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The contents of this booklet were presented at a symposium on Canadian creative literature at the University of Toronto in March 1974. Included are five papers, summaries of two talks (one by Bill Sault on the oral tradition of Canada's native peoples and one by Robert Weaver on discovering and encouraging Canadian writers) and of a panel discussion on the agencies between authors and their public, and an annotated bibliography on creative literature in Canada. The papers and authors are "Canadian Writing Today" by Marian Engel, "Some Opinions on Canadian Poetry" by Al Purdy, "The French-Canadian Novel, 1967-1972--An Overview" by Ben Shek, "Creative Literature for Children in Canada" by Ruth Nichols, and "Making Modern Canadian Children's Books" by Irma McDonough. (JM)

This document contains a report delivered at a special meeting held in Tehran on the situation of children's books published in Canada. The report focuses specifically on work with children's literature within the two dominant cultures, French and English, and also discusses literary efforts and publications of native Indians and Eskimos. (JM)

Some critics of Robertson Davies' three novels that comprise the Salterton trilogy, "Tempest-Tost" (1951), "Leaven of Malice" (1954), and "A Mixture of Frailties" (1958) complain of their creaky novelistic machinery, suggesting that they merely show an essayist, or journalist, becoming a novelist. These three novels, however, can introduce students to a Davies world that reappears in the Deptford and Cornish trilogies. One reason these early novels might have appeared to be anomalies in twentieth-century fiction is that Davies employs unabashedly old-fashioned techniques. It is made quite clear that he likes a good suspenseful story involving a cast of talkative characters whose idiosyncrasies allow him to express his own attitudes in a satiric way. He brings his experiences both as playwright and essayist to the writing of novels, reveling in dialogue and comic scenes and coming forward in his best Samuel Marchbanks manner to express his opinions for the edification of the gentle reader. Davies pleases his audience because he combines the expected with the unexpected. Davies manipulates the reader to admire artistic genius on stage, in the concert hall, at the writer's desk, and in the painter's studio. He lets the reader see that those characters who are to be most admired are the ones who bring magic to their artistic endeavors, and he stands behind them as the supreme prestidigitator. (MG)

Canadian Indians have long been represented by stereotypes presented by non-native writers. Only recently have Indians begun to create their own literature and re-examine historic sources of native speech and tales. This paper traces early European views of the bloodthirsty native and the noble savage, but contrasts them with recorded comments of Indians on the white man, his love of money and his bearded face. It demonstrates that another stereotype of the native American was created by egalitarians in the mid-twentieth century: the Indian as victimized; dispossessed; and cultureless. Although literature about natives by non-natives is often sympathetic and perceptive, writers have a tendency to portray every aspect of the lives of native people as problematic. Strengths of the culture may be ignored or unrecognized. Native literature emphasizes communal living and a sense of place; quests lead home to the elders. The style is often influenced by oral narratives. This paper examines several examples of contemporary native literature that speak from the native point of view. It concludes that young natives should not be reading what it is to be native by James Fenimore Cooper, but from the numerous natives writing today. (DHP)

The aim of the research is to describe child’s image as one of the most important components in the structure of childhood narrative. Great significance is attributed in its depiction to characters’ portrait, action and its psychological motivation, age, degree of socialization, and name. Methods of the paper: theoretical and historical analysis of prose texts by bringing together semiotic, comparative, biographical, literary historical methods of literary research. Results of the paper: depiction of the artistic time of childhood in the prose texts of Latvian and Canadian literature is marked by rather stably observed principles. Firstly, diachronic time is predominant, that is typical of the traditional narrative and composition of a literary text showing events and experiences following one another in a sequence. Secondly, the artistic chronotope of the childhood narratives of the 1900-30s is closely related to the category of memory; narration often fits into the cyclical time of nature processes and it is also created in the past form. Besides, the distance between the past and the present is often specially emphasized by the author by inserting into the plot the present viewpoint and reflections on the past, emphasizing the author’s position (Aspazija, A. Brigadere, L. M. Montgomery). However, also in this perspective time is manifested as a subjective phenomenon creating an imaginary picture of the world. Thirdly, great importance is attributed to the time related to childhood as an age period. In the texts of the considered period, disregarding the priorities of any literary trend, the chronological boundaries of childhood are extended from pre-school age to early adolescence (12-13 years of age), and school becomes a point of reference for the change of the child’s status. Fourth, especially in the prose texts produced in the 1900-30s childhood, on the one hand, is included in the linear time conception but simultaneously it is subjected to the cyclic rhythm of seasons and the cycle of farm labour. Both seemingly opposite perceptions of the time flow are united in childhood memory narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is dedicated to investigation of a specific pattern of memory narrative – recollecting the past by the protagonist when visiting sites of personal memories – as a framework of reconstructing personal and collective identity in Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s novel “Cat’s Eye” (1988) and Latvian writer Anita Liepa’s memory narrative “Dāvana jeb Flensburgas noskaņas” (A Present or Reflections of Flensburg, 2013). The methodology of the research draws on contemporary developments in the field of memory studies, autobiography and life writing as well as psychoanalytical and gender studies concerning such issues as subjective perception and reconstruction of memory space, sites of memory, identity reconstruction, trauma and loss, mourning and creative self-expression. Margaret Atwood’s novel is produced in the form of memory narrative that traces in the urban environment of Toronto the autodiegetic heroine/narrator Elaine Risley’s recreation of memory space of her childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood. The narration unfolds her travel in memories relating them to actual impressions in present and the aesthetic reality in her paintings. The dynamic of the heroine’s subjective experience leads to working out the traumatic experience in her consciousness and achieving spiritual transcendence through normalization of sexuality, motherhood, religious experience, and creativity. Anita Liepa’s autobiographical narrative traces the author’s memories when visiting Flensburg, a town on the northern border of Germany where she spent some years as a refugee after World War II that she perceived as happy time of her youth, by juxtaposing the memory time-space (the post-war Flensburg) to that of the present (Flensburg nowadays). The subjective point of view foregrounded by the author’s personal voice is contrasted to the collective memorydimension episodically introduced by referring to the community of Latvian refugees and local residents of Flensburg. Blending of the personal and the collective voices in this work highlights the collective memory dimension in the autobiographical narrator’s individual memory, attributing greater cultural and communal significance to the autobiographical narrator’s attitude, evaluation, and experience as revealed in the narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates memory narratives in contemporary Latvian and North American life-writing with the focus on Latvian writer Anita Liepa's autobiographical fiction and Canadian writer Alice Munro's short stories. The theoretical framework of the paper is related to the fast developing memory culture after the end of the Cold War in Europe and Latvia as well as globally, and sketches out the theoretical framework of memory writing referring to the studies of Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Paul Ricoeur, Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Vieda Skultans, Ene Kõresaar, Mārtiņš Kaprāns, Baiba Bela-Krūmiņa, James V. Wertsch, Astrid Erll who represent history, philosophy, cultural anthropology, sociology, literary studies. The broad interdisciplinary field provides rich opportunities for dealing with the complex issues of memory and identity. The specific focus of the paper is on the spatial and temporal aspects of memory representation in A. Liepa's memory novel "Kumeļa gadi" (Colt Years) (1993) and A. Munro's "Lives of Girls and Women" (1971) that reveal the familial and communal contexts of memories: parents' house, native town/village, school, community. The paper also investigates the temporal framing of childhood and adolescence in both author's works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]