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This section presents a literary criticism of the 2015 novel "The Illegal," by Canadian author Lawrence Hill. Topics discussed include the publication of the novel prior to the rise of cultural and political issues concerning refugees in Canada, the way the novel addressed themes such as forced migration, Canadian humanitarian assistance, and nationalism, and the evolution and increasing recognition of Canadian refugee fiction.

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.

In the article, the author discusses postmodern Western genre in Canadian literature. Other topics include the changes in media and communication during the postmodernism period, the postmodernism in the American Western as seen in the novel "Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down" by Ishmael Reed and the films "Blazing Saddles" and "Little Big Man," and the development of neoliberalism and capitalism.

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

In the article, the author discusses the depiction of the outlaw-lawman in Western films and literature, particularly in Canada, as seen in films like "High Noon," "Green Grass, Running Water," and "The Long Patrol: A Tale of the Mounted Police." Also cited are the perspectives of Indigenous filmmakers as seen in their works like "Injun," "Maliglutit," and "The Searchers."

The article discusses the topics of transnationalism and Christianity in early Canadian Western literature and films. Other topics include the modern axis of colonialism in North America, the portrayal of symbolic law enforcers in Canadian Westerns, and the symbolism of the image of the cross based on genre, geography, and religion in Canadian and American films and literature.

In the article, the author discusses the issues of transnationalism, regionalism, and nationalism in the Western genre of films and literature. Other topics include the growth and globalization of literary studies, the relationship of Canadian literature with other national literatures and cultures, and how American Western films were inspired by Japan as seen in films like "The Magnificent Seven" and "Eastern Westerns."

Mark Anthony Jarman's characters are often down and out, and often wandering and wondering. Using theories of wonder, this essay argues that wonder plays a key role in many of Jarman's stories--stories that are marked not by narrative or psychological closure, but by a sense of wonder as characters muse on their lot in life. After briefly considering Jarman's role within Canadian literature, including his innovative approaches to the short story form, and his odd status as an influential yet often ignored writer, the essay moves to a discussion of the various ways that wonder is at play in his works, both as a verb and a state. Jarman's characters are frequently in doubt, and the act of wondering takes us into their drifting, self-reflecting minds. However, there is also the sense of wonder as the miraculous. Jarman's narrators find optimism in the world around them, thanks to flashes of the beauty of the unlikely. Wonder, thus, has a crucial structural function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1979 Writing in Our Time series became Vancouver's most attended reading series, bringing light to the viability and international status of the city's literary scene. While it has largely been remembered as a celebration of Vancouver's literary culture, more marginalized voices of Vancouver's literary communities have highlighted the series' implications for gay male and female writers in the city. This article considers whose time was actually represented by the Writing in Our Time series. I suggest that while it gave gay men the opportunity to be onstage and speak about their concerns, including the homophobic attacks against bill bissett in the House of Commons that prompted the series, Writing in Our Time provided women limited opportunities to publicly share their work while relying upon their invisible labour to succeed. Through the production of a new socio-cultural history of the series, including an analysis of printed publications, oral histories, and audiovisual documentation of the events, this article demonstrates that Writing in Our Time was catalyzed by attacks on a gay writer, relied on women's invisible labour, showcased the androcentric relations of Vancouver's literary scene, and sparked resistance from feminists to women's peripheral position in the series. I argue that, due to their proximity to or distance from heterosexual white males in power within the scene, the series simultaneously supported gay writers in Vancouver's literary scene and further marginalized women by reinforcing sexist social hierarchies. The effects of these androcentric relations led to greater dialogue about issues affecting gay men within the series and by women about sexism within and outside of the series at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper addresses the noticeably low presence of Canadian literature in hemispheric American literary research. The fact that hemispheric literary studies focuses on a comparison of the United States and Spanish America is partly because of Canada's marginal position in the Americas, its lack of identification with the continent, and Canadian scholars' reluctance to engage in hemispheric studies due to their insecurity concerning cultural identity and the discipline's potential imperialistic impulses. By examining a representative history of Canadian literature and several literary studies for intersections and tangencies between Canadian literature and other literatures of the Americas, this paper will demonstrate that there are natural links between them, which make a transnational comparative approach to Canadian literature both legitimate and desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Niniejsza interpretacja dwóch kanadyjskich klasyków - opowiadania Margaret Atwood pt. „Śmierć na tle krajobrazu" i powieści Emmy Donoghue zatytułowanej „Pokój" - jest w rzeczywistości pretekstem do rozważań o kanadyjskiej tęsknocie za, i strachu przed otwartą przestrzenią. W obu tekstach jej wyrazem staje się nostalgia za przestrzenią zewnętrzną, jednoznacznie nie-domową. Używając teorii agorafobii jako narzędzia interpretacji, proponuję alternatywne odczytanie kanadyjskiej przestrzeni, wpisane jednak w wielowiekową tradycję definiowania „kanadyjskości" poprzez przestrzenne metafory i relacje między jednostką a miejscem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the history of Canadian literary criticism. It mentions a naively subjective approach to literature, and even if the work of subjective excavation depends on an inward move, an irrelevance of the external world of the social, political, and material, this very turning away makes those realities open to reimagining, reconstitution, indeterminacy, process.

