“Please Eunice, Don’t Be Ignorant”: The White Reader as Trickster in Lee Maracle’s Fiction
Abstract: In the Preface to Sojourner’s Truthand OtherStories, Lee Maracle explains how she attempts, in her writing, to integrate conventions of ...
“Proceeding Before the Amorous Invisible”: Phyllis Webb and the Ghazal
Abstract: PHYLLIS WEBB’S LATEST BOOK, Water and Light, brings together five sequences of “ghazals and anti-ghazals,” including “Sunday Water,” first published ...
“Prochain Episode” et “Menaud, maitre-draveur”: le decalque romanesque
Abstract: L’OEUVRE COMPLEXE et déroutante d’Hubert Aquin a peu d’égales dans notre littérature. Seul Jacques Ferron, sans doute, peut rivaliser avec ...
“Promptings Stronger” than “Strict Prohibitions”: New Forms of Natural Religion in the Novels of Robertson Davies
Abstract: θ εοσεβ ε στατον αυτό εστί, πάντων ζώων άνθρωπος; Plato, Laws x.902. Omnia ilia per quae Deo reverentia exhibetur, pertinent ...
“Rebel Woman,” “Little Woman,” and the Eclectic Print Culture of Protest in The Woman Worker, 1926-1929
Abstract:
This essay argues that periodicals of protest can be crucial in helping us to understand the tangled history of the welfare state in Canada, and it contends that the Communist periodical The Woman Worker (1926-1929) is one important site for undertaking this work. The forms of citizen participation that are evident in early- and mid-twentieth century periodicals of protest have not played much part in shaping narratives of the development of the welfare state in Canada. More invisible still is the role of women, and particularly working-class women, in this ephemeral history of political activism. Furthermore, if labour historians have mined periodicals of protest for their political content, little work has been done to analyze the cultural material in these publications, such as short fiction and poetry. This frequently devalued material plays a crucial role in the summoning of state reform that one finds in the pages of The Woman Worker.
“Rose and Janet”: Alice Munro’s Metafiction
Abstract: ‘That Rose you write about? Is that supposed to be you?'”1 The Genesis of Who Do You Think You Are? ...
“Sailor, Novelist, and Scientist—Also Explorer”: Frank Burnett, Canada’s Kon-Tiki, and the Ethnographic Middlebrow
Abstract: This article focuses attention on an interesting, overlooked contributor to early twentieth century Canadian writing, Frank Burnett, whose collection of South Pacific artifacts formed the nucleus of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. It draws upon scholarship of travel narratives about science as well as middlebrow print culture to introduce and elaborate a particular class of texts identified here as "the ethnographic middlebrow." These texts, this paper argues, inhabited a peculiar and culturally variable space in relation to the academic fields of science and literature and popular tastes for adventure, escape, and celebrity. Reading Burnett’s early twentieth century writing about the South Pacific in relation to the mid-century Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl illuminates a variety of national and international dynamics at work in positioning each of these writers in relation to highbrow literature, ethnographic science, late colonial modernity, and the middlebrow.
“Seeing religiously that his socks were always darned”: Serving Idols in As For Me and My House
Abstract: As For Me and My House has been read as a documentary about the Depression, an unreliable narrative by a deceived and self-deceiving wife, and a narrative of gender, power, and creativity, to name only a few recent approaches. It has rarely been read seriously as what it purports to be: a story about the consequences of unbelief. Sinclair Ross had himself been offered the chance to attend university if he would commit to becoming a minister and had refused; his imagining of what such a life could become was the germ of the novel. I read the narrative as a sustained account of the loss of God in which misplaced yearning for the infinite (for an immortal art in Philip’s case and a transcendent love in his wife’s) condemns the two main characters to loneliness and self-loathing. Examining the novel’s biblical references and images-from its ironic title to its motif of idol worship-I explore how the problem of meaning without faith is at the heart of the novel’s resonance and enduring interest.
“Signals Across Boundaries”: Non-Congruence and Erin Mouré Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love
Abstract: You’re not going to get it. I didn’t. And I read the whole book. —RICHARD VAUGHAN Coming near the end ...
“Still Crazy After All These Years”: The Uses of Madness in Recent Quebec Drama
Abstract: FOR YEARS, MADMEN and madwomen have been spotlighted by Quebec dramatists, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by critics. ...
