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This article historicizes cultural appropriation in Canadian literature today by examining key texts from the critiques of cultural appropriation in Canadian culture in the 1990s. Appropriation is contextualized in relation to a modernist temporality that constructs an Other outside of modernity and to the temporality in Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, a temporality in which the colonized is liberated but the colonizer is still “choked” and not yet rehabilitated. Reading appropriation through its cultural historical context in relation to modernist art and conceptual art, the practice of appropriation emerges as an extension of colonial practices and as an extractivist economy. Countering this, I point to the Indigenous concept of “cultural belongings” as a form of critique and alterity that counters the logic of cultural appropriation.

At the Mikinaakominis/TransCanadas conference held at the University of Toronto in May 2017, Rinaldo Walcott described Canadian literature as being as white then as it was when Insomniac Press published his Black like Who? twenty years prior. This essay responds to Walcott’s critique with a personal ethnography that describes Canadian literature as a field of study, that pays particular attention to the internal fractures that belie the field’s whiteness, and that considers students’s self-governance within neo-liberal universities. Beyond Canadian post-secondary education’s anti-Black structural barriers, graduate-level studies in the humanities depend on students’ access to financial and social credit. In turn, credit limits who can afford to study Canadian literature. Academic labour’s growing precarity further redlines non-professional fields of study, intensifying racial divisions within Canadian post-secondary education.

Now that the dust is settling after the anniversary of one of the key game-changers in Canada's history, the legendary War of 1812, it has become even clearer that this conflict has been best chronicled perhaps by an actual Canadian combatant in a historical text published in 1842, which is certainly one of the first such publications, and first memorialized in fiction in Canada's first national epic completed two years earlier at the beginning of our literary tradition—both written by the same person, Major John Richardson. Dubbed the “father of Canadian literature,” Richardson, a favourite of both General Brock and Tecumseh, is both a remarkable early war historian and one of the ancestral voices of the Canadian imagination.

This paper analyzes Brand’s short story “Blossom” in light of Freud’s notion of the uncanny. As I argue, Brand invokes the uncanny to illustrate that in a country like Canada, with a history of arrivals and departures, the trope of haunting is a particularly useful way to think about the relationship between history and memory, about displacement, about ancestors, and about inheritance. My contribution to the discussion of the role played by haunting in Brand’s corpus lies in suggesting that her fiction is not solely informed by embodied experiences of trauma and dispossession. Instead, I argue that Brand’s early engagement with Afro-Caribbean understandings of spirit possession, evident in her first short story collection Sans Souci, provides the foundation for her critique and transformation of the racist, classist, and sexist dimensions of Toronto’s urban space. While scholarly accounts of Brand’s work informed by Western paradigms of poststructuralist performance and trauma theory remain helpful, Brand’s fictions exceed these paradigms because they self-consciously explore the muted consciousness of volatile, possessed female bodies and, in so doing, demonstrate a profound knowledge of alternatives to Western epistemology and ontology afforded by Afro-Caribbean possession rituals and spiritual traditions. RESUME On analyse ici la nouvelle « Blossom » de Brand a la lumiere de la notion freudienne d’inquietante etrangete. On affirme que Brand invoque l’inquietante etrangete pour illustrer que, dans un pays comme le Canada, dont l’histoire est ponctuee d’arrivees et de departs, le theme de la hantise est une facon utile de reflechir aux relations entre l’histoire et le souvenir, au deplacement, aux ancetres et au patrimoine. Notre apport a la discussion sur le role joue par la hantise dans l’œuvre de Brand consiste a suggerer que la fiction de l’auteure n’est pas uniquement informee par les experiences encorporees du traumatisme et de la depossession. Plutot, on soutient que l’interet de Brand envers la perspective afro-caribeenne de la possession, presente au debut de son œuvre comme dans le recueil de nouvelles Sans Souci, jette les bases pour sa critique et sa transformation des dimensions racistes, classistes et sexistes de l’espace urbain torontois. Si les etudes savantes de l’œuvre de Brand issues des paradigmes occidentaux poststructuralistes de theorie de la performance et du traumatisme demeurent utiles, la fiction de l’auteure depasse ces cadres, dans la mesure ou elle explore de maniere deliberee la conscience attenuee des corps feminins volatiles possedes. Ce faisant, l’auteure demontre une grande connaissance des epistemologies et ontologies non occidentales sous-jacentes aux traditions spirituelles et aux rituels de possession afro-caribeens. KEYWORDS: Dionne Brand; Canadian literature; haunting; trauma; the uncanny; Afro-Canadian writing

The early efforts of CBC Radio to promote Canadian literature through programs such as Canadian Short Stories and its successor, Anthology, gave rise to various issues related to media integrity, including the selection of content, the use of language, and the format of presentation. Even before Robert Weaver retired in 1985, the approach he developed in the 1950s gave way to a different philosophy of literary arts programming, one focusing less on the needs of CanLit and more on the contingencies of radio. As in other cases of textual migration across media, the ontological requirements of the destination medium eventually took precedence. The process by which this shift occurred is examined using the relatively unexplored papers of Weaver and Howard Engel and other documents. Les premiers efforts de la part de CBC Radio pour promouvoir la litterature canadienne au moyen de programmes tels que Canadian Short Stories et son successeur, Anthology, ont souleve diverses questions concernant l’integrite des medias, y compris la selection du contenu, l’usage de la langue et le format de presentation. L’approche developpee dans les annees 50 par Robert Weaver s’est vue supplanter, meme avant sa retraite en 1985, par une philosophie differente envers la programmation en litterature, portant moins sur les besoins de la litterature canadienne et davantage sur ceux de la radio. Comme dans d’autres cas de transfert de texte d’un media a un autre, les besoins ontologiques du media destinataire ont fini par avoir la priorite. Cet article examine le processus par lequel cette transition a eu lieu en se fondant sur les papiers relativement inexplores de Robert Weaver et de Howard Engel, ainsi que sur d’autres documents.

