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"The American Western in Canadian Literature" by Joel Deshaye is a comprehensive study that explores the presence and significance of the American Western genre in Canadian literature. The book delves into the historical and cultural factors that have shaped the development of the Western genre in Canada, highlighting the lack of a corresponding frontier mythos in the country. Deshaye's research is extensive, providing a valuable resource for those interested in the topic. While the Western genre has shallow roots in Canada, the book offers insights into the few Canadian Western works that exist and their unique perspectives. Despite initial reservations, the reviewer highly recommends the book for its originality and scholarly value. [Extracted from the article]

The article critiques the 2017 poetry collection "Table Manners," by Canadian poet Catriona Wright. Topics discussed include the way Wright depicted the culture of consumption and the fusion between work and life in her lyric poetry, the repetitious element in the poetics of Wright, and the themes of her poems such as alcohol dependence in "Mukbang" and food cravings in "Job Satisfaction."

The article critiques the 2014 documentary long poem "From the Poplars," by Canadian poet Cecily Nicholson. Topics discussed include the way she addressed the colonial history of Poplar Island in New Westminster, British Columbia, the arguments raised by Nicholson with regard to the restitution of Indigenous lands, and the subjects addressed such as dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the racism experienced by Black Canadians, and the white supremacy in British Columbia.

This article will show that in Canadian literature, once problematized thematic criticism has retrenched itself as an interpretative thematics cohering under the sign of diversity (racial and sexual), anticolonialism, and anticapitalism. Theoretically guiding my critique are Frank Davey's classic essay "Surviving the Paraphrase" and the early work of Terry Eagleton. My article resends a signal first sent by Russell Brown, who in 2001 argued" that some kind of reassessment of thematics is needed because of the incessant reiterations about the danger of reading for themes," but with a difference. In Canada, thematic criticism that once valorized nation has become an anti-national thematic criticism. By considering a broad-based (albeit necessarily limited) sample of critical work on poetry from an academic journal, a literary journal, and a recent notable text in Canadian literary studies, I identify critical and cultural assumptions that inform casual and institutionally sanctioned professional practices in literary scholarship. Foremost among these assumptions is the incidental nature of poetry itself for the production of antioppression arguments. I argue that the means of this coverage has become a recapitulation of thematic criticism under the sign of a nation-hostile, programmatic, and yet sincere "diversity" that unintentionally limits the cohort it seeks to liberate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies is the property of Associacao Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

Two recent anthologies of Canadian writing – Refuse: CanLit in Ruins and Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry – reflect stances of resistance to mainstream institutional understandings of Canadian writing culture. They highlight recent scandals in academia and in literary communities, as well as highlighting the voices of Indigenous and women writers. These stances echo earlier forms of cultural revolution in Canada, in particular the Refus global manifesto, which provoked conventional Quebec society in the late 1940s. This paper contrasts these forms of refusal with a period in the 1950s and 1960s when influential Jewish writers, including Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton, took a counter-cultural stance while appearing in mainstream venues offered to them by CBC television and radio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Neophilologica is the property of Acta Neophilologica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

From late fifteenth- to late sixteenth-century Europe, travellers and intellectuals from Iberia, Italy, France, and England (at least) were dazzled by the so-called areitos of the Caribbean and mainland Americas. Most held them to be a public-performed poetry/song that kept peoples’ history, spirituality, and shared culture alive in ways lost to contemporary European elites but known to the ancients and folk life. Many yearned to transfer such usage from the Americas to Europe, even to integrate them into a European poetics and historiography. This was all the more so because the areitos seemed linked to pictorial and pictographic practice, seeming to recall notably those Egyptian hieroglyphs that had fascinated the same European scholars since the mid-fifteenth century. This moment of possible Americo-European transculturation stayed alive throughout the sixteenth century, but it did not survive it in any meaningful way [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the works of Canadian poets Lisa Robertson and Rachel Zolf. Topics discussed include why Lisa and Rachel modify their rhythm and meter with accompanying sound recordings; opinion that the poets invite disquiet in their books to reveal the bodies at the margins of capitalist and colonial accounts; argument that feminism manifests itself in their text as a communal force.

The article discusses the literary movement in Canada and its impact on its poetry and literature category. Topics include work done in books "The Winds of War," "Roots" and "The Thorn Birds"; work done by authors such as Anne Carson's "Short Talks," Michael Crummey's "Hard Light," and Marilyn Dumont's "; and work of John Thompson in "Collected Poems and Translations."

