Translocated Modernisms

Translocated Modernisms
Author: Emily Ballantyne
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0776623826

Translocated Modernisms is a collection of ten chapters partitioned into sections and framed by an introduction by the editors and a coda by Kit Dobson, which is interested in those who thronged to the vibrant streets, cafés, and salons of Montparnasse, those who stayed such as Brion Gysin and Mavis Gallant, those who returned “home” such as Morley Callaghan, John Glassco, David Silverberg, and Sheila Watson, and those who galvanized local cultural practices by appropriating and translating them from elsewhere. While for some Paris becomes a permanent home, for others, it is simply a temporary excursion which can last for months, or for many years. The collection opens up the Lost Generation to include multiple generations and broadens its ambit to encompass modernist writers placed under erasure by dominant narratives of Anglo-American modernism. Instead of limiting the category to a single group based on a collective identity, this volume considers lost generations as a particular type of modernist identity attributable to multiple and disparate collectivities. These lost generations include those excluded from canonical narrativizations of expatriate modernisms, among which we spy the glimmer of other modernists living in the shadows of luminaries long recognized in the Anglo-American tradition.

The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature
Author: Eva-Marie Kröller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2017-06-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107159628

A fully revised second edition of this multi-author account of Canadian literature, from Aboriginal writing to Margaret Atwood.

Northrop Frye and Others

Northrop Frye and Others
Author: Robert D. Denham
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2018-09-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0776626728

Robert D. Denham pursues his quest to uncover the links between Northrop Frye and writers and others who directly influenced his thinking but about whom he did not write an extensive commentary. The first chapter is about Frye’s reading of Patanjali, the founder of the philosophy of Hindu yoga, while the second, discusses cultural mythographer Giambattista Vico, literary history and poetic language. The focus of Frye’s criticism was the verbal arts, but he also had an abiding interest in both the visual arts and music; hence Frye’s admiration of J.S. Bach. The essay on Tolkien examines the tendency in literary history to return from irony to myth, as well as the role that Tolkien played in Frye’s fiction-writing fantasies. In subsequent chapters, Denham explores Frye’s preference for romance and his critique of realism, which run parallel to the views of Oscar Wilde, and their strong shared convictions about the centripetal thrust of art, and about criticism being as creative as literature. Frye’s appreciation for Whitehead’s concept of interpenetration in Science in the Modern World became a key feature of Frye’s speculations about the highest reaches of literature and religion. Frye is clearly indebted to Martin Buber, particularly his influential meditation I and Thou. Aristotle, an important influence upon Frye, was partially filtered through R.S. Crane and his The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Finally, the relationship between Frye and his Oxford tutor Edmund Blunden are explored, while the last is an essay on Frye and M.H. Abrams on how Frye’s critical project might be viewed developed in Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp. This book is published in English. - Robert D. Denham poursuit son examen d’écrivains et autres influences qui ont marqué l’éminent critique Northrop Frye, mais sur lesquels celui-ci n’avait pas consacré de réflexions très développées. Le premier chapitre porte sur la lecture que fait Frye de Patanjali, le fondateur de la philosophie du yoga hindou, et le deuxième, sur le mythographe culturel Giambattista Vico, l’histoire littéraire et le langage poétique. Frye s’intéressait aux arts visuels et à la musique et Denham approfondit l’influence de J.S. Bach sur Frye. Le chapitre sur Tolkien porte sur la tendance en histoire littéraire de passer de l’ironie au mythe, mais aussi sur l’ascendant de Tolkien sur la fiction fantaisiste de Frye. Dans les chapitres suivants, Denham explore la préférence de Frye pour le romantique et sa critique du réalisme, qui trouvent écho chez Oscar Wilde, de même que leur conviction, partagée, de l’importance de l’art, et de la critique comme étant aussi créative que la littérature. L’admiration de Frye pour le concept d’interpénétration présenté dans le Science in the Modern World de Whitehead est devenue un élément clé des réflexions de Frye sur la portée de la littérature et de la religion. Denham explore aussi le lien entre Frye et Martin Buber, dont la méditation I and Thou l’a beaucoup inspiré, et celui entre Frye et R.S. Crane, qui parle beaucoup d’Aristote dans son ouvrage The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Le chapitre 9 explore la relation entre Frye et son tuteur d’Oxford, Edmund Blunden, alors que le dernier chapitre porte sur Frye et M.H. Abrams, et notamment sur le projet critique de Frye compris à la lumière du cadre sur la théorie critique développé par Abrams dans The Mirror and the Lamp. Ce livre est publié en anglais.

Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant
Author: Marta Dvorak
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019-11-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487531966

With a confidante’s insights, Marta Dvořák sets up an innovative connection between Mavis Gallant’s dazzling writing and the whole spectrum of the arts. She simultaneously engages with the feats of art making and the adventures of reading, looking, and listening. Drawing on private correspondence and conversations with the Gallant she repositions as a late modernist, Dvořák investigates the relationships between the Paris-based master of the short story and visual and sound culture. Through the filter of philosophical aesthetics, she identifies the painterly, cinematic, and musical dynamics which light up Gallant’s craft. At the same time, she opens a dialogue between Gallant and other international modernists and with those they were reading, watching, and listening to, from the moving pictures which shaped Gallant’s generation to the rhythm and dissonance of, say, Stravinsky and jazz, which − like the Cubist rupture with spatial perspective − spearheaded modernity’s aesthetics of breakage. How does Gallant’s work work? Dvořák’s hands-on rhetorical analyses of Gallant’s stories and lesser-known, recently reissued novels illuminate the superb stylist’s language and vision via an emphasis on both image and rhythm. Providing keys to Gallant’s famous sleights-of-hand and tonal shifts, the discussions reveal a fictional world as multidimensional as a Cubist picture or a symphony − depending on whether we lean towards the eye or the ear.

Man Should Rejoice, by Hugh MacLennan

Man Should Rejoice, by Hugh MacLennan
Author: Hugh MacLennan
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Total Pages: 485
Release: 2019-04-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0776628011

Man Should Rejoice is one of two hitherto unpublished novels by acclaimed novelist Hugh MacLennan. Completed in 1937 and left unpublished due to economic conditions during the Great Depression, it lay in the McGill archives until now. This critical edition of Man Should Rejoice , which is also the first-ever publication of the work, is comprised of a critical introduction, a bibliography of published and unpublished sources, a fully-edited text based on a typescript of the novel, a list of textual emendations, and explanatory notes. The introduction draws upon extensive research undertaken in three Canadian archival collections located in Montreal and Calgary. It provides relevant historical, cultural, and biographical context for the novel. From hundreds of archival documents, Colin Hill reconstructs a textual history of the novel’s production that acknowledges the crucial contribution of Dorothy Duncan, who heavily revised the text and assisted MacLennan behind the scenes. Hill also explores the critical reception of MacLennan’s fiction from the 1930s to the present. This book is published in English. - Man Should Rejoice est un des deux romans inédits du grand romancier Hugh MacLennan. Terminé en 1937, il fut victime de la Grande Crise et fut conservé dans les archives de McGill jusqu’à maintenant. Cette édition critique de Man Should Rejoice comprend une introduction critique, une bibliographie des sources publiées et non publiées, le texte révisé tiré d’un tapuscrit du roman, une liste des emendations textuelles, et des notes explicatives. L’introduction, qui repose sur des recherches archivistiques poussées de trois collections canadiennes situées à Montréal et à Calgary, fournit le contexte historique, culturel et biographique du roman. Colin Hill érige l’histoire textuelle de l’écriture de ce roman à partir de centaines de documents d’archives qui jettent la lumière sur la contribution clé de Dorothy Duncan, qui a révisé en profondeur le texte et a aidé MacLennan en coulisses. Il explore par ailleurs la réception critique de la fiction de MacLennan, des années 1930 jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Ce livre est publié en anglais.

