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While significant differences separate modernist and fin-de-siècle assessments of nostalgia in Canada, intellectuals from both periods associate longing for a lost past with the absolute. This essay examines Northrop Frye's idea of nostalgia in relation to that of two late Victorians, the idealist philosopher John Watson and the writer Agnes Maule Machar, to suggest that the distinction between the two treatments of nostalgia lies in their authors' disparate views of the absolute's relationship to history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early book reviews of William French, literary editor of the Globe and Mail from 1961 to 1990, reflect his years as an education and political reporter. At a time when cultural nationalism was cresting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he refused to engage in what Desmond Pacey called the "perpetual hopefulness" of Canadian literary criticism, arguing instead that there was no Canadian literature, only literature that should be judged purely on literary merits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At issue in this essay are the silences and equivocations, the controversies and paradoxes, that the question "Is there an Anglo-Québécois literature?'" evokes. Anglo-Québécois literature (if it exists) has recently enjoyed its apogee, delineated by David Fennario's Balconville (1979) and Neil Bissoondath's Doing the Heart Good (2002), and the essay offers readings of six novels from and about English Quebec, published in the 1990s, as examples of an emerging "minor literature" that reterritorializes English in a post-1976 Quebec. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture," by Marlene NourbeSe Philip, is presented. Particular focus is given to Philip's role as a public intellectual and activist using Canadian literature as part of her antiracist program. Topics discussed include social change, the African diaspora, and racism.

Drawing upon recent anthropological scholarship for a general theory of production, exchange, and valuation, this essay seeks to understand cultural appropriation, in a consequential but not exclusive way, as an ambivalent process whereby the norms and practices of imperialist society may be challenged by modern writers whether of Native or non-Native heritage. The examples of Emily Cart, Marius Barbeau, and Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) here illuminate a basic set of relationships between modernism, imperialism, and nationalism.

This essay examines how recent fiction by Wayne Johnston and Joan Clark counters or colludes with popular cultural constructions of Newfoundland as a "strange terrain" attractive to non-Newfoundlanders because of its associations with placemyths. How do Johnston's "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams" and Clark's "Latitudes of Melt" position the nonlocal reader? As tourist? Friendly visitor? Alien invader? Whatever the case, both writers construct imagined geographies that encode and comment on the history and consequences of Newfoundland's mythologization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces topics on Canadian literature that were discussed in the March 2004 issue of Essays on Canadian Writing.

This paper explores a controversy over Wayne Johnston's "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams" that persists, principally inside Newfoundland, where some readers who know his sources argue that Johnston has distorted and betrayed them. Taking seriously the responsibility to history of a historical novelist, the essay nevertheless defends "Colony" as an important, if oblique, take on Newfoundland history and culture, resisting objections to the novel that disregard aesthetic criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wayne Johnston's works engage with the idea of origin as trauma, often via the theme of a lost/found father. "The Divine Ryans" offers a profound meditation on the ambivalent connection between paternal ghosts and individual identities, all interwoven within an extended metaphor of hockey and psychoanalysis. In an ironic reversal of national iconography, the novel uses the motif of hockey as a metaphor for the elusiveness of paternity, genealogy, and symbolic legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Set in mid-twentieth-century Newfoundland, "The Divine Ryans" is a haunted tale in which nine-year-old Draper Doyle narrates the story of his father's visitations in the troubled year following his death. His father appears to Draper exclusively and usually in the guise of a hockey player, hockey functioning as a substitute for the lost intimacy between father and son. In articulating this coming-of-age story in which relationships, family secrets, and sexual codes ate all mediated through the rules and references of hockey, Wayne Johnston angles his narrative toward a dispossessed postcolonial expression of the ghosts that inhabit the margins of story and settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patrick Kavanagh's novel "Gaff Topsails" explores a day in the life of a Newfoundland outport on the cusp of change from the traditional life to the uncertainties of modernism. The outport depicted in the novel, although realistic in its details, is essentially mythological and archetypal, representing defining elements of Newfoundland culture, especially the primary values of community and interdependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Winter's "This All Happened" has gained significant acclaim as an autobiographical account of Gabriel, one youngish man in love. Gabriel's depiction of his view of the world represents the kind of heterosexual man for whom most women wish because, although a difficult person to handle, he would understand his girlfriend's point of view. This article attempts to trace how Winter shapes this representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many critical readings of Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News," both local and outside Newfoundland, are motivated by an earnest corrective impulse, setting out to pinpoint erroneous depictions of place and character, overwrought style, or mangled metaphor. This essay argues, in contrast, that "straight," outright condemnations of Proulx's novel overlook the possibility of a camp or post-tourist reading, a reading that will allow for a playful and defamiliarizing alternative to currently circulating stories of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written in the wake of many novels that depict Newfoundlanders as being somehow at one with the island, Michael Crummey's "River Thieves" shows Newfound-landers as not so much of the island as in constant struggle with it. His re-creation of the quest to rescue a dwindling Beothuk population is a metaphoric voyage into the collective unconscious of Newfoundland—a communal ego imbued with feelings of pride and shame and a desire to know how things could have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses two books and one play published by African Canadian writers which address the cultural memory of African American people through a historical retelling of slavery through Canadian characters, concerns or locations. Information on 'Any Known Blood,' by Lawrence Hill; Description of 'Beatrice Chancy,' by George Elliott Clarke; Explanation of 'At the Full and Change of the Moon,' by Dionne Brand.