It was [the Contact Poetry Reading Series] more than the magazines that had, I believe, the greatest impact on Canadian poets of the 1960s ... [I]t brought the world to us. When the fledgling Canada Council gave us money for the Series, we were able to bring some of the best poets in the world to Toronto ... these Black Mountain and City Lights people were avenues to the wider world of human intrigues. Toronto and Canada felt restrictive and parochial by contrast. When they started to come, our own poets started to change. It was like flowers germinating. (Souster 2002, 200)Poetry readings are a distinct and important part of the processes of publication, distribution, and reception of poetry in Canada. They are public utterances that occur in the presence of a reading public reconstituted as a listening public. Poetry readings, by their ephemeral nature, shift the terms of what can and should be studied as a literary "text," rendering it difficult but necessary to interrogate the roles such events play. The physical and symbolic conditions of public performance invest readings with particular significance in the development of Canadian literature in the middle decades of the twentieth century, yet such events remain widely understudied. The Contact Poetry Reading Series, organized and run primarily by poetpublisher Raymond Souster and poet Kenneth McRobbie from 1957 to 1962, was a landmark in Canada, establishing a successful model for future poetry reading series while engaging Canada's poets in new dialogues with international writing and publishing communities.1 Among the 44 poets hosted during the series' five-year run were many of the leading Canadian poets of the day; A.J.M. Smith, Margaret Avison, Leonard Cohen, Jay Macpherson, and Al Purdy all made at least one appearance. The series also featured writers from the vanguard of mid-century American poetics such as Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Frank O'Hara (see Appendix A for a full list of poets). Importantly, the Contact Poetry Reading Series was the first institution of its kind to receive funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, establishing a precedent that would shape the development of Canadian poetry in the twentieth century and the structures that supported, promoted, and distributed it. The Contact Poetry Reading Series marks the emergence of a fundamental form of modern literary expression in Canada. Studying the series broadens the history of literary publication and dissemination in this country, and restores an indispensable-yet-overlooked component of Raymond Souster's editorial legacy.The Contact readings, like much of Souster's editorial work, occurred at a nexus in Canadian poetry between the origins of Canadian literary modernism in the 1920s and the first appearances of influential poets and theorists of the coming postmodern turn in the 1970s. The series is a fundamental part of Souster's contribution to Canadian poetry at mid-century, and its implicit relationship to his more commonly studied editorial projects is made clear by his use of "Contact" for each of them. Contact Press (1952-67), Contact magazine (1952-54), and the Contact Poetry Reading Series (1957-62) collectively emphasize his concern with building and maintaining the community of Canada's poets. None the less, little has been written about the series. The few discussions that do exist tend to subordinate the Contact Poetry Reading Series within broader treatments of Souster's life and work.2 Existing criticism of Souster includes textual analysis (see Frank Davey's Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster [1980] and Stephen Cain's "Mapping Raymond Souster's Toronto" [2005]), bibliographic and archival research (see the bookseller catalogues of Nicky Drumbolis's Letters Bookshop [Drumbolis 1984], Bruce Whiteman's Collected Poems of Raymond Souster: Bibliography [1984], and Michael Gnarowski's Contact Press 19521967 [1971] and Contact 1952-1954 [1966]), as well as studies that document and analyze his work as an editor (see Ken Norris's The Little Magazine in Canada, 1925-1980 [1984] and Davey's Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster [1980]). …

Abstract: This Historical Perspectives surveys the state and prospect of the Canadian environmental history field, which studies the relations between people and nature through time. Four international scholars with deep knowledge of the Canadian literature and four homegrown practitioners discuss what has been distinct, best, and lacking in the work coming out of Canada so far this century. How have environmental historians engaged with broader literatures and how are they placed within them? What connections have been made – and missed? What contributions do the specific Canadian environmental and historical examples offer the broader field? And what does environmental history offer the broader Canadian history? The forum begins with three pairings that explore Canadian environmental history in relation to literatures with which it could expect to have an impact: Sverker Sörlin and Liza Piper consider Canada and the Circumpolar North, J.F.M. Clark and Graeme Wynn discuss Canada and the British Empire, and Nancy Langston and Sean Kheraj examine Canada and the United States. The Forum concludes with stand-alone perspectives by Stephen J. Pyne and Tina Loo on the place of, and for, Canadian environmental history in the world. As to be expected, the contributors vary widely in their diagnoses and prognoses: from claiming, for example, the evolution of a distinctive environmental politics in Canada to emphasizing sameness in Canadian and American treatment of the natural world. But, collectively, the essays suggest a vibrant field that implicitly critiques, and even rejects, many of the central tendencies of Canadian historical writing of the past generation. Sverker Sörlin, The Historiography of the Enigmatic North, http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.4.hp02 Liza Piper, Coming In from the Cold, http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.4.hp03 J.F.M. Clark, From the Other Side of the Ocean: Environment and Empire, http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.4.hp04 Graeme Wynn, Empires of Nature and the Nature of Empires, http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.4.hp05 Nancy Langston, Thinking like a Microbe: Borders and Environmental History, http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.4.hp06 Sean Kheraj, Borders, Intersections, and Ideas of Nature, http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.4.hp07 Stephen J. Pyne, Imagining Canada: Reflections in the Flames, http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.4.hp08 Tina Loo, Missed Connections: Why Canadian Environmental History Could Use More of the World, and Vice Versa, http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.4.hp09

First published in 1987, Paul Quarrington's novel King Leary was out of print until being selected as a contestant in, and ultimately the winner of, the 2008 edition of CBC Radio's Canada Reads competition. Since it is a novel about hockey, narrated from the perspective of Percival "King" Leary, a fictional ex-NHL (National Hockey League) star, it is easy to see the book's victory as yet another example of how the Canada Reads contest has tended to prioritize "titles [that] reinforce certain popular notions of Canadianness" (Moss 2004, 2). While the novel in some ways readily lends itself to being made to serve the nationalist agenda of Canada Reads, it is important not to underestimate the complexity of Quarrington's representation of hockey and its meanings in Canadian culture. The novel's new visibility in the field of Canadian literature has coincided with an increasing amount of critical attention being directed, in literary and cultural studies, not only to a previously ignored or maligned body of "Hockey Literature" (Dopp and Harrison 2009, 11), but also to the category of age as a previously "unspoken (and thus untheorized) form of 'difference'" (Goldman 2012, 1). Drawing upon these two bodies of work in order to trace the complexities implicit in the novel's deployment of "the unusual perspective" of the "aged ... hockey player," this essay explores the extent to which Quarrington's text is both critical of and invested in the version of masculinity habitually celebrated in hockey, and the central place accorded to the game in Canadian culture (Morrow 2002, 114).The novel follows Leary as he travels from his small-town nursing home to the city to drop the ceremonial puck as the guest of honour on "King Leary Night at the Toronto Gardens" (Quarrington [1987] 2007, 26). Alternating with this present-day plot is a chronologically ordered series of reminiscences in which he tells the story of his life from the time he was a boy in Ottawa skating on the frozen canal, to a stint as a juvenile delinquent at the Bowmanville Reformatory, to his career in the NHL as a player with the Ottawa Patriots and the New York Americans. When his playing career is ended by an injury, he joins the Toronto Maple Leaves (sic) as a coach, then as director of hockey operations, and, finally, as president. In the nursing home, Leary remains the "honorary president" of the franchise (17), occupying the kind of "prestigious but ... powerless" position that is a privileged variant of the downward career mobility experienced by many ex-professional players (Smith and Diamond 1976, 287). The difficulty involved in sustaining a position of prestige without the power to back it up is an experience that links "King Leary" to his Shakespearean namesake. Both Quarrington's novel and Shakespeare's play explore situations in which the problems often associated with adjusting to retirement are unusually vexed and aggravated. King Lear's troubles are traceable in part to his attempt to step down voluntarily from his position as head of a political system that does not really acknowledge his right to do so (Porter 1984, 60). By contrast, Leary's retirement is thrust upon him at 35 because his body can no longer withstand the rigours of professional hockey. His is the "minor tragedy" of the star athlete's truncated career trajectory (Blake 2010, 51), a life narrative that Ken Dryden describes as both accelerated and attenuated, "a quick climax in the first act, and a long denouement to the end" (2013, 69).1Further situating his novel in relation to canonical scripts of aging masculinity, Quarrington includes an epigraph from The Winter's Tale: "A sad tale's best for winter; I have one of sprites and goblins" (Quarrington [1987] 2007, n.p.). In addition to characterizing Leary as a man in the winter of his life, haunted by the ghosts of his past, the epigraph provides a context for reading the novel's critical exploration of the role of sport in conceptualizations of male development. …

