"Trading Magic for Fact," Fact for Magic

Author: Marc Colavincenzo
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2021-10-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004487832

This study brings together three major areas of interest - history, postmodern fiction, and myth. Whereas neither history and postmodern fiction nor history and myth are strangers to one another, postmodernism and myth are odd bedfellows. For many critics, postmodern thought with its resistance to metanarratives stands in direct and deliberate contrast to myth with its apparent tendency to explain the world by means of neat, complete narratives. There is a strain of postmodern Canadian historical fiction in which myth actually forms a complement not only to postmodernism's suspicion of master-narratives but also to its privileging of those marginal and at times ignored areas of history. The fourteen works of Canadian fiction considered demonstrate a doubled impulse which at first glance seems contradictory. On the one hand, they go about demythologizing - in the Barthesian sense - various elements of historical discourse, exposing its authority as not simply a natural given but as a construct. This includes the fact that the view of history portrayed in the fiction has been either underrepresented or suppressed by official historiography. On the other hand, the history is then re-mythologized, in that it becomes part of a pre-existing myth, its mythic elements are foregrounded, myth and magic are woven into the narrative, or it is portrayed as extraordinary in some way. The result is an empowering of these histories for the future; they are made larger than life and unforgettable.

Catching the Torch

Catching the Torch
Author: Neta Gordon
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2014-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1554589851

Catching the Torch examines contemporary novels and plays written about Canada’s participation in World War I. Exploring such works as Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers, Jack Hodgins’s Broken Ground, Kevin Kerr’s Unity (1918), Stephen Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding, and Frances Itani’s Deafening, the book considers how writers have dealt with the compelling myth that the Canadian nation was born in the trenches of the Great War. In contrast to British and European remembrances of WWI, which tend to regard it as a cataclysmic destroyer of innocence, or Australian myths that promote an ideal of outsize masculinity, physical bravery, and white superiority, contemporary Canadian texts conjure up notions of distinctively Canadian values: tolerance of ethnic difference, the ability to do one’s duty without complaint or arrogance, and the inclination to show moral as well as physical courage. Paradoxically, Canadians are shown to decry the horrors of war while making use of its productive cultural effects. 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.”

Towards a Transcultural Future

Towards a Transcultural Future
Author: Gesellschaft für die Neuen Englischsprachigen Literaturen. Annual Conference
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9042017368

This second collection, complementing ASNEL Papers 9.1, covers a similar range of writers, topics, themes and issues, all focusing on present-day transcultural issues and their historical antecedents: TOPICS TREATED Preparing for post-apartheid in South African fiction; Maori culture and the New Historicism; Danish-New Zealand acculturation; linguistic approaches to 'void'; women's overcoming in Southern African writing; new post-apartheid approaches to literary studies; Afrikanerdom; postmodern psychoanalytic interpretations of Indian religion and identity; transcultural identity in the encounter with London: Malaysian, Nigerian, Pakistani; hypertextual postmodernism; fictionalized multiculturalism and female madness in Australian fiction; myopia and double vision in colonial Australia; Native-American fiction and poetry; Chinese-Canadian and Japanese-Canadian multiculturalism; the postcolonial city; African-American identity and postcolonial Africa; Johannesburg as locus of literary and dramatic creativity; theatre before and after apartheid; the black experience in England. WRITERS DISCUSSED Lalithambika Antherjanam; Ayi Kwei Armah; J.M. Coetzee; Tsitsi Dangarembga; Helen Darville; Lauris Edmond; Buchi Emecheta; Yvonne du Fresne; Hiromi Goto; Patricia Grace; Rodney Hall; Joy Harjo; Bessie Head; Gordon Henry Jr.; Christopher Hope; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Hanif Kureishi; Keri Hulme, Lee Kok Liang; Bill Manhire; Zakes Mda; Mike Nicol; Michael Ondaatje; Alan Paton; Ravinder Randhawa; Wendy Rose; Salman Rushdie; Sipho Sepamla; Atima Srivastava; Meera Syal; Marlene van Niekerk; Yvonne Vera; Fred Wah CRITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS BY Ken Arvidson; Thomas Bruckner; David Callahan; Eleonora Chiavetta; Marc Colavincenzo; Gordon Collier; John Douthwaite; Dorothy Driver; Claudia Duppe; Robert Fraser; Anne Fuchs; John Gamgee; D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke; Konrad Gross; Bernd Herzogenrath; Susanne Hilf; Clara A.B. Joseph; Jaroslav Ku nir; Chantal Kwast-Greff; M.Z. Malaba; Sigrun Meinig; Michael Meyer; Mike Nicol; Obododimma Oha; Vincent O'Sullivan; Judith Dell Panny; Mike Petry; Jochen Petzold; Norbert H. Platz; Malcolm Purkey; Stephanie Ravillon; Anne Holden Ronning; Richard Samin; Cecile Sandten; Nicole Schroder; Joseph Swann; Andre Viola; Christine Vogt-William; Bernard Wilson; Janet Wilson; Brian Worsfold. CREATIVE WRITING BY Katherine Gallagher; Peter Goldsworthy; Syd Harrex; Mike Nicol THE EDITORS: Geoffrey V. Davis and Peter H. Marsden teach at the Rhenish-Westphalian Technical University, Aachen; Benedicte Ledent and Marc Delrez teach at the University of Liege.

