The Grove Symposium

Each year the Department of English, University of Ottawa, sponsors a symposium on a major Canadian writer. University of Ottawa Press, in its _REAPPRAISALS: Canadian Writers_ series, publishes the proceedings of each symposium, sometimes with additional critical articles and biographical material.

Canadian critics and scholars, along with a growing number from around the world, have long recognized the achievements of Canadian short story writers. However, these critics have tended to view the Canadian short story as a historically recent phenomenon. This reappraisal corrects this mistaken view by exploring the literary and cultural antecedents of the Canadian short story.

No longer dismissed as "escapist" reading, critics have finally discovered a brave new world of science fiction and fantasy literature. This book is a long-overdue tribute to this previously ignored genre, placing these works within a general context of Canadian literature and culture.

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.

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. Published in English.

At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination collects a dozen re-evaluative essays on Marshall McLuhan and his critical and theoretical legacy; from intellectual adventurer creating a complex architecture of ideas to cultural icon standing in line in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Given McLuhan’s prominent status in many academic disciplines, the contributors reflect a multi-disciplinary background. John Moss and Linda Morra chose the essays from a gathering of McLuhan’s academic devotees. The contribution – from “McLuhan as Medium” and “McLuhan in Space” to “What McLuhan Got Wrong” and “Trouble in the Global Village” – to provide a kaleidoscope of new views. As Moss writes of the collected essays: “Some are big and some are small, some exegetic and some confessional, some stand as major statements and others are sidelong glances; some resonate with the concerns of public discourse and others are private or privileged or impious and provocative. Each consists of many parts, each a design on its own. They speak to each other...they may have come together as one version of what happened.”

The most recent installment of the Reappraisals series, which examines the range of meanings associated with animals in the Canadian literary imagination.