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A new critical edition of the acknowledged best Canadian novel of the 1930s. Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage is a groundbreaking work of Canadian fiction based on the dramatic and violent labour disputes that took place in British Columbia in 1938. The story follows the progress of two friends, Matt Striker, a 23-year-old from Saskatchewan, and his simple-minded companion Eddy, as they travel from Vancouver to Victoria following the occupation of the Vancouver Post Office. Like the unemployed masses that took siege of the Post Office, Matt and Eddy yearn for relief after years of economic depression. Empathetic and tragic, Waste Heritage has been praised as Canada’s Grapes of Wrath and the most important Canadian novel of the 1930s. A new critical apparatus surrounds Baird’s original text, informing the reader of the historical and literary contexts of the work, as well as providing exhaustive textual analysis.
First published in 1937, Of Mice and Men has been a staple of American literature ever since. Divided by decade, The Essential Criticism of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men provides an overview of criticism over the 70 years the book has been in print. Michael J. Meyer has assembled significant articles and book excerpts from critics and reviewers, citing the early book reviews and highlighting some of the most significant essays. While not all critical studies are included, those assessments not present in the text are evaluated by summaries and their bibliographic citations are given. The essays express various critical approaches, including those that criticize the book and examine what some consider the book's flaws. Ideal for research work at all levels, this volume collects in one place the most significant contributions to the study of the novel, making it a welcome addition to the canon of Steinbeck criticism.
While Canadian historians have studied socialism in the 1930s, and although there have been many studies of American and British literary leftists from this period, Comrades and Critics is the first full-length study of Canada's 1930s literary left. Challenging dominant perceptions that this decade was a lull between the more celebrated modernist enterprises of the 1920s and 1940s, Candida Rifkind argues that the events of the 1930s - from mass unemployment, to the dustbowl, to the Spanish Civil War - galvanized a generation of writers, leading them to unite artistic practice and political action in provocative and influential ways. Analyzing and recovering much-neglected poems, plays, manif...
Much of the scholarship on twentieth-century Canadian literature has argued that English-Canadian fiction was plagued by backwardness and an inability to engage fully with the movement of modernism that was so prevalent in British and American fiction and poetry. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction re-evaluates Canadian literary culture to posit that it has been misunderstood because it is a distinct genre, a regional form of the larger international modernist movement. Examining literary magazines, manifestos, archival documents, and major writers such as Frederick Philip Grove, Morley Callaghan, and Raymond Knister, Colin Hill identifies a 'modern realism' that crosses regions as well as urban and rural divides. A bold reading of the modern-realist aesthetic and an articulate challenge to several enduring and limiting myths about Canadian writing, Modern Realism in English- Canadian Fiction will stimulate important debate in literary circles everywhere.
Recent archaeological discoveries in the polar region have reanimated stock images of the intrepid explorer who braves the elements to bring modernity to a frigid northern wasteland. The Iconic North reveals that ideological assumptions, economic priorities, and a shift in government strategy in the postwar era all influenced how northern culture was represented in popular Canadian imagery. Whether it was film, television, or women’s autobiographies, the “primitive” North was often portrayed as the mirror opposite to the “modern” South. In crisp and elegant prose, Joan Sangster redirects current debates about the geopolitical prospects of the North by addressing how women and gender relations have played a key role in the history of northern development.Drawing on archival and cultural sources, Sangster shows how gender, race, and colonialism shape our understanding of northern peoples, economies, and government policy. This work reveals how assumptions about both Indigenous and non-Indigenous women shaped gender, class, and political relationships in the circumpolar north – a region now commanding more of the world’s attention.
This monograph is the first academic work to apply a neo-Marxist approach to 20th-century Canadian social realist novels, pursuing a refreshingly (neo-)Marxist approach to such issues as Bakhtinian notions of the novelistic form and dialogism as applied to Canadian socio-political novels influenced by various socialisms, socialist-feminist concerns, economic and sexual politics, and the genre of social realism. In so doing, it demonstrates that Marxist socialism is as relevant today as it was in the 1930s, just as social realist novels continue to thrive as a critique of capitalism. Readers will find valuable insights into the social significance, formal innovations, moral sensitivity, aesthetic enrichment, and ideological complexity of Canadian social realist novels.
New discusses the ways in which Canadian writing, through images of land and space, expresses various assumptions about social values. In addition to wide range of literary texts, he also draws upon geography, the social sciences, and the visual arts.
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 landmark study explores the cultural and literary history of unemployment in Canada from the 1920s to the 1970s, which were crucial decades in the formation of our current conception of Canada as a nation. Writing Unemployment asks how writers with diverse political affiliations participated in and protested against the discursive framing of unemployment. It argues that Depression-era conceptions of unemployment shaped later twentieth-century understandings of both worklessness and citizenship. By examining novels, short stories, poetry, manifestos, and agitprop, Jody Mason situates the literary history of the cultural left in a broader context, challenges the dominant literary-historical narrative of the pioneer settler, and contributes to new scholarship on Canada's modern period. By bridging close textual readings with book and publishing history, economic and sociological analysis, and original archival research, Writing Unemployment offers new ideas on work by many of Canada's most important writers.