National Plots

National Plots
Author: Andrea Cabajsky
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2010-10-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1554582091

Fiction that reconsiders, challenges, reshapes, and/or upholds national narratives of history has long been an integral aspect of Canadian literature. Works by writers of historical fiction (from early practitioners such as John Richardson to contemporary figures such as Alice Munro and George Elliott Clarke) propose new views and understandings of Canadian history and individual relationships to it. Critical evaluation of these works sheds light on the complexity of these depictions. The contributors in National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada critically examine texts with subject matter ranging from George Vancouver’s west coast explorations to the eradication of the Beothuk in Newfoundland. Reflecting diverse methodologies and theoretical approaches, the essays seek to explicate depictions of “the historical” in individual texts and to explore larger questions relating to historical fiction as a genre with complex and divergent political motivations and goals. Although the topics of the essays vary widely, as a whole the collection raises (and answers) questions about the significance of the roles historical fiction has played within Canadian culture for nearly two centuries.

War, Myths, and Fairy Tales

War, Myths, and Fairy Tales
Author: Sara Buttsworth
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2016-12-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 981102684X

This exciting new collection examines the relationships between warfare, myths, and fairy tales, and explores the connections and contradictions between the narratives of war and magic that dominate the ways in which people live and have lived, survived, considered and described their world. Presenting original contributions and critical reflections that explore fairy tales, fantasy and wars, be they "real" or imagined, past or present, this book looks at creative works in popular culture, stories of resistance, the history and representation of global and local conflicts, the Holocaust, across multiple media. It offers a timely and important overview of the latest research in the field, including contributions from academics, story-tellers and artists, thereby transcending the traditional boundaries of the disciplines, extending the parameters of war studies beyond the battlefield.

Bodies and Voices

Bodies and Voices
Author: Anna Rutherford
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 9042023341

The articles investigate representations in literature, both by the colonizers and colonized. Many deal with the effect the dominant culture had on the self image of native inhabitants. They cover areas on all continents that were colonized by European countries.

'My Mother was the Earth, My Father was the Sky'

'My Mother was the Earth, My Father was the Sky'
Author: Nadia Majid
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2010
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9783034302241

This study brings together three closely related aspects of Maori literature - myth, memory and identity. It examines selected novels by Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace in order to trace an ever-developing Maori identity that has changed considerably over three decades of the Maori novel. This book demonstrates that an investigation of the construction of identity in literature benefits from a close look at the importance of Maori mythology as well as associated cultural and individual memories. Indicating that Maori fiction has become what Homi Bhabha terms a third space, this book verifies the links between novel, myth and memory with the help of existing research in these areas in order to assess their importance for the reinterpretation of identity. The Maori novels that depict situations reflecting current issues are viewed as an experimental playground in which authors can explore a variety of solutions to tribal, societal and political issues. This study establishes the early novels as reinterpretations of the past and guides to the future, and characterises the more recent novels as representing a move towards empowerment and pioneering that has not yet come to a conclusion.

Canadian Literature

Canadian Literature
Author: Faye Hammill
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2007-09-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748629521

An important critical study of Canadian literature, placing internationally successful anglophone Canadian authors in the context of their national literary history. While the focus of the book is on twentieth-century and contemporary writing, it also charts the historical development of Canadian literature and discusses important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors. The chapters focus on four central topics in Canadian culture: Ethnicity, Race, Colonisation; Wildernesses, Cities, Regions; Desire; and Histories and Stories. Each chapter combines case studies of five key texts with a broad discussion of concepts and approaches, including postcolonial and postmodern reading strategies and theories of space, place and desire. Authors chosen for close analysis include Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Leonard Cohen, Thomas King and Carol Shields.

Revisiting The Great White North?

Revisiting The Great White North?
Author: Darren E. Lund
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2015-01-20
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9462098697

Returning seven years later to their original pieces from this landmark book, over 20 leading scholars and activists revisit and reframe their rich contributions to a burgeoning scholarship on Whiteness. With new reflective writings for each chapter, and valuable sections on relevant readings and resources, this volume refreshes and enhances the first text to pay critical and sustained attention to Whiteness in education, with implications far beyond national borders. Contributors include George Sefa Dei, Tracey Lindberg, Carl James, Cynthia Levine-Rasky, and the late Patrick Solomon. Courageously examining diverse perspectives, contexts, and institutional practices, contributors to this volume dismantle the underpinnings of inequitable power relations, privilege, and marginalization. The book’s relevance extends to those in a range of settings, with abundant and poignant lessons for enhancing and understanding transformative social justice work in education. Revisiting The Great White North? offers terrific grist for examining the persistence of Whiteness even as it shape-shifts. Chapters are comprehensive, theoretically rich, and anchored in personal experience. Authors’ reflections on the seven years since publication of the first edition of this book complexify how we understand Whiteness, while simultaneously driving home the need not only to grapple with it, but to work against it. Christine Sleeter, Professor Emerita, California State University Monterey Bay Our understanding of racial inequities in education will be impoverished unless we look deeply at White privilege, its variation in different contexts, and resistances to change. Such is the call in this important book by Lund, Carr, and colleagues, whose analyses within Canadian contexts, framed and re-framed for this captivating revised edition, will be useful to educators and scholars around the world. Read this book today. Kevin Kumashiro, Dean, School of Education, University of San Francisco; President, National Association for Multicultural Education Darren Lund and Paul Carr have given the contributors to their original 2007 text the opportunity to revisit, rethink, reconceptualize, and reframe their earlier work. The result is an interesting, invigorating, and unsettling group of chapters that challenge readers to also revisit and rethink their own ideas about Whiteness, privilege, and power .... Teachers, administrators, policymakers, and researchers will all benefit from this critical work. Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, Language, Literacy, and Culture College of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Lund and Carr bring together a superb collection of authors who collectively challenge readers to go beyond liberal platitudes about race ... until educators confront the political, social and economic consequences of inequitably distributed privilege, the path towards equality and freedom will remain elusive. By immersing us in the discourse of Whiteness, the essays in this book illuminate that very path. Joel Westheimer, University Research Chair & Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa