-builders. He argues that a specific form of whiteness emerged in Canada that was heavily influenced by Britishness. Examining four allegorical figures that recur in a wide range of Canadian writings between 1820 and 1950 - the Loyalist fratricide, the enterprising Scottish orphan, the muscular Christian, and the maturing colonial son - Coleman outlines a genealogy of Canadian whiteness that remains powerfully influential in Canadian thinking to this day. Blending traditional literary analysis wi...
Examining the centrality of the city in Canadian literary production post-1960, this collection of critical essays presents an interdisciplinary representation of the urban from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. By analysing contemporary Canadian literature (in English), the contributors intend to produce not only an alternative picture of the national literary traditions but also fresh articulations of the relationship between (Canadian) identity, citizenship, and nation. Since the 1960s, metropolitan regions across the world have experienced radical transformation. For critical urban studies scholars, this phenomenon has been described as a ‘restructuring’. This study argues t...
How can postcolonialism be applied to Canadian literature? In all that has been written about postcolonialism, surprisingly little has specifically addressed the position of Canada, Canadian literature, or Canadian culture. Postcolonialism is a theory that has gained credence throughout the world; it is be productive to ask if and how we, as Canadians, participate in postcolonial debates. It is also vital to examine the ways in which Canada and Canadian culture fit into global discussions as our culture reflects how we interact with our neighbours, allies, and adversaries. This collection wrestles with the problems of situating Canadian literature in the ongoing debates about culture, identi...
This fully revised second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature offers a comprehensive introduction to major writers, genres and topics. For this edition several chapters have been completely rewritten to reflect major developments in Canadian literature since 2004. Surveys of fiction, drama and poetry are complemented by chapters on Aboriginal writing, autobiography, literary criticism, writing by women and the emergence of urban writing. Areas of research that have expanded since the first edition include environmental concerns and questions of sexuality which are freshly explored across several different chapters. A substantial chapter on francophone writing is included. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, noted for her experiments in multiple literary genres, are given full consideration, as is the work of authors who have achieved major recognition, such as Alice Munro, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature.
This collection of essays studies the cultural and literary contexts of narrative texts produced in English Canada over the last forty years. It takes as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses on the cultural identity of the country. That type of metaphor provided the nation with the distinctive elements it was looking for and contributed to the creation of a sense of tradition that has survived to the present. In the decades following the 1970s, however, critics, artists, and writers have repeatedly questioned such a model of national identity, still fragile and...
The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature introduces the fiction, poetry and drama of Canada in its historical, political and cultural contexts. In this clear and structured volume, Richard Lane outlines: the history of Canadian literature from colonial times to the present key texts for Canadian First Peoples and the literature of Quebec the impact of English translation, and the Canadian immigrant experience critical themes such as landscape, ethnicity, orality, textuality, war and nationhood contemporary debate on the canon, feminism, postcoloniality, queer theory, and cultural and ethnic diversity the work of canonical and lesser-known writers from Catherine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie to Robert Service, Maria Campbell and Douglas Coupland. Written in an engaging and accessible style and offering a glossary, maps and further reading sections, this guidebook is a crucial resource for students working in the field of Canadian Literature.
Cities are material and symbolic spaces through which nations define their cultural identities. The great cities that have arisen on the North American continent have stimulated the imaginations of the United States and Canada in very different ways. This first comparative study of North American urban fiction starts out by delineating the sociohistorical and literary contexts in which cities grew into diverging symbolic spaces in American and Canadian culture. After an overview of recent developments in the cultural conception of urban space, the book takes New York and Toronto fiction as exemplary for exploring representations of the urban after postmodernism. It analyzes four twenty-first...