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

An introduction is presented to this special-themes issue focused on topics related to literary criticisms of the works of Nobel-prize winning Canadian author Alice Munro.

This essay reads Munro’s 2001 story collection as embodiment of her artistic accomplishment. Beginning with a 1952 internal Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reader noting “evocative and luminous phrases” in two of Munro’s earliest stories, it argues that such phrases have informed Munro’s fiction throughout her career. InHateship, these phrasings are key to “Family Furnishings,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” “Post and Beam,” “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” and especially “Nettles.” There Munro structures her stories around “real facts in the making,” combining autobiographical facts and situations with her imaginative renderings of them. This collection reveals Munro at the height of her accomplished art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Both Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence have named L.M. Montgomery’s work— particularly her books about Emily—as childhood readings that are central to their development as writers. This essay explores how Montgomery’s three books about Emily—Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, and Emily’s Quest—provide a persisting imaginary that The Diviners by Laurence and Who Do You Think You Are? by Munro reflect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the way in which Canadian author Joan Barfoot's novel Exit Lines draws upon the pastoral tradition in its representation of old age. Pastoral literature has traditionally encoded ideologies of age, and it is the inclusion of pastoral tropes that structures Barfoot's participation in the discussion of population aging currently taking place across disciplines and in the popular media. Pastoral writing is characterized by an acceptance of vulnerability and loss, and this provides Barfoot with an effective counterpoint to a contemporary culture of “positive” aging founded on an ethic of bodily control that alternately stigmatizes and masks the existence of decline and dependency in late life. The novel questions the way in which the rhetoric of crisis that characterizes discussions of population aging threatens to generate resentment against the dependent elderly, whom the novel depicts as vulnerable to exploitation by those who stand to profit from this “crisis.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the writing, publication, and reception of the 1972 book "Death on the Ice: The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914" by Cassie Brown with Harold Horwood, an account of the deaths from exposure of dozens of sealers seen as stemming from corporate indifference to their welfare. The book, an international bestseller written by and about Newfoundlanders, is seen as a landmark in Newfoundland print culture and cultural identity. Topics discussed include sealing in Newfoundland literature, Brown's early career and development as an author, and the life cycle of her book.

The article explores the complexity of a multilingual and multicultural environment and its influences on female Italian Canadian writers. Writers focused on in the article include Bianca Zagolin, Fiorella De Luca Calce, and Elettra Bedon. The author examines the writers' upbringing in an Italian Canadian community and how this environment acted as a source of creative inspiration. The book "Storia di una emigrante," by Elena Randaccio, is examined. The article also discusses how these women authors have contributed to redefining the Italian Canadian woman.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Damiano Pietropaolo on the hyphen in "Italian-Canadians," one by Francesco Loriggio on the questions of Italian-Canadian literature, and another by Licia Canton on Italian-Canadian women writers.

The article briefly discusses the author's monograph on Canadian poet Phebe Florence Miller (1889-1979), from the small town of Topsail, Newfoundland. Miller's life as an unmarried postmistress who kept voluminous diaries and published poetry is discussed, with a focus on her autobiographical writing. Also discussed is her contribution to local literary culture by her hosting of a salon called The Blue Castle, where local writers gathered for games, musical recitals, poetry readings, and general discussion.