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Book SynopsisSo much to read, so little time? Get a brief overview of the Japanese KonMari method of organizing and take control of your life. Japanese cleaning consultant and New York Times–bestselling author Marie Kondo is known for the revolutionary method of organization detailed in her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which has helped millions create and keep tidy homes. With chapter-by-chapter breakdowns, this summary explains the key points of her book, including: How a calm, comfortable home can ease your mind Why a “little-by-little” approach doesn’t work How to identify items that “spark joy” and dispose of those that don’t How to declutter your home by category Complete with historical context, important quotes, fascinating trivia, a glossary of terms, and other features, this summary and analysis of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.

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Book Synopsis Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography explores some of the latest developments in the literary and cultural practices of Canadians of Asian heritage. While earlier work by ethnic, multicultural, or minority writers in Canada was often concerned with immigration, the moment of arrival, issues of assimilation, and conflicts between generations, literary and cultural production in the new millennium no longer focuses solely on the conflict between the Old World and the New or the clashes between culture of origin and adopted culture. No longer are minority authors identifying simply with their ethnic or racial cultural background in opposition to dominant culture. The essays in this collection explore ways in which Asian Canadian authors (such as Larissa Lai, Shani Mootoo, Fred Wah, Hiromi Goto, Suniti Namjoshi, and Ying Chen) and artists (such as Ken Lum, Paul Wong, and Laiwan) have gone beyond what Françoise Lionnet calls autoethnography, or ethnographic autobiography. They demonstrate the ways representations of race and ethnicity, particularly in works by Asian Canadians in the last decade, have changed have become more playful, untraditional, aesthetically and ideologically transgressive, and exciting. Trade Review"The essay collection is noteworthy in its comprehensive analysis of a diverse range of literary texts, and analysis that involves a critical examination of autoethnographic writing in its complicity with and departures from representations of otherness." -- Ranbir K. Banwait -- Canadian Literature 204, 201007"Beyond Autoethnography offers an impressive set of critical interventions that illustrate the range of scholarship in Asian Canadian literary studies and will be of great interest to scholars and students of contemporary Asian Canadian culture." -- Christopher Lee, University of British Columbia -- Pacific Affairs, Volume 82, no. 2, Summer 2009Table of Contents Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, edited by Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn Introduction I. Theoretical Challenges and Praxis The Politics of the Beyond: 43 Theses on Autoethnography and Complicity Smaro Kamboureli Autoethnography Otherwise: Challenging Poetics and Re-Meaning Race in Fred Wah's Creative Critical Writing Paul Lai Tides of Belonging: Reconfiguring the Autoethnographic Paradigm in Shani Mootoo's He Drown She in the Sea Kristina Kyser II. Generic Transformations Strategizing the Body of History: Anxious Writing, Absent Subjects, and Marketing the Nation Larissa Lai The Politics of Gender and Genre in Asian Canadian Women's Speculative Fiction: Hiromi Goto and Larissa Lai Pilar Cuder-Domínguez ""auto-hyphen-ethno-hyphen-graphy"": Fred Wah's Creative-Critical Writing Joanne Saul III. Artistic/Textual/Bodily Politics Troubling the Mosaic: Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand, Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, and Representations of Social Differences Christine Kim Ken Lum, Paul Wong, and the Aesthetics of Multiculturalism Ming Tiampo Potent Textuality: Laiwan's Cyborg Poetics Tara Lee IV. Global Affiliations ""Do not exploit me again and again"": Queering Autoethnography in Suniti Namjoshi's Goja: An Autobiographical Myth Eva C. Karpinski An Ethnos of Difference, a Praxis of Inclusion: The Ethics of Global Citizenship in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night Miriam Pirbhai Ying Chen's ""Poetic Rebellion"": Relocating the Dialogue, In Search of Narrative Renewal Christine Lorre Bibliography Contributors Index Contributors' Bios Pilar Cuder-Domínguez is Associate Professor of English at the University of Huelva (Spain), where she teaches British and English-Canadian Literature. Her research interests are the intersections of gender, genre, nation, and race. She is the author of Margaret Atwood: A Beginner's Guide (2003), and the (co)-editor of five collections of essays (La mujer del texto al contexto, 1996; Exilios femeninos, 2000; Sederi XI, 2002; Espacios de Género, 2005; and The Female Wits, 2006). She has been visiting scholar at universities in Canada and the United States: McGill (1997), Dalhousie (1999), Northwestern (2002), and Toronto (2004). Her current research deals with Canadian women's transnational poetics. Smaro Kamboureli is Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature at the University of Guelph and the Director of the TransCanada Institute. Her publications include Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada and a new edition of Making a Difference: Multicultural Literatures in English. Eva C. Karpinski teaches women's life writing, cultural studies, and feminist theory in the School of Womens Studies at York University in Toronto. Her research interests include postmodernist fiction, immigrant autobiography, translation studies, and feminist ethics. She has published articles on John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Federman, and Eva Hoffman. She is the editor of Pens of Many Colours, an anthology of Canadian multicultural writing. Her article on Angela Carter won the best essay award from Utopian Studies in 2001. Christine Kim is Assistant Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. Her teaching and research focus on contemporary Canadian literature, feminist theory, print culture and publishing, and diasporic writing. She has published articles in Mosaic, Open Letter, and Studies in Canadian Literature and has an essay forthcoming in Essays on Canadian Writing. Kristina Kyser is an instructor of Canadian literature at the University of Toronto, where she completed her doctorate in 2004. Her research and teaching interests include literature and ethics and postcolonial theory. She is also interested in interdisciplinary approaches to Canadian literature from the perspectives of philosophy, religious studies, and political