Ecocriticism can be described in very general terms as the investigation of the many ways in which culture and the environment are interrelated and conceptualized. Ecocriticism aspires to understand and often to celebrate the natural world, yet it does so indirectly by focusing primarily on written texts. Hailed as one of the most timely and provocative developments in literary and cultural studies of recent decades, it has also been greeted with bewilderment or scepticism by those for who...

One day. One city. Infinite lives unfolding in silence and thought. Mrs Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf, is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and a landmark of modernist literature. The story follows Clarissa Dalloway, an elegant London hostess, as she prepares for a party. Over the course of a single June day, Woolf weaves together Clarissa's reflections with the lives of those around her—including Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked war veteran—capturing the hidden dep...

In the rugged Nepisiguit River region of northern New Brunswick, two hunters face off. One is local sports lodge employee Danny Knockwood, a Mi’gmaw guide with a withered hand. The other is Mui’n, a one-eared black bear battling his inexorable hunger. When Danny is charged by the lodge owner to hunt down the bear that is frightening guests at the salmon pools, his personal values come into sharp conflict with his commitment to the task. The resulting confrontation tests both his physical s...

“Speaking in the Past Tense participates in an expanding critical dialogue on the writing of historical fiction, providing a series of reflections on the process from the perspective of those souls intrepid enough to step onto what is, practically by definition, contested territory.”— Herb Wyile, from the IntroductionThe extermination of the Beothuk ... the exploration of the Arctic ... the experiences of soldiers in the trenches during World War I ... the foibles ...

The recent 100 year anniversary of the first publication of L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables has inspired renewed interest in one of Canada's most beloved fictional icons. The international appeal of the red-haired orphan has not diminished over the past century, and the cultural meanings of her story continue to grow and change. The original essays in Anne's World offer fresh and timely approaches to issues of culture, identity, health, and globalization as they ap...

It would be difficult to exaggerate the worldwide impact of postmodernism on the fields of cultural production and the social sciences over the last quarter century—even if the concept has been understood in various, even contradictory, ways. An interest in postmodernism and postmodernity has been especially strong in Canada, in part thanks to the country’s non-monolithic approach to history and its multicultural understanding of nationalism, which seems to align with the decentralized, pl...

People grow in dimensions other than those we perceive.The teenage narrator of award-winning author Daniel Karasik’s latest story must deal with the fact that his older sister is now a grown woman, and Lucy, his crush-next-door, has become a mystery, with depths beyond his comprehension. Has he been coasting all this time, school and television his life’s only sources of momentum?

Stories shape the world, imposing order on chaos, and the stories we tell declare: I exist. Neil Bissoondath presses these assertions about narrative further. Stories are also, he says, forms of confession. Each time we tell a story, we reveal a little about our experiences, dreams, fears, desires, and fantasies. Unlike governments, which try to control and simplify narrative, fiction writers use narrative expansively, for exploration and discovery. Questions are numerous; answers are rare...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, journalism, politics, and social advocacy were largely male preserves. Six women, however, did manage to come to prominence through their writing and public performance: Agnes Maule Machar, Sara Jeannette Duncan, E. Pauline Johnson, Kathleen Blake Coleman, Flora MacDonald Denison, and Nellie L. McClung. The Woman's Page is a detailed study of these six women and their respective works.Focusing on the diverse sources of ...

Margaret Laurence: The Making of a Writer is an engaging narrative that contains new and important findings about Laurence’s life and career. This biography reveals the challenges, successes, and failures of the long apprenticeship that preceded the publication of the The Stone Angel, Laurence’s first commercially successful novel.Donez Xiques demonstrates the importance of Margaret Laurence’s early work as a journalist in her development as a writer and covers he...

This collection of essays focuses on the varied and complex roles that editors have played in the production of literary and scholarly texts in Canada. With contributions from a wide range of participants who have played seminal roles as editors of Canadian literatures—from nineteenth-century works to the contemporary avant-garde, from canonized texts to anthologies of so-called minority writers and the oral literatures of the First Nations—this collection is the first of its kind. Contrib...

This is a representative collection of the writings of a neglected Canadian author, William Wilfred Campbell (1858-1918).Among the 112 poems in William Wilfred Campbell: Selected Poetry and Essays are the familiar “Indian Summer” and “How One Winter Came in the Lake Region,” along with many less well-known love poems, patriotic songs, and occasional poems. Some twenty manuscript pieces are published here for the first time.The notorious “Mermaid Inn” essay in which...