Critical Approaches To The Fiction Of Margaret Laurence

The essays collected in this volume offer a range of different approaches to the significance of the work of Margaret Laurence, historical, feminist, descriptive and thematic, in which critics from Europe, America and Canada offer assessments of this 20th century novelist.

In Writing Grief, Christian Riegel argues that the protagonists in Margaret Laurence's books achieve resolution through acts of mourning, placing this fiction within the larger tradition of writing that explores the nuances and strategies of mourning. Riegel's analysis alludes to sociological and literary antecedants of the study of mourning, including the tradition of elegy, from Derrida and Lacan to Freud, van Gennep, and Milton.

This book highlights the accomplishments of one of Canada's most acclaimed and beloved fiction writers, Margaret Laurence. The essays in this collection explore her body of work as well as her influence on young Canadian writers today.

Although at times painfully insecure about her creative ability and achievement, Margaret Laurence nevertheless remained fiercely loyal to her artistic vision, an archetypal vision of loss, exile and redemption that sought comprehensive expression in the epic mode that shapes the Bible, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, and ultimately the Manawaka world of Hagar Shipley, Rachel Cameron, Stacey MacAindra, and Morag Gunn. Paul Comeau traces the development of Margaret Laurence's epic voice from its tentative beginnings in her African fiction to its culmination in the epic Manawaka Cycle, a Dantesque journey through an infernal state of self-destructive pride, out of a purgatorial paralysis of self-doubt, and on to a kind of paradisal fulfillment in self-knowledge. Laurence discovered in epic a fitting mode at once to requite her debt to the ancestors and to break free of their influence to portray the world through the sight of her own eyes. In so doing, she became the enduring epic voice of a country and a generation.

Margaret Laurence is justly famous for her Manawaka cycle of Canadian novels, but her work extends from Canada to Africa and includes poetry and prose, children's and adult literature, memoir and travel-writing.

In a postmodern and postcolonial age, how do we approach the writing of Margaret Laurence? Challenging Territory demands of the reader a re-evaluation of the basic assumptions that underlie their understanding of Laurence's life and writing by addressing the full range of her writing. Laurence is presented as Canadian, colonial and postcolonial subject; as feminist, humanist and political active individual; and as essayist, translator, journalist, memoir writer and fiction writer. The essays stake out a critical territory as well as offer a challenge to territory previously mapped by the criticism - in addition to charting critical space never before traced.

This Anthology Offers New Modes Of Response In The Theory And Practice Of Postcoloniality. While Taking Stock Of The Postcolonial Theoretical Constructs It Stresses The Need For Viable Critical Models To Match The Creative Spectrum Evidenced In Postcolonial Societies. It Provides A Pointer To The Various Means Of The Imperial Centre To Falsify, Mythicise And Control Postcolonial Studies As The Need To Develop Local/National Models Of Criticism Gains In Importance.The Book, In Its Wide Ranging Sweep, Covers Different Terrains Canonical Texts, Emerging Literatures And Native Indian Literatures And Subjects Some Individual Texts To Closer Critical Scrutiny. It Takes Into Its Fold Different Genres And Explores The Possibilities Of Alternative Critical Viewpoints.