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In this study of the Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence, recent narratological models provide the theoretical framework for a textual analysis that aims at complementing previous thematic critiques. The chief focus is on The Stone Angel and The Diviners, which the conclusion then presents in the context of the other novels in Laurence's Manawaka cycle. Consideration of the published works is rounded off with genetic comparison of the novelist's typescript drafts and an evaluation of the manuscript notes kept in the archives of McMaster and York Universities. The central structural principle of The Stone Angel is its dovetailing of past and present scenes. Temporal arrangement, reflecting th...
This volume deals with contrasting developments in the period between 1400-1550. It is one that is characterized by a search for greater personal liberty and more opportunities for creative expression, on the one hand, and a quest to secure stability by establishing binding norms, on the other.
Treating poverty not simply as a theme in literature but as a force that in fact shapes the texts themselves, Rimstead adopts the notion of a common culture to include ordinary voices in national culture, in this case the national culture of Canada.
This volume brings together essays which suggest that the relationship between Canada and Europe is a two-way process, as historically the traffic between them has been: either may have something to offer the other. Europe too acknowledges situations today in which difference and community are hard terms to reconcile. Difference refers to gender, sexuality, race, nationality, or language. Community is the collective understanding which must continually be renegotiated and reconstructed among these factors. The Canadian-European connection is one in which it seems especially appropriate to explore such circumstances. The topics covered include pioneer women's writing, transcultural women's fi...
Boundaries, borderlines, limits on the one hand and rites of passage, contact zones, in-between spaces on the other have attracted renewed interest in a broad variety of cultural discourses after a long period of decenterings and delimitations in numerous fields of social, psychological, and intellectual life. Anthropological dimensions of the subject and its multifarious ways of world-making represent the central challenge among the concerns of the humanities. The role of literature and the arts in the formation of cultural and personal identities, theoretical and political approaches to the relation between self and other, the familiar and the foreign, have become key issues in literary an...
The present collection of essays endeavours to furnish informed responses to central questions posed by the editors: Is the fact that the marvellous coexists with the factual and never resolves itself into the supernatural an indication that the whole literary project of 'magical realism' is an instrumental and representational form which can be regarded as particularly suitable for reconciling dichotomies and oppositions otherwise experienced as intolerable? Was 'magical realism' an explosive process in cultural dynamics, taking place at intersections of heterogeneous cultures most favourable to the efflorescence of this type of literature? The authors of the various essays - on Patrick White and David Malouf, Ben Okri, Syl Cheney-Coker, Robert Kroetsch, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Jack Hodgins, Salman Rushdie, Janet Frame, Wilson Harris and others - provide a dynamic focus on the reality at stake beneath the surface representations of 'magical realism' in post-colonial literatures.
Both the alliterative Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy (c. 1400) and the Laud Troy Book (c. 1400), a metrical romance, deal with the lives and feats of chivalric heroes and place special emphasis on the psychological effects of love. This book is a study of the motifs in John Clerk's and the Laud-poet's narratives and of their characterization of the Trojan War's principal actors. Both writers used the same source, but their preferences for motifs and their attitudes toward the persons involved were often quite different. Thirteen illustrations, mainly from medieval Guido manuscripts, serve as a stimulus to those who want to know more about the medieval understanding of the Trojan War.
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