Published for the first time ever, the first draft of The Blue Castle exactly as L. M. Montgomery originally wrote it, with critical context from a leading Montgomery scholar.
Available for the first time ever, the original draft of Lucy Maud Montgomery's The Blue Castle is presented with scribbled notes, character name changes, additions and deletions, and other pre-publication changes, offering fascinating new insight into the writing process of one of Canada's most beloved writers.
First published in 1926, The Blue Castle is one of Montgomery's few adult novels-and the only one set entirely outside of the author's home province of Prince Edward Island. Montgomery scholar Carolyn Strom Collins provides a transcription of the text and notes from Montgomery's handwritten manuscript, showing how they were integrated to form the published novel. (Major changes include changing the inspiring main character's name from Miranda to Valancy, and Barney's beloved cat from Jigglesqueak to Banjo.)
Edited with a keen eye to detail and deep respect for the writer's creative process, and featuring high-quality photographs of select pages of the original manuscript, The Blue Castle: The Original Manuscript is a necessary addition to any Montgomery lover's collection.
Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour by Kate Beaton, award-winning author of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, explores connections between class, literature, and art from Cape Breton Island. She addresses the fact that people from poor or working-class backgrounds face significant barriers entering the Canadian arts scene and shows that if they do not write themselves into stories, others will, often with damaging results. Beaton thoughtfully examines personal and working-class legacies, celebrating the authenticity and power of truly seeing ourselves and each other in the art that we create.
When first published in 1972, Survival was considered the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature. Since then, it has continued to be read and taught, and it continues to shape the way Canadians look at themselves. Distinguished, provocative, and written in effervescent, compulsively readable prose, Survival is simultaneously a book of criticism, a manifesto, and a collection of personal and subversive remarks. Margaret Atwood begins by asking: What have been the central preoccupations of our poetry and fiction? Her answer is survival and victims.
Atwood applies this thesis in twelve brilliant, witty, and impassioned chapters; from Moodie to MacLennan to Blais, from Pratt to Purdy to Gibson, she lights up familiar books in wholly new perspectives. This new edition features a foreword by the author.
First published in 1972, Survival is considered the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature.
Alternative temporalities have often emerged as a reaction to the normativizing force of time, demonstrating that time can be used as an instrument of power and oppression, but also as a means to resist this very oppression. Alternative Temporalities draws on analyses of modern literature to examine this often-neglected role of time. By exploring forms of temporal resistance in artistic representation, such as short stories and novels, that challenge the imposition of colonial, gender, or capitalist temporal orders, the book reveals how storytelling can be an essential tool in questioning and pushing back against coercive temporal structures.
The book analyses literary representations of time that challenge dominant temporalities and intersect different disciplines such as gender and sexuality studies, trauma and Indigenous studies, race and identity, and religion. It features narrative analyses proposing alternative embodied experiences of time, focusing on topics including the temporality of the AIDS-affected body, the experience of time in prison, and slowness in opposition to modern acceleration. Ultimately, Alternative Temporalities aims to create new theories as well as practices that may foster more diverse and inclusive ways of perceiving and embodying time.
In 1973, Hildi Froese Tiessen published the first academic essay about Rudy Wiebe's fiction (included in this volume). Since then, in scholarly essays and talks, she has examined with great insight the literary careers of Di Brandt, Patrick Friesen, Julia Kasdorf, Sandra Birdsell, and David Waltner-Toews, as well as key origin figures like Arnold Dyck and Al Reimer. Dr. Froese Tiessen's widely admired essays include several (among the first of their kind) which situate Mennonite literature in relation to postmodernism, as well as investigations of the sometimes disconcerting ethnic and theological assumptions about Mennonite artistic practice. The essays in On Mennonite/s Writing are the first solo collection of Dr. Tiessen's writings, and she has written a major new piece especially for this publication.
Aboriginal Canadians tell their own stories, about their own people, in their own voice, from their own perspective.
If as recently as forty years ago there was no recognizable body of work by Canadian writers, as recently as thirty years ago there was no Native literature in this country. Perhaps a few books had made a dent on the national consciousness: The Unjust Society by Harold Cardinal, Halfbreed by Maria Campbell, and the poetry of Pauline Johnson and even Louis Riel. Now, three decades later, Native people have a literature that paints them in colours that are psychologically complex and sophisticated. They have a literature that validates their existence, that gives them dignity, that tells them that they and their culture, their ideas, their languages, are important if not downright essential to the long-term survival of the planet.
Essential reading for those interested in questions of justice and cultural representation, Land/Relations speaks to and moves beyond the critical junctures in the study of Canadian literatures today.
In the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and following Canada's sesquicentennial, Land/Relations presents a collaborative effort at what Smaro Kamboureli and Larissa Lai call counter-memory, a collective effort to recognise relationships that have always been--between peoples, between humanity and other living forms, between us and the land--in an effort to avoid erasure, loss, and trauma. Twenty influential literary critics engage a variety of genres--essay, life writing, testament, polemic, poetry--to explore the ways Canadian cultural production has been shaped by social and historical relations and can be given new and various forms to decolonize the institutions associated with the creation of this country's vision of Canadian literature.The Contemporary Leonard Cohen is an exciting new study that offers an original explanation of Leonard Cohen's staying power and his various positions in music, literature, and art.
The death of Leonard Cohen received media attention across the globe, and this international star remains dear to the hearts of many fans. This book examines the diversity of Cohen's art in the wake of his death, positioning him as a contemporary, multi-media artist whose career was framed by the twentieth-century and neoliberal contexts of its production. The authors borrow the idea of the contemporary especially from philosophy and art history, applying it to Cohen for the first time--not only to the drawings that he included in some of his books but also to his songs, poems, and novels. This idea helps us to understand Cohen's techniques after his postmodern experiments with poems and novels in the 1960s and 1970s. It also helps us to see how his most recent songs, poems, and drawings developed out of that earlier material, including earlier connections to other writers and musicians. Philosophically, the contemporary also sounds out the deep feelings that Cohen's work still generates in readers and listeners. Whether these feelings are spiritual or secular, sincere or ironic, we get them partly from the sense of timeliness and the sense of timelessness in Cohen's lyrics and images, which speak to our own lives and times, our own struggles and survival. From a set of international collaborators, The Contemporary Leonard Cohen delivers an appreciative but critical examination of one of our dark luminaries.