The Tomorrow Tamer

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.

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.

Although at times painfully insecure about her creative ability and achievement, Margaret Laurence nevertheless remained fiercely loyal to her artistic vision, an archetypal vision of loss, exile and redemption that sought comprehensive expression in the epic mode that shapes the Bible, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, and ultimately the Manawaka world of Hagar Shipley, Rachel Cameron, Stacey MacAindra, and Morag Gunn. Paul Comeau traces the development of Margaret Laurence's epic voice from its tentative beginnings in her African fiction to its culmination in the epic Manawaka Cycle, a Dantesque journey through an infernal state of self-destructive pride, out of a purgatorial paralysis of self-doubt, and on to a kind of paradisal fulfillment in self-knowledge. Laurence discovered in epic a fitting mode at once to requite her debt to the ancestors and to break free of their influence to portray the world through the sight of her own eyes. In so doing, she became the enduring epic voice of a country and a generation.

Examines stereotypes in Canadian literature reflecting both the racist view that Jews and other aliens could never become good "white" Canadians because of their inherent defects, and the belief that with time they could assimilate. Discusses the origins of ethnic tension in Canada. Up to 1939, English Canadian literature expressed the demand for British Protestant political and cultural dominance. The popular novelist Charles Gordon, a Presbyterian minister, viewed the British (especially the Scots) as the chosen race, and even when trying to present Jews sympathetically he treated them as stereotypes. John Murray Gibbon was violently antisemitic. F.P Grove saw the Jews as urban businessmen exploiting the peasant immigrants. After 1945 antisemitism became unfashionable. Works by Jews such as Mordecai Richler exposed anti-Jewish discrimination, and English Canadians produced works attacking antisemitism and racism.

Up-to-date biographies with a list of works for each of the writers, detailed annotations to the original text and a glossary complete this edition."--BOOK JACKET.