Articles



Anything but Reluctant: Canada’s little magazines
Abstract: HISTORICALLY, LITTLE MAGAZINES have sprung up when- ever new, animated, and serious writing cannot find a market. Thus these maga- ...

Appropriate Appropriations?: Reading Responsibility in Joan Crate’s Pale as Real Ladies
Abstract: This paper engages certain sets of reading challenges posed by Alberta Métis writer Joan Crate’s 1991 collection of poems, Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson, a text which re-visions/re-works the life and oeuvre of nineteenth-century Six Nations poet and performer, Emily Pauline Johnson.  I work to understand how Crate’s text forces readers to confront their place(s) in the scene of reading, to engage questions of identity and difference—and of appropriation—and their articulation in relation to particular operations of canonical value and cultural power, in order, I argue,  to better  understand not Johnson’s life, identity, and work expressly but the conditions of their production. With close study of Pale as Real Ladies  and brief treatment of the later collection, Foreign Homes (2001), I ultimately argue that Crate’s texts exhort of  readers a confrontation with what we can think of as the violence of representation itself.

Archives and Truth in Fred Stenson’s The Trade
Abstract: Fred Stenson uses two sets of archives in his historical novel The Trade: the first grounds his narrative firmly in ...

Are Canadians Politically Naïve?
Abstract: JLou .ou WON’T LIKE THIS ESSAY, but let it be a comfort to you that the question in my title ...

Aritha van Herk’s Places Far From Ellesmere: The Wild and Adventurous North?
Abstract: In Places Far From Ellesmere, Aritha van Herk situates her work as a response to the fiction of male writers ...

Articulating a World of Difference: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism and Globalization
Abstract: In The World, the Text and the Critic, Edward Saidcounters the generally textualist tendency of literary critical conversation of the ...

Artistry in Mavis Gallant’s “Green Water, Green Sky”: The Composition of Structure, Pattern, and Gyre
Abstract: M.LICHEL BUTOR, IN HIS essays “The Novel as Research” ( i960) and “Research on the Technique of the Novel” ( ...

As Birds Bring Forth the Story: The Elusive Art of Alistair MacLeod
Abstract: ΕARL Y IN ” T H E CLOSING DOWN OF SUMMER,” t h e first StOiy in As Birds Bring ...

As For Me and Me Arse: Strategic Regionalism and the Home Place in Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven
Abstract:
English Lynn Coady’s novel Strange Heaven is a significant addition to a prominent Canadian genre: narratives about sensitive souls struggling to survive in a dysfunctional family in a small town. Whereas typically the critique of the small town invites the critical gaze of the outsider, however, Coady’s comic novel about a Cape Breton teenager turns that gaze back on the observer, highlighting the cultural politics between centre and periphery. In the process, the novel provides a good example of Atlantic-Canadian literature’s increasing and subversive self-consciousness, foregrounding and deconstructing the way in which Canada’s eastern edge tends to be framed from outside.

French Le roman Strange Heaven de Lynn Coady apporte un enrichissement majeur à un genre important dans la littérature canadienne : récits d’âmes sensibles qui essaient de survivre à une vie de famille dysfonctionnelle dans un village rural. Alors que (typiquement) la critique du village invite le regard critique de l’étranger, ce roman comique d’un adolescent du Cap-Breton retourne ce regard sur l’observateur lui-même d’une manière qui démontre la politique culturelle entre ce qui est central et ce qui est périphérique. En même temps, le roman est un bon exemple de ce que la littérature du Canada atlantique devient de plus en plus subversivement consciente d’elle-même, mettant en relief et déconstruisant la façon dont la côte est du Canada est souvent envisagée de l’extérieur.

Ascension: Liliane Welch Talks About Poetry
Abstract: Born in Luxembourg, Liliane Welch has lived forthirty-one years in Sackville, New Brunswick. A professor of French Studies at Mount ...