Unruly Penelopes And The Ghosts

This collection of essays studies the cultural and literary contexts of narrative texts produced in English Canada over the last forty years. It takes as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses on the cultural identity of the country. That type of metaphor provided the nation with the distinctive elements it was looking for and contributed to the creation of a sense of tradition that has survived to the present. In the decades following the 1970s, however, critics, artists, and writers have repeatedly questioned such a model of national identity, still fragile and in need of articulation, by reading the nation from alternative perspectives such as multiculturalism, environmentalism, (neo)regionalism, feminism, or postcolonialism. These contributors suggest that the artistic and cultural flowering Canada is experiencing at the beginning of the twenty-first century is, to a great extent, based on the dismantlement of the images constructed to represent the nation only forty years ago. Through their readings of representative primary texts, their contextual analysis, and their selected methodological tools, the authors offer a tapestry of alternative approaches to that process of dismantlement. Together, they read as an unruly Penelopiad, their unravelling readings self-consciously interrogating Canada’s (lack of) ghosts.

This collection of essays studies the cultural and literary contexts of narrative texts produced in English Canada over the last forty years. It takes as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses on the cultural identity of the country. That type of metaphor provided the nation with the distinctive elements it was looking for and contributed to the creation of a sense of tradition that has survived to the present. In the decades following the 1970s, however, critics, artists, and writers have repeatedly questioned such a model of national identity, still fragile and in need of articulation, by reading the nation from alternative perspectives such as multiculturalism, environmentalism, (neo)regionalism, feminism, or postcolonialism. These contributors suggest that the artistic and cultural flowering Canada is experiencing at the beginning of the twenty-first century is, to a great extent, based on the dismantlement of the images constructed to represent the nation only forty years ago. Through their readings of representative primary texts, their contextual analysis, and their selected methodological tools, the authors offer a tapestry of alternative approaches to that process of dismantlement. Together, they read as an unruly Penelopiad, their unravelling readings self-consciously interrogating Canada’s (lack of) ghosts.

The dismantling of “Understanding Canada”—an international program eliminated by Canada’s Conservative government in 2012—posed a tremendous potential setback for Canadianists. Yet Canadian writers continue to be celebrated globally by popular and academic audiences alike. Twenty scholars speak to the government’s diplomatic and economic about-face and its implications for representations of Canadian writing within and outside Canada’s borders. The contributors to this volume remind us of the obstacles facing transnational intellectual exchange, but also salute scholars’ persistence despite these obstacles. Beyond “Understanding Canada” is a timely, trenchant volume for students and scholars of Canadian literature and anyone seeking to understand how Canadian literature circulates in a transnational world. Contributors: Michael A. Bucknor, Daniel Coleman, Anne Collett, Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Jeremy Haynes, Cristina Ivanovici, Milena Kaličanin, Smaro Kamboureli, Katalin Kürtösi, Vesna Lopičić, Belén Martín-Lucas, Claire Omhovère, Lucia Otrísalová, Don Sparling, Melissa Tanti, Christl Verduyn, Elizabeth Yeoman, Lorraine York

Contested Communities explores the concept of community in postcolonial and diaspora contexts from an interdisciplinary (linguistics, literature, cultural studies) perspective.

Examining the centrality of the city in Canadian literary production post-1960, this collection of critical essays presents an interdisciplinary representation of the urban from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. By analysing contemporary Canadian literature (in English), the contributors intend to produce not only an alternative picture of the national literary traditions but also fresh articulations of the relationship between (Canadian) identity, citizenship, and nation. Since the 1960s, metropolitan regions across the world have experienced radical transformation. For critical urban studies scholars, this phenomenon has been described as a ‘restructuring’. This study argues that in Canada this ‘restructuring’ has been accompanied by a literary rearrangement of its canon, consisting of a gradual shift of focus from the wild or rural to the urban. Alluding to the changes within contemporary Canadian cities, the term ‘postmetropolis’ locates the contributors’ shared theoretical framework within a critical postmodern paradigm. Centered on a particular selection of poetic or fictional texts, each essay pushes the theoretical framework further, suggesting the need for new tools of interpretation and analysis. This book presents an urban literary portrait of Canada that is both thematically and conceptually coherent. Using a range of interdisciplinary methodologies, it adeptly navigates a range of urban issues such as surveillance, asylum, diaspora, mobility, the queer, and the post-political. This book will be of interest to those studying or working on Canadian literature, both in Canada and internationally, as well as to those scholars engaged in investigations that intersect literature and urban studies.

The first collection of critical essays devoted to the study of English-Canadian literary anthologies brings together the work of thirteen prominent critics to investigate anthology formation in Canada and answer these key questions: Why are there so many literary anthologies in Canada, and how can we trace their history? What role have anthologies played in the formation of Canadian literary taste? How have anthologies influenced the training of students from generation to generation? What literary values do the editors of various anthologies tend to support, and how do these values affect canon formation in Canada? How have different genres fared in the creation of literary anthologies? How do Canadian anthologies transmit ideas about gender, region, ideology, and nation? Specific essays focus on anthologies as national metaphors, the controversies surrounding early literary collections, representations of First Nations peoples in anthologies, and the ways in which various editors have understood exploration narratives. In addition, the collection examines the representation of women in Canadian anthologies, the use of anthologies as teaching tools, and the creation of some very odd Canadian anthologies along the way.

In the twenty-first century, food is media – it is not just on plates, but in literature and on screens, displayed in galleries, studios, and public places. Canadian Culinary Imaginations provokes new conversations about the food-related concepts, memories, emotions, cultures, practices, and tastes that make Canada unique. This collection brings together academics, writers, artists, journalists, and curators to discuss how food mediates our experiences of the nation and the world. Together, the contributors reveal that culinary imaginations reflect and produce the diverse bodies, contexts, places, communities, traditions, and environments that Canadians inhabit, as well as their personal and artistic sensibilities. Arranged in four thematic sections – Indigeneity and foodways; urban, suburban, and rural environments; cultural and national lineages; and subversions of categories – the essays in this collection indulge a growing appetite for conversations about creative engagements with food and the world at large. As the essays and images in Canadian Culinary Imaginations demonstrate, food is more than sustenance – as language and as visual and material culture, it holds the power to represent and remake the world in unexpected ways.

This book is about the role that the imperfect, the disquieting and the dystopian are currently playing in the construction of Irish identities. All the essays assess identity issues that require urgent examination, problematize canonical definitions of Irishness and, above all, look at the ways in which the artistic output of the country has been altered by the Celtic Tiger phenomenon and its subsequent demise. Recent narrative from Ireland, principally published in the twenty-first century and/or at the end of the 1990s, is dealt with extensively. The authors examined include Eavan Boland, Mary Rose Callaghan, Peter Cunningham, Emma Donoghue, Anne Enright, Emer Martin, Lia Mills, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Bernard O’Donoghue, Peter Sirr and David Wheatley.