Battle Lines

Battle Lines
Author: Joel Baetz
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2018-05-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1771123214

For Canadians, the First World War was a dynamic period of literary activity. Almost every poet wrote about the war, critics made bold predictions about the legacy of the period’s poetry, and booksellers were told it was their duty to stock shelves with war poetry. Readers bought thousands of volumes of poetry. Twenty years later, by the time Canada went to war again, no one remembered any of it. 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. As eagerly as Canadians took to the streets to express their support for the war, poets turned to their notebooks, and shared their interpretations of the global conflict, repeating and reshaping popular notions of, among others, national obligation, gendered responsibility, aesthetic power, and deathly presence. The book focuses on the poetic interpretations of the Canadian soldier. He emerges as a contentious poetic subject, a figure of battle romance, and an emblem of modernist fragmentation and fractiousness. Centring the work of five exemplary Canadian war poets (Helena Coleman, John McCrae, Robert Service, Frank Prewett, and W.W.E. Ross), the book reveals their latent faith in collective action as well as conflicting recognition of modernist subjectivities. Battle Lines identifies the Great War as a long-overlooked period of poetic ferment, experimentation, reluctance, and challenge.

Conversations with Trotsky

Conversations with Trotsky
Author: Bruce Nesbitt
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2017-05-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0776624652

This collection presents all of Earle Birney’s known published and unpublished writings on Trotsky and Trotskyism for the very first time. It includes their correspondence as well as a selection of Birney’s letters and literary writings. Before he became one of Canada’s most influential and popular twentieth century poets, Earle Birney lived a double life. To his students and colleagues, he was an engaging university lecturer and scholar. But for seven years—from 1933 to 1940—the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was the focus of his writing and much of his life. During his years as a Trotskyist in Canada, the United States and England, Birney wrote extensively about Trotsky, corresponded with him, organized Trotskyist cells in two countries, and recruited on behalf of Trotskyism; he also lectured on Trotsky and interviewed him over the course of several days. One of his two novels is based on some of these activities. The collection traces the origins of Trotsky’s mistrust of “the British” to his experiences in Canada; shows Birney’s influence on a major shift in Trotsky’s policy of “entrism” in British politics; includes the largest body of Trotskyist criticism in Canadian literary history; and demonstrates the need for a radical re-reading of Birney’s poetry in light of his Trotskyism.

The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada

The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada
Author: Sonja Boon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2022-12-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1000800946

The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada explores the exciting world of nonfiction writing about the self, designed to give teachers and students the tools they need to study both canonical and lesser-known works. The volume introduces important texts and contexts for interpreting life narratives, demonstrates the conceptual tools necessary to understand what life narratives are and how they work, and offers an historical overview of key moments in Canadian auto/biography. Not sure what life writing in Canada is, or how to study it? This critical introduction covers the tools and approaches you require in order to undertake your own interpretation of life writing texts. You will encounter nonfictional writing about individual lives and experiences—including biography, autobiography, letters, diaries, comics, poetry, plays, and memoirs. The volume includes case studies to provide examples of how to study and research life narratives and toolkits to help you apply what you learn. The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada provides instructors and students with the contexts and the critical tools to discover the power of life writing, and the skills to study any kind of nonfiction, from Canada and around the world.

Divided Highways

Divided Highways
Author: Heather Macfarlane
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2019-06-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0776627759

