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This teaching note considers the benefits of including very short stories or "flash fiction" in the (Canadian) literature classroom. Because the genre is relatively new and favors brevity, it can be attractive to students. Teachers can be sure the students will have read the story, or even find the time to have them read entire stories in class. As well, choosing very short works lets us introduce a variety of Canadian authors to our students. We begin by questioning the dominance of context-hunting and theme-searching among young readers, and point out that this mode of reading comes at the expense of an appreciation or serious consideration of form and language. While historical context and themes are of course important to understanding any story, students often privilege the extra-textual over the literary merits of fiction; they are not necessarily reading literature as literature. The latter part of the note zeroes in on classroom experiences we have had while teaching stories by John Gould, Carin Makuz and Douglas Glover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author of more than thirty-five books and the winner of prestigious literary prizes, such as the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Governor General's Award. Her influence on Canadian literature and contemporary literature as a whole is phenomenal. Nevertheless, little is known with respect to how Atwood represents animals covering the full range of her novels. This paper reports on the analysis of animal representations in Atwood's seventeen novels through Python programming and close reading under the framework of a new semiotic research finding, a pan-indexicality model within the context of literature and the environment. This study investigates the frequencies of animal vocabulary in the seventeen novels, the changes of animal representations in her novels before 1990s and after 1990s, and the implication of the ever-changing animal representations during the fifty years. This paper concludes that nonhuman animal descriptions in Atwood's novels of 1970s and 1980s run at a high level and decrease in her novels of 1990s, while scientific animal descriptions increase in her novels of 2000s and 2010s. Nonhuman animals in her novels of 1970s and 1980s are instrumentalized as a vehicle for indigenization and national individuation from the United States, and scientific animals in her novels of 2000s and 2010s are instrumentalized in the service of environmental apocalypticism. This study suggests that the pan-indexicality model can be employed to understand the meaning of signs in literature and the environment from the perspective of authorial intention, with reference to authors' encyclopedic knowledge, personal experience, social, and cultural background information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was created based on a talk given by Canisia Lubrin with the Black Canadian Studies Association (BCSA) for their 2022 conference, "Black Solidarities, Thought and the Quest for Black Freedom." It engages with the theme of Black solidarities, thought, and the quest for Black freedom, in the interest of recognizing the complexities of its range. In this era of new forms of Black dispersement, the author offers this as a care work in the core character of Blackness. It is a wish for a kind of respite from the ontological over-determinism that bares down on us from all directions, from the restlessness that forms the tenor of our being in this world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A scholar of Medieval and early English Renaissance literature by training, he also has research and teaching interests in nature writing, environmental literature, and literature and science. B Gry Ulstein b is a Ph.D. candidate at Ghent University in Belgium and a Ph.D. researcher on the European Research Council Starting Grant project "Narrating the Mesh." B Marco Caracciolo b is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant project "Narrating the Mesh.". [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the chapter "The Future(s) of Indigenous Horror: Moon of the Crusted Snow" from open access resource CanLit Guides which focuses on horror of Indigenous with examination of novel of author Waubgeshig Rice. Topics discussed include book "Moon of the Crusted Snow" by Rice which discusses Indigenous genre fiction, pedagogy of the chapter focused on indigenous scholarship and knowledge, and prominence gained by Indigenous fiction in Canadian literary pedagogy.

In the article, the author discusses the Western genre in the Canadian literary market in the 21st century. Other topics include the importance of cultural studies like literature and films in influencing how to protect the environment and how to shift away from plastics and fossil fuels, and the focus on some novels like "The Outlander," "The Sisters Brothers," and "Saltwater Cowboys."

As defined by Georg G. Iggers and promoted by Hayden White, the postmodern challenge of historiography calls into question the objective enquiry and truth value of history writing. Many works of fiction have embodied this trend, embracing the challenge by exploring objectivity and the retrievability of the past. In contemporary Canadian literature, such cases are also to be found. The novel Weird Sister (1999) by Kate Pullinger thematizes history and history writing, utilizes Gothic elements, and employs the elements of historiographic metafiction, e.g. as characterized by Linda Hutcheon. The book features characters representing the so‐called silent voices whose testimony had remained lost in the official historical record. This paper aims to show that the depiction of the impossibility of uncovering the truth about the past represents a significant contribution by contemporary fiction authors to the postmodern challenge of historiography, with Pullinger’s novel emerging as a notable contribution to this discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads Black Canadian literary fiction for what it reveals about the ironic place of blackness in Canadian universities. It weaves together this literary analysis with the author's first-person account of classroom practice in order to illuminate the risks involved for Black scholars and students currently teaching, learning, and producing knowledge within Canadian institutional structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "The Stone Angel" by Margaret Laurence is presented. Topics include demonstrates theme of survival, that is main point to the development of Canadian literary identity; and considered it as pathetic tale of narrator and protagonist, Hagar Shipley who wanders in wilderness and undertakes a halting, unwilling, rebellious journey towards self-knowledge.

This paper deals with the issue of "utopianism" in L.M. Montgomery's novel Anne of Green Gables (1908), a book which has been translated into Polish many times and has been shaping the worldview and mentality of Polish female readers for over a century. This utopianism is here presented in three separate approaches. Firstly, the study investigates the "translatological utopianism" of the first translation of the novel (by R. Bernstein, published in 1911), which, as a result of the linguistic and stylistic decisions of the translator, has been significantly naturalised and domesticised, as well as adapted to the multiple (genological, social, and cultural) expectations and conceptions of the Polish implied audience. Secondly, attention was drawn to the fact that Avonlea as presented in the novel is a kind of social "matriarchal utopia", emphasising the issues of women's solidarity, responsibility, and education, at the same time strongly referring to the Arcadian trend in utopian literature. Thirdly, it was suggested that in Moira Walley-Beckett's film adaptation Anne of Green Gables (Anne with an E, 2017-2018), the reading "between the lines" of Montgomery's novel and the application of the hermeneutics of suspicion by the screenwriter made the idyllic utopia of the original resemble a dystopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs that five novels were published in 2016 from all areas of Canada. It is noted outstanding novel of this year is Madeleine Thien's third novel, "Do Not Say We Have Nothing." It also discusses several other novels of Thien and their theme of Thine. It is stated that second novel of Thine "Dogs at the Perimeter" deals with the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s and long periods of Chinese unrest.

Diaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett’s life story in Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novelThe Stone Diaries(1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. “Death,” the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy’s demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, “I’m still in here” (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy’s death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields’s postmodernist gem,The Stone Diaries, and Laurence’s modernist masterpiece,The Stone Angel(1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields’s title clearly references Laurence’s. Two decades after Williams’s insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction and biography and parodying canonical texts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Problematic notions of Canadian identity in the work of Mavis Gallant provide an entry point into current debates on the topic of cosmopolitanism, and begin to challenge dominant modes of postcolonial and multiculturalism theory. Depictions of the cosmopolitan in her work reveal a spectrum of representation and experience, from euphoric visions of shared humanity to more complex pictures of global citizenship. The clear challenge that her work presents for literary theory and comparative study is to understand lives and ideas less settled in one culture or another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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