In Sanctioned Ignorance (2013), based on his doctoral thesis in comparative literature (University of Alberta), Paul William Martin provides an overview of “the teaching of the literatures of Canada.” Framed by Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of “the market of symbolic goods” and based on fieldwork which consists of in-depth interviews with professors in French and English university departments and an examination of university calendars, his work offers a fascinating “snapshot” of the teaching of our literatures. Over several pages, Martin investigates and comments upon the unique program that I run at the University of Victoria: the undergraduate degree in comparative Canadian literature, jointly offered by the departments of English and French. This highly specialized undergraduate degree concentrates on classic literary texts from English-speaking Canada and French-speaking Québec (with subfields in Québec cinema and Québec history and various courses on culture and literature: Cartier and Champlain; graphic novels; Métis, migrant, and Amerindian writing; fine art; and so on). In this article, I propose the advantages of such a program to the future of the study of Québec in Canada, examine the challenges I have faced in maintaining this program over the past twenty-five years, and reflect on the teaching of the literature and culture of Québec in an anglophone university in the city that is identified as being “more British than the British”: Victoria, British Columbia.

abstract The years that poet P.K. Page spent in Brazil as wife of the Canadian ambassador are widely considered to be a transformative episode in her literary career, marking a dramatic shift in her aesthetics. Critical work on Brazil’s influence on Page tends, however, to deploy Brazil as a trope of the foreign, eliding her affiliation with the Canadian embassy. This construction of Brazil mirrors Page’s own narrativization of her time there, exemplified in her 1969 essay ‘Questions and Images,’ originally published in a special tenth anniversary issue of Canadian Literature but most frequently cited in its 1991 republication in The Glass Air: Poems Selected and New. This essay examines the different print contexts of ‘Questions and Images’ to call for a rereading of Page’s Brazilian work that is more attentive to the geopolitical realities of Canadian-Brazilian relations and the alignment of Page’s travels with a particular moment in Canadian cultural nationalism.

abstract Representing the first two sustained literary treatments of the Cambodian genocide in Canadian literature, Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared and Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter employ the genre of fiction to contribute to the testimonial archive of the atrocities committed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime while simultaneously deconstructing the foreignness of this historical trauma in relation to Canada’s past. Mobilizing an aesthetics of entwined responsibility that claims Cambodia’s history as a part of Canada’s international history, the novels of Echlin and Thien prompt a consideration of the role of novels written by non-Cambodians in confronting issues of Western complicity in foreign human rights abuses and in mediating questions about alternative epistemologies of healing and trauma recovery in the aftermath of mass violence. This essay suggests that the failure of justice and accountability that has characterized Cambodia’s international human rights movement speaks to the urgency and importance of such acts of literary responsibility.

Halfway through Suzette Mayr’s 2004 novel Venous Hum , a number of the central characters are revealed to be cannibalistic vampires, some of whom are reformed and loveable while others are violent and villainous. The novel is funny and satirical with connections to cult horror films and canonical Canadian literature. By reading Venous Hum in terms of magic realism and literary cannibalism, this essay focusses on the ways in which Mayr’s evocations of vampires and cannibals lead readers towards a politicized questioning of the relationship between perceived differences and official nation-state discourse. This essay thus examines the novel’s magic realist monster imagery in relation to racialization and the politics of interpellation, visibility, inclusion, and assimilation in multicultural Canada. Mayr makes ironic use of the colonial resonances of cannibalistic discourse in order to critique the relationship between the nation-state and its varied citizens, and between official multicultural policy and the lived experience of racialization. Abstract: Vers la moitie du roman de 2004 de Suzette Mayr intitule Venous Hum , plusieurs des personnages centraux sont devoiles comme des vampires cannibales, dont certains sont reformes et aimables tandis que d’autres sont violents et malefiques. Le roman est plein d’humour et de satire, et offre des liens avec divers films d’horreur cultes ainsi que les canons de la litterature canadienne. En examinant Venous Hum en termes de realisme magique et de cannibalisme litteraire, le present article met l’accent sur les facons dont les evocations de vampires et de cannibales de Mme Mayr orientent les lecteurs vers un questionnement politise du rapport entre les differences percues et le discours officiel de l’Etat-nation. Cet article examine donc l’imagerie realiste magique du monstre dans le roman en faisant un lien avec la racialisation et la politique de l’interpellation, de la visibilite, de l’inclusion et de l’assimilation dans un Canada multiculturel. Mme Mayr utilise avec ironie les resonnances coloniales du discours cannibalique afin de critiquer le rapport entre l’Etat-nation et ses divers citoyens, et entre la politique multiculturelle officielle et l’experience vecue de la racialisation.

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4.2 (2012) Maksimowska, Aga. Giant. St. John’s: Pedlar, 2012. 226 pp. $20.00 pb. ISBN 978-1897141472. Print. Snyder, Carrie. The Juliet Stories. Toronto: Anansi, 2012. 304 pp. $22.95 pb. ISBN 978-1770890022. Print. Stevenson, Robin. Inferno. Victoria: Orca, 2009. 240 pp. $12.95 pb. ISBN 978-1554690770. Print. Walton, Jo. Among Others. New York: Tor, 2011. 302 pp. $24.99 hc. ISBN 978-0-7653-2153-4. Print.

This essay proposes a new critical approach to modern prairie fiction through a reading of Edward McCourt's self-contradictory criticism and novels. The author re-evaluates McCourt's literary significance and locates his book, The Canadian West in Fiction, at the beginning of a formative and enduring prairie-realist "school" of criticism with geographical, thematic, and regionalist emphases. This essay suggests that these same theses, ironically, are partly responsible for the neglect of McCourt's own significant fiction, which resists them. These established and influential theses have disconnected prairie writing from larger modern movements and its rarely acknowledged international, psychological, and experimental aspects. Le present article propose une nouvelle facon critique d'examiner la fiction moderne des prairies en lisant les romans et ouvrages critiques contradictoires de Edward McCourt. L'auteur re-evalue l'importance litteraire de McCourt et situe son livre - The Canadian West in Fiction - au tout debut d'une « ecole » critique formative et persistante de realisme des prairies en mettant l'accent sur ses aspects geographique, thematique et regionaliste. Cet article suggere que ces memes hypotheses sont, ironiquement, en partie responsables de la negligence de l'importante fiction de McCourt lui-meme, laquelle leur resiste. Ces theses acceptees, voire influentes, ont debranche la fiction des prairies, avec ses aspects internationaux, psychologiques et experimentaux rarement reconnus, de plus vastes mouvements modernes. Although Edward McCourt is almost unknown today, he was among the most prolific Canadian writers of the middle of the twentieth century, and his most significant work of literary criticism, The Canadian West in Fiction, belongs among the most influential books about Canadian literature. The Canadian West in Fiction - first published in 1949 and reissued in revised form in 1970 - established foundational and enduring conceptions of western Canadian writing, and its characterizations of early twentieth-century prairie fiction have been especially influential. It offers the first significant literary-historical survey of Canadian writing from west of Ontario and features in-depth treatment of major writers of the West (most of whom have since become canonical figures). It asks why western Canadian literary production and quality, in McCourt's estimation, have been substandard. Most significantly and influentially, McCourt roots his analyses and evaluative principles in three main suppositions that have been loudly echoed and proven remarkably persistent: writing from western Canada should be seen primarily through the lens of regionalism; it is firmly grounded in a particular and deterministic geographical space or place; and, accordingly, it is realistic, mimetic, and technically conventional. As McCourt writes on the first page of his preface, "It is the purpose of this book to examine some of the prose fiction written about the Canadian West by native Westerners and others, and to attempt an estimate of the extent to which it is an artistic re-creation of the prairie way of life" (1970, 5). Both editions of McCourt's book were greeted with laudatory reviews, and nearly all of the major critics to approach prairie writing implicitly or explicitly consider The Canadian West in Fiction a point of departure. The thematic bases for evaluation that McCourt employs in his book proved particularly useful to critics writing as Canadian cultural nationalism was peaking in the 1970s. Even today, the criticism and pedagogy that surround prairie fiction continue to be guided by thematic theses that can be easily traced back to McCourt's book. McCourt's influence is perhaps most tangible at the beginning of Laurence Ricou's Vertical Man / Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction (1973), probably the most read book on prairie writing: "Anyone who writes on the fiction of the Canadian West would do well to start with a tribute to the author of the only book-length study of the subject yet attempted" (1). …

