Canadian Literature - DRAFT

Mapping with Words re-conceptualizes early Canadian settler writing as literary cartography. Examining the multitude of ways in which writers expanded the work of mapmakers, it offers fresh readings of both familiar and obscure texts from the nineteenth century. [Also available as an eBook]

The essays gathered here range from treatments of early postcolonial gothic expression in Canadian literature to attempts to define a Canadian postcolonial gothic mode. Many of these texts wrestle with Canada's colonial past and with the voices and histories that were repressed in the push for national consolidation but emerge now as uncanny reminders of that contentious history. [Also available as an eBook]

Literature not only represents Canada as ""our home and native land"" but has been used as evidence of the civilization needed to claim and rule that land. Indigenous people have long been represented as roaming ""savages"" without land title and without literature. Literary Land Claims: From Pontiac's War to Attawapiskat analyzes works produced between 1832 and the late 1970s by writers who resisted these dominant notions. [Also available as an eBook]

This book examines how concepts of citizenship have been negotiated in Anglophone Canadian literature since the 1970s. Katja Sarkowsky argues that literary texts conceptualize citizenship as political "co-actorship" and as cultural "co-authorship" (Boele van Hensbroek), using citizenship as a metaphor of ambivalent affiliations within and beyond Canada.

In his book Fashioning the Canadian Landscape, J.I. Little examines how Canada, much like the United States, came to be identified with its natural landscape. Little argues that in contrast toAmerica, Canada's image was strongly influenced by the picturesque convention favoured by British travel writers. [Also available as an eBook]

This book seeks to bring into view the development of ecocriticism in the context of Canadian literary studies. Selections include work by Margaret Atwood, Northrop Frye, Sherrill Grace, and Rosemary Sullivan.

By studying Canadian cultural artifacts, particularly literary ones of the twentieth century, she explores the Canadian 'langscape' (the set of myths through which a culture processes its encounter with nature), aiming at nothing less than the delineation of the 'prototypical Canadian' and the 'mapping' of the Canadian sense of self. [Also available as an eBook]

Written with the delightful style and narrative grace which will be immediately familiar to all of Atwood's fans, this superbly crafted and compelling portrait of the mysterious North is at once a fascinating insight into the Canadian imagination, and an exciting new work from an outstanding literary presence.

In ten lively and wide-ranging essays, William Closson James examines various derivations of the sacred in contemporary Canadian culture. Most of the essays focus on the religious aspects of modern Canadian English fiction -- for example, in essays on the fiction of Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, Margaret Atwood and Joy Kogawa... [Also available as a print book]

... In this volume, Daniel Shank Cruz brings this growing genre into a critical focus, bridging the gaps between queer theory, literary criticism, and Mennonite literature...

Through short stories, journal entries and poetry, the women in Voices and Echoes explore the changing landscape of their spiritual lives. Experienced writers such as Lorna Crozier, Di Brandt and Ann Copeland, as well as strong new voices, appear to speak to each other as they draw from a wealth of personal resources to find a way to face life's questions and discover meaning in their lives. [Also available as a print book]

Canada did not fight in the Vietnam War, but the conflict seized the Canadian imagination with an energy that has persisted. In War Is Here Robert McGill explains how the war contributed to a golden age for writing in Canada... [Also available as a print book]

... Battle Lines traces the rise and disappearance of Canadian First World War poetry, and offers a striking and comprehensive account of its varied and vexing poetic gestures... [Also available as a print book]

Since 1977, a new generation of Canadian writers and artists has been mapping the cultural landscapes formed by the memories of war we have inherited, and also the ones we are expected to forget...

... Through a close analysis of the way sacrifice, service, and the commemoration of war are represented in these literary works, Catching the Torch argues that iterations of a secure mythic notion of national identity, one that is articulated via the representation of straightforward civic and military participation, work to counter current anxieties about the stability of the nation-state, in particular anxieties about the failure of the ideal of a national "character." [Also available as a print book]

... L.M. Montgomery and Gender addresses the degree to which Montgomery's work engages and exposes, reflects and challenges the gender roles around her, underscoring how her writing has shaped future representations of gender...

An examination of the feminist avant-garde aesthetics developed in experimental novels of the mid-1970s. Mothers of Invention draws together innovative works of fiction written by French and Quebec feminists in the mid-1970s... [Also available as a print book]

Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, poststructuralist, and First Nations theory, Hoy raises and addresses questions around ?difference? in relation to texts by contemporary Native women prose writers in Canada. [Also available as a print book]

... Practising Femininity analyses the ways in which Canadian texts by Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Nellie McClung, Sinclair Ross, and others work to produce and naturalize femininity in a colonial setting...

Hockey occupies a prominent place in the Canadian cultural lexicon, as evidenced by the wealth of hockey-centred stories and novels published within Canada. [Also available as a print book]

Writing the Body in Motion offers introductory essays on the most commonly taught Canadian sport literature texts. The contributions sketch the state of current scholarship, highlight recurring themes and patterns, and offer close readings of key works.

In Refereeing Identity, Michael Buma examines the ways in which the hockey novel genre attempts to reassure readers that "threatened" traditional Canadian and masculine identities still thrive on the ice.

In the richly interdisciplinary study, Challenging Addiction in Canadian Literature and Classrooms, Cara Fabre argues that popular culture in its many forms contributes to common assumptions about the causes, and personal and social implications, of addiction.

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. [Also available as a print book]

A diverse anthology of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction compiled from writers in the mental health and addiction communities.

By uncovering residues of ancestral languages found in Indigenous uses of English, Mareike Neuhaus shows how these remainders ground a reading strategy that enables us to approach Indigenous texts as literatures in their own right.

Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an ongoing crisis, with roots deep in the nation's colonial history. Despite numerous policies and programs developed to address the issue, Indigenous women continue to be targeted for violence at disproportionate rates. What insights can literature contribute where dominant anti-violence initiatives have failed? [Also available as a print book]

Canadian Indigenous Literature and Art sheds light on Indigenous justice perspectives in Indigenous literature and art. Decolonizing education, culture, and society is the revolutionary pulse of this book aimed at educational reform and comprehensive change.

Directions Home explores the trajectories and tendencies of African-Canadian literature within the Canadian canon and the socio-cultural traditions of the African Diaspora.

Focusing on the work of black, diasporic writers in Canada, particularly Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, and Tessa McWatt, Blackening Canada investigates the manner in which literature can transform conceptions of nation and diaspora.

Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature is a pioneering study of African-Canadian literary creativity, laying the groundwork for future scholarly work in the field. Based on extensive excavations of archives and texts, this challenging passage through twelve essays presents a history of the literature and examines its debt to, and synthesis with, oral cultures.

An anthology of African-Canadian writing, Black Writers Matter offers a cross-section of established writers and newcomers to the literary world who tackle contemporary and pressing issues with beautiful, sometimes raw, prose.

The present volume critically examines South Asian Canadian fiction in the light of personal narratives which give ethnic existence a 'voice' and create an awareness of the 'different' and the 'other'.

A research project of the Centre for Feminist Research (York University). "This bibliographic essay provides an overview of the experiences of women who came to Canada from South Asia during the twentieth century".

"... I have put together this collection of essays and reviews that I have written between 1982 and 1992 on the Indian diaspora ... most of the essays have been revised for this volume." - Preface