Clearly devoted to the analysis of various issues of belonging, the work of Marusya Bociurkiw, a Ukrainian-Canadian queer writer, director, academic, and activist, examines culture, memory, history, and subjectivity in a fascinatingly unique way. Such a thematic composition is, however, not the only aspect that visibly marks and unities Bociurkiw’s multi-generic oeuvre; what clearly stands out as yet another distinguishing characteristic that Bociurkiw’s works have in common is the idea that seems to stand behind their creation – an impelling notion that “[t]o have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue” (Brand 2001: 18). Consequently, what Bociurkiw’s works vividly portray is the writing-self “in search of its most resonant metaphor” (Brand 2001: 19). In one of her works, Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl (2007), this metaphor is food as the art of food-making and the act of eating become here a crucial background against which the issues of belonging are played out. The aim of this article is thus to show how Bociurkiw finds her way of discussing various aspects of subjectivity by means of writing about food, whether about preparing it, tasting it, or recollecting its preparation and tastes. Ultimately, however, the article is to prove that food in Bociurkiw’s memoir not only reflects identity but is presented as a vital site of intersectionality. Thus, embedded in intersectionality discourse, and particularly instructed by Vivian May’s Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries (2015), the analysis of Comfort Food for Breakups is carried out from an interdisciplinary perspective because it is simultaneously grounded in food studies theory, i.e., the ideas developed by Elspeth Probyn in Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (2000), confirming, in this way, that vital connections can and should be made between the two, ostensibly unrelated, fields of study.

This article approaches recent discussions on the state of contemporary CanLit as a body of literary texts, an academic field, and an institution. The discussion is informed primarily by a number of recent or relatively recent publications, such as Trans.CanLit. Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (Kamboureli & Miki 2007), Refuse. CanLit in Ruins (McGregor, Rak & Wunker 2018), Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (McWatt, Maharaj & Brand 2018), and the discussions and/or controversies some of those generated – expressed through newspaper and magazine articles, scholarly essays, but also through tweets, etc. The texts have been written as a response to the current state and – in some cases – scandals of CanLit. Many constitute attempts at starting or contributing to a discussion aimed at not only taking stock of, but also reinterpreting and re-defining the field and the institution in view of the challenges of the globalising world. Perhaps more importantly, they address also the challenges resulting from the rift between CanLit as implicated in the (post)colonial nation-building project and rigid institutional structures, perpetuating the silencings, erasures, and hierarchies resulting from such entanglements, and actual literary texts produced by an increasingly diversified group of writers working with a widening range of topics and genres, and creating often intimate, autobiographically inspired art with a sense of responsibility to marginalised communities. The article concludes with the example of Indigenous writing and the position some young Indigenous writers take in the current discussions.

In the twenty-first century, Canadian writers have been doing something they did infrequently in the past: acknowledging and referencing the work of past Canadian writers. Although declining pedagogical and academic interest in Canadian literature has made this development hard to see, writers themselves have been quietly building upon and contributing to something that looks very much like a literary tradition. Canadian writers of course continue to read and be influenced by writers outside Canada, just as they always have: but in their own words, they are now telling us that they are reading, learning from, and responding to other Canadian writers – that there is a Canadian literary tradition that crosses generational and regional borders, and that Canadian writers (and publishers, and readers) are aware of parts of that tradition, the parts that matter to them.

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.

