The Tomorrow Tamer And Other Stories

The ten stories gathered together in The Tomorrow-Tamer are Margaret Laurence’s first published fiction. Set in raucous and often terrifying Ghana, where shiny Jaguars and modern jazz jostle for eminence against fetish figures, tribal rites, and the unchanging beat of jungle drums, the stories tell of individuals, European and African, trying to come to terms with the frightening world brought about by the country’s new freedom. With the same compassion and understanding she would bring to her later fiction set in Canada, Laurence succeeds brilliantly in capturing the atmosphere of a continent and of individual men and women struggling for survival under the impact of the wind of change.

A collection of essays about contemporary Canadian novels by Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Mordechai Richler, Rudy Weibe, as edited by professor of English at the University of Ottawa John Moss.

Margaret Laurence: The Making of a Writer is an engaging narrative that contains new and important findings about Laurence's life and career. This biography reveals the challenges, successes, and failures of the long apprenticeship that preceded the publication of the The Stone Angel, Laurence's first commercially successful novel. Donez Xiques demonstrates the importance of Margaret Laurence's early work as a journalist in her development as a writer and covers her return to Canada from Africa in the late 1950s. She details the significance of Laurence's "Vancouver years" as well as the challenges of her year in London prior to settling at Elm Cottage in Buckinghamshire, when Laurence stood on the verge of success. The Margaret Laurence known to most people is a public figure of the 1960s and 1970s; matriarchal, matronly, and accomplished. The story of her early years in the harsh setting of the Canadian Prairies during the 1930s - years of drought and the Great Depression - and of her African years has never before been chronicled with the thoroughness and vividness that Xiques provides for the reader. Appended to this powerful new biography is a short story by Margaret Laurence that has never before been published and two other stories that have not been widely available. They indicate the range of her concerns and show a marked departure from her fiction in The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories and A Bird in the House. Readers will benefit from the extensive research in this full and vibrant portrait of one of the most revered writers of twentieth-century Canadian literature.

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.

Known as "one of the titans of Canadian literature", Margaret Laurence is remembered for her novels and short stories. She was born in the prairie town of Neepawa, Manitoba (model for the fictional Manawaka). Her work examines the quest for identities in a foreign land through The Tomorrow Tamer and Other Stories and also an understanding of the inner self in A Bird in the House and Other Stories. Her short stories are not only a journey of self discovery but acceptance of the true self. The revelation of the self also leads to acceptance of the Other. Her short stories, as her novels, are usually preoccupied with the identity of the marginalised, side by side with a youngster's journey into adulthood. In terms of distance, her short stories are continents apart, one based in Africa on the verge of gaining her independence and the other in Canada which has its own struggles with peripheral identities. Yet, each character in the stories, has its own particular individuality, his/ her own cultural identity to display. The book is an attempt at analysing Laurence's acknowledgement of the struggles and existence of the Other.

Traces Laurences literary growth, focusing on the years she spent in Africa. Includes a previously unpublished short story.