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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.

In recent years, while economic decline and anti-government sentiment in Canada have placed many established social ideals under attack, the myth of multiculturalism has remained relatively unscathed. This may be [...]

In recent years, while economic decline and anti-government sentiment in Canada have placed many established social ideals under attack, the myth of multiculturalism has remained relatively unscathed. This may be [...]

The grotesque elements in Edgar Allan Poe's writings were very close to archaic religious beliefs. Poe depicts a grotesque world where the sacred mingles not just with the ordinary but also with the impure, where transgressions are committed to reunify man and nature, and where beautiful female adepts in the magical arts become repugnant creatures and are buried prematurely. Poe's depiction of the grotesque and the archaic in his stories proves Mircea Eliade to be correct when he said that religious elements would be found camouflaged in modern art.