An interview with Guy Gavriel Kay, a bestselling author of Canadian fantasy novels, is presented. Topics discussed include the first time he became interested in writing, authors and their works that influenced him to write "The Fionavar Tapestry," and the universalization of a theme in his fantasy novels.

Copyright of Journal of Language & Law / Revista de Llengua i Dret is the property of Revista de Llengua i Dret 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.)

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.)

Long dismissed as a "critical error" (Booth 2016) and still capable of inciting "embarrassment palpable" (Watson 2006) among scholars otherwise happy to emphasize the material contexts that inform the circulation of texts, literary tourism has recently become the focus of serious academic inquiry. Recent work has begun to disaggregate the various forms of literary tourist sites (Fawcett and Cormack 2001), but continues to have a methodological gap surrounding the specifically literary aspects of the practice itself, and—with the notable exception of Green Gables (Squire 1992; Devereux 2001)—has left Canada predictably unexamined. This essay begins with a brief introduction to literary tourism in Canada before moving into a comparative analysis of two National Historic Sites associated with Canadian literary authors: the Robert Service cabin in Dawson City, Yukon, and the John McCrae House in Guelph, Ontario. The sites offer a compelling comparison as the former homes of two of the best-known Canadian poets of the early twentieth century whose works have become popularly synonymous with two of Canada's most heavily mythologized eras. The enduring popularity of poems like "The Cremation of Sam McGee" reflect not only Service's central role in mythologizing Canada's north but also a strategic "cultural commoditization" of the area's gold rush heritage (Jarvenpa 1994; Grace 2001), while McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" retains its status not only as the "most popular poem" of the First World War in Canada and beyond (Fussell 2000), but also as a primary example of the ideological function of Great War literature within Canada (Holmes 2005; Gordon 2014). Although the two author houses may initially appear a study in contrasts, I draw on recent work in literary tourist studies to argue they are linked in their function as "materialized fictions" (Hendrix 2008), or concrete interpretative frames that aim to offer tangible evidence of the Canadian myths their former inhabitants helped to fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mary Shelley’s iconic Frankenstein is a pivotal work in the Western canon. Since its publication in 1818, the novel has been re-written and adapted many times. Shelley’s magnum opus sublimely evokes the postlapsarian condition of the fallen, while also capturing the imminent fear of technology, scientific progress and artificial procreation. The paper aims to explore the Frankenstein legacy and the development of Frankensteinian motifs in Atwood’s speculative fiction. More precisely, the paper focuses on The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The MaddAddam Trilogy – Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), MaddAddam (2013), and The Heart Goes Last (2015), analyzing how postmodern literature recycles and incorporates elements from Frankenstein to reflect (on) contemporary anxieties and to insist on the fluid discursivity of monstrosity.

This article looks at trauma beyond the fixation on the limits of narrative as expressed in the mainstream theory of trauma in the 1990s, in the work of Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, among others. Its purpose is to achieve an appreciation of narrative as a navigable textual itinerary whose very flows and discontinuities are energized by a reconciliation (or lack thereof) with life’s shocking and incomprehensible moments. I build upon Amir Khadem’s rejection of the polarity between narrative and the incurable psychic wound in order to provide textual analyses of a corpus of three contemporary novels set in the context of a historically traumatized regional identity, that of Newfoundland in Canada: The Town That Forgot How to Breathe (2003), by Kenneth J. Harvey, February (2009), by Lisa Moore, and Sweetland (2014), by Michael Crummey. A revision of the role of genres traditionally used to describe historical and personal crises will help us observe how their conventions function within a context of outrage at the global and regional mismanagement of natural resources.

What happens once the rogue rides off into the sunset? This cross-genre essay considers the figure of the rogue’s decline and gradual dismemberment in the face of the pressures of the world. Beginning with the “rogue” digits and other body parts lost by the men who surrounded him in his youth—especially his grandfather—Dobson considers the costs of labour and poverty in rural environments. For him, the rogue is one who falls somehow outside of cultural, social, and political norms— the one who has decided to step outside of the establishment, outside of the corrupt élites and their highfalutin ways. To do so comes at a cost. Turning to the life of writer George Ryga and to the poetry and fiction of Patrick Lane, this essay examines the real, physical, material, and social costs of transgression across multiple works linked to rural environments in Alberta and British Columbia. The essay shows the ways in which very real forms of violence discipline the rogue, pushing the rogue back into submission or out of mind, back into the shadowy past from whence the rogue first came. Resisting nostalgia while evincing sympathy, this essay delves into what is at stake for one who would become a rogue.

