My dear Anton Myrer
: A Late Lowry Letter
Abstract: When the American writer Anton Myrer (1922-93) wrote to Malcolm Lowry on 29 January 1957, he did so to praise ...
Mystory
in Allison Muri’s the hystery of the broken fether
Abstract: Iv told my story, what I ment to tel, the histry of Sams ranch is in here somewheres, and I ...
No Short Cuts
: The Evolution of The Double Hook
Abstract: In her copy of The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Sheila Watson noted the following passage: You see I too have a ...
Our Next Neighbour Across the Way
: Japan and Canadian Writers
Abstract: For most readers, Japan as a Canadian literary topic begins with Obasan. Joy Kogawa’s 1981 novel is not about Japan, ...
Susceptible to no common translation
: Language and Idealism in Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist
Abstract: At the turn of the century, Canada’s cultural periodi- cals chronicled an impassioned debate amongst intellectuals and politicians over Canada’s ...
The Age of Frye
Abstract: On April 30, 1957, Benjamin F. Houston of Princeton University Press wrote to Northrop Frye in Toronto that the printing ...
The Age of Frye
: Dissecting the Anatomy of Criticism, 1957-1966
Abstract: This article explores the earliest reviews of the Anatomy of Criticism, constructing a microhistory of the moment when the unsuspecting critics of 1957-1966 first encountered Northrop Frye’s massive new critical theory. Their long-forgotten reviews reveal the critical concepts they brought to the attempt to understand Frye’s ideas, and illustrate why criticism as they understood it proved vulnerable when, with equal suddenness, in 1966 the
Age of Derridasuperseded what Harold Bloom would call
The Age of Frye.Though the few Canadian reviewers (with one exception) spoke with the same voice as those in the US and England, the long-term consequences of Frye’s theories were very different on native ground. Only once did Frye himself debate his critics directly, and though the ideas of the Anatomy inform all his later work, the critical path he himself was choosing in the same decade would lead neither to Paris nor New Haven.
The Most Canadian of all Canadian Poets
: Pauline Johnson and the Construction of a National Literature
Abstract: On March 10, 1913, the City of Vancouver publicly observed the funeral of Pauline Johnson with office closures, flags at ...
The profound poverty of knowledge
: Sandra Birdsell’s Narrative of Concealment
Abstract: Sandra Birdsell’s fiction has attracted a wide range of different labels, variously identifying her as a “feminist… Prairie, Mennonite, magic-realist ...
Was Ever an Adventure Without its Cost?
: The Price of National Unity in E. J. Pratt’s Towards the Last Spike
Abstract: E. J. Pratt’s "Towards the Last Spike" deserves critical reconsideration. Pratt’s epic poem documents the history of the Canadian railway, but not, as critics have generally conceded, in a blanket celebration of the nation’s achievements: rather, Pratt allows the darker moments of railway history into his retelling, challenging the unifying impulse of projects of national definition.