Welcome to Canadian Literature!

Canadian Literature aims to foster a wider academic interest in the Canadian literary field, and publishes a wide range of material from Canadian and international scholars, writers, and poets. Each issue contains a variety of critical articles, an extensive book reviews section, and a selection of original poetry.

Canlit.ca's Online Exclusives section offers supplementary content like Interviews with Canadian authors and poets, our databases of Canadian scholars, Canadian publishers, and Canadian Literary Magazines/Journals; and Letters & Reflections—a place for commentary that is not published in the print journal.

News

Calls for Papers

January 26, 2012

Letters for Robert Kroetsch: A Special Issue on His Work and Influence

We invite you to continue the play with word and place that he introduced to Canadian literature by submitting an essay on his work to Canadian Literature. […more…]

Beyond Borders to Bioregions: Teaching and Reading Ecocritically

We seek essays, reviews, and other responses for a special issue of Canadian Literature honouring the teaching, scholarship, and example of Laurie Ricou. […more…]

Current Issue: #209, Spectres of Modernism (Summer 2011)

December 2, 2011

Canadian Literature's Summer 2011 issue (CL#209), Spectres of Modernism, is now available. The issue features articles by Alan Filewod, Erica Kelly, Anouk Lang, Annette Hayward, Mark Benson, Len Early, Alastair Morrison, and new Canadian poetry & book reviews.

Canadian Literature’s winter 1995 “Marx and Other Dialectics” issue watched over the changing of disciplinary and literary old guards—or, if you will, an old left guard. This was the same number that announced the establishment of the journal’s home page (canlit.ca) and the creation of the Canadian Literature Discussion Group listserv (canlit-l) hosted by the National Library. It was “an hour / Of new beginnings,” as F.R. Scott said in his 1934 poem “Overture.” That same year observed the deaths of Earle Birney and George Woodcock. Dorothy Livesay passed away the year following. These deaths signaled the passing of a generation that put into practice the dialectics of modernism and political radicalism. With the appearance of an issue devoted to Marxism and Canadian literature, it may have seemed at the hour of their death that their generation’s literary and political legacies had for the moment been granted reprieves and survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of European communism.

—Dean Irvine, Spectres of Modernism

Website upgrades

November 14, 2011

We have launched some structural changes to the website today, and some content may be temporarily unavailable. The store will be back shortly. Please bear with us.

Update 2:48pm: all content should now be available. Please note that the URL structure has changed, but any links you may be using on your own website should redirect to the new pages. If they don't, please email us at cl.info@ubc.ca with the broken link and we will investigate.

Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference

October 19, 2011

The Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference starts today! We have published a number of poems and interviews with some of the participants in CanLit Poets:

• Stephanie Bolster
• Steven Heighton
• Gillian Jerome
• Catherine Owen
• Steven Price
• Meredith Quartermain
• Russell Thornton
• Rita Wong

Many other V125PC poets have appeared in our pages/on our website over the years, including Ken Babstock, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Gregory Betts, Christian Bök, Rob Budde, Clint Burnham, Wayde Compton, Jeff Derksen, Adam Dickinson, Phinder Dulai, Sue Goyette, Katia Grubisic, Helen Guri, Sonnet L‘Abbé, Larissa Lai, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Michael Lista, David McGimpsey, Don McKay, Kevin McNeilly, Garry Thomas Morse, Elise Partridge, Christopher Patton, Miranda Pearson, Shane Rhodes, Sue Sinclair, Carmine Starnino, Christine Stewart, and Proma Tagore. Search our Cumulative Index or Google to find their work.

If you are at the conference, look for a flyer promoting a special deal on our upcoming issue, 21st Century Poetics (#210/11, Autumn/Winter 2011). This double-issue is guest-edited by Clint Burnham and Christine Stewart (both V125PC attendees), and features critical discussions on the current state of Canadian poetry, and a selection of new, unpublished work by some of Canada‘s best poets.