The article provides information on several aspects related to Canada's first full-time book reviewer William Arthur Deacon. Topics discussed include his importance as a member in Canadian Authors Association (CAA), Governor General's Literary Awards (GG awards), his views on award system, and national culture.

The article offers an overview of Canadian literary translations published in 2013. Emphasis is given to topics such as translations for children and young adults, Francophone poetry translated into English, and nonfiction texts with historical themes. Authors noted include France Daigle, Robert Dickson, and Nicole Brossard.

The article provides an overview of Canadian poetry published in 2013. Books noted include "Red Doc>" by Anne Carson, "Correspondences" by Anne Michaels, and "Ocean" by Sue Goyette. Other poets noted include Don Domanski, Russell Thornton, and Adam Dickinson. Emphasis is given to topics such as poetry awards, Canadian identity, and intertextual experimental collaborations.

This paper examines Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen's verse play Terror and Erebus by considering the play's representation of technology in light of its own poetic technologies. Terror and Erebus is a play for voices that features four characters: Franklin, Crozier, Rasmussen, and Qaqortingneq. As the character Rasmussen searches for the traces of the lost expedition, imagining the voices of the explorers in their final hours, his investigation reveals how the "white technologies" used to explore the Arctic succumb to the environment without the indigenous knowledge possessed by the Inuit who inhabit the Arctic. The paper shows how MacEwen's literary vision contrasts recent coverage of efforts to locate the Franklin ships which have ignored or down-played Inuit testimony. Working from Rasmussen's transcriptions of Qaqortingneq's voice, MacEwen represents Inuit knowledge and technology as both an alternative to the model of scientific discovery underwriting the Franklin expedition and as source of the authoritative account of what happened to Franklin and his crew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Literature / Primerjalna Književnost is the property of Slovenian Comparative Literature Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An essay is presented which discusses the poem "Seed Catalogue" by Robert Kroetsch. Topics discussed include the question that Kroetsch addressed in his poem, the author's lack of personal connection in the focus of Kroetsch's poem, how he values the poem because it liberated the Canadian poetry and English-Canadian poets, the poem as a homage to the poetry in the niceties and Kroetsch's exploitation of the anticipated ordering of the catalogue.

The article discusses the role of worker poetry in the Trail, British Columbia trade union newspaper "Commentator." Topics include the role of poetry in inspiring labour activism among smelters at the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (CM&S Company), the role of the writing as protest literature, and the role of political poetry in Trail. Also addressed are anti-unionization efforts by the CM&S Company, the work of company's president S. G. Blaylock in dividing workers by creating a company town, and the creation of a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) local at Trail.

Louis Riel has received much study as a man of politics but little to date as a man of letters. Indeed, only since the publication in 1985 of volume 4 of "The Collected Writings of Louis Riel," under the direction of Glen Campbell, have researchers had access to the founder of Manitoba's entire body of poetic work. The interest in studying the poetic writings of Riel resides primarily in the unique character of a poetic universe in which a temporal world and a spiritual world both coexist and collide. The temporal world was inspired by the difficult circumstances of the Métis people and the personal problems of Louis Riel, while the spiritual one had its roots in Catholic traditions. The poet worked to legitimize his vocation as a prophet by appropriating certain characteristics of the priesthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with poet and editor Sarah Dowling and professor and author Charles Bernstein is presented. The two discuss their roles as co-organizers of North of Invention: A Festival of Canadian Poetry, a 2011 event that focused on North American poetics. Bernstein also mentions his academic writing concerning the connection between Canadian and American writing practices.

In The T.E. Lawrence Poems (1982), the Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen writes in the voice of the man also widely known as Lawrence of Arabia to consider the extent of her identification with him and to raise questions about their relative cultural standing. Identifying with Lawrence both as a fan and as a celebrity of lesser degree, she implies in the end that both of them owe their celebrity to appropriation of Middle Eastern culture. She accomplishes her critique through artistic passing. She could not pass as Lawrence in the flesh, but by imitating his voice so accurately, and by using many uncredited phrases from the historical Lawrence in her book, MacEwen begins to pass for him. When she modifies his descriptions, the extent of her identification with him becomes more apparent than it was. Ultimately, she asserts her difference from him in a postcolonial feminist critique related to her identity as a Canadian poet in the 1970s, when some Canadian poets had recently emerged as celebrities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that those who are involved in Canadian literature will need to examine themselves first before being able to visualize its future. The poem "Inventory" by Dionne Brand and Northrop Frye's argument of Canadian garrison mentality are used to describe the state of Canada. It is pointed out that there is a need for a grounded or situated affect and that readers will need to examine their effects on their environments.

