The Mask of Satire: Character and Symbolic Pattern in Robertson Davies’ Fiction
Abstract: Very WELL, if you wish it, I shall talk to someone else,” says Samuel Marchbanks to one of his many ...
The Masks of D. G. Jones
Abstract: “Pour se reconnaître, il faut se traduire” E.D.Blodgdt LUBLIC SILENCE surrounding the work of D. G. Jones in Canada is ...
The Maze of Life: The Work of Margaret Laurence
Abstract: DR. JOHNSON in his “Preface to Shakespeare” comments trenchantly on the hazards of evaluating that which is new in the ...
The Media of Environmental Listening in Don McKay’s Songs for the Songs of Birds
Abstract: Drawing on media ecology and acoustic ecology, this essay "reads" Don McKay's audiobook, Songs for the Songs of Birds (2008). The essay explains this audiobook as a meditation on listening and on media and technology, such as headphones and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), that produce an interplay between the natural environments of birds and our built environments. It also contends that various metaphorical abstractions and deterritorializations in the recording and imagery of the audiobook are part of McKay's lament for extinct birds and his concern for threatened species, not only birds but also humans.
The Model Prisoner: Reading Confinement in Alias Grace
Abstract: This article explores the complex physical and psychological space of the prison in Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed historical novel Alias Grace (1996). Rather than understanding the imprisonment of the convicted nineteenth-century “murderess” as an aberration, this article argues that it is part of a spectrum of confining and repressive institutions that have defined Grace Marks’s existence. Yet despite obvious restrictions, Grace uses the prison setting and her interviews with the young psychiatrist Dr. Simon Jordan for her own ends, engaging in a form of self-therapy that disturbs these seemingly top-down power relationships. This article suggests that by using storytelling as a means of escape and empowerment, Grace positions her narrative within recognizable tropes in prison literature, but her challenges to the cathartic power of narrative can be read as exploring the epistemological limits of prison narration.
The Naked Narrator: “The Studhorse Man” & the Structuralist Imagination
Abstract: DEMETER PROUDFOOT’S NAKEDNESS describes not only his physical condition as he sits writing in his bathtub, but also his role ...
The Natural World in Early Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature
Abstract: I.N THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY the idea that early Canadian writers —•and, by extension, early Canadians — ...
The Nature of Modernism in Deep Hollow Creek
Abstract: There may be little doubt that Sheila Watson’s 1959 novel, TheDouble Hook, belongs to a cosmopolitan modernism; that it is ...
The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Sixties: A Memoir
Abstract: In 19671 was contacted by board officials of the Nova Scotia College of Art to see if I was interested ...
The Novelist as Dramatist: Davies’ Adaptation of “Leaven of Malice”
Abstract: THOUGH ROBERTSON DAVIES’ FIRST LOVE WAS THEATRE, and he was a playwright first, he has achieved greater recognition as a ...