Congratulations, Laura Moss!

September 7, 2011

Congratulations to associate editor Laura Moss for her honourable mention in the Priestley Prize Competition. From the CACLALS website:

CACLALS member Laura Moss garned an honourable mention in the prestigious Priestley Prize competition for 2011. Laura was cited for her essay "Hesitating Readers: When Turn of the Screw Meets Disgrace in the Classroom." English Studies in Canada 35.2-3. According to the citation, Laura's essay "offers an unconventional and provocative meditation on teaching and reading postcolonial literature that takes readers through a series of complex and original ideas with clarity and purpose."

Mordecai Richler Issue Online-Only Content

August 18, 2011

This special volume of Canadian Literature (#207, Mordecai Richler) is a part of the growing reconsideration of Mordecai Richler's work since his death. A Canadian icon and canonical voice, views of Richler have shifted over the past decade. A new generation of scholars and readers has discovered him, while even among French speakers in Quebec, a new understanding of him as a Quebec writer has taken hold. Nathalie Cooke's efforts at McGill University led to The Richler Challenge conference, which was followed by my collaboration with her in an effort to gather a range of materials that reflected the new views of Richler's writing and influence. We pursued scholarly essays by a group of young international scholars, but also approached things as the editors of a trade book might: we interviewed a screenwriter who'd adapted Richler's stories; we took a walking tour of Richler's old neighbourhood and recorded it both orally and visually; we looked into his reception as a "diaspora" writer in Israel. The outcome was a fairly heterodox, wide-ranging collection. It was editor Margery Fee's fast thinking, along with the aide of Glenn Deer and Canadian Literature's excellent young editorial and technical specialists, that pointed the best way to make use of this material. Some of it is in print, some is on the journal's ever-changing web site. All of it is shown to great effect. This outcome reflects the mix of creativity and editorial savvy that can exist among the kind of academics that Richler considered a stodgy bunch of bores asleep at their desks. Hopefully readers will welcome this case of the author being proved wrong.

—Norman Ravvin, co-guest editor

• About the issue
• A Walk in Mordecai Richler's Old Neighbourhood with Stan Asher, Nathalie Cooke, Norman Ravvin, and Photographer Owen Egan
• Mordecai Richler: An Annotated Bibliography, by Michael Darling (ECW Press, 1979). Smaller file (~11MB), intended for browsing
• Mordecai Richler: An Annotated Bibliography, by Michael Darling (ECW Press, 1979). Larger file (~186MB), intended for research
• Mordecai Richler Bibliography, by Christine Mervart (2011)
• Interview with Norman Ravvin, by Alissa McArthur, August 4th, 2011. Part 1 of 3
• Interview with Norman Ravvin, by Alissa McArthur, August 4th, 2011. Part 2 of 3
• Interview with Norman Ravvin, by Alissa McArthur, August 4th, 2011. Part 3 of 3

Current Issue: #208, Prison Writing (Spring 2011)

August 10, 2011

Canadian Literature's Spring 2011 issue (CL#208) is now available. This special issue on Prison Writing features articles by Alison Toron, Deena Rymhs, Dominic Marion, Keavey Martin, Sam McKegney, Stephanie Oliver, Douglas Ivison, and new Canadian poetry & book reviews.

Prisoners are not as isolated from literary cultures in this country as much as one might believe; it is literary criticism that has yet to catch up with these rich cross-pollinations. The critical neglect of writing by and about prisoners in Canada is all the more perplexing if one considers that internationally one of the most frequently cited sources on prison writing is Writers in Prison (1990) by Canadian sociologist Ioan Davies.

—Roxanne Rimstead and Deena Rymhs, "Prison Writing/Writing Prison in Canada"

Current Issue: #207, Mordecai Richler (Winter 2010)

July 12, 2011

Canadian Literature's Winter 2010 issue (CL#207) is now available. This special issue on Mordecai Richler features articles by Melina Baum Singer, Brian Johnson, Glenn Deer, Krzysztof Majer, David Brauner, Robin Nobel, and new Canadian poetry & book reviews.