This essay argues that As for Me and My House is very much in need of ecocritical approaches that resist the kinds of cultural marginalization that have long been a part of the Canadian experience. The essay offers a fresh approach to Ross’s extensively analyzed novel, beginning with comments about the under-representedness of Canadian regional literature in the burgeoning field of ecocriticism (a field itself robustly American) and then developing a case that the distinctively Canadian context and traditions to which this slightly queer novel responds require a criticism that both differs from the American nature-celebration mode often associated with ecocriticism and addresses the novel’s complex representations of social responses to sexuality and to the natural environment. Such an approach reveals that the unpredictability of the land on the one hand and the compulsions of Philip on the other share a kind of theoretical alliance; an ecocritical approach allows us to hear the silenced voices of the land and of Philip, while affirming the importance of continued readings of this very central morsel of Canadian literature.

Aritha van Herk's writing-fiction and non-fiction-constitutes one of the defining aspects of Canadian western letters of the last 20 years. Of the multiple Wests at work in her oeuvre, her playful reimaginings of the mythic West / American Wild West (e.g., the romancing of force and violence at the celebrated Calgary Stampede chuckwagon races or her "deconstruction" of the Marlboro Man) have, however, received scant attention from critics. This article will attempt to remedy this critical oversight by exploring the representation of this mythic West as it appears in four of her most recent performance pieces and short stories: "A Fondness for the Bay" (1998), "Washtub Westerns" (2004), "Shooting a Saskatoon (Whatever Happened to the Marlboro Man?)" (2005), and "Leading the Parade" (2006). The author's purpose here is thus to examine the intersection of gender and the West in these less-studied texts, but also to use them as an inspiration for "the poetics of the crossing"-that is, the development of a specifically North American approach to Canadian literature that posits the Canadian imaginary not in deference to but in relation to the American. Les romans et essais critiques de l'ecrivaine Aritha van Herk ont enormement marque la litterature canathenne de l'ouest des 20 dernieres annees. Or, de tous les differents espaces dans son oeuvre, son evocation ludique de l'Ouest mythique americain (p.ex. sa representation romantique de la force et de la violence des chuckwagon races lors du Stampede de Calgary et sa deconstruction de l'homme Marlboro) n'a suscite que tres peu d'interet de la part de la critique. Cet article va travailler a combler cette lacune en explorant la representation de l'Ouest mythique tel qu'il se manifeste dans quatre de ses textes courts recents : "A Fondness for the Bay" (1998), "Washtub Westerns" (2004), "Shooting a Saskatoon (Whatever Happened to the Marlboro Man?)" (2005), et "Leading the Parade" (2006). Le but de I'auteure ici est d'examiner la relation entre les questions du genre et de l'Ouest dans ces textes moins connus, mais egalement de les utiliser pour developper une "poetique de la traversee," c'esta-dire une approche specifiquement nord-americaine de la litterature canathenne qui encourage and facilite un cadre qui situe l'imaginaire canathen non pas par egard de l'imaginaire americain mais en rapport avec celui-ci. Part frontier, part prairie, part no man's land, part Klondike, the Canadian West, like its southern counterpart, is both geography and imagination, place and narrative, homestead and story. Western Canadian identity is "a puzzle in motion with new pieces added and old ones discarded, all without a sense of where the edges lie" (Felske and Rasporich 2004, 1). Basic terminology is fraught: what was "wilderness" or "frontier" to trappers, miners, and fortune-seekers was the "home" of a diversity of Aboriginal peoples. The perspective of First Nations and non Anglo-Saxon settler cultures has been strengthened in recent years by postmodern and postcolonial theorists who argue that all voices have equal weight and that those voices that claim centrality ahead of others, previously on the margins, need to be counterbalanced (2). This new theoretical context has informed the ongoing study of the complexities of western development (backed by the imperial designs of the Canadian heartland), settlement (by various waves of incomers), and displacement (of Native peoples and their cultural practices). Others have sought to rethink western cultural history from a continental rather than national perspective, highlighting how the western regions in both Canada and the United States were the result of nineteenth-century statemaking: eastern-controlled, resource-driven expansionist enterprises, translated into eastern desires and then projected onto western spaces (West 2004). Despite the plethora of western histories from each side of the border, comparative analysis of Canadian and American Wests as "interconnected, interdependent stories, histories and myths" remains, as Robert Thacker laments, "a nascent enterprise" (2006, 11). …

The term “Canadian literature” was popularized by early Canadian anthologists who viewed their collections as evidence of the country’s coming of age. These editors were driven by a mix of evangelical nationalism, political allegiance, literary alliances, and the desire to profit from shifting perceptions of the country and its literature as Canada moved towards the twentieth century. The representation of Canada that emerges in these formative collections is intimately linked to the conditions surrounding their production, which impacted the anthologies as much as the editor’s religious, political, or aesthetic values. These conditions influenced the representation of nation and affected the ways in which readers came to understand the meaning of “country” as a textually constructed ideal. This essay examines seven anthologies of English-Canadian literature published in the nineteenth century in an attempt to determine the kind of values they promoted, the tensions their editors faced, and the extent to which they established canonical norms that would be inherited by their twentieth-century successors.

During the mass Jewish immigration of Eastern-European Jews to Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish publications offered a primary forum for a group of local writers to negotiate with their new identities as Canadian Jews. Within this wider process, Montreal writers H.M. Caiserman and B.G. Sack authored studies of Canadian literature in the early 1920s centred on Mohawk-English writer E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). What these essays show is that, despite the long-standing association of Canada’s Jewish population with the country’s dominant English culture, their status as “other” impelled leading members of the local Yiddish cultural milieu to seek out literary models among other historically marginalized groups. For Caiserman and Sack, Johnson’s Native heritage offered a model for resistance to assimilation into Canada’s dominant culture. In contrast, the advent of literature responding to the Nazi Holocaust by A.M. Klein and Eli Mandel, Native peoples became a symbol of loss and vanished landscapes.

This essay argues for bringing the methodology of post-colonial studies to bear on mainstream Canadian popular culture, towards a rethinking of Canada's ideological affinities with nations traditionally considered as Canada's ‘Others,’ the United Kingdom and the United States, through the mobilizations of popular culture for militarized nation-building. This argument identifies Germany's role in popular Canadian literature as a recurring national ‘Other’ against which Canadian nationalism develops, sensitized to the discourse of national security. Representations of Germany as a chronotope of distant war and natural evil recur among some of the most internationally famous works of Canadian literature. Those read here include Anne of Green Gables, ‘In Flanders Fields,’ Never Cry Wolf, The Handmaid's Tale, the oeuvre of Leonard Cohen, and Neuromancer. The essay concludes with thoughts on the ironies and implications of transnational stereotype and state policy in the popular uses of literature.

This essay traces the genealogy of the stereotype of the French Canadian found in two popular postwar Canadian history textbooks. French Canadians were portrayed as gregarious, easy-going, colourful, and fond of song and dance, but also unlettered, ignorant of the world outside Quebec, and content with their lot. These stereotypes are traced back to the work of earlier scholars on New France, notably Francis Parkman, and to primary sources. From the character traits mentioned in these sources, textbook writers selected those that allowed them to construct the French Canadian in the negative image of the contemporary English Canadian, thus detaching French Canadians from the main narrative of Canadian history.

