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This is the first full-length study of Alice Munro's work to be published in Britain. Highlights Munro's distinctive storytelling methods where everything becomes both 'touchable and mysterious'.
Times change, lives change, and the terms we need to describe our literature or society or condition—what Raymond Williams calls “keywords”—change with them. Perhaps the most significant development in the quarter-century since Eli Mandel edited his anthology Contexts of Canadian Criticism has been the growing recognition that not only do different people need different terms, but the same terms have different meanings for different people and in different contexts. Nation, history, culture, art, identity—the positions we take discussing these and other issues can lead to conflict, but also hold the promise of a new sort of community. Speaking of First Nations people and their literature, Beth Brant observes that “Our connections … are like the threads of a weaving. … While the colour and beauty of each thread is unique and important, together they make a communal material of strength and durability.” New Contexts of Canadian Criticism is designed to be read, to work, in much the same manner.
In the context of de/colonization, the boundary between an Aboriginal text and the analysis by a non-Aboriginal outsider poses particular challenges often constructed as unbridgeable. Eigenbrod argues that politically correct silence is not the answer but instead does a disservice to the literature that, like all literature, depends on being read, taught, and disseminated in various ways. In Travelling Knowledges, Eigenbrod suggests decolonizing strategies when approaching Aboriginal texts as an outsider and challenges conventional notions of expertise. She concludes that literatures of colonized peoples have to be read ethically, not only without colonial impositions of labels but also with the responsibility to read beyond the text or, in Lee Maracle's words, to become "the architect of great social transformation." Features the works of: Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan), Louise Halfe (Cree), Margo Kane (Saulteaux/Cree), Maurice Kenny (Mohawk), Thomas King (Cherokee, living in Canada), Emma LaRocque (Cree/Metis), Lee Maracle (Sto:lo/Metis), Ruby Slipperjack (Anishnaabe), Lorne Simon (Miíkmaq), Richard Wagamese (Anishnaabe), and Emma Lee Warrior (Peigan).
The first one-volume history of Canadian fiction covering its growth and development from earliest times to the present day. Recounting the struggles and the glories of this burgeoning area of investigation, it explains Canada's literary growth alongside its remarkable history.
Is it possible to write an artistically respectable and theoretically convincing religious novel in a non-religious age? Up to now, there has been no substantial application of theological criticism to the works of Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan, the two most important Canadian novelists before 1960. Yet both were religious writers during the period when Canada entered the modern, non-religious era, and both greatly influenced the development of our literature. MacLennan’s journey from Calvinism to Christian existentialism is documented in his essays and seven novels, most fully in The Watch that Ends the Night. Callaghan’s fourteen novels are marked by tensions in his theology of Catholic humanism, with his later novels defining his theological themes in increasingly secular terms. This tension between narrative and metanarrative has produced both the artistic strengths and the moral ambiguities that characterize his work. Faith and Fiction: A Theological Critique of the Narrative Strategies of Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan is a significant contribution to the relatively new field studying the relation between religion and literature in Canada.
An engaging, critical study of Hugh Hood's ambitious twelve-volume novel-series.
Patterns of the Past has been published to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Ontario Historical Society. Organized on 4 Sept 1888 as the Pioneer Association of Ontario, the Society adopted its current name in 1898. Its objectives, for a century, have been to promote and develop the study of Ontario’s past. The purpose of this book is both to commemorate and to carry on that worthy tradition. Introduced by Ian Wilson, Archivist of Ontario, and edited by Roger Hall, William Westfall and Laurel Sefton MacDowell, this distinctive volume is a landmark not only in the Society’s history but in the prince’s historiography. Eighteen scholars have pooled their tale...
This Companion is a complete introduction to the fictional and non-fictional writings of the Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro.
Western culture may have enshrined North as a touchstone by which all other directions are defined, but the North is not one but a number of Netherlands; like all frontiers, the North is, in its essence, imaginative, magicked out of ice and snow, muskeg and tundra. Storytelling is its generative principle, the activity through which the North and Northerners call themselves into being. In essays on topics ranging from the Aboriginal justice system in Canada to the search for the Northwest Passage to the cultural paradigms of medieval Iceland, The Fictional North examines stereotypes and iconic images of the North, the relationship of North to South, and ethnographic and fictional models of “Northerness.” This diversity of subjects and methodologies not only introduces readers to the diversity found above the 53rd Parallel, but also reflects the catholicity of the North itself. Interdisciplinary and timely, The Fictional North offers insights into the North’s past as well as its present to those interested in circumpolar issues and the areas of culture, literature, history, film, sociology, and education.