English-Canadian Literature Research Articles

THE IMAGES OF FEMALE WRITERS IN THE “EMILY” AND “ANNE” SERIES BY L.M. MONTGOMERY

While the Künstlerroman may well be considered one of the genres that have blossomed most prominently in the 20th century English-Canadian literature, research investigating its poetics has remained on the fringes of literary scholarship. This paper examines L.M. Montgomery’s sophisticated use of the Künstlerinroman through her portraits of female writers in the Emily and Anne series. My goal is to explore how Montgomery’s heroines choose to narrate themselves and the world around them, how they transcend difficulties and assert their own unique perspectives. Therefore, this paper examines not only the socio-cultural environment which served as background for the creation of literature, but also the writer’s reflections regarding the process of bringing said literature into the world. Drawing on the scholarship of J. Buckley, R. Seret, E. Varsamopoulou, F. Hammill, K. Macfarlane, G.A. Guth and others, this paper aims to analyze L.M. Montgomery’s “sophisticated handling of genre” (E.R. Epperly) in greater depth and place her portraits of the female artists within a broader cultural and literary context. The question of female subjectivity, which concerns women’s perceptions of their own writing (and their fate as artists), is central to my research.

Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood ed. by M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus

Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood ed. by M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus

Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood. Ed. by M. J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus

<i>Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood</i>. Ed. by M. J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus

Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood ed. by M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus (review)

Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood ed. by M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus (review)

SOME PECULIARITIES OF S. LEACOCK’S SHORT-STORY «THE MAN IN ASBESTOS: AN ALLEGORY OF THE FUTURE» TRANSLATION INTO UKRAINIAN

The role of S. Leacock as a representative of English-Canadian literature and peculiarities of his creative works are given in the article. The peculiarities of the literary translation which aim is to reflect ideas, feelings transforming the author’s images with the help of another language material, the main features that make it different from a classical one were stated. The scholars who scrutinize the problems of a literary text translation in the contemporary linguistics was found out. The differences between the original text of S. Leacock’s short-story «The Man in Asbestos: an Allegory of the Future» and the text of translation and its translation by A. Yevsa were analyzed in the article. The translation can be called adequate as some change of content of the original text by the target language means did not impact into general perception of the short-story in its translation. The translator conveys the author’s ideas provoking reader’s reaction to the story. A. Yevsa preserved its content, the system of images and the author’s style, emotional atmosphere and plot identity of the original text and the choice of linguo-stylistic devices used in the original text. General peculiarities of the translation into Ukrainian, main grammar and lexical transformations used by A. Yevsa were marked, among which are generalization, concretization, compensation, semantic development and combination of sentences prevail.

Review: Medievalism in English Canadian Literature from Richardson to Atwood

Review: Medievalism in English Canadian Literature from Richardson to Atwood

Evidence of Reading in Reading Michael Ondaatje’s Novel “The English Patient”

The main aim of the book reading is to gain knowledge and contains numerous sources of information. Reading makes a person to be depth on subjects. Literature is a unique creation by human to expose, understand, to share self experience. Reading offers human to escape from the present, detects from problems and responsibilities in day to day lives. Moreover, reading literature exercise into the world of imagination. Everyone enjoy stories, it offers a reader to meet with many characters and to journey into their world, in attempting with their happy and unhappy. A person will be creative by reading a lot in perceiving truth, making valuable decision, dealing with complex situation in life and also reading helps one to use the logic and to reason well. Reading books continually make more satisfied with life and happiness; it makes one to feel the activities and the involvement by them in life are worthwhile. Michael Ondaatje works characterize in countless ways the best of contemporary Canadian Literature in English. Michael Ondaatje writing focuses not only on Canadian Literature but focus on the world prospect. This paper highlights on the evidence of reading books in Michael Ondaatje’s novel “The English Patient”, the joint winner of Booker Prize for fiction in 1992 and was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1996.