In the years immediately following his death, it seemed understandably difficult for commentators to separate the man from his work. During "The Richler Challenge," a conference hosted by McGill's Institute for the Study of Canada in 2004, speakers found themselves "missing" him, "remembering when," or laughing outright at Richler's wit and warmth.

—Nathalie Cooke and Norman Ravvin, "Mordecai Richler"

Celebrating Robert Kroetsch (1927-2011)

June 24, 2011

A disclaimer: This is not a biography. It is a gesture toward a portrait, which I take to be quite a different kettle of fish.

When Robert Kroetsch died in a car accident this week on his way home from the Artspeak Festival in Canmore Alberta, the Canadian writing community collectively mourned. Kroetsch was a poet, novelist, critic, trickster, teacher, mentor, friend, and father. He was an immensely important figure in the development of Canadian literature because of his own award-winning poetry and prose and because of the support he gave others. On hearing the sad news of Kroetsch’s death, critic and mystery writer (and my own father) John Moss responded that “Robert Kroetsch was the singular most influential Canadian writer of the twentieth century. Not as celebrated as some, nor as widely known, he was a writer whose voice echoes through the poetry and fiction and criticism of innumerable others, who sometimes in spite of themselves picked up his profoundly whimsical cadence, his startling syntax, his innovative and illuminating turns of logic, his radiant capacity to make story from the world we live in and turn everyday experience into astonishing poetry.” I agree. Kroetsch’s sense of place and sense of play have permeated Canadian writing, for the better.

In the sadness of his passing, it is comforting to think of how fitting and even beautiful it is that Kroetsch was celebrating literature and being celebrated until the final days of his life. He had just spent five days at a writer’s retreat with emerging and mid-career poets. For someone invested in digging through the sedimentary stories of place, particularly Alberta, it seems fitting too that he died not many miles from where he was born. I think Kroetsch would have appreciated the symmetry.

Growing up in the farming community of Heisler Alberta, Kroetsch once remembered how he “loved listening in on adult conversations. In a rural area there was a great oral tradition of tall tales, gossip, that kind of continuous flow of language that came to fascinate me.” Those tall tales infused his fiction and informed his poetry. He made an art of eavesdropping, quotation, ventriloquism, and gossip but he also drew on a vast knowledge of world, classical, canonical, experimental, and doggerel literature. His writing is replete with intertexts, mythic resonances, magic realism, and parodic undertones. Kroetsch could put Homer in Alberta, Foucault on the prairies, or Aritha van Herk in designer jeans, without dissonance.  

It is hard not to be self-reflexive when thinking about the man Linda Hutcheon called Mr. Canadian Postmodern. I wrote part of my Master’s thesis in the early 1990s at the University of Guelph on “historiographic metafiction,” Kroetsch, and Badlands. I still remember the jolt of recognition when I read “On Being an Alberta Writer” (I am from Ontario, but still...), especially his take on the “model of archaeology, against that of history.” Kroetsch argued that “it is a kind of archaeology that makes this place, with all its implications, available to us for literary purposes. We have not yet grasped the whole story; we have hints and guesses that slowly persuade us towards the recognition of larger patterns. Archaeology allows the fragmentary nature of the story, against the coerced unity of traditional history. Archaeology allows for discontinuity. It allows for layering. It allows for imaginative speculation.” I embraced the fragment and the speculative (it was the 90s after all) and started to dig through what Kroetsch called “particulars of place: newspaper files, place names, shoe boxes full of old photographs, tall tales, diaries, journals, tipi rings, weather reports, business ledgers, voting records.” Through this process, Kroetsch introduced me to the local archive, post-structuralism, print culture, thing theory, and the idea we are surrounded by stories, all through his Albertan archeological deposits. Kroetsch could tell the lived experience of a place through an object: a stone hammer, a seed catalogue (especially a seed catalogue), a ledger, a lemon, a crow, a bee, a studhorse.