The road trip genre, well established in the literatures of Canada, is a natural outcome of the nation’s obsession with geography. Divided Highways examines road narratives by Anglo-Canadian, Québécois and Indigenous authors and the sense of place and nationhood in these communities. Geography describes the land, and history peoples it, just as memories connect us to place. This is why road trips are such a feature of writing in Canada, allowing the travellers to claim, at least symbolically, the terrain they have traversed. Macfarlane examines works by a variety of writers from each of these communities, including Gilles Archambault, Jeannette Armstrong, Jill Frayne, Tomson Highway, Claude Jasmin, Robert Kroetsch, Jacques Poulin, Aritha van Herk and Paul Villeneuve, to name but a few. Studying a diversity of road narratives from Anglo-Canadian, Québécois and Indigenous populations not only demonstrates the existence of a very specific road genre, but is also revelatory of very diverse and often conflicting perceptions of nationhood. It is these expressions of sovereignty that are integral to ongoing discussions of reconciliation and decolonization. This book is published in English. - Cet ouvrage étudie l’existence et la tradition du roman de la route au Canada. La géographie décrit le territoire et l’histoire lui insuffle vie, tout comme les souvenirs sont des points d’attache à un lieu donné. Voilà pourquoi les road trips ont une place privilégiée dans l’écriture d’expression anglaise, française et autochtone du Canada : ils permettent aux voyageurs de revendiquer, du moins symboliquement, le terrain qu’ils ont couvert. C’est l’intersection de l’histoire et de la géographie qui confère toute sa signification à un voyage, qui alimente cet esprit des lieux, ou qui permet d’en constater l’absence. Les voyages sont révélateurs des intérêts propres aux trois groupes examinés dans le cadre de cette étude. Le désir, et parfois la nécessité, d’entreprendre un voyage, les compagnons de voyage ainsi que les destinations, de même que l’histoire qui s’écrit au fil des distances parcourues sont autant d’indicateurs de cette notion de l’espace et du concept de nation au sein du pays. Pour illustrer ce phénomène, ce livre examine des oeuvres littéraires d’une gamme d’écrivains anglophones, québécois et autochtones, dont Gilles Archambault, Jeannette Armstrong, Jill Frayne, Tomson Highway, Linda Hogan, Scott Gardiner, Claude Jasmin, Robert Kroetsch, Lee Maracle, Jacques Poulin, Aritha van Herk et Paul Villeneuve. L’approche comparative aux littératures du Canada est le prolongement logique aux études postcoloniales dans la mesure où elle révèle les complexités de même que les spécificités de diverses communautés, contribuant ainsi à une meilleure compréhension de collectivités nationales. Elle propose, en outre, des histoires qui font le contrepoids aux études transnationales. Ce livre est publié en anglais.

They Have Bodies, by Barney Allen

They Have Bodies, by Barney Allen
Author: Barney Allen
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0776631268

Published in 1929, and almost instantly censored by the Toronto City Police, They Have Bodies has been completely overlooked by generations of scholars and writers interested in the Canadian avant-garde. It is not just the novel’s extreme formal innovation that is immediately startling about They Have Bodies. There is also its close attention to the depraved, licentious behaviour of Toronto’s elite, its revelation of moral hypocrisy, and its exposure of the means by which aristocratic and church power provides succour to egregious duplicity. Its social criticism and dark humour were too much for Canadian readers at the time. It is, however, exactly the kind of book contemporary Canadian readers, writers, and scholars hope lies buried in the archives waiting to be recovered. A gem of insight, innovation, and novelty: finally, here is a new edition of one of the rarest, wildest books of the twentieth century. This book is published in English - Publié en 1929 et presque instantanément censuré par les services de police de la ville de Toronto, cet ouvrage, intitulé They Have Bodies, a été complétement négligé par des générations d’écrivains et de chercheurs, par ailleurs habituellement sensibles aux créations de l’avant-garde canadienne. En fait, ce n’est pas seulement l’extrême innovation formelle de ce roman qui surprend et saisit de prime abord, mais aussi l’attention particulière que l’auteur prête au comportement dépravé et licencieux de l’élite torontoise. Dans cet ouvrage, Barney Allen révèle l’hypocrisie morale de cette élite aristocratique et religieuse ainsi que les moyens auxquels elle recourt pour masquer sa monstrueuse duplicité. Cette violente critique sociale, alliée à un humour noir des plus décapants, était sans doute trop corrosive pour les lecteurs canadiens de cette époque. Cependant, ce roman correspond exactement au type d’ouvrages, profondément enfouis dans les archives, que des lecteurs, des écrivains et des chercheurs canadiens contemporains espèrent ardemment exhumer et redécouvrir. En fait, ce texte avant-gardiste constitue un véritable joyau de perspicacité, d’innovation et de hardiesse. Cette nouvelle édition vous permettra de découvrir un des romans les plus singuliers et les plus audacieux du XXe siècle. Ce livre est publié en anglais.