Tracing cosmopolitan literacies: a case study of transnational literacy curricula

ABSTRACTThis case study explored the institutional, programmatic, and classroom literacy curricula of a Canadian offshore school in Macau (school pseudonym: MCS). Undergirded by the conceptual tool of cosmopolitan literacies, this study specifically examined the network effects that influenced the forms of cosmopolitan literacies in MCS’s three levels of curriculum. In exploring the English immersion-based programmatic curriculum for MCS, data show a universalistic vision of literacy that foregrounds essentialism and universalism in world and Canadian literature in English. Yet school policy-makers and teachers concerted efforts to adapt the parochial, Canadian programmatic curricula and responded to students’ diverse needs and fluid identities in the local/global intersections. Findings also relate English and Mandarin literacy teachers’ agency, collaboration, and creativity in enacting cosmopolitan literacy practices in the transnational education classrooms. The paper ends with a reconfiguration of cosmopolitan literacies for curriculum-making, pedagogy, and assessment in the 21st century interconnected schooling contexts.

How Do You Translate Regard? Rewriting Gabrielle Roy

In Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, Andre Lefevre begins his chapter on translation by introducing the notion of 'the image of work of literature as projected by a translation.' This is introduced as a form of rewriting, translation points to the ways in which a literary work undergoes calculated 'manipulation' in the rewriting process, to subsequently appear in its revised form for the reader. Translation is able to 'project the image of an author and/or a series of works in another culture, lifting that author and/or those words beyond the boundaries of their culture of origin. Whereas Lefevre indicates two elements that shape the image of a word involved in the process of rewriting, namely, the translator's position vis-a-vis the work (the translator's ideology), and the type of discourse evident in the original text, this paper examines the author's active roles in rewriting. We are interested in the ways Gabrielle Roy - her authorial persona as well as her work - translates across the canons of French-Canadian and English-Canadian literature.

Keepers of The Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation by Robert Lecker (review)

Reviewed by: Keepers of The Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation by Robert Lecker Robert David Stacey Robert Lecker. Keepers of The Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation. University of Toronto Press, 2013. 388 pp. Paper $27.96; cloth $56.00. I am probably the wrong person to review Robert Lecker’s new book on English-Canadian literary anthologies. I do teach English-Canadian literature and have done so going on a dozen years now. But I don’t use anthologies—never have—which, I suppose, is another way of saying that I have made myself into an anthologist, picking and choosing which texts I think worthy enough or useful enough for inclusion in my classes. Yet I have fond memories of those Canadian anthologies I used as an undergraduate at McGill: Brown, Bennett, and Cookes’s An Anthology of Canadian [End Page 239] Literature in English and Lecker’s own two-volume Canadian Poetry (with Jack David) are still on my shelf, much consulted—and indeed, photocopied—over the years. These texts helped invent Canadian Literature for me; they made it a real thing that I could hold in my hand, and I probably wouldn’t be doing what I do now if it weren’t for them. So why have I denied my own students the same privilege? Arrogance plays a part, I suppose: editors don’t seem to like the same stuff as I do, and I want my students to get my version of CanLit, which I would like to pretend is a superior one. But my version has a problem, which Lecker’s Keepers of the Code has helped me see. Namely, it deconstructs avant la lettre, as it were, any received tradition of Canadian Literature in English. It therefore withholds a narrative of development and influence, a national mythology the contestation of which is the duty and, indeed, great joy of every student who goes beyond the introductory level. In effect, my canon of Canadian literature is, at times, only accidentally so; my course-pack is an assortment of oppositional, alternative, and idiosyncratic texts, not an anthology. Like a parent with no rules, I haven’t given my young ones anything to rebel against. Then again, if you knew my students, you wouldn’t presume that any such desire to question authority actually exists on their part. But, still, I wonder if I haven’t made a mistake. Of course, it is a lot harder these days to “hold Canadian literature in your hand.” The anthologies have swelled in size and spawned multiple volumes and are now more conveniently pulled behind you in a wagon than carried in hand. But even as these anthologies have become lengthier and more inclusive, their authority has necessarily declined in this period of automatic contestation and in the context of globalization and the consequent disintegration of the nation state and its ideological supports, including a national literary tradition. It is more than possible that my own reluctance to endorse that tradition by way of a standard anthology in my classroom is a symptom of this very problem. So it seems to me that Lecker’s critical history of Canadian literary anthologies comes at a crucial time, even if it does not fully come to terms with the crisis at the core of its topic. Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation pursues, with much success, it must be said, a single broad thesis: “national literature anthologies mediate between critical values, material realities, and pedagogical goals. They act as matrixes that display the tensions, doubts, and ideals attached to crucial historical moments in the cultures that produce them” (8). More crucially, Canadian anthologists themselves, argues Lecker, figure themselves, intentionally or not, “as culture keepers, [End Page 240] as secular agents vested with the responsibility of transmitting national archetypes and tropes” (11). Hence “the code,” about which the reader will hear a great deal, is the underlying logic of an anthological act predicated on the assumption “that identity and culture are linked, that their job is to reinforce this connection, and that only by repeating the...

Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention by Cynthia Sugars (review)

Cynthia Sugars. Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014. xii + 291 pp. $150. Canada is haunted house. Cynthia Sugars argues in Canadian that has been congenial mode for English-Canadian authors because its vision is so uncongenial; that is, its grotesque forms express the anxious historiography of settler culture that has never felt quite at home in the land it settled. With an eye for paradox, she calls Canada an unhomely home, whose settled unsettlement (166) has been evoked over the years in styles that treat as kind of exorcism-a of self-invention according to her subtitle. Canadian writers articulate (73), sensibility seeking national authen ticity from past that promises legitimacy, only to produce monsters and ghosts. forms are perversely congenial because they summon, but promptly confound, the polarities by which European settlers justified their conquest of America such as primitive-modern, supernatural-natural, wild-civilized, body-mind, female-male. Sugars teases out these conflations to show how they have provoked an anxious national narrative. Being anxious is good thing, however, because according to Freud, who also haunts these pages, anxiety is humanity's defining neurosis: we are all wonderfully twisted beings. Because the is both wonderful and twisted, it is just what the doctor ordered. Applying Freud's model of loss and reward, Sugars detects fort-da dynamic in Canadian literature (6) by which the spectre of nationality is simultaneously invoked and rejected, sought only to vanish. This frustrating fate does not prevent her from designing an orderly history of manifestations, from first encounters with an inhospitable land to the latest multicultural confusions. As co-editor of Penguin's bulky Canadian Literature in English, she is well acquainted with the scope of Canadian letters and is admirable in studying the nineteenth century, when romance was dominant mode. She focuses on fiction, somewhat less on poetry, and less still on drama. It is revealing, although what it reveals is not explored, that drama is especially important in modern Native writing. Each of the seven chapters defines style in accordance with the cultural climate of period defined by that style. Taken in sequence, they compose tale of their own, as the spectral is in turn projected, rejected, respected, invited, domesticated, reinvigorated, and embraced-fort-da. The chapters investigate: 1. first contact with an alien wilderness inhabited by alien people 2. the felt absence of national ghost in colonial outpost: a haunt ing by an absence of haunting (15) 3. the fondness of early English writers to dress up Quebec in garb 4. defamiliarizing the uncanny through double negative effect that makes it un-uncanny (109), that is, companionable 5. postcolonial of atonement and restoration surfacing in the 1960s and 1970s 6. the meta-haunting (180) of ethnicity 7. indigenous Each stage is illustrated by examining the unsettling ideological effects of suitable texts. Here, the breadth of Sugars's expertise is especially useful and her analysis is adept. The fact that Canadian is volume in Gothic Literary Studies, an international series published in Wales, may explain why readers are also given patient guidance and plot summaries. As my list of themes shows, there is no literary motive that cannot be gothicized, that is, read as contemplating its own insufficiency, exclusion, or erasure. …

Hockey in the Canadian Imagination: Three Books on Hockey in Literature, Culture, and History