The article talks about the author's experience as a comics reader reflecting the significance of comics in heritage collections and the challenges faced in their recognition as important cultural artifacts. She draws on her experience as a curator of the exhibition "Alter Ego: Comics and Canadian Identity" to demonstrate the importance of comics in heritage collections. The exhibition showcased the rich history of Canadian comics and their impact on Canadian identity, politics, and culture.

This article examines the relation between affect and agency in Michael Christie's short story collection The Beggar's Garden (2011). It builds its argument on recent philosophical discussions about the oxymoronic nature of the relational subject. Many contemporary thinkers have emphasized the fundamental paradox that affective relations are as necessary as they are profoundly destabilizing of the subject's supposed autonomy. Following this train of thought, a number of studies have appeared that explore the relation between vulnerability and agency. Would a focus on affective relations and the subsequently increased sense of vulnerability produce or foreclose action? The article takes this question to the field of the literary to provide a critical reading of the first two stories in Christie's collection, "Emergency Contact" and "Discard", both of which probe, in very different ways, the power of affect in the midst of highly precarious material conditions. Drawing on the work of feminist materialist scholars Sara Ahmed, Marianne Hirsch, Judith Butler, and Martha Nussbaum, who have explored how the experience of vulnerability may imply a radical openness toward surprising possibilities, I investigate how each of these two stories may produce unexpected spaces of human agency through the affective energy of compassion and love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the rationale for definitions of the homeless in the public imagination and the kind of discourses used to create a physical, psychological, and moral distance between the domiciled and the destitute. In a society where the worthy individual is tied to an ideal of entrepreneurial, rational, homed, successful consumer, and where public space is solely destined for the unobstructed consumption of the privileged, street dwellers are naturally seen as a threat to the economic, social, and moral order as well as a visual blemish: an obstacle to safety and wellbeing. Drawing from a number of sociological, urban, and narrative studies on the survival tactics of homeless people, and especially from Nicholas Blomley's (2010) insights about street mobility and Leon Anderson's (2017) classifications of stigma management, this article describes how subjects defined as pathological, dangerous, or pitiful, negotiate street restrictions and create their own standing within a revanchist city. These individuals feature in two comic books published in Canada, Zanta: The Living Legend (2012) and The Dregs (2017), whose originality lies in the heroic role the street person assumes, a legitimate searcher for meaning that sees what most people overlook. In their different format as non-fiction comic and serialized fictional comic we find the expressive visual and narrative potential of the genre and become witnesses of the tribulations of two characters whom the world may consider as deranged but are, however, able to enhance their self-esteem, dismantle ideologies behind assumed notions of respectability, and actively contribute to the city as a place of encounter with difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Boat People by Sharon Bala, Blue Sunflower Startle by Yasmin Ladha, and Lives of the Family: Stories of Fate and Circumstance, by Denise Chong, are texts that engage with vulnerability as it relates to immigration, one of the most precarious of states or sites that Canadian literature chronicles. The abstract and concrete politics of adaptation are exemplified in these narratives of displacement, inspired by the Tamil refugee crisis of 2009–2010, the Indo-Tanzanian immigration wave of the 1970s, and the resourcefulness of Chinese immigrant families in the mid-twentieth century. These narratives effectively investigate vulnerability within spaces of interconnection, imprisonment, relation, visibility, and transformation. This paper works with their explorations of the Canadian trope of immigration as a process that moves from the vulnerability of strangeness to the vulnerability of adaptation to the vulnerability of commitment. Addressing the ways that these stages are subverted, the paper examines the extent to which migrancy and its resolution resist a "national" narrative in these texts, undercutting the prototype of success through adversity. How they model Hirsch's "openness to unexpected outcomes" recites the complexity of their depictions of vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall's 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter with the other (Butler, 2004). The text is written as a journal where Bishop-Stall describes his personal journey through homelessness; and more importantly, it gives a voice to the other down-and-out people in notorious Toronto's Tent City. The characters' unreliable and fragmented storytelling uncovers the lives of the faceless others. I contend that in Down to This individuals' life stories are connected to realities which question binaries through the re/mapping of ordinary experiences and affects; they disintegrate the opposition materiality vs abstraction, or as I argue, exclusion vs inclusion (out of the ordinary/ordinary). Down to These bridges the private details of the residents' life stories, and the public perception of the problem of homelessness, illustrating