Observing the Outports

Observing the Outports
Author: Jeff Webb
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2016-01-27
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1442625325

The years after Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada were ones of rapid social and economic change, as provincial resettlement and industrialization initiatives attempted to transform the lives of rural Newfoundlanders. At Memorial University in St. John’s, a new generation of faculty saw the province’s transformation as a critical moment. Some hoped to solve the challenges of modernization through their rural research. Others hoped to document the island’s “traditional” culture before it disappeared. Between them they created the field of “Newfoundland studies.” In Observing the Outports, Jeff A. Webb illustrates how interdisciplinary collaborations among scholars of lexicography, history, folklore, anthropology, sociology, and geography laid the foundation of our understanding of Newfoundland society in an era of modernization. His extensive archival research and oral history interviews illuminate how scholars at Memorial University created an intellectual movement that paralleled the province’s cultural revival.

Dictionary of Newfoundland English

Dictionary of Newfoundland English
Author: W.J. Kirwin
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 858
Release: 1990-11-01
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1442690658

The Dictionary of Newfoundland English, first published in 1982 to regional, national, and international acclaim, is a historical dictionary that gives the pronunciations and definitions for words that the editors have called "Newfoundland English." The varieties of English spoken in Newfoundland date back four centuries, mainly to the early seventeenth-century migratory English fishermen of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset, and to the seventeenth- to the nineteenth-century immigrants chiefly from southeastern Ireland. Culled from a vast reading of books, newspapers, and magazines, this book is the most sustained reading ever undertaken of the written words of this province. The dictionary gives not only the meaning of words, but also presents each word with its variant spellings. Moreover, each definition is succeeded by an all-important quotation of usage which illustrates the typical context in which word is used. This well-researched, impressive work of scholarship illustrates how words and phrases have evolved and are used in everyday speech and writing in a specific geographical area. The Dictionary of Newfoundland English is one of the most important, comprehensive, and thorough works dealing with Newfoundland. Its publication, a great addition to Newfoundlandia, Canadiana, and lexicography, provides more than a regional lexicon. In fact, this entertaining and delightful book presents a panoramic view of the social, cultural, and natural history, as well as the geography and economics, of the quintessential lifestyle of one of Canada's oldest European-settled areas. This second edition contains a supplement offering approximately 1500 new or expanded entries, an increase of more than 30 per cent over the first edition. Besides new words, the supplement includes modified and additional senses of old words and fresh derivations and usages.

The Outport People

The Outport People
Author: Claire Mowat
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005
Genre: Fishing villages
ISBN: 9781552636473

' A captivating tale....Claire Mowat writes with warmth and sensitivity.' -Winnipeg Free Press Claire Mowat and her husband, Farley, arrived in Baleena by schooner. There were no roads, no cars and no telephones. The tiny village that nestled among the rocky hills of Newfoundland's desolate southern coast had existed for generations with ancient customs and patterns of speech that still endured-while the modern world waited impatiently in the wings. Drawing on a wealth of first-hand experience-the Mowats lived in the outport community for five years-Claire Mowat has written a fictional memoir that beautifully recreates an almost vanished world. A world where life revolved tightly around the home and neighbours watched over one another. A world where one's kitchen was open to anyone who might drop in, day or night. A world that Claire Mowat grew to love.

Mounties, Moose, and Moonshine

Mounties, Moose, and Moonshine
Author: Norman Ryukichi Okihiro
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1997
Genre: History
ISBN:

Examines three different types of criminal behavior in two small Newfoundland fishing villages: economic subsistence behaviors, such as poaching and making moonshine; conventional crimes, such as assault, theft, and domestic violence; and exploitative behavior, such as fish plant operators preying on vulnerable outport residents. Also describes the mounting tensions between the state and the residents since commercial fishing ceased in 1992 due to a collapse of ground fish stocks. He argues that the state's increasing and insensitive regulations force powerless people out of the fishery and destroy what is left of the outport way of life in Atlantic Canada and British Columbia. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Elizabeth Bishop at Work

Elizabeth Bishop at Work
Author: Eleanor Cook
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-08-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674973143

In her lifetime Elizabeth Bishop was appreciated as a writer’s writer (John Ashbery once called her “the writer’s writer’s writer”). But since her death in 1979 her reputation has grown, and today she is recognized as a major twentieth-century poet. Critics and biographers now habitually praise Bishop’s mastery of her art, but all too often they have little to say about how her poetry does its sublime work—in the ear and in the mind’s eye. Elizabeth Bishop at Work examines Bishop’s art in detail—her diction, syntax, rhythm, and meter, her acute sense of place, and her attention to the natural world. It is also a study of the poet working at something, challenging herself to try new things and to push boundaries. Eleanor Cook traces Bishop’s growing confidence and sense of freedom, from her first collection, North & South, to Questions of Travel, in which she fully realized her poetic powers, to Geography III and the breathtaking late poems, which—in individual ways—gather in and extend the poet’s earlier work. Cook shows how Bishop shapes each collection, putting to rest the notion that her published volumes are miscellanies. Elizabeth Bishop at Work is intended for readers and writers as well as teachers. In showing exactly how Bishop’s poems work, Cook suggests how we ourselves might become more attentive readers and better writers. Bishop has been compared to Vermeer, and as with his paintings, so with her poems. They create small worlds where every detail matters.

Folklore in the United States and Canada

Folklore in the United States and Canada
Author: Patricia Sawin
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253052882

To ensure continuity and foster innovation within the discipline of folklore, we must know what came before. Folklore in the United States and Canada is an essential guide to the history and development of graduate folklore programs throughout the United States and Canada. As the first history of folklore studies since the mid-1980s, this book offers a long overdue look into the development of the earliest programs and the novel directions of more recent programs. The volume is encyclopedic in its coverage and is organized chronologically based on the approximate founding date of each program. Drawing extensively on archival sources, oral histories, and personal experience, the contributors explore the key individuals and central events in folklore programs at US and Canadian academic institutions and demonstrate how these programs have been shaped within broader cultural and historical contexts. Revealing the origins of graduate folklore programs, as well as their accomplishments, challenges, and connections, Folklore in the United States and Canada is an essential read for all folklorists and those who are studying to become folklorists.

The Shipping News

The Shipping News
Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0743519809

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents). As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.