Hockey in Canadian Imagination: Three Books on Hockey in Literature, Culture, and History Canada's Game: Hockey and Identity. Ed. Andrew C. Holman. Montreal: McGill- Queen's University Press, 2009. 236 pp. $24.95 (paper) ISBN 978-0-77353-598-5. Canadian Hockey Literature. By Jason Blake. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 228 pp. $60.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-80209-984-6. $27.95 (paper) ISBN 978-0-80209-713-2. Now Is Winter: Thinking about Hockey. Ed. Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison. Hamilton: Wolsak and Wynn, 2009. 140 pp. $25.00 (paper) ISBN 978-1- 894987-34-9. Three recently published books on hockey in literature, culture, and history show that hockey has finally entered into academia as a subject worthy of study. It is about time: hockey has been consistently invoked as a symbol of nation arguably since its conception in late 1800s. Andrew C. Holman's edited collection of essays, Canada's Game: Hockey and Identity (2009), Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison's edited collection of essays, Now Is Winter: Thinking about Hockey (2009), and Jason Blake's monograph, Canadian Hockey Literature (2010), all engage in rigorous academic analyses of hockey and delineate hockey's complex and troubled relationship with nation. The editors and authors of these books clearly have a passion for sport, but studies not merely celebratory. The diversity of topics in these books is admirable, as is decidedly interdisciplinary nature of two edited collections. While topics range from women's shinny in Toronto parks, to representations of First Nations in hockey media, to fans' responses to trades, three themes emerge as prominent. First, hockey is mythologized, idealized, and imagined as intimately intertwined with Canadian nationalism. Second, representations of hockey embedded in often problematic cultural and historical understandings of gender and race. Third, hockey is understood as being in peril, lost or in process of being lost to corporate America, commercialization, economic interests, and spectacle. Anxiety over this perceived loss is coupled with a longing to regain a mythic past, a nostalgia for what once was-children skating on open ponds, a joining of in what Blake calls the play spirit (2010, 177). Holman's Canada's Game includes essays from scholars in fields as diverse as history, kinesiology, sport management, English, and communications. The book is divided into three parts: first part questions hockey's relationship to regional and national identities, with a historical and cultural studies focus; second part addresses hockey in relation to English-Canadian literature; and third part considers hockey as a commodity, something to be sold and bought, consumed and internalized (2009, 7). The structure of book leaves reader with a comprehensive understanding of various representations of sport: book addresses hockey from different disciplinary angles, and is not narrow or limited in scope. In his introduction, Holman explains that we must not just watch game of hockey, but read it: And to read it, scholars need to understand sport as a text that contains many narrative possibilities (6). The book explains how hockey provide meaningful and useful texts for understanding who we [Canadians] are (7), but also that it can be read in ways that make us uncomfortable, challenging us to view it anew. That hockey is intertwined with Canada as an imagined nation is clear in essays in Canada's Game. In Big Liners and Beer Gardens, for example, Greg Gillespie implies that myth of small town was central to how hockey was understood in 1936 Canada. As Gillespie explains, team that represented Canada in Olympics that year was Bear Cats, from Port Arthur, Ontario-a team that reflected community's values and small-town identity (2009, 13). With team went aspirations of a Northern Ontario community (13). …

An English-Canadian Poetics . Vol. 1, The Confederation Poets (review)

