Double Voicing The Canadian Short Story

Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story is the first comparative study of eight internationally and nationally acclaimed writers of short fiction: Sandra Birdsell, Timothy Findley, Jack Hodgins, Thomas King, Alistair MacLeod, Olive Senior, Carol Shields and Guy Vanderhaeghe. With the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature going to Alice Munro, the “master of the contemporary short story,” this art form is receiving the recognition that has been its due and—as this book demonstrates—Canadian writers have long excelled in it. From theme to choice of narrative perspective, from emphasis on irony, satire and parody to uncovering the multiple layers that make up contemporary Canadian English, the short story provides a powerful vehicle for a distinctively Canadian “double-voicing”. The stories discussed here are compelling reflections on our most intimate roles and relationships and Kruk offers a thoughtful juxtaposition of themes of gender, mothers and sons, family storytelling, otherness in Canada and the politics of identity to name but a few. As a multi-author study, Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story is broad in scope and its readings are valuable to Canadian literature as a whole, making the book of interest to students of Canadian literature or the short story, and to readers of both.

A " who's who" of the literary genre in Canada, including Carol Shields, Timothy Findley, Alistair MacLeod, Guy Vanderaegheand, Jane Rule.

This volume aims to introduce undergraduates, graduates, and general readers to the diversity and richness of Canadian short story writing and to the narrative potential of short fiction in general. Addressing a wide spectrum of forms and themes, the book will familiarise readers with the development and cultural significance of Canadian short fiction from the early 19th century to the present. A strong focus will be on the rich reservoir of short fiction produced in the past four decades and the way in which it has responded to the anxieties and crises of our time. Drawing on current critical debates, each chapter will highlight the interrelations between Canadian short fiction and historical and socio-cultural developments. Case studies will zoom in on specific thematic or aesthetic issues in an exemplary manner. The Routledge Introduction to the Canadian Short Story will provide an accessible and comprehensive overview ideal for students and general readers interested in the multifaceted and thriving medium of the short story in Canada.

The short story and the short story cycle have long been considered a marginal genre, free to make room for fresh or risk-taking voices. But in thematizing masculinity in crisis, the genre uses the premise of the marginal to elevate recuperative masculinity politics and nostalgia for traditional patriarchy. Despite the scholarly tendency to link marginal genres and marginalized voices, features of the CanLit infrastructure – including genre criticism and literary prize culture – are complicit in normalizing hegemonic masculinity and the Settler colonial project. Bearers of Risk examines how male Canadian writers mobilize the early twenty-first-century short story cycle as an illustration of post-9/11 recuperative masculinity politics, exposing the tendency to position White, heteronormative men’s viewpoints as objective. Neta Gordon introduces the civil bearer of risk, a figure who comprehends the position of men as being marked by or for failure, and who reasserts masculine authority as civil duty towards community. This book looks at contemporary experimental short story cycles, debut cycles by ethnically minoritized and immigrant writers, and cycles unified by setting, whether suburban, urban, or rural. Bearers of Risk unsettles popular notions of the inherent outsider status of the short story cycle while also scrutinizing expressions of recuperative masculinity politics through which men assert their right to reclaim the centre.

The first one-volume history of Canadian fiction covering its growth and development from earliest times to the present day. Recounting the struggles and the glories of this burgeoning area of investigation, it explains Canada's literary growth alongside its remarkable history.

Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. It continues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genre and the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism and theory has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This collection redresses that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of a range of thirty well-known and often-anthologized Canadian short stories from the genre's beginnings through the twentieth century. A historical survey of the genre introduces the volume and a timeline comparing the genre's development in Canada, the US, and Great Britain via representative examples completes it. The collection is geared both to specialists in and to students of Canadian literature. For the latter it is of particular benefit that the volume provides not only a collection of interpretations, but a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Canadian short story. Reingard M. Nischik is professor and chair of American Literature at the University of Constance, Germany.

Compares the cultural productions of Canada and the US - literature, but also film, opera, and even theme parks - providing a reassessment of Canadian Studies within a comparative framework.

This wide-ranging volume has much to say about the continuing relationship between place and identity in Canadian literature and culture.".