This paper attempts to interrogate some of the challenges involved in the ar-ticulation of a black Canadian literature and suggests that such a literature may best be understood not as a set of “coherent” national narratives but as a complex engagement of the multiple diasporic experiences that inform and influence understandings of Canadian-ness. The study argues, therefore, that the very diasporic character of black Canadian literature—its pluralism and heterogeneity—articulate a deliberately transgressive Canadian-ness. By linking narrative and social geographies, the paper situates the works of black women writers in the Americas as part of a tradition of the counter-novel, involved in acts of boundary crossing and cultural and textual unmanageability. The paper explores finally the disruptive, but also potentially liberating, function of the literature by engaging in a detailed discussion of Esi Edugyan’s novel The Second Life of Samuel Tyne.

From 1909 until his death in 1924, Peter McArthur became one of Canada's most popular writers by describing life on his Middlesex County farm in articles for the Toronto Globe and the Farmer's Advocate of London, Ontario. That he was able to appeal to both rural and urban readers is interesting in two respects: it suggests that the lines between the country and the city were considerably more amorphous than contemporary rhetoric has suggested, and it provides an example of anti-modernist writing that gave as much pleasure to the "folk" as it did to the urban middle-class. De 1909 jusqu'a sa mort en 1924, Peter McArthur devint l'un des ecrivains canadiens les plus populaires par les descriptions de sa vie passee a sa ferme du comte de Middlesex, parues dans des articles ecrits pour le Globe de Toronto et le Farmer's Advocate de London, en Ontario. Le fait qu'il ait pu plaire a la fois aux lecteurs ruraux et urbains est interessant et ce, pour deux raisons : ce phenomene suggere que les differences entre la ville et la campagne etaient beaucoup plus floues que la rhetorique contemporaine ne l'avait suppose et fournit egalement un exemple d'ecriture antimoderniste qui a procure autant de plaisir aux « paysans » qu'a la classe moyenne urbaine. Like two sides of the same coin, conceptions of "the city" and "the country" have travelled inseparably through western culture, from antiquity to the present day. From one perspective, cities have been seats of government, learning, civilization, and commerce standing in contrast to a backward and unwashed countryside. From another, the country has been the locus of healthy living and untutored virtue, and a food-producing bulwark of social and racial strength against urban centres of corruption, pollution, crime, and sexual deviance. In late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Ontario, this rural-urban dichotomy was particularly strong in the face of contemporary developments in the province. In the daily and farm press, in magazines and at pulpits, in Ottawa and at Queen's Park, people followed the decennial returns of the census and worried about rural depopulation and the province's urbanization. Many farmers' opposition to the conscription of their sons in the First World War prompted further debate, and the election of the United Farmers of Ontario to government in 1919, the first third-party victory in Canadian history, seemed the countryside's ardent response. Into the breach of a supposedly hardening rural-urban divide, however, we might place a discussion of the life and career of the Canadian writer Peter McArthur. He is now little known-rarely anthologized and no longer considered a part of the national literary canon. His Ontario farm house survives at Doon Heritage Crossroads in Kitchener as an example of a generic "pioneer building" rather than as an opportunity to introduce visitors to someone who was, in fact, one of the most successful and prolific authors of his time. From 1909 until his death in 1924, McArthur wrote more than 1,500 articles for the Toronto Globe and the London-based Fanner's Advocate. Many of these pieces, which combined a whimsical advocacy of rural life with realistic descriptions of activities on a farm, were collected and republished in five books. McArthur was known throughout Ontario and much of Canada, admired by figures ranging from the teetotalling E.G. Drury to the free-loving Bliss Carman, and honoured in 1923 with a volume in the Ryerson Press's Makers of Canadian Literature series. Eighty years after he first encountered it, John Kenneth Galbraith, who grew up on a farm in Elgin County not far from McArthur's, had "vivid memories of the McArthur poetry" and of his father cutting out McArthur's pieces to be "kept, read, and reread" (2000). What do we make of this literary phenomenon and its meaning for the ruralurban dichotomy of the author's times? Was Peter McArthur a rural or an urban writer? Did he effectively straddle both worlds and, if so, how did he do so? …

Scholarly publishing is rarely examined as a global contributor to a field of research. But its value as a map to the evolution of a discipline can be inestimable. The output of journals can be the key to understanding shifts in perspective and, in the case described in the following essay, may ultimately provide an overview of an instance in the development of Canadian literature.

A literature must be greater than its critics, yes; but that does not mean lesser-than assessors are permitted a carte blanche illiteracy. Even carpaltunnel-syndrome-challenged typists who jet newspapery opinions should attempt a minimal degree of scholarly probity, so as to prevent their inventing idiocies or venting idiosyncrasies. Such observations must apply forcefully to critics of any obscure literature-such as that of African Canada-possessing a phantasmal bibliography, a shadowy canon, and murky archives. The critique of African-Canadian literature remains an enterprise open to any form of intellectual abuse, for the literature itself has not yet been granted the dignity of an accepted, distinct existence. To many, it is a branch of Caribbean-or West Indian-or African-American-or African, literature. Its critique need derive therefore from no Canadian source. Too many think that by reading Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott, they are equipped to read, without alterating any facts of geography or society, Austin Clarke or M. Nourbese Philip. Thus, the public-and the academy-is assaulted with abstract social work or political bavardage that is alien, irrelevant, and unreal. See, for instance, Donna Bailey Nurse's op-ed piece in The [Toronto] Globe and Mail "Books" insert of Saturday, 21 February 2004, appearing on page DlS. Titled "Black in print" and prefaced by a teaser proclaiming, "What you need to know about... being black in Canada," the article purports to offer an analysis of "black Canadian identity," but it is perversely narrow. Nurse begins with a canard, the idea that "According to Canadian culture, there was no such thing as a black Canadian woman." Yet, all one has to do is pick up a decent history, or even go to First Baptist Church on Huron Street in Toronto (not that far from Nurse's native Pickering, Ontario) and examine its documents, to commence a discovery of the deep roots of African men and women in Canadian soil. Agreed: European-Canadian nationalist propaganda has never wanted to accept the prior presence of First Nations peoples, let alone the later arrivals of people of colour. It is lazy, however, to deny the history of the continuous presence of "Coloureds" and Natives thwarting white anglophone and francophone claims of cultural primordiality. Nurse then posits, "suddenly, things have changed, and I think it has to do with the stories, the accumulation over time of black voices and literary ideas, characters and themes that are showing me who I am." One must applaud this development of positive self-consciousness, but the literature did not materialize into existence yesterday, nor did it do so simply to provide solace for one individual. Again, Nurse demonstrates a refusal to engage any AfricanCanadian literary earlier than, say, 1970-or maybe 1980 (or maybe 1990 or 2000). One must ask what her phrase "over time" really means: since 1783 or since 1983? Nurse opines, too, "Black Canadian literature has reached the tipping point." (Her use of the metaphor popularized by African-Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell is unfortunate: Is the literature tipping "up" or "down"?) Problematic here is the determination that "now" the literature is doing "something," whereas before, presumably, it was somnambulant, infantile, or comatose. …

Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions. Arnold E. Davidson, Priscilla L. Walton, and Jennifer Andrews. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Thomas King is perhaps the most well-known Native writer in Canada today. Not only are his works widely taught in university literature and Native studies courses-particularly his novels Medicine River (1990) and Green Grass, Running Water (1993)-but he has also achieved immense public acclaim for his parodie, and at times irreverent, CBC Radio program The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour (1995-2000). In 1999, the scholarly journal Canadian Literature devoted an entire issue to King's writing (Kroller 1999); however, the issue was dedicated primarily to his innovative novel Green Grass, Running Water. Border Crossings is the first full-length study of King's enormously influential body of creative fiction and multimedia work, and it is certainly long overdue. Its breadth of focus makes this text particularly valuable to scholars and teachers interested in King's work. It is a little-known fact, for example, that King is also an accomplished photographer who has staged exhibitions throughout the United States and Canada. Nor are many of his readers aware of the fact that he wrote his PhD thesis in 1986 at the University of Utah on images of Aboriginals in English literature, a few years before Terry Goldie's more well-known and oft-cited study Fear and Temptation. King's acting and screen-writing work, as well as his children's stories, are also rarely discussed. These are all topics that enter into this exhaustive, interdisciplinary study of King's oeuvre. Ranging from his creative fiction, to his critical essays and anthologies, to his film-scripts, to his photographic work, this study provides an invaluable overview of King's comic spirit and creative output. It will undoubtedly become a key reference point for any future scholarship on King. Despite King's own critique of postcolonial criticism in his article "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial," Border Crossings takes a postcolonial approach to King's engagement with the legacies of imperialism for North American Native peoples. And rightly so. The fact remains, notwithstanding King's rejection of postcolonialism's focus on the period beginning with "the advent of Europeans in North America" (King 1997, 242-43), that King's creative work tends to focus on the implications of colonial contact and its problematic legacy for Native peoples. John Willinsky's Learning to Divide the World explores how the legacy of imperialism has had a pervasive influence on the ways we experience our world-namely, the ways we are educated to structure reality according to rigid, and generally falsifying, borders and boundaries. The future legacy of many contemporary Aboriginal writers in North America may prove to be the undoing of these boundaries and the debilitating divisions they instill. This is the focus of Border Crossings. As the authors of this study put it, King's work ensures "a multiplicity of perspectives that create dialogue across borders rather than merely reasserting the solidity of the borders that typically divide Native and non-Native communities" (7). The focus of this study is two-fold. First, it explores various stylistic and thematic "border crossings" and boundary subversions as these occur in King's life and work. Second, it is concerned with King's "comic inversions"-that is, the ways in which his texts sustain a counterdiscursive perspective by mingling the comic with the political. This contributes to what the authors identify as the "trickster effect" of King's work. On the one hand, his work inverts inherited values, particularly those "measures of 'difference' that have oppressed Native peoples" (54). On the other hand, his fictions are sly, performing as "tricksters which lure [readers] into believing one thing at their own expense" (55). …

In making their selections from the published poetry of P.K. Page, literary anthologists have produced a canon of sorts, a remarkably consistent body of work that is clearly intended to be seen as representative of her voice and vision. Such anthological selections, however, too often appear to owe as much to habit and genealogy as to critical alertness to shifts in her evolving poetic practice. An examination of the way Page's work has been anthologized over the past century suggests that a broader representation of her work, which more generously responds to the Protean nature of her output over the past half-century, is needed in our time - and indeed that such a shift has begun to occur in the early years of the twenty-first century. En effectuant leur choix parmi les poesies publiees de P.K. Page, les createurs d'anthologies litteraires ont produit une forme de canon, recueils d'uvres remarquables par leur qualite soutenue et dont l'intention est clairement de representer sa voix et sa vision. Toutefois, les morceaux recueillis ont trop souvent l'air d'etre tributaires tout autant de l'habitude et de la genealogie que de la vigilance critique a l'egard de l'evolution dynamique de sa creation poetique. En examinant la maniere dont les uvres de Page ont ete selectionnees pour des anthologies depuis cent ans, on conclut qu'une plus large representation de ses poemes, qui repondrait plus genereusement a l'oeuvre proteiforme qu'elle a creee depuis un demi-siecle, est necessaire de nos jours - et qu'effectivement ce virage s'affirme deja a l'aube du vingt-etunieme siecle. The literary anthology is a time-capsule of sorts, composed of snippets of work issembled by editors whose task is to select the "best" and "most representaive" of the material available to them at a particular moment. Questions of value and notions of representation, however, are culturally specific and change over time. Presumably, then, the works chosen to represent a particular writer will shift over time, as new anthologies appear, themselves products of new contingencies of value - particularly in the case of a living writer whose body of published work increases substantially over the years. If there is little change in anthological selection with respect to such a writer over decades of anthology-making, one must ask why - and perhaps ask for revision in the face of conservative tendencies that may therefore be said to inhere in "anthological acts," which are themselves powerful instruments of canon-formation in the field of literary studies. My essay addresses the anthologizing of the work of RK. Page from the 1940s to the present, through an analysis of the poems by Page that have been selected for inclusion in literary anthologies. Such a line of inquiry reveals a great deal of overlap in the poems selected by various editors over the years, and suggests that Page has been "packaged" with remarkable consistency and in very specific ways within the evolving canon of Canadian literature over the past five decades. Indeed, this essay argues that, by continuing to include a specific cadre of core poems as representative of her work, literary anthologists have contributed to a perception of Page's work as much more static than it actually is, given the degree to which she has evolved and changed over the many years of her long life as a working poet. In fact, Page is a protean poet, one whose half-century of published work reflects great variety, deliberate change and considerable technical experiment. While she is certainly the poet of "voluptuous eye" and "lush image" that her anthologized oeuvre suggests, I would argue that much that is otherwise in her work has been obscured by the blunt instrument that is the literary anthology, the main means by which poetry is imported into the public sphere in this country. None amongst us would deny, I'm sure, that anthologies - collections of work by various authors intended to represent a period, genre or theme as selected by the representative figures who are their editors - are political instruments, whether wielded from the centre, in the service of the interests of a dominant culture (and hence as instruments in canon formation), or from the margins, as countercultural devices designed to correct the trajectory of established hegemonic collections. …

