Abstract
Carol Shields's Swann provides fertile ground for an exploration of issues relating to literary production, particularly women's literary production, and matters of sexual politics and the gendering of discourse figure prominently in the text. The novel has been read as a mystery; indeed, in various editions the full title appears as Swann: A Mystery or Swann: A Literary Mystery. It unravels the strange disappearance of not only all the volumes of poetry produced by the now dead Mary Swann but also everything connected with her literary production, the single clear photograph of her, and even the lectures and notes of two critics studying her poetry, Syd Buswell and Morton Jimroy. As in Antonia Byatt's Possession or Jane Gardam's The Sidmouth Letters, the research process is itself seen as a kind of theft—almost, Shields suggests, a form of “cannibalism” (231), as if the critics who fight over Swann's life and texts consume her body and soul.1
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