Reviewed by: An English-Canadian Poetics. Vol. 1, The Confederation Poets Tracy Ware (bio) Robert Hogg , editor. An English-Canadian Poetics. Vol. 1, The Confederation Poets. Talonbooks. 2010. 320. $29.95 Robert Hogg had a great idea: to collect 'as completely as possible every article on poetics by a published Canadian poet,' and then to publish them in several volumes. There is much to admire about this first volume, which brings together important essays by the Confederation poets with a brilliant introduction by D.M.R. Bentley. Unfortunately, there are also many flaws. Bentley demonstrates that the Confederation poets came together in the wake of Roberts's Orion, and Other Poems (1880) then started to lose coherence around 1894. He finds in the combination of an 'insistence on workmanship as the overriding criterion for Canadian poetry,' with a sense of national purpose the key to Roberts's success. Their 'cosmopolitan nationalism' meant that these poets shared a keen interest in the international trends of the day, and such figures as Wordsworth, Keats, Poe, Tennyson, Arnold, and Whitman receive much attention here, as do contemporary sonnets in England, the United States, and Canada. The great exception is William Wilfred Campbell, whose 'hostility to fixed forms and technical polish was in part a reflection' of a wider reaction against artifice, in part a 'preference for the sublime over the picturesque,' and in part sheer cantankerousness. Campbell was a difficult colleague, but his spirited parodies of nature sonnets in his Mermaid Inn columns are amusing, and his belief that 'all that is great in literature will always be connected with the tragedy of human sin and human despair as long as the humanity we are walks this earth' contrasts with the tendency in Roberts and Lampman to stress the wholesome and uplifting qualities of poetry. Campbell is so contrary-minded that he disagrees with himself on Wordsworth, whom he calls 'too self-centred to be a great [End Page 315] human poet' in February 1893, then four months later writes, 'The true greatness of Wordsworth lies in his simple, grand emotion.' Campbell notwithstanding, Lampman speaks for the core values of the group when he writes, 'The main current of the human spirit through many changes, and many falls[,] is setting eternally toward a condition of order and divine beauty and peace.' The problems start with Hogg's preface, which moves quickly from the Confederation poets to such later writers as A.J.M. Smith and Daphne Marlatt. Hogg's enthusiasm is contagious, but it should have been directed to the writers at hand. Both the choice of essays and the amount devoted to particular writers raise questions: Bliss Carman is represented by no fewer than nine essays, none of them memorable, over fifty-two pages, while Charles G.D. Roberts, probably the best and certainly the most influential essayist of the group, is represented by seven essays over forty pages. The concept of 'poetics' is so loosely used that Hogg includes Lampman's 'Happiness' but not his 'Two Canadian Poets: A Lecture,' in which Bentley locates the 'most famous Eureka moment in Canadian literature.' Hogg names Roberts's 'The Poetry of Nature' as one of many essays not included in 'any anthologies of Canadian poetry,' perhaps unaware of its presence in both Daymond and Monkman's Literature in Canada (1978) and Sugars and Moss's Canadian Literature in English (2008). He includes the helpful footnotes provided by such previous editors as Bentley, Laurel Boone, and W.J. Keith, but adds none of his own, and so quotations are sometimes identified and sometimes not. His author bibliographies are erratic: with Duncan Campbell Scott, for instance, he notes Stan Dragland's doctoral thesis but not his Floating Voice, and he omits In the Village of Viger for obvious reasons, then lists two articles on it. Although most of these essays are available at the Canadian Poetry Press website, it is good to have them in book form. Hogg's next volume will be on 'the early modernists.' If he can correct the flaws that mar this book, his series might yet achieve its goal. Tracy Ware Tracy Ware, Department of English, Queen's University Copyright...

Nineteenth-Century English-Canadian Anthologies and the Making of a National Literature

The term “Canadian literature” was popularized by early Canadian anthologists who viewed their collections as evidence of the country’s coming of age. These editors were driven by a mix of evangelical nationalism, political allegiance, literary alliances, and the desire to profit from shifting perceptions of the country and its literature as Canada moved towards the twentieth century. The representation of Canada that emerges in these formative collections is intimately linked to the conditions surrounding their production, which impacted the anthologies as much as the editor’s religious, political, or aesthetic values. These conditions influenced the representation of nation and affected the ways in which readers came to understand the meaning of “country” as a textually constructed ideal. This essay examines seven anthologies of English-Canadian literature published in the nineteenth century in an attempt to determine the kind of values they promoted, the tensions their editors faced, and the extent to which they established canonical norms that would be inherited by their twentieth-century successors.

Canadian Literature in English (review)

