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First Nations Public Library Week: February 10–15, 2014

February 13, 2014

Cover of CanLit 215

CanLit 215: Indigenous Focus

This week is First Nations Public Library Week in Ontario. The theme this year is “Celebrating Mother Earth.”

Our open-access classroom resource, CanLit Guides, has a guide to Indigenous Literatures in Canada—it’s a great resource for instructors, students, and anyone who wants to learn more about the complicated relationship between colonialism, culture, and language.

The guide features chapters on Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters, Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, and much more.

#readwomen2014

February 5, 2014

CanLit Guides Logo

CanLit Guides

Are you reading women authors in 2014?

Writer and artist Joanna Walsh’s Twitter hashtag #readwomen2014 has gone viral, encouraging readers worldwide to share their favourite women authors. Walsh’s campaign picks up on studies by organizations such as CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts) and VIDA that have found that far more books written by men are reviewed than ones written by women. The #readwomen2014 hashtag has sparked a lively online conversation about the role of gender in literary representation. CBC Books got into the fray with their list of 10 Canadian women you need to read, which includes writers such as Eden Robinson.

CanLit Guides has lots of content to help contextualize debates around gender and literature, starting with our Gender, Sexuality, and Canadian Literature guide. The guide contains primers on academic theories about on topics such as feminism, sexuality, performativity, and their relationship to literature. For example, we have a chapter on Feminist History of Literature and Culture in Canada, which examines the waves metaphor of feminism and the history of feminist literary culture in Canada. Our page on CWILA helps contextualize the debate about gender and literary representation from a Canadian perspective.

We also have plenty of literary case studies on work written by Canadian women authors:

As well, our Poetic Visuality and Experimentation guide features poetry by Canadian women poets M. Travis Lane and Rita Wong.

Explore CanLit Guides for lots more content on Canadian women writers!

CanLit Guides is a flexible learning resource, developed by Canadian Literature, that introduces students to academic reading and writing. The guides use articles from Canadian Literature’s online archive, helping students navigate scholarly conversations surrounding Canadian Literature.