History

This revised and expanded edition of Major Canadian Authors provides an entrance into that realm.Stouck's carefully integrated essays introduce the life and writings of eighteen foremost Canadian authors, including Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, Sinclair Ross, and Alice Munro. The second edition adds a new chapter on Margaret Atwood, updates the text, and expands the reference guide to include more than sixty Canadian authors.

Profiles in Canadian Literature is a wide-ranging series of essays on Canadian authors. Each profile acquaints the reader with the writer's work, providing insight into themes, techniques, and special characteristics, as well as a chronology of the author's life. Finally, there is a bibliography of primary works and criticism that suggests avenues for further study.

This up-to-date reference book brings together 300 leading Canadianists to look at literature in Canada from a variety of perspectives. In over 2000 entries, acknowledging Canada's cultural plurality, the Encyclopedia discusses literature in English and French, and also in such other languages as Yiddish, Spanish, Haida and Cree; authors and their work; related literary and social issues; professional institutions that play a role in the lives of Canadian writers; and the major historical and cultural events that have shaped Canada. The unique richness of this work is also reflected in the breadth of other entries. Among them are commentaries on humour and satire, genre (including radio drama and the long poem), social history, film, television and popular culture, literary awards, language, critical theory, the oral literatures of the First Nations, petroglyphs, the publishing industry, journalism, gender, race, religion, region, myth, and class.

From Aboriginal writing to Margaret Atwood, this is a complete English-language history of Canadian writing in English and French from its beginnings. The multi-authored volume pays special attention to works from the 1960s and after, to multicultural and indigenous writing, popular literature, and the interaction of anglophone and francophone cultures throughout Canadian history. Established genres such as fiction, drama and poetry are discussed alongside forms of writing which have traditionally received less attention, such as the essay, nature-writing, life-writing, journalism, and comics, and also writing in which the conventional separation between genres has broken down, such as the poetic novel. Written by an international team of distinguished scholars, the volume includes a separate, substantial section discussing major genres in French, as well as a detailed chronology of historical and literary/cultural events, and an extensive bibliography covering criticism in English and French.

The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature introduces the fiction, poetry and drama of Canada in its historical, political and cultural contexts. In this clear and structured volume, Richard Lane outlines: the history of Canadian literature from colonial times to the present key texts for Canadian First Peoples and the literature of Quebec the impact of English translation, and the Canadian immigrant experience critical themes such as landscape, ethnicity, orality, textuality, war and nationhood contemporary debate on the canon, feminism, postcoloniality, queer theory, and cultural and ethnic diversity the work of canonical and lesser-known writers from Catherine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie to Robert Service, Maria Campbell and Douglas Coupland. Written in an engaging and accessible style and offering a glossary, maps and further reading sections, this guidebook is a crucial resource for students working in the field of Canadian Literature.

A history of Canadian literature, looking at the work of individual writers and also at the social and cultural contexts that helped shape their preoccupations and direct their choice of literary form. W.H. New explains how - from early records of oral tales to the writing strategies of the 1980s - writer, reader, literature and society are interrelated. New discusses both Aboriginal and European mythologies, looking at pre-Contact narratives and also at the way Contact experience altered hierarchies of literary value. He then considers representations of the real, whether in documentary, fantasy or satire; the precedence of historical romance and the social construction of Nature and State; and ironic subversions of power, the politics of cultural form, and the relevance of the media to a representation of community standard and individual voice. New suggests some ways in which writers of the later 20th century codified such issues as history, gender, ethnicity and literary technique itself.

This book celebrates "the arrival of a national literature on the international stage." Intended primarily for nonspecialists, the twenty essays in the volume suggest the breadth of Canadian literature and illustrate the range and variety of contemporary Canadian criticism. The first section contains eight essays on Canadian writing in English; the second, eight essays on Canadian writing in French. Each section begins with an overview essay on the historical development of the literature. In the third section, four comparative essays "cross and conjoin the linguistic divide."

The literary history of a nation is one of the main cornerstones of its national identity. As a result of Canada's diverse cultural history, however, its literary history is varied and, as E.D. Blodgett contends, is composed of five parts that work to create the whole. These parts include English Canada, French Canada, First Nations communities, Inuit communities, and immigrant communities. Using the critical writing on constructing nationhood, E.D. Blodgett suggests that Canadian literary histories can be used to address the problem of nation and to examine how each of the several 'national' groups that compose Canada develops unique narratives that demonstrate their different responses to the notion of nationhood and their sense of place within Canada's borders. The first such history of its kind in Canada, Five-Part Invention offers a means of reading ethnic difference through cultural representations: the concentration on place and spatial configuration in English Canadian literature; the focus on time and history in French Canadian literature; the cultural trauma of the First Nations and Inuit literature; and the losses and ambiguous recoveries of ethnic minority writing. Blodgett concludes by addressing the roots of Canada's fragmented literary history and speculates on the reasons that this tradition continues today.

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.