Treasuring the past, savouring the present, and wanting to do right by the future, Archibald Lampman was a poet keenly focused on the workings of time. He was also a thinker of mystical predisposition. His goal was not to transcend time, but to find redemptive meaning within it. Archibald Lampman: Memory, Nature, Progress explores the ways in which Lampman pursued this goal in relation to the three faces of time.Memory fascinated Lampman. He relished the “alchemy”...

Memory Serves gathers together the oratories award-winning author Lee Maracle has delivered and performed over a twenty-year period. Revised for publication, the lectures hold the features and style of oratory intrinsic to the Salish people in general and the Sto: lo in particular. From her Coast Salish perspective and with great eloquence, Maracle shares her knowledge of Sto: lo history, memory, philosophy, law, spirituality, feminism and the colonial condition of her people....

“The most important book to be written in more than 40 years about the rise of Canadian literature… Arrival: The Story of CanLit brims and crackles, in equal measure, with information and energy.” — Winnipeg Free PressA Globe and Mail Top 100 BookNational Post 99 Best Books of the YearIn the mid-twentieth century, Canadian literature transformed from a largely ignored trickle of books into an enorm...

A four-time Governor General’s-award nominee for both poetry and non-fiction, Christopher Dewdney is celebrated internationally as a writer and a visionary and is best known for his particular imagining of place and memory. Beginning with Paleozoic fossil formations in southwestern Ontario and moving through eons of natural history to cityscapes and the digital present, Dewdney’s poetics encapsulate often surreal experiences from radical and epiphenomenal perspectives. His writing vibrates...

“The problem with writer longevity can be a complicating, even contradictory oeuvre. Hopefully.”Where the Truth Lies collects forty years of essays and speeches that award-winning author Rudy Wiebe has crafted throughout his career. In this illuminating and wide-ranging selection, Wiebe provides a look behind the curtain, revealing his thought processes as he worked on many of his great books. Within this book, he dissects controversies that arose after publication of his ...

The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in the development of Asian Canadian literature. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s contextualizes and reanimates the urgency of that period, illustrates its historical specificities, and shows how the concerns of that moment—from cultural appropriation to race essentialism to shifting models of the state—continue to resonate for contemporary discussions of race and literature in...

About Revisiting Tolerance. Lessons drawn from Egypt's CosmopolitanismHow does a polyglot Jewish family from Alexandria, Egypt, get caught up in the power play of the Suez Crisis? In this fascinating ebook Egyptian-born writer Victor Teboul recounts his cosmopolitan experience and his family’s ordeal following the 1956 Suez Crisis and the expulsion of Egypt’s Jewish community."Strangely enough, in Alexandria, we spoke so many languages and yet I do not remember any...

Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic examines how Canadian writers have combined a postcolonial awareness with gothic metaphors of monstrosity and haunting in their response to Canadian history. The essays gathered here range from treatments of early postcolonial gothic expression in Canadian literature to attempts to define a Canadian postcolonial gothic mode. Many of these texts wrestle with Canada’s colonial past and with the voices and histories t...

Nella Cotrupi's Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process sheds a new conceptual light on Frye, successfully bringing him back into the central ring of contemporary critical thought. Challenging the often dismissive view of Frye's work as closed and outdated, Dr. Cotrupi explores the implications of his proposition that the history of criticism may be seen as having two main approaches — literature as "product" and literature as "process." In focusing on Frye's exploration of the p...

The best essays from the Tamblings newsletter for 2015-2016.

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 trenche...

Ever wondered where novelists get the inspiration for their characters? Why the hero or villain of your favourite book seems oddly familiar?Who inspired Mordecai Richler to create Bernard Gursky; Margaret Atwood to create Zenia in The Robber Bride? In which novel does Northrop Frye appear (as a character named Morton Hyland)? The answers can be found in Character Parts, Brian Busby’s irreverent yet authoritative guide to who’s really who in Canadia...