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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.
The Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador is a mythologized place that resonates with tragic adventure, polar expeditions and Grand Banks fishing; a real and imagined geography with an incredible artistic output that calls for critical discussion. This book examines the diversity of this province’s literature and culture, taking into consideration the expertise of scholars and writers who have first-hand knowledge of its unique context. Chapters on history, travel, fiction, autobiography, poetry, theatre, storytelling, filmmaking, and the visual arts provide an up-to-date survey across a broad range of artistic endeavours, as well as close readings of selected texts. The questions...
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...
Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective problematizes different aspects of the renewal and development of the short story. The aim of this collection is to explore the most recent theoretical issues raised by the short story as a genre and to offer theoretical and practical perspectives on the form. Centering as it does on specific authors and on the wider implications of short story poetics, this collection presents a new series of essays that both reinterpret canonical writers of the genre and advance new critical insights on the most recent trends and contemporary authors. Theorizations about genre reflect on different aspects of the short story from a multiplicity of per...
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...
This volume about the modernist writer and artist Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) presents him as a radical figure in twentieth-century modernism. The authors rediscover aspects of Lewis's work which show how his fiction challenges modernist norms, and how his acute and wide-ranging critique of culture has a vital contemporary relevance. Lewis's range is extraordinary - it covers Nietzsche as well as classic cinema, Renaissance art and English classicism. Being politically conservative, he had nonetheless a place on the political left, and he can be seen as a postmodernist before his time. These essays by leading Spanish and British specialists reveal Lewis as one of the key modernists of our time.
Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield – texts which explore the far reaches of Schadenfreude, and so-called ‘superiority theories’ of laughter, pushing these theories to breaking point. In these literary texts, the violent superiority often ascribed to laughter is seen as radically unstable, co-existing with its opposite: an anarchic sense of equality. Laughter, humour and comedy are slippery, duplicitous, ambivalent, self-contradictory hybrids, fusing apparently discordant elements. Now and then, though, literary and philosophical texts also dream of a different kind of laughter, one which reaches beyond its alloys – a transcendent, ‘perfect’ laughter which exists only in and for itself.
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In an age where southern power-holders look north and see only vacant polar landscapes, isolated communities, and exploitable resources, it is important to note that the Inuit homeland encompasses extensive philosophical, political, and literary traditions. Stories in a New Skin is a seminal text that explores these Arctic literary traditions and, in the process, reveals a pathway into Inuit literary criticism. Author Keavy Martin considers writing, storytelling, and performance from a range of genres and historical periods—the classic stories and songs of Inuit oral traditions, life writing, oral histories, and contemporary fiction, poetry and film—and discusses the ways in which these ...
This collection addresses the complex process by which translation and other forms of rewriting have contributed to canon formation, revision, destabilization, and dismantlement. Through the play between version and subversion, which is inherent to any form of rewriting, these essays – focusing on translations since the sixteenth century down to the present day – stress the role of translation and adaptation as potentially transformative mediations, capable of shaping and undermining identities. Such manipulation is deeply ambivalent, since it can be used as a means of disseminating the ideology of oppressive regimes at the expense of the source text; but it can also serve to garner attention to marginalised texts. This tense interplay between political, social, and aesthetic purposes almost inevitably generates discontents, which may turn out to be the outcome of translation in general. However, discontent is a relational concept, depending on where one stands in the field of competing positions that is the canon.