The Gay Grey Moose

The Gay]Grey Moose is a collection of essays presenting a comprehensive view of English poetry in Canada from the early colonial period to the Post-Modern era. From a wide range of poets, this book provides fresh contexts for viewing and discussing three centuries of English Canadian poetry. Both national and regional in its orientation, it seeks to discover the relationship between poetry and landscape in a poetic continuity that stretches from the late 17th century to the present.

The Gay]Grey Moose is a collection of essays presenting a comprehensive view of English poetry in Canada from the early colonial period to the Post-Modern era. From a wide range of poets, this book provides fresh contexts for viewing and discussing three centuries of English Canadian poetry. Both national and regional in its orientation, it seeks to discover the relationship between poetry and landscape in a poetic continuity that stretches from the late 17th century to the present.

His analysis reveals the extent to which problems of allegiance, anxiety, and identity were inextricably involved in the colonial and national projects, an involvement which the poetry, despite its intentions, could neither mask nor resolve.

A growing number of literary historians and critics now recognize the contemporary long poem as a distinctively Canadian genre. This collection of essays leads the reader to a deeper understanding of Canadian literary cultures in terms of their local intimacies and idiosyncrasies as well as in their national contexts.

As one of the formative periods in Canadian history, the late nineteenth century witnessed the birth of a nation, a people, and a literature. In this study of Canada's first 'school' of poets, D.M.R. Bentley combines archival work, including extensive research in periodicals and newspapers, with close readings of the work of Charles G.D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, William Wilfred Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Frederick George Scott. Bentley chronicles the formation, reception, national and international successes, and eventual disintegration (after the 1895 'War Among the Poets') of the Confederation Group, whose poetry forever changed the perception and direction of Canadian literature. With the aid of biographical, political, and sociological analyses, Bentley's literary history delineates the group's political, aesthetic, and thematic dispositions and characteristics, and contextualizes them not only within Canadian history and politics, but also within contemporary intellectual and literary currents, including Romantic nationalism, 'Canadianism', and poetic formalism. Bentley casts new light on the poets' commonalities - such as their debt to Young Ireland, their commitment to careful workmanship, and their participation in the American mind-cure movement - as well as on their most accomplished and anthologized poems from 1880 to 1897. In the process, he presents a compelling case for the literary and historical importance of these six men and their poems in light of Canada's cultural and political past, and defends their right to be known as Canada's first poetic fraternity at a time when Canada was striving to achieve literary and national distinction. The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880-1897 is an erudite and innovative work of literary history and critical interpretation that belongs on the bookshelf of every serious scholar of literary studies.

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” by which the dross of past experience could be left behind and the gold preserved. Nature compelled his mind and emotions, and his clear-eyed observations of both countryside and wilderness settings gave rise to a self-evolved poetics of inclusiveness. In his celebrations of nature in all its manifestations, mild or bleak, he anticipated the work of iconic Canadian painter Tom Thomson and he forecasted the environmentalism of our own time. Progress for Lampman spelled societal rectification. By forwarding the cause of social betterment, one was part of a movement larger than oneself, and this expansion, too, was redemptive. Archibald Lampman: Memory, Nature, Progress is the first book on this foundational figure in Canadian literature to appear in over twenty-five years and the first thematically focused study. Combining close analysis with biographical context, it shows how Lampman’s oeuvre was shaped by his responses to his physical surroundings and to his social-intellectual milieu, as filtered through his stubbornly independent outlook.

New discusses the ways in which Canadian writing, through images of land and space, expresses various assumptions about social values. In addition to wide range of literary texts, he also draws upon geography, the social sciences, and the visual arts.

The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature provides a broad-ranging introduction to some of the key critical fields, genres, and periods in Canadian literary studies. The essays in this volume, written by prominent theorists in the field, reflect the plurality of critical perspectives, regional and historical specializations, and theoretical positions that constitute the field of Canadian literary criticism across a range of genres and historical periods. The volume provides a dynamic introduction to current areas of critical interest, including (1) attention to the links between the literary and the public sphere, encompassing such topics as neoliberalism, trauma and memory, citizenship, material culture, literary prizes, disability studies, literature and history, digital cultures, globalization studies, and environmentalism or ecocriticism; (2) interest in Indigenous literatures and settler-Indigenous relations; (3) attention to multiple diasporic and postcolonial contexts within Canada; (4) interest in the institutionalization of Canadian literature as a discipline; (5) a turn towards book history and literary history, with a renewed interest in early Canadian literature; (6) a growing interest in articulating the affective character of the literary - including an interest in affect theory, mourning, melancholy, haunting, memory, and autobiography. The book represents a diverse array of interests -- from the revival of early Canadian writing, to the continued interest in Indigenous, regional, and diasporic traditions, to more recent discussions of globalization, market forces, and neoliberalism. It includes a distinct section dedicated to Indigenous literatures and traditions, as well as a section that reflects on the discipline of Canadian literature as a whole.