how everyday moments of precarity intersect with wider political issues. In the process, the narrative also questions the binary attitudes of exclusion (disfranchisement) and inclusion (privilege). This literary strategy gives the constellation of stories a profound illuminating vision of the human condition. I show my point by drawing on the of marginalia (Kistner 2014), and by analysing the characters' narratives of precariousness through the notions of editing and affective assemblage (Gerlach, 2015; Hamilakis, 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores two Henry Kreisel lectures by Indigenous authors, Eden Robinson's The Sasquatch At Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling (2010, published 2011) and Tomson Highway's A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism (2014, published 2015), to demonstrate how Indigenous nonfiction employs complex rhetorical strategies in order to engage cross-cultural readers and address crucial issues related to contemporary Indigeneity. Both narratives are claimed to convey a fragile balance between cultural loss and cultural survival — a negotiation which is related theoretically to Judith Butler's notions of vulnerability, precarity, and resistance, particularly to her premise that vulnerability and resistance do not have to be opposed and/or mutually exclusive but rather work in intricate relationships. The article shows that while Robinson (Haisla/Heiltsuk) combines family stories with ethnography to bear witness to both the precarity and resilience of Haisla cultural and ecological survival, Highway (Cree) presents a multimodal and multilingual performance to unsettle his audience through combining humor and confrontation. I ultimately argue that, if Indigenous writing has always expressed this duality of exposing vulnerability as well as inscribing resistance, then, it may serve as a model for transcending the binary structure powerful/powerless, a move that Butler sees as fundamental to her redefinition of vulnerability. In other words, through this optic the history of Indigenous writing is indeed a history of exploring the ways in which vulnerability and resistance relate and interweave, rather than stand in opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers ways in which solidarity across social locations might play a role in fostering resistance to vulnerability. My case study consists of the interplay between writer George Ryga's 1967 play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, and Okanagan Syilx writer and scholar Jeannette Armstrong's 1985 novel Slash. While these important and compelling texts have received considerable critical attention, the relationship between them is less known. I am interested in the ways in which these works both hail and offer critique to one another. In the contemporary moment, in which questions of appropriation of voice have gained renewed urgency within Indigenous literary circles in Canada and beyond, the relationship between these texts speaks to a historical instance of appropriation, but also of complicated processes of alliance-building. These texts demonstrate how agency resides across multiple locations. I read Ryga's Ecstasy in the context of Jeannette Armstrong's engagement with the play within her novel Slash in order to witness the ways in which Ryga's text, in the first instance, appropriates Indigenous voices into an anti-capitalist critique. In the second instance, I read these works in order to witness how they might simultaneously provide a compelling analysis of the vulnerability of the people who are the subject of both works. I compare the interplay between Armstrong and Ryga's texts to contemporary debates around appropriation in order to argue for the historical and ongoing importance of these two works as precursors to the crucial interventions made by contemporary Indigenous critics and writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyze a selection of texts from Ivan Coyote's One in Every Crowd (2012) and Tomboy Survival Guide (2016) and to discuss the author's ability to transform vulnerability into strength and resistance through their self-referential storytelling. The reading of Coyote's stories is guided by Judith Butler's conception of the relational character of vulnerability, Leticia Sabsay's understanding of permeability, and Sara Ahmed's discussions on queer (un)happiness and imposition. Coyote's ability to confront the gender binary through narrative is also highlighted, together with their determination to create an archive for transgender children and youth, to let them know that theirs is not a unique experience, and that one of the ways to transform vulnerability is to break the silence and make use of creativity. My reading of Coyote's stories confirms that narratives can be used by subjects to act politically, to resist regulation and control and to counteract the way in which concepts such as vulnerability and resilience, which are "politically produced," are finally understood (Butler et al., 2016: 5). By breaking the silence that they associate with vulnerability and creatively "writing down difficult things" (Coyote, 2016: 221) the author metaphorically reassembles components for themselves and, especially, for their young audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs Christine L. Marran's notion of "obligate storytelling" to examine the poetic structures of vulnerability in Canadian author Claire Cameron's novel The Last Neanderthal (2017). The theoretical backbone of ideas on the materiality of being suggested by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Erinn C. Gilson, and Matt Edgeworth, among others, solicits a reading which foregrounds the moral