Reviewed by: Canadian Literature in English Cynthia Sugars W.J. Keith . Canadian Literature in English. Revised edition. 2 volumes. Porcupine's Quill. 220, 200. $24.95 each This two-volume revised edition of W.J. Keith's literary history, Canadian Literature in English, is an expanded version of his 1985 book by the same title, which provides a valuable historical survey and analysis of Canadian writing from the eighteenth century to the present, with chapters organized by period and genre. Its focus is the formation of [End Page 181] a Canadian literary tradition, so the emphasis throughout is on linking authors within this trajectory. The major differences between the two editions are to be found in the organization of the chapters, an updating of the contemporary period to include works published in the intervening twenty years since the first edition, an updated list of suggested further readings, and the inclusion of a lengthy 'Polemical Conclusion' at the end of volume 2, which assesses the state of the humanities in the contemporary Canadian academy and the impending dearth of an educated reading public sufficiently qualified to appreciate serious literature. Keith is well known among Canadian literary scholars as an incisive critic, unafraid to apply exacting evaluative criteria to Canadian writing. However, his opinions have also carried an edge of intolerance, which has lost him many supporters in the Canadian literary establishment. Many readers of this book will undoubtedly take issue with Keith's obdurate and sometimes defensive pronouncements about 'postmo-dernism' (which he always places in quotation marks). Unfortunately, this residue of the notorious 1980s culture wars pervades the book and ultimately dates it. A rift opened up within the field of literary studies in the early 1980s, a divide that has been formulated in different and often contradictory ways: between thematic critics and formalists, nationalists and cosmopolitans, cultural studies and literature, the ideologues (the 'politically correct' practitioners variously labelled 'postmodern,' 'post-colonial,' or 'feminist') and those committed to purely aesthetic criteria. These leftovers are a shame, because Keith's literary analyses merit attention from all camps. His discussion of the Canadian modernist movement is astute and wide-ranging, and his readings of Stephen Leacock, Frederick Philip Grove, Hugh MacLennan, and Irving Layton are second to none. He has much to add to discussions of Canadian literary history but unfortunately alienates potential supporters by not giving contemporary literary theorists and writers the same consideration that he grants to earlier writers and periods. The contents of volume 1 remain essentially unchanged from the original edition. Keith's project is to trace a continuous Canadian tradition, or, as he puts it, to find signs of literary influence and 'cultural continuity.' This is unquestionably the greatest strength of the book. The clear plotting of a tradition is a welcome and satisfying way of ordering the mélange that has come down to us as the body of Canadian literature, and it is instructive to read a synthesis of literary influence within a local national context. The seriousness with which Keith approaches his task is admirable as he takes the time to make links across periods, enhancing the reputation of individual authors in the process. Comparisons between Malcolm Lowry and Frederick Philip Grove or between Thomas Raddall and William Kirby are [End Page 182] instructive. He is also to be congratulated for reaffirming many literary texts that have been neglected over the years, particularly the writings of Frederick Niven of the 1930s and 1940s. The valuable contributions of Keith's original 1985 study make the limitations of the revised edition all the more disappointing. I would have welcomed Keith's considered commentaries on many contemporary Canadian writers, and even more, would have enjoyed an account of the ways the tradition has been quite powerfully continued and reformulated into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, particularly given the revival of the historical novel and documentary poem in Canada. Postmodernism, after all, does not necessarily signify a break with tradition, but an incorporation of it. The opportunity to publish an expanded edition of his work, especially given the additional space provided by the two-volume format, would have afforded Keith the opportunity to build on...

The Poetics of Geography in English-Canadian Literature

The Poetics of Geography in English-Canadian Literature

Ghost-National Arguments

Ghost-National Arguments Sylvia Söderlind In his introduction to Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada Jonathan Kertzer writes: 'My worries arose partly in response to the October 1995 referendum, which loomed and passed as I wrote most of the book, and partly in recognition that worrying characterizes much English-Canadian writing' (35).1 At no point does he see a connection between these two; his own worries over the future of Canada as its fate is decided in Quebec bear no causal relation to the worrying that he sees as symptomatic of English-Canadian literature – and its criticism, I would add. Even though he feels obliged to admit that 'the absence of Québécois and French-Canadian writing from this volume is another worry' (36) – and the cultural and linguistic limitations of his project are honestly announced in his title – he does not reflect on whether his book might have taken a different turn if the referendum had not loomed and passed but lingered and changed the map of Canada. Or, for that matter, if it could have been written at all; even if the book does not include Quebec, the nation about which it worries surely does. Kertzer's book is predicated on his persuasive argument that 'the nation is inescapable and continues to haunt us' (26). The particular nature of his own worrying corroborates the argument I will be presenting here, that the difficulty English-Canadian critics have had in their hunt for a definition of Canada stems from their blindness to the fact that the 'inescapable nation' is figured specifically by Quebec. English-Canadian writing – particularly critical writing – about nation isin a way doubly haunted: on the one hand by the particular role played by Quebec in the country's history, and, on the other – perhaps as a result – by its own inability to acknowledge its indebtedness to Quebec for its self-definition as a nation. As multiculturalism increasingly supersedes the overt preoccupation with nation in critical discourse, hiding 'nation' from view, as it were, this inability is becoming ever more deeply entrenched. I am not arguing that one cannot write a literary history of English Canada without writing about Quebec; one certainly can, and many, [End Page 673] including Kertzer, have done so very well indeed. What I am arguing is that there is something fundamentally missing when – in an age when the concept of nation is more than ever at issue – one writes a history in which 'nation' is the structuring principle without mentioning the role Quebec has played in English-Canadian thinking about nation. In this respect Kertzer's book is symptomatic of an emerging version of Canada that displaces Quebec in ways that I find puzzling. Kertzer's persuasive argument that English-Canadian worrying about nation has never ceased is a salutary corrective to Frank Davey's Post-National Arguments, which claims that the obsession with the nation that characterized cultural debate in Canada from the 1950s through the 1970s has been abandoned in favour of a focus on the relationship between the local and the global, balancing a renewed regionalism with an acceptance of emerging globalization. Davey's identification of Canada as first past the post of the outdated notion of nation is only one of several recent twists I will deal with in this paper that have turned the lamentations over Canada's belatedness that characterized the nationalist 1970s into a millennial celebration of Canada's – belatedly discovered – firstness. It is this preposterous turn – in the literal sense of the word, putting first what ought to come last – and its relation to the ghost of 'nation' that I want to examine in this essay.2 Kertzer attributes many of the moves I see as preposterous to a 'fin-de-siècle sentiment of perpetual belatedness'; thus, for instance, he sees being postmodern as being 'resolutely after the fact, where the "fact" is any principle defining period or place' (162).3 The way in which the idea – and the prefix – of 'post' is used by the critics I will be citing, however, including, as we shall see, Kertzer himself, seems in fact to emphasize the flip...

The Canadian modernists meet

Canadian Modernists Meet is a collection of new critical essays on major and rediscovered Canadian writers of the early to mid-twentieth century. F.R. Scott's well-known poem Canadian Authors Meet sets the theme for the volume: a revisiting of English Canada's formative movements in modernist poetry, fiction, and drama. As did Scott's poem, Dean Irvine's collection raises questions - about modernism and antimodernism, nationalism and antinationalism, gender and class, originality and influence - that remain central to contemporary research on early to mid-twentieth-century English Canadian literature. Canadian Modernists Meet is the first collection of its kind: a gathering of texts by literary critics, textual editors, biographers, literary historians, and art historians whose collective research contributes to the study of modernism in Canada. The collection stages a major reassessment of the origins and development of modernist literature in Canada, its relationship to international modernist literature, its regional variations, its gender and class inflections, and its connections to visual art, architecture, and film. It presents a range of scholarly perspectives, drawing upon the multidisciplinarity that characterizes the international field of modernist studies.

The Continuum encyclopedia of British literature

This comprehensive guide to all British literature also includes literature in English from the colonial and post-colonial periods in Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, India, and New Zealand. Important authors from these areas are covered in substantive topical articles on their respective literatures. The contributors, from the UK and US, are all experts in their fields, and include: R.S. White on William Blake; W.H. New on Canadian Literature in English; Derek Brewer on Geoffrey Chaucer; Ian Ousby on Detective Fiction before 1945; David Kirby on Expatriates; Merryn Williams on Thomas Hardy; Sandie Byrne on Tony Harrison; Fred Marchant on Ted Hughes; Peter Barnes on Ben Jonson; Ian MacKillop on F.R. Leavis; Norman Kelvin on William Morris; Claire Tomalin on Samuel Pepys; and Peter Finch on Poetry since 1945.

Five part invention: a history of literary history in Canada

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. Original, intelligent, and provocative, Five-Part Invention brings an entirely new perspective to the notion of literary history and will greatly influence the study of Canadian literature in the future.