Presents an essay on Canadian writing about food and gender during the 1930s.

Introduces articles in the special issue of the book 'Essays on Canadian Writing,' which concerns the topic of food in Canadian literature.

Lists several books that focused on social realism and working women in Canadian literature. 'Sister Woman,' by Jessie Georgina Sime; 'Roland Graeme, Knight,' by Agnes Maule Machar; 'North of Fifty-Three,' by Bertrand Sinclair; 'The House of Windows,' by Isabel Ecclestone.

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Discusses the return of racial issues to Canadian literary and cultural discussions. Perception of Canadian nationalist on race issues; Details of multiculturalism; Public controversy over race in Canadian cultural institutions.

Discusses the antiracist activism in the literary arts community in Canada. Innovations in British cultural studies and its relationship to the Black British arts movement; Achievements in Canadian literature; Details of the struggle against corporate globalization.

Provides information on the book 'Canada in Us Now: The First Anthology of Black Poetry and Prose in Canada,' by George Elliott Clarke. Discussion on the role of African-Canadian on political and cultural concerns in the country; Details of racism in Canada; Information on some African-Canadian authors and poets.

Discusses creative literature of crime and punishment against African-Canadian literary authors. Information on the execution of African-Canadian writer Marie-Jos è phe Ang é lique; Information on various literary works related to race, injustices and execution; Protest action staged by African-Canadian writer Ken Wiwa, against capital punishment; Discussion on slavery in Canada.

Focuses on the biography 'Diamond Grill,' by Fred Wah. Discussion on the innovative and intelligent revisions of hybridity in the Canadian literature; Information on the deconstruction of race as a category of identity and the reconstruction of racialized identity to account for racial mixedness; Alternative conceptions of identity based on purity by Wah.

Discusses the standard practice of M é tis authors and poets literature about race and religion in Canada. Information on the identity of M é tis; Details of some Canadian literary works; Idas of traditional M é tis about the significance of blood heritage; Social condition of M é tis.

Argues against the logic common to various resistance-poetics of African-Canadian authors, based on the playwright of Andrew Moodie and George F. Walker. Discussion on the Canadian literary context; Information on the literary works of African-Canadian authors about racism; Details of how racism was depicted in the works of Moodie and Walker.

Examines the changing conditions of possibility for cultural production between the 1950s and the 1990s, when literature works no longer in the service of Canada's identity within a Cold War competition between communism and capitalism. Historical background on Canadian literature; Evidence of the impact of a shift in conditions of possibility; Studies used to analyze the mediations operative in the production of cultural texts.

Examines the development of Asian Canadian literature as compared with the Asian American literary studies. Explanations for the belated birth of Asian Canadian literature; Comparison between South Asian Canadian writing and East/Southeast Asian Canadian writing; Lessons from the American experience.

Presents an article on teaching Canadian literature. Analysis of the novel `The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz'; Choices to be made when putting together a course syllabus.

Discusses the canonical activity in Canadian literature. Details on the book `Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value,' by Robert Lecker; Analysis of the idea that Canadian literature is a web of interconnected people rather than books.

