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.
www.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
Editing The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller, co-editors of The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, reflect on their experience of editing the volume.
As, for example, Bruce Greenfield's chapter on explorers' narratives and Marta Dvorák's discussion of writing related to migrations and multiple allegiances from Frances Brooke to Thomas Chandler Haliburton make clear, global mobilities have always affected Canadian literature to some extent. We found particularly interesting the case of the Black United Empire Loyalists, because of the bestselling success of Lawrence Hill's novel The Book of Negroes and because of George Elliott Clarke's role as educator in keeping the public memory of this particular migration alive. Mobility, as imperialist quest or as enforced exile, is a key theme in Canadian writing that deserves to be studied further.
—Eva-Marie Kröller
Fold-over poetry
Wednesday, January 06th, 2010
For Congress 2008, I made a Fold-over poetry game (writing poetry one line at a time with multiple people) to get some traffic at our booth. It was a lot of fun and people kept coming back to see what lines were getting added.
While I wasn't looking, some people went ahead a wrote a pretty good one:
Fold-over Poem #22
Everything starts somewhere
Except the times it don't
make any sense to worry about
who's judging your decision
it's a whole bunch of shame for a whole bunch of reasons
leaving him at home so I could go and bed Edith
who came from the coast, looking like a dream
on a navy night we parted
the stars crying their sympathies
tearing down the nighttime solitude with light
empty streets, empty faces passed us by as we parted
submitting a smirk that would surprise a porcupine
smarmy enough to smother the sharp spine
of the gargantuan monster made out of twine
Add a line to the next one here.
Current Issue: Sport and the Athletic Body, #202 (Autumn 2009)
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
Canadian Literature's Autumn 2009 issue (CL#202), "Sport and the Athletic Body", celebrates the Vancouver Olympics with papers about sport, postcolonialism, masculinity, race, culture, multiculturalism, globalization, disability studies, and creative writing. Guest edited by former Canadian Literature editor, Laurie Ricou.
I was sitting in the campus cafeteria wondering how to introduce this issue when two Japanese students approached with a questionnaire on health and fitness—part of their English-language training. Question 3 was “What is the greatest benefit of physical activity?” They are probably still puzzling over my ready answer: “It fosters an ability to appreciate poetry.” “Oh,” they said smiling demurely, “that’s a good answer.”
—Laure Ricou, "Thinking Tremolo and Backflip"
UPDATE: Canadian Literature issues #101 - #150 now online, too!
Wednesday, December 09th, 2009
Big thanks again to Hung Te for doing such a great (and quick!) job getting our back issues online. See the archives to explore almost 40 years of Canadian Literature.
Thomas King at the Museum of Anthropology
Wednesday, December 09th, 2009
As part our 50th Anniversary celebration, we presented Thomas King as the 2010 UBC English Department Sedgewick Lecture on October 1, 2009.
Introduction by Dennis Danielson, Head of UBC English, and Linc Kesler, Director of the UBC First Nations Studies Program.
Canadian Literature issues #1 - #100 now online!
Tuesday, December 08th, 2009
Issues #1 - #100 of Canadian Literature are now available as PDFs (#101 - #150 coming soon) from our issue archive pages. Special thanks to our co-op student, Hung Te Tjia, for his time spent cutting up articles.
[...] Just as technology has meant that proofs are no longer assembled on kitchen tables, so now it means that those who want to browse through the back issues of the journal will be able to do so via the internet. We have just started to put the back issues of the journal on-line: issue number one, up for only a few days, has already had 30 hits. We hope to have the first 150 issues up by the time you read this. Then we’ll pause while we turn to transforming our submission process so that instead of requiring authors to stick those colourful little paper squares on envelopes to send in their articles, it will all happen on the web.
Our more recent issues are available electronically to anyone who belongs to a library which has a subscription to one or more of the aggregators to which we licence the journal, which certainly includes most university libraries in North America and Europe, and many public and school libraries in Canada. However, on a visit to Hungary last spring, I discovered that not all university libraries can afford either the paper or the electronic subscription. Even universities with courses in Canadian literature fall into this category, and there are many such universities in the world now, thanks to the efforts of the International Council for Canadian Studies. So we will keep moving to make more and more of the journal freely available, insofar as this is possible without becoming a drain on the university’s finances.
—Margery Fee (forthcoming editorial in Canadian Literature #203)
Interview with Reingard Nischik
Wednesday, December 02nd, 2009
We just posted audio and a transcript of Sarah Banting's interview with Reingard Nischik from our 50th Anniversary Gala.
And you should never be surprised again, no Canadian should ever be surprised again, that international scholars, scholars from abroad, take a large interest in your literature.
—Reingard Nischik
Larissa Lai reads "Rachel" from The Automaton Biographies
Wednesday, December 02nd, 2009
Featured CanLit Poet: Daniel David Moses
Tuesday, November 03rd, 2009
Every couple of weeks, we will be promoting a "Featured Poet" from the CanLit Poets archive on this site and @canadianlit. This week is Daniel David Moses:
Playwright, poet, essayist, and teacher, Daniel David Moses is a Delaware from the Six Nations lands in southern Ontario, Canada. He holds an Honours B. A. in General Fine Arts from York University and an M. F. A. in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. His plays include his first, Coyote City, a nominee for the 1991 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, The Indian Medicine Shows, a winner of the James Buller Memorial Award for Excellence in Aboriginal Theatre and, his best known, Almighty Voice and His Wife. He is also the author of Delicate Bodies and Sixteen Jesuses, poems, and co-editor of Oxford University Press’ An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, 3rd Edition, 2005. His most recent publications are Pursued by a Bear, Talks, Monologues and Tales (2005) and Kyotopolis, a play in two acts (2008), both from Exile Editions. His honours include the Harbourfront Festival Prize, a Harold Award, a Chalmers Fellowship and being short-listed for the 2005 Siminovitch Award. He teaches as a Queen’s National Scholar in the Department of Drama at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.
Visit CanLit Poets for more info.
CanLit Poets wins a Canadian Online Publishing Award
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Canadian Literature's poetry archive, CanLit Poets, won a Canadian Online Publishing Award (presented by Masthead) in the Best Cross Platform category!
George Elliott Clarke, who has been involved with the archive since the very beginning, attended the ceremony to accept the award on our behalf and read a speech:
On behalf of Canadian Literature, I would like to thank all the poets who have generously donated their time to make the archive a success. CanLit Poets draws on the many poems published in Canadian Literature since it was founded in 1959—it is not only moving poetry from print to web, but is also an offshoot from an academic journal designed to educate and inspire young poets.
Canadian Literature is delighted to win an award for online publishing and is excited that we have been able to make our website appealing and useful to a wider audience than university students and researchers. The main drive is to expose high school students to great poetry, no matter where they live in the world, so that they will be inspired to write poetry themselves. Canadian Literature staff member Matthew Gruman deserves credit for having this idea and carrying it through to completion. This award from Masthead will give Canadian Literature inspiration to be more creative with its website.
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