Canadian Literature’s Issue 222 (Autumn 2014), Recursive Time, is now available for order. Editor Margery Fee brings together several unexpected elements to make an important point about oral stories and literary studies in her introduction to the issue:
Beowulf and Old English were wheeled into English literary studies in the 1920s around the same time as English literature was formed as a separate university discipline. National literatures were supposed to be grounded in an indigenous oral culture—so the obscure British Beowulf became preferable to the famous Greek Homer. Similarly, many major anthologies of Canadian literature begin with some Indigenous oral poems in translation, although they too were unknown to most Canadian writers and so cannot really be said to
groundthe Canadian literary tradition. This retroactive claiming of a formerly ignored indigenous tradition was fairly harmless in English literary studies. In Canadian literary studies, it is part of a colonial history that takes over Indigenous culture without doing it justice as something more than the beginning ofourliterary history. We should not study oral stories here without keeping the history of colonial appropriation clearly in mind.
—Margery Fee,
The Princess, the Bear, the Computer, and the King of England
Recursive Time also features articles by Hannah McGregor, Aleksandra Bida, Anne Quéma, Nicholas Milne, Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten, and Eric Schmaltz, as well as new Canadian poetry and book reviews.
The new issue can be ordered through our online store. Happy readings!