Hetty Dorval

Seeking refuge from her mysterious past, the beautiful Mrs. Dorval arrives in a small British Columbia town at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers. As Frankie Burnaby, the young schoolgirl Mrs. Dorval befriends, pieces together Hetty’s story, she begins to realize that her enigmatic idol is also a treacherous opponent. Hetty Dorval, Wilson’s first novel, is a wise and expertly crafted tale of innocence and experience.

Ethel Wilson is one of Canada's most important writers. This biography draws on archival material and interviews to describe, in detail, her early life as an orphan in England and Vancouver and her long writer's apprenticeship, spanning from the publication of some children's stories in 1919 to the appearance of "Hetty Dorval" in 1947. 2003.

Brings together all of the writings of Northrop Frye, both published and unpublished, on the subject of Canadian literature and culture, from his early book reviews of the 1930s and 1940s through his cultural commentaries of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Willmott (English, Queen's U., Canada) has undertaken a study of modern English-language Canadian novels, breaking them down into unifying components to allow their consideration as a distinct literary genre. Among the authors whose novels are discussed are Bertram Brooker, Sinclair Ross, Frederick Philip Grove, Martha Ostenso, Ethel Wilson, Thomas Raddall, Ernest Buckler, and Alice Jones. Themes include the nation as youth, post-colonialism, post- modernism, imperialist ideology, and economic class distinctions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Blanche H. Gelfant's book Cross-Cultural Reckonings both demonstrates and questions the applicability of postmodern cultural and literary theories to realistic texts - to fiction and autobiographies valued for their truth. Drawing together an unusual combination of Russian, American, and Canadian writers, the various essays of this book provide new and original perspectives upon the puzzling issues of national identity, of historical change and continuity, of gender and the integrity of literary genres, the boundaries between text and context, and the underlying if overlooked conflicts between the postmodern critic's skepticism and a writer's belief in the transcendence of art and truth. To avoid the contingencies inherent in binary comparisons, the essays in this book seek a triadic form analogous to the triptych or polyptych of the visual arts. Multi-faceted, non-linear, and open-ended, such a form might allow the academic essay to recover a waywardness that traces back to Montaigne, cited in prefactory notes, and to the etymological meaning of the essay as an exagium or weighing, as an act of reckoning. A study at once elegant, erudite, and personal, Cross-Cultural Reckonings reckons with writers of different backgrounds and reputation in whom Gelfant discovers surprising affinities - among them the Russian writers Lydia Chukovskaya, Natalya Baranskaya, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Ethel Wilson, a highly reputed Canadian writer; the famous cross-cultural figure, Emma Goldman; and established as well as new or rediscovered American writers, such as Willa Cather, Saul Bellow, Arlene Heyman, and Meridel Le Sueur. These writers are discussed singly and in comparative essays, each of whichis discrete and self-contained, while all interconnect and reflect upon each other as exemplary demonstrations of cross-cultural literary criticism and the deferred final judgment that results from a weighing and reweighing of books.

Praise for the earlier edition: "Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--Sixteenth Modern American Authors--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains."--American Studies