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Abstract: In a 1989 interview, Métis author Maria Campbell complained to Hartmut Lutz that a section of her autobiography, Halfbreed, first published in 1973, was removed by the publisher against her wishes. During a chance meeting with Campbell in Dublin in 2017, and following Indigenous protocols, Deanna Reder and Alix Shield asked her for permission to search for early versions of Campbell's text. With Campbell's blessing, Alix Shield conducted an archival search for any early material, and discovered the excised passage that revealed that when Campbell was a teenager, she had been raped by RCMP officers. This article includes the found text and discusses the impact of its excision.

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Abstract: “BASICALLY, Master Mason Ihle despised everything that was female” (99), is the phrase F. P. Grove used to describe the ...

Abstract: Alice Major’s most recent long poem, “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” engages with scientific, mythological, and poetic discourse to create a complex reworking of Alexander Pope’s Epistle I from An Essay on Man within the context of contemporary climatic, genetic, and geologic change. Drawing on such apparently disparate sources as Pope, Hinduism, DNA studies, and research on the current global climate crisis, Major paints several dramatically engaging but nevertheless alarming pictures of our present shared condition. Nudging Pope’s Great Chain of Being towards the “chain” of the DNA double helix, she offers a nuanced moral and ethical understanding of what is now often referred to as the anthropocene epoch that invites the reader to consider their own potential response to a shared reality that offers “no ending, happy or otherwise,” exhorting them to “Just play your part,” but not without providing them with valuable guidance for doing so.

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Abstract: D.VE GODFREY’S NOVEL The New Ancestors1 contains one A very puzzling chapter entitled “In the Fifth City.” The book’s other ...

Abstract: In 2004, two questions were asked in reference to Mordecai Richler, questions that position Jewish and Canadian in opposition. The questions—“Is Richler Canadian Content?” and “Whose history is being told? Jewish or Canadian?”—seem to belong to an image of the past found in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. And yet these questions not only were asked recently, but failed to draw attention to their ideological assumptions. One was posed as the topic of a plenary panel for “The Richler Challenge” conference, held at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, March 18-19, 2004. And the other was asked by Coral Ann Howells and Peter Noble in the introduction to Where are the Voices Coming From? Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History (2004). This paper takes up these questions and their underlying logic.

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Abstract: This essay explores the ethical dimensions of documentary appropriation by staging a "resistant reading" of Stephen Scobie's McAlmon's Chinese Opera (1980). By dwelling on Robert McAlmon's documented aversion to seeing his controversial marriage transformed into literature, Scobie's long poem effectively commits the very transgression it thematizes while also encouraging the reader to further scrutinize McAlmon's private life. Yet Opera'sproliferation of transgressions is inextricably linked to its efforts to rescue McAlmon from historical obscurity, and to pay homage to the values inherent in his own writings. With this in mind, Operaserves as a compelling example of the ethical ambivalence often at play in the documentary long poem's engagement with historical figures and events.

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Abstract: Once in Blockadia by Stephen Collis is poetry of direct action, a book of revolutionary record where the speaker is a participant in the protest. Collis radically challenges traditional uses of form, breaking the bounds of the poem and asking the reader to engage more deeply with his text. The organizational metaphor of the barricade connects with the poetry’s social and political aspirations but also showcases a blockade of normative reading, one where the text is a contained entity. Guided by literary theorist Gérard Genette, structural analysis of Once in Blockadia allows a comprehensive picture of its intertextuality. An active reading—from covers and epigraphs to interviews, legal transcripts, and news reports, in what I call a critical literary praxis of ‘reading the notes’—provides unique understandings of poetry that highlights the complexities of interacting with a text that is forever unfinished for both the writer and the reader. The active nature of this paratextual writing and reading challenges the dominance of the author or publisher over a text, opening the closed poem to a democracy of voice, content, and meaning. For Once in Blockadia, every context is a paratext and every paratext becomes, granularly, part of the text itself.

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Abstract: This paper argues that Lynn Coady’s Saints of Big Harbour (2002) resists the static and stereotypical portrayal of place and identity often associated with Atlantic-Canadian culture and literature by portraying the participation of the adolescent characters (in early 1980s Cape Breton) in a transnational popular culture rather than an "authentic" local folk culture, by emphasizing the banal sameness rather than the unique particularities of Cape Breton, by downplaying the impact of geography on identity formation, and by critiquing the parochial and localist understandings of place associated with some of the adult characters. In doing so, Saints articulates an understanding of place as unfixed and porous rather than as static and bounded, and thus provides a portrait of Cape Breton as part of not apart from the contemporary world.

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Abstract: ?»MiLY CARR’S FIRST BOOK, earned the Governor-General’s award for best non-fiction in Canada in 1942. But it has, since then, ...