Considers some primary mainstream critical texts in Canadian literature. Analysis of the book `A Good House,' by Bonnie Burnard; Views on the evidence offered regarding the generational anxiety in Canadian literary commentary; Suggestions on Canadian literature.

Reflects on the ways in which the study of Canadian literature has changed. Canadian authors who became prominent in the late 1960s; Factor that influenced academic work done on Canadian literature; Interest in national culture in Canada.

Presents an article on teaching Canadian literature to students. Analysis of the book `Survival: A Strobic Guide,' by Michael Turner; Approach in teaching Canadian literature; Information on the novel `Basic Black With Pearls,' by Helen Weinzweig.

Focuses on the conditions of Canadian culture and literature. `Details on the book `Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture,' by Roberto Schwarz; Views of Northrop Frye on Canadian writing.

Discusses the place of Canadian literature in the 21st century. Details on Canadian literature in the latter part of the twentieth century; Technological developments that influenced the production of literature in the late twentieth century; Characteristics of Canadian literature as an academic field.

Provides information on Canadian poetry. Outstanding achievement of Canadian poetry according to writer Northrop Frye; Phases of development in Canadian poet's career; Analysis of the poem `Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror,' by Peter Dale Scott.

Suggests that Canadian literature would be stronger and deeper if its practitioners were to learn some of the lessons that the works of writer Hugh Hood could teach them. Dimension of Hood's persona; Qualities of Hood's works.

Presents an article on teaching Canadian literature course. Problem with Canadian literature in the mid-1970s; Developments in Canadian literature; Practical problems of course selection.

Discusses issues raised by the existence of dramaturgy in Canada that are central to a rethinking of the field as a whole and to ways in which it is constructed in and through scholarship, curricula and teaching. Overview of the essay `Averting the Colonizing Gaze: Notes on Watching Native Theatre,' by Alan Filewood; Details on Canadian dramatic writing.

Examines the relationship between Canadian and United States (U.S.) literature. Analysis of the essay `The Absentee Novelists of Canada,' by Isabel Paterson; Relationship between the Canadian short story and U.S. periodicals.

Considers the institutional history of Canadian literature in Great Britain and discusses the way in which Canadian literature is actually delivered in the classroom. Assessment of British readings of Canadian literature made by Cynthia Sugars; Status of Canadian literature in Great Britain; Characteristics of Canadian literature studies in the academy of Great Britain.

Discusses the globalization of Canadian literature. Argument on the prediction of Karl Siegler about the Canadian literature in the 1990s; Impact of literary successes on the country; Effects of playing the global market aggressively.

Analyzes the writings of Northrop Frye in Canadian literature. Prediction of Frye on Canadian criticism; What conservatives want readers to think about literary theory.

Explores the proximity between entertainment and literary worlds and its meaning for Canadian literature. Range of marketing practices in Canadian literary culture that seek to create or underpin celebrities; Effect of literary prizes in Canada.

Talks about the bad multiplicity in Canadian literature. Assumption in critical practice regarding Canadian literature; Definition of bad multiplicity; Analysis of the history of Canadian sociability.

Presents an essay about Canadian literature. Why identity politics has been so persistent in Canadian literary criticism; Arguments on Canadian studies; Theory on how political theory deals with Canadian issues.

Introduces a series of articles on Canadian literature.

An important but suppressed feature of our literary history is the remarkable number of writers who have identified themselves publicly with socialist politics or ideologies that range from parliamentary social democracy to revolutionary communism. This article documents the socialist affiliations of many major and minor writers, among them canonical figures such as Lampman, Grove, ER. Scott, Birney, Livesay, Laurence, Wiseman, Klein, Webb, Layton, Gallant, Acorn, Richler, Atwood, Ryga, and Fennario. This tradition is historically contextualized with reference to the social gospel movement, the influence of the "Old Left" on modernist poetry of the 1930s and 1940s, and the impact of the "New Left" on the establishment of indigenous professional theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addresses the significance of the emergence of Asian Canadian literature as a critical category. Theoretical issues concerning the possible containment of cultural differences in a multicultural context; Discussion on the novel `Disappearing Moon Cafe,' by Sky Lee.