upshot of conceiving the body as an affective centre of life and an arc of anthropogenesis. By following this trajectory, I attempt to show how in troping the archeological dig as a biosemiotic archive, Cameron exposes the structural homologies between the lives of her two female protagonists, a twenty-first-century scientist and a Neanderthal, whose bones she has unearthed. The novel's use of narrative bifocality offers a visceral construction of subjectivity, which takes its bearings from the shared experience of corporeal vulnerability. By thus imaginatively unspooling the affective links between the neoliberal female subject and her Neanderthal cousin, the novel calls upon us both to rescale our conceptions of creaturely life and rethink our narratives of human origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an analysis of Underground, published by Canadian writer June Hutton in 2009. The main protagonist of the novel is a young Canadian, Albert Fraser, who suffers severe shock and disillusionment in the trenches of the First World War. He faces unemployment and destitution during the Great Depression and eventually joins the 1,700 Canadian volunteers who fought in the anti-fascist cause during the Spanish Civil War. My purpose is to analyse Hutton's representation of the Canadian veterans' difficult reintegration in the post-war years and the protagonist's prise de conscience which ultimately leads him to Spain, despite his hatred of war. While discussing the veterans' discontent and the Canadian government's attempts to control this unruly population, I refer to Judith Butler's conceptualization of precariousness and precarity, as well as Giorgio Agamben's philosophical reflection on biopolitics and bare life. Central in my reading is the terrain of the camp — the hobo camp, the relief camp, and the POW camp — as a site of biopolitical exclusion, yet also a space of encounter that triggers ethical reflection. Furthermore, I demonstrate how the novel stages unexpected alliances between the protagonist and Chinese characters, which cause Fraser to revise his racist opinions. I propose the concept of multidirectional vulnerabilities to explore the parallels between these apparently disjointed geographies and temporalities. The article shows how Hutton represents the vulnerability of Canadian bodies in a historical period of socio-political upheavals, yet at the same time locates in their vulnerability the possibility of resistance and an alternative ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to share key findings from a scoping review of the literature about LGBTQI migrants from a global context. The scoping review methodology allows for rapid assessment of a broad range of literature while also highlighting key knowledge and policy strengths and gaps. Although this review focuses on the Canadian-specific literature, it also compares the Canadian context with the broader global context. Upon presenting a synthesis of the knowledge produced about LGBTQI migrants, implications on Canadian refugee and newcomer settlement policies are critically assessed. This review presents how the Canadian literature has shifted over the past decade from a focus on legal scholarship to broader knowledge from multiple disciplines about the social, political, economic and transnational contexts for LGBTQI migrations to Canada. Although there have been key improvements to Canadian refugee policy, there remains a lack of federal and provincial policies and settlement programs designed to attend to the particular needs of LGBTQI migrants. The relevance of the Canadian knowledge and policies in relation to knowledge emerging from the Global South and elsewhere in the Global North will also enrich the discussion about present and future research and policy directions in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerned with the Canadian context, this study proposes a critique as a strategy to access a time relatively ignored in historical-literary manuals. Particularly focused on the discussion of ethnic-racial issues in literary education, elements are provided for the understanding of post-colonial literature in its interface with pedagogical relations, in the face of marginalization in curricula, and the absence in the canon of the literary production of minority groups in Canada. Thus, there is herein a commitment to opening borders through a critical and theoretical movement capable of overcoming the rigidity of traditional limits in the interpretation of the world, resulting in more flexible, plural, and heterogeneous readings of Canadian literature, as opposed to totalizing understandings remaining from colonialist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alice Munro published in 2012 her last collection of short stories, Dear Life, which includes "Finale", a quartet of stories introduced by the author in semiautobiographical terms. The relevance of the themes addressed is, as may be inferred, significant in relation to her life and previous work. In fact, they echo her first two collections of short stories --Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Lives of Girls and Women (1971)-- not only in motifs and events, but also in style. This paper analyses and compares this last section --Munro's conclusive contribution to the literary world-- with her early work to establish joint features and similarities in order to support and extend the often-claimed autobiographical dimension of Munro's fiction from this unexplored perspective. In addition, this process of analogy has recognised the author's literary and emotional closure in relation to her mother, a hitherto elusive endeavour in her work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]