This essay examines the deliberate role undertaken by the Macmillan Company of Canada tc develop a contemporary Canadian literature. It focusses on the period from 1921 to 1973, wher first Hugh Eayrs and later John Gray were presidents of the company. Under the direction ol Eayrs, Macmillan established itself as a publisher with a culture and interest separate from it! parent and affiliate houses in London and New York. Eayrs built a roster of important writers including Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, Frederick Philip Grove, E.J. Pratt, Grey Owl and Money Callaghan, and helped establish an audience for Canadian novels and poetry. Afte Eayrs's death, Gray continued to publish Canadian writers, among them novelists Huge MacLennan, Robertson Davies, W.O. Mitchell and Adele Wiseman. Both Eayrs and Gray were visionaries who shared a deep commitment to fostering the literature of Canada, which the often published in difficult circumstances and at considerable financial risk. Cet article examine le role intentionnel adopts par Macmillan Company of Canada afin d'etablisune litterature contemporaine au Canada. L'article porte sur les annees 1921 a 1973 lorsque tour d'abord Hugh Eayrs puffs John Gray etaient presidents de l'entreprise. Sous la direction de M. Eayrs, Macmillan s'est etabli comme une maison d'edition ayant une culture et des interets differents de ses maisons mere et affiliee de Londres et New York. Eayrs a encourage son groupe d'ecrivains importants comprenait Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, Frederick Philip Grove E.J. Pratt, Grey Owl et Morley Callaghan qui ont aide A former une appreciation pour la poesie et les romans canadiens. Apres le deces de Eayrs, John Gray a continue A publier des ecrivains canadiens, dont les romanciers Hugh MacLennan, Robertson Davies, W.O. Mitchell et Adele Wiseman. Eayrs et Gray etaient tous les deux des visionnaires qui etaient tres devoues a la promotion de la litterature canadienne qu'ils ont publiee - souvent dans des circonstances difficiles et en prenant des risques financiers consWiables. The Macmillan Company of Canada, along with Ryerson Press and McClelland & Stewart, has been described as "one of the foremost Canadian publishers of the twentieth century" (Spadoni, "Bibliography" 38). Macmillan was instrumental in developing Canadian letters and in shaping the culture of Canada. Literary historian Bruce Whiteman confirms that "Macmillan was willing to support at an early stage, both morally and financially, authors who were eventually to play key roles in modern Canadian literature" ("Archive" v). This essay examines the deliberate role undertaken by Macmillan to develop a contemporary Canadian literature. It focusses on the period from 1921 to 1973, when first Hugh Smithurst Eayrs and later John Morgan Gray were presidents of the company. Under the direction of Eayrs, Macmillan established itself as a publisher with a culture and interest separate from its parent and affiliate houses in London and New York. Eayrs, so encouraging of Canadian writers, fostered Macmillan's "enviable reputation for publishing Canadian books" (Whiteman, "Early" 70). His roster of important writers included Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, Frederick Philip Grove, EJ. Pratt, Grey Owl and Morley Callaghan, and helped establish an audience for Canadian novels and poetry. After Eayrs's death, Gray continued to publish Canadian writers, among them novelists Hugh MacLennan, Robertson Davies, W.O. Mitchell and Adele Wiseman. Throughout his tenure as president of the company, Gray was, in fact, "one of the most highly regarded publishers in Canada" (Whiteman, "Archive" vii). Both Eayrs and Gray were visionaries who shared a deep commitment to fostering Canadian literature, which they often published in difficult circumstances and at considerable financial risk. The Macmillan Company of Canada fonds - housed at the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library - is a vast and rich treasure trove of archival documents available for scholarly use. …

nrough radio, W a n d the computer, we are already entering aglobal theatre in which the entire world is a Happening. Our whole cultural habitat, which we once viewed as a mere container ofpeople, is being transformed by these media and by space into a living organism, itself contained within a new macrocosm or connubium of a supraterrestrial nature. -Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Interview (from March 1969, qtd. in McLuhan and Zingrone 1995:258)

Margaret Atwood’s attempt to define ‘What’s Canadian about Canadian Literature’ in Survival is a helpful starting point for considering the way the stories in Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), and Wilderness Tips (1992) relate to the short story genre and Canadian literature as broad, limiting categories. Atwood herself recognizes the personal nature of Survival, defining it as ‘a cross between a personal manifesto’ and ‘a political manifesto’ (Survival, 13). She also acknowledges that ‘several though by no means all of the patterns I’ve found myself dealing with here were first brought to my attention by my own work’ (14). As the title suggests, Atwood’s main thesis is that the recurring theme of Canadian literature is survival. Although Atwood identifies different types of survival (such as Canada’s cultural survival despite the influence of the United States), she believes that the most prevalent type of survival in ‘Canlit’ is simply that of ‘hanging on, staying alive’ (33). Survival was a difficult challenge for early settlers, and Atwood certainly seems correct in identifying it as a formative experience for early writers

Writing in the Literary History of Canada almost thirty-five years ago, Alec Lucas noted that "nature writing, particularly the animal story, had its hay-day in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has long past. Perhaps the literary vein has been worked out" (1965:404). In retrospect, Lucas's epitaph for animal presences in Canadian literature may be premature; writing in the same volume, no less a lumi- nary than Northrop Frye noted, with no predictions for the genre's demise, "the prev- alence in Canada of animal stories, in which animals are closely assimilated to human behaviour and emotions" (343). Indeed, according to Gaile McGregor, any survey of the foundational works of Ernest Thompson Seton and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and the many animal imaginings offered by recent and contemporary authors reveals that "Canadians are fascinated by animals" (1985: 192). Poets as diverse as Layton, Atwood, Ondaatje, Page, Lane, Acorn, and Nowlan (among others) have written of animals; novelists such as Fred Bodsworth, Sheila Watson, Marian Engel, and Thomas King have all created animal characters of one form or another. The proliferation of an increasingly urbane literature in the Canadian imaginative landscape may bear out Lucas's prediction for the demise of the animal genre at some future date, but for now the important position of non-human actors in the recent history of the Canadian imagination remains intact, a fact that has been further emphasized by the recent crit- ical and commercial success of Barbara Gowdy's elephant novel, The White Bone.

Interdisciplinary Canadian Studies emerged in two distinct phases. The first was launched with the birth of the Institute of Canadian Studies at Carleton University in 1957, and provided a bridge from the age of the metanarrative and the canon to phase two, originating with the first issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies in 1966, and encountering the discourses of the postmodern and the post-colonial. As we begin the new millennium the second phase is beginning to give way to a third. This paper investigates phase two, particularly the interval 1966 to 1975. During these years the idea of diversity was institutionalized as a resistance to the metanarrative. The period is characterized by the liberation of a multiplicity of voices. Throughout its brief life, interdisiciplinary Canadian Studies has consistently favoured the collaboration of the disciplines in a spirit of widening intellectual boundaries. In phase two it proved to be uncomfortable with the fragmentation of imported critical theory, in its very nature conflicted by an intellectual commitment to the nation state and to notions of community and citizenship. Throughout phase two there has been a tension between interdisciplinarity and theory. Phase three might, it is suggested be characterized by a renewed collaboration of the disciplines, and a conversation of the voices, in defence of the relationship that makes them possible. Canadian Studies emerged in two distinct phases, both of which were responses to the intellectual ferment characteristic of cataclysmic social change. The first phase dates from 1957 with the establishment of Carleton University's Institute for Canadian Studies, a postgraduate and research-centred enterprise which, in its path-breaking alliance with the trade publisher McClelland and Stewart, not only introduced the concept of interdisciplinarity to academic discourse about Canada, but, in the Carleton Library Series, also resurrected for students, faculty and the general public a rich array of discipline-centred canonical texts around which to construct a new analytical infrastructure. This first phase sat squarely at the centre of the Cold War era, framed culturally by (among other things) the Massey-Levesque Commission (1949-1951), the founding of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (1951), the birth of CBC Television (1952), the opening of the National Library of Canada (1953), the beginning of the Canada Council (1957), the inauguration of the journal Canadian Literature by George Woodcock (1959), and a period of massive immigration from southern and eastern Europe, much of it constituting - as in the refugees from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - raw resistance to the forces of totalitarianism. The first phase also paralleled intellectual developments in the United States. The American Studies movement is traceable to a number of markers - most notably to the work of Henry Nash Smith whose 1940 Harvard PhD dissertation, published as Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, first appeared in print in 1950. In 1947, the American Studies Association launched its journal, American Quarterly, to which Smith contributed his seminal article, "Can 'American Studies' Develop a Method?" in 1957. Smith conceived of American Studies as "a collaboration" among scholars working from within existing disciplines but attempting to widen the boundaries imposed by conventional methods of inquiry. This implies a sustained effort of the student of literature to take account of sociological, historical and anthropological data and methods, and of the sociologist or historian to take account of the data and methods of scholarship in the fields of the arts.... Method in scholarship grows out of practice, or rather out of repeated criticism of practice intended to remedy observed shortcomings. In the inadequacies of answers we have found to our questions we discover clues to the reformulation of questions, and the reformulated questions in turn suggest new ways of finding answers. …

Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) composed Dance on the Earth: A Memoir (1989) as a tribute to her mothers and a celebration of "the female principle in the Holy Spirit." Laurence's copious holograph notes and drafts show that she used "Dance on the Earth" as the title of a novel she attempted to write before giving it to her memoir. While the draft novel parallels the memoir in more ways than its title, it resembles The Diviners even more closely. Why was Laurence so determined to compose "Dance on the Earth" as a novel, and why was she unable to complete it? An answer to both questions may lie in the censorship controversies of 1976 and 1985, when her Manawaka novels, especially The Diviners, were attacked as pornographic. When she was unable to complete her last novel, Laurence turned to the memoir form to convey her legacy to her inheritors. Margaret Laurence (1926-87) a compose son autobiographie, Dance on the Earth A Memoir (1989), comme un hommage a sa mere et une celebra tion "du principe feminin dans l'esprit saint." Les copieuses notes et les ebauches olographes de Laurence demontre qu'elle a essaye a plusieurs reprises d'ecrire > en tant que roman avant de le composer comme un memoire. Mais l'ebauche de son roman > rejoint encore plus The Diviners, ce qui est peu surprenant, puisque que la fiction Dance on the Earth a ete clairement destine pour faire partie du cercle de Manawaka. Pourquoi Laurence etait-elle si determine a ecrire > en tant que roman, et pourquoi a-t-elle ete incapable de le terminer? Je propose une reponse aux deux questions, qui tourne autour de la polemique de censure qui a fait rage autour de Laurence dans son propre comte de Peterborough en 1976 et en 1985 lorsque ses romans de Manawaka, particulierement The Diviners, qui a d'ailleurs ete introduit dans le programme d'etudes de la treizieme annee, ont ete juges "pornographiques". Lorsqu'elle a compris qu'elle ne pouvait pas terminer son dernier roman, elle s'est tournee vers la forme du memoire pour transporter son legs a ses heritiers. Margaret, are you grieving...? Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall: to a young child To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die... a time to mourn and a time to dance.... Ecclesiastes 3: 1-4. Margaret Laurence (1926-1987), dubbed "Canada's most successful novelist" (434) in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, predicted that The Diviners, the final of her five Manawaka novels, would be her last. And it was, just as the novel that Morag Gunn is writing in The Diviners is predicted to be her last. But The Diviners was not the last novel Laurence tried to write; it was merely the last she succeeded in finishing. Actually, she tried repeatedly over several years to write another novel, as we know from James King's The Life of Margaret Laurence (1997) and from recent editions of Laurence's letters by John Lennox, Ruth Panofsky and J.A.Wainwright. What was the novel that she tried so hard to compose and why was she unable to complete it? These questions have haunted me ever since reading her Dance on the Earth: a Memoir, published posthumously in 1989. Not until a decade later was it possible to answer these questions because Laurence's holograph notes and drafts for this novel were not available until 1997 when they formed an accession of material in the Margaret Laurence Archives at McMaster University.(f.1) The title of her unfinished novel was to he "Dance on the Earth," which is also the title of her memoir. Textual evidence suggests that Laurence had first attempted to compose Dance on the Earth as a novel. Only after she failed to complete the work as a fiction did she compose Dance on the Earth as an autobiographical work of nonfiction.(f.2) But the fictional and non-fictional versions are parallel in several ways. …

This essay surveys the major achievements and world-wide acclaim that give substance to Northrop Frye's reputation as one of the most influential Canadians of the twentieth century. It points out, however, that Frye did not succeed in his project to establish criticism as a discipline with its own accepted axioms based on an acknowledgement of the unity of literature. Rather than concluding that the more theoretical works have been superseded, however, the essay argues that they may now be read as imaginative creations approaching poetry, embodying an insight nourished by literature but focussed on the human condition itself. Cet article examine les accomplissements principaux et la reconnaissance mondiale qui ont aide a solidifier la reputation de Northrop Frye en tant qu'un des Canadiens les plus influents du vingtieme siecle. II precise cependant que Frye n'a pas reussi son projet d'etablir la critique comme une discipline acceptee avec ses propres axiomes et bases sur une reconnaissance de l'unite du champ litteraire. Plutot que de conclure que les travaux theoriques ont ete remplaces, Particle suggere qu'ils peuvent maintenant etre lus en tant que creations imaginatives s'approchant de la poesie, incarnant une perspicacite nourrie par la litterature, mais concentree sur l'etat humain lui-meme. It is not necessary to refer to the recent spate of pre-millennium polls on important figures of the twentieth century to establish that Northrop Frye has been a towering presence in Canadian intellectual life. One thinks, for instance, of the undergraduate at Victoria College who went through a religious crisis. A fervent believer in her first year, she was in despair in her second when her studies convinced her that there was no God. But her equanimity returned in her third year: she discovered that Northrop Frye was God. Without going quite so far, one may nevertheless recognize that Frye's reputation and influence have been enormous. His work is inseparable from the growth of Canadian culture into maturity. Throughout his career he wrote on our literature and explored the national psyche; his last major speech (delivered to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) was on the cultural development of the country. The astounding recent flowering of Canadian literature - a phenomenon which Frye hailed as one of the most gratifying to occur in his lifetime - arguably owes something to his efforts as a reviewer and commentator. Between 1951 and 1961 he was responsible for the poetry section of the University of Toronto Quarterly's review of the year's literature, reading virtually every poem published in the country during the preceding year. He wrote his commentary on the year's work not to judge poems by an international standard but to elucidate them and to create the informed and interested reading public which is one of the conditions necessary for a mature literature. Frye had a gift for combining profound thought and quotable aphorism, as in his remark that "Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it." Phrases such as the "garrison mentality" or the question "Where is here?" have become part of the national consciousness. Scarcely a day goes by without some columnist or writer of a letter to the editor citing Frye to bolster a point. He has become a national icon, one of the defining voices of Canada. But of course Frye's reputation spreads far beyond Canada. He is often mentioned in the same breath with Marshall McLuhan - a pairing that rather annoyed both of them - as one of the few Canadian thinkers of world stature. His works have now been translated into 17 languages, including Serbo-Croatian, Korean and Portuguese. He is particularly revered in Italy: the University of Bologna gave him an honorary doctorate in 1979 and he was the subject of a three-day conference in Rome in 1987. But, perhaps surprisingly, he is proving to have much to offer to non-European countries. …

In a post-Survival (1972) update in 1985, Margaret Atwood announced to an audience at Princeton, `yes, Virginia, there is a Canadian Literature' (Atwood, `After Survival,' 135). Yet, another fourteen years later, what constitutes `Canadian' is still a dominant critical question. Geographically and demographically speaking, there have always been very good reasons for Margaret Atwood to conclude, as she does elsewhere, that `Canadian' is a kind of overdetermined nebula

The short story is a genre both trapped by intensity and freed by brevity. At its best, it can enact a scintilla of momentary dazzlement, a brilliant flash articulated with swift and graceful hesitation. That is perhaps all that can be asked of the short story, and yet, how difficult to achieve that eloquent, elegant shape, a short story that seizes its reader with the glittering authority of a novel, the reduced beauty of a poem. The moveable feast that banquets short stories written in Canada belies description, falls into a wonderful, vast bath of difference, of articulated regionalisms, of strange euphonies and stranger etchings. Short stories can truly call themselves the heartbeat of Canadian literature, in so far as they collapse the erratic, the elemental, and the reluctant into a version of multiplicitous and wildly contaminatory fiction.