This essay presents Canadian fiction. It examines the modern-realism movement which occurred in the 1920s and its effects on Canadian literature. Modernist Canadian poetry is discussed, and the periodical "Canadian Bookman" is described for its role regarding the development of literature. The characteristics of Canadian literature compared to European literature are also explored.

This article examines the competing narratives in the poem "Malcolm's Katie," by Isabella Valancy Crawford. The poem has been treated as a narrative of nation building, a contribution to a patriotic program of Canadian settlement and expansion. It also reflects Crawford's engagement in political and social issues of her period. Some critics have read Katie as another commodity in the Canadian landscape to be owned by men in the poem. The poem also illustrates a type of dialogue that occurs between a masculine narrative and a feminine one.

This essay focuses on the use of weather in Canadian poetry. Gives an interpretation of weather in a line of the poem of Margaret Artwood, in the voice of Susanna Moodie. Discusses the early Canadian poetry and rendition of weather in current culture.

The article focuses on the journal "The Canadian Mercury." Published in seven issues between December 1928 and June 1929, the contents of "The Canadian Mercury," disclose the emergence of a modernist aesthetic that was trying to counter a prevailing but lifeless strain of the Romantic tradition in Canada, and which would influence Canadian poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The journal documents a transition between poetic traditions. Canadian modernist poetry is not born in this magazine, but its head is emerging. The magazine's contents disclose a moment in which a new aesthetic struggles to find its modernist breath while yet entangled in a Romantic umbilical cord against which it protests. Created as a monthly journal of "Literature and Opinion," the journal purpose, according to its opening editorial, was to replace "the state of amiable mediocrity and insipidity" in which Canadian literature "languished" with a poetic spirit the McGill poets understood as having already emerged in Britain and the United States, and which they believed was "at last beginning to brood upon our literary chaos" in Canada.

The article focuses on "In Flanders Fields," Canada's official poem. The poem appears on the ten dollar note as part of the Bank of Canada's "Canadian Journey" series. The poem appears because of its iconic status in relation to Remembrance Day, November 11. The poem is also English-speaking Canada's most well-known verse; most Canadians can probably recite a line or two from it if from no other. Since the poem has achieved such a dominant position, now is a good time to review its curious place in Canadian culture, to see how the poem works and what it says. This poem may have made it onto the currency, yet it has been virtually ignored in any discussion of Canadian literature. "In Flanders Fields" enacts a deep-rooted timidity in Canadian national identity even while it supposedly honours resolve. Its key symbol, the poppy, has recently been hijacked as a symbol of the military, partly because literary critics have ignored the poem; by not pointing out its ambivalences, officials have easily and uncritically been allowed to misuse and distort it. This poem is lavishly honoured yet studiously ignored, a complacent blindness that is key to the poem's political aptness, its artistic strategy, and its national significance.

The article presents the authors views on Canadian poetry. In the 1970's, when Studies in Canadian Literature began publishing, the phrase "Canadian poetry" connoted something of an official discourse in English Canada pertaining to questions of "Canadian identity" and nationalism. If one were to attempt to unravel all the threads and filaments of current Canadian poetry written in English, one would almost certainly be left with a hopelessly decentred tangle of poetic and cultural ideas. It is as if Canadian poets are not so much anxious about the "question" of Canadian identity as they are desirous of exploding the very notion of a Canadian poetry, of seeking to imagine all possible worlds, of attempting to think through every imaginable way of conceiving what Canada might be. It is not surprising that critics of Canadian poetry have trouble keeping up. Among the many reasons for this new multiplicity are, of course, Canada's changing demographics and the increasingly sophisticated and nuanced way of speaking about racial and sexual identities. Perhaps unsurprisingly in the francophone context of poetry writing and criticism, the foremost subject appears to be the poetic genre itself, its innovations, the overt break from all constraints of versification, yet also the servility to a French European tradition, at least on the part of nineteenth-century poets who, perhaps for that very reason, have failed to leave their mark on the literary history of French Canada.