Hailed as a landmark in Canadian literary scholarship when it was originally published in 1965, the Literary History of Canada is now being reissued, revised and enlarged, in three volumes. This major effort of a large group of scholars working in the field of English-language Canadian literature provides a comprehensive, up-to-date reference work. It has already proven itself invaluable as a source of information on authors, genres, and literary trends and influences. It represents a positive a...
For most of Canada's history, its children's literature, with the exception of such notable authors as Charles G.D. Roberts, Ernest Thompson Seton, L.M. Montgomery, and Grey Owl (Archibald Belaney), was not a growth industry. British and American books were readily available and had already achieved approval in the centres of intellect or fashion. More recently, however, with a larger and more diverse population and with the support of numerous publishers specializing in the field and a growing...
Taking off from the Promethean myth of human creation, Gillian Sze's second poetry collection explores the "anatomy of clay" and the individual as a sentient mystery. At times reflective, instructional, playful, or strange, the first section, Quotidianus, offers observational poems, which recount intimate and ordinary moments often missed, overlooked, or forgotten. Sze tugs at the fabric of habit and amidst the urban mundane finds her subjects in a woman waiting for the bus, a neighbour who talk...
Avant Canada
Avant Canada presents a rich collection of original essays and creative works on a representative array of avant-garde literary movements in Canada from the past fifty years. From the work of Leonard Cohen and bpNichol to that of Jordan Abel and Liz Howard, Avant Canada features twenty-eight of the best writers and critics in the field. The book proposes four dominant modes of avant-garde production: "Concrete Poetics," which accentuates the visual and material aspects of language; "Language Wri...
This is a memoir in the vein of Plath's "Bell Jar". A few months after selling his first book to a major publisher, Jan Lars Jensen woke in a psychiatric ward, only to find that the ideas that had inspired his fiction now roamed through his waking nightmares. Gripping and harrowing, darkly comic and deeply moving, "Nervous System" is the memoir of a novelist who almost let his imagination get the best of him.
"The Quebec Anthology: 1830-1990" provides a complete overview of the Quebec short story from its beginnings to the 1990s and offers a unique opportunity for English readers to discover the essence of this fascinating literature. In addition, a detailed biography of each author and an assessment of each story's place in the larger canvas of Quebec literature are included.
Gesa Stedman mines the vein of emotion in Victorian writing to unearth new insights into the ways literature responded to the dramatic social and political changes then taking place. Contemporary research from various disciplines, including sociology, ethnology and history, inform this study, which juxtaposes canonical material such as Dickens' "Hard Times", Charlotte Bronte's "Shirley" and Germaine de Stael's "Corinne" with popular novels and non-fictional texts, such as "The Education of the H...
Since the 1860s, long before scientists put a name to Alzheimer's disease, Canadian authors have been writing about age-related dementia. Originally, most of these stories were elegies, designed to offer readers consolation. Over time they evolved into narratives of gothic horror in which the illness is presented not as a normal consequence of aging but as an apocalyptic transformation. Weaving together scientific, cultural, and aesthetic depictions of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, Forgotten...
Mitchell: The Life of W.O. Mitchell
by Ormond Mitchell and Barbara Mitchell
Exotics and Retrospectives (Lafcadio Hearn Library, v. 5)
by Lafcadio Hearn
Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference is a book of both practical and theoretical criticism. Some chapters are feminist deconstructive readings of a broad range of the writings of contemporary Canadian poet-critic-novelist Robert Kroetsch, from But We are Exiles to Completed Field Notes . Other chapters self-consciously examine the history and possibility of feminist deconstruction and feminist readings of Kroetsch's writing by analyzing Kroetsch, Derrida, and Freud on subjectivity an...