In speaking with several literary friends over the past few days, I heard Kroetsch’s generosity mentioned repeatedly. The day after he died, the poet Nicole Markotic emailed me and a group of writers to tell us the sad news. She wrote that "Kroetsch was infinitely important to writers across Canada, and some of us were lucky enough to know him personally. He was ever supportive of others' writing, and constantly engaged in an investigation and celebration of the word." He showed the process of the engagement and reciprocity in his own work. In “January 11: After a Visit to Nicole’s Manuscript Class” in The Snowbird Poems, for instance, he chews on the line “the mountains wear a diadem of lambent sky” for the rest of the poem as he draws together the Rockies, Persian miniatures, a memory of his mother, and a pen-hoarding coffee barista. We see the archeology of thought in action.

I once watched Kroetsch watch a young man give an academic paper on Kroetsch. It was mesmerizing. Instead of having an objective or even dismissive face (as I have, on occasion, seen on other authors), he beamed his infectious smile the whole time. It wasn’t that it was a particularly laudatory (or even good) paper. It was that Kroetsch seemed to genuinely enjoy watching this young person engage with his work. He got a kick out if it and he took it seriously. Dawne McCance once lovingly described him as “a man of great optimism, one who offers encouragement in many ways.” About his own writing, Kroetsch has said, “For me, to rewrite is to re-imagine the possible poem. I doodle. I dawdle. I dare.” I think he must have appreciated the daring of anyone who made him/herself vulnerable through the act of public writing.

How do you grow a poet?

My friend Angela Chotka was introduced to Canadian literature as an undergraduate student at the University of Manitoba in a class taught by Kroetsch. She remembers that he “brought real living authors into the classroom to read to us and talk about their writing. Wonderfully unpretentious, he enthusiastically encouraged creativity and freedom. Literature and those who created it? They are alive!” This perhaps is one of his most important legacies. He wanted to bring Canadian creativity to life, to share it with others, and, as he said, to make it real.

Kroetsch was also a friend to Canadian Literature. He first published a poem in our journal in 1981 and continued to publish poetry with us for the next two decades. He also published an article (“The Grammar of Silence: Narrative Patterns in Ethnic Writing” in 106 [1985]) and a note (“Dorothy Livesay, 1909-1996” in 155 [1997]). In 2009 when Matthew Gruman was creating CanLit Poets, he worked with Kroetsch on his entry. When the site was awarded the 2009 Canadian Online Publishing Award for best cross-platform, Matthew sent out a bulk e-mail to the featured poets telling them about the award. Kroetsch wrote back with: “Matthew, Congratulations. You are original, being originating, showing poetry into the new, rewriting the writing into the writing. Thank you. Robert.” As Matthew said, “it was a thrilling and humbling response from someone of his caliber. In every email he thanked me for the archive, even though he was the one giving us his time and work.” A man of generosity, originality, and enormous talent, Robert Kroetsch will be missed by us at the journal and by the whole Canadian literary community.

—Laura Moss

Survey for Professors, Instructors, TAs, Teachers, etc.

June 1, 2011

Canadian Literature seeks feedback to assist in developing two pedagogical and critical online resource guides to support instructors and students of Canadian literature, culture, and academic writing. One guide will provide detailed examination and analysis of the complexities of critical topics and authors, seeking to foster careful discussions of previous trends and future possibilities for critical inquiry. A companion guide will provide academic writing instruction as well as guidance in critically assessing and referencing scholarly articles in various genres. Both guides will use our vast online database as a reference and resource.

We sincerely appreciate you taking the time to complete this survey. It should take only 5 to 10 minutes. Your responses will help shape the form and content of the online guides.

Complete the survey at canlit.ca/survey for a chance to win one of two free year-long subscriptions to Canadian Literature. Please note that we will be conducting another survey, for students, later in the year.

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