science. She has published or presented papers on Michael Ondaatje, Thomas King, Rohinton Mistry, and Yann Martel. She is currently revising her book-length study, Swallowed by the Whale: Bible and Nation in English-Canadian Writing, for publication. Larissa Lai is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of two novels, When Fox Is a Thousand and Salt Fish Girl. Her research interests include race, memory, subjectivity, globalization, sexuality, labour, cyborgs, strategy, and borders. Paul Lai teaches Asian American literature at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He is researching a project on sound and Asian American cultures. His work considers Asian American Studies as a pedagogical practice, an institutional presence, and a theoretical space for addressing social issues. His work explores how things like anthologies, music websites, and comedy routines link screams, cries, melodies, accents, and other sounds to Asian American identities and politics. Tara Lee holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Simon Fraser University. Her teaching interests are in Canadian literature and ethnic minority writing. She has published articles on Asian Canadian literature and identity in journals such as West Coast Line, Dandelion, and Cultural Studies Review. Christine Lorre is an Assistant Professor of English at Université Paris III--Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her teaching interests are in American studies, literature in English, and translation. She has published articles in journals edited in France (Etudes canadiennes / Canadian Studies, Commonwealth, Journal of the Short Story in English / Cahiers de la nouvelle, Lisa) and as chapters in books published in France (Lectures d'une œuvre: The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood, Editions du Temps; Les Amériques et le Pacifique, Université Rennes 2) and in Canada (Vision / Division dans l'œuvre de Nancy Huston, Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa). Mariam Pirbhai is an Assistant Professorin the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, where she teaches Post-Colonial Literatures and Theory. Her publications includearticles on Indo-Caribbean Literature,Post-Colonial Theory,Multicultural Writing in Canada, and onliteraryfigures such as Salman Rushdie. She is presently working on a book-length study of the theoretical and socio-historical intersections between indentured labourand slavery in Caribbean writing. Joanne Saul teaches English and Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto. She is author of Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2006). She is also co-owner of the independent bookstore TYPE Books in Toronto. Ming Tiampo is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa. Her research examines questions of cultural translation and transmission in an international context, concentrating on Japan's relations with the West as well as pluralism in Canada. Her current projects include an exhibition on pluralism in Canada, as well as a book that considers the Japanese avant-garde art movement Gutai in a transnational context. She has published and given papers in Japan, Europe, the United States, and Canada, and in 2004-5 was the curator of the award-winning exhibition ""Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka 1954-1968"" at the Grey Art Gallery in New York and at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver. She is a founding member of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis (CTCA) at Carleton. Eleanor Ty is Professor and Chair of English & Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Author of The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (University of Toronto Press, 2004), Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796&0150;1812 (University of Toronto Press, 1998), and Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (University of Toronto Press, 1993), she has edited Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford 1996) and The Victim of Prejudice (Broadview 1994) by Mary Hays and has co-edited with Donald Goellnicht a collection of essays, Asian North American Identities Beyond the Hyphen (Indiana University Press, 2004). She has published essays on Michael Ondaatje, on Joy Kogawa, on Jamaica Kincaid, on reading romances, on Exotica, and on Miss Saigon. Christl Verduyn is Professor of Canadian Studies and Canadian literature at Mount Allison University. She publishes on Canadian and Québécois women's writing and criticism, multiculturalism and minority writing, life writing, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature. Recent books include Identity, Community, Nation: Essays on Canadian Writing (with D. Schaub, 2002), Marian Engel: Life in Letters (with K. Garay, 2004), and Must Write: Edna Staebler's Diaries (2005). Her 1995 study Lifelines: Marian Engel's Writings received the Gabrielle Roy Book Prize.

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Book Synopsis Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts focuses on mothers as subjects and as writers who produce auto/biography, fiction, and poetry about maternity. International contributors examine the mother without child, with child, and in her multiple identities as grandmother, mother, and daughter. The collection examines how authors use textual spaces to accept, negotiate, resist, or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering and maternal roles, and how these texts offer alternative practices and visions for mothers. Further, it illuminates how textual representations both reflect and help to define or (re)shape the realities of women and families by examining how mothering and being a mother are political, personal, and creative narratives unfolding within both the pages of a book and the spaces of a life. The range of chapters maps a shift from the daughter-centric stories that have dominated the maternal tradition to the matrilineal and matrifocal perspectives that have emerged over the last few decades as the mother's voice moved from silence to speech. Contributors make aesthetic, cultural, and political claims and critiques about mothering and motherhood, illuminating in new and diverse ways how authors and the protagonists of the texts ""read"" their own maternal identities as well as the maternal scripts of their families, cultures, and nations in their quest for self-knowledge, agency, and artistic expression. Table of Contents Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures edited by Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O'Reilly Acknowledgments Introduction: Maternal Literatures in Text and Tradition: Daughter-Centric, Matrilineal, and Matrifocal Perspectives Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O'Reilly Part 1: Maternal Absence 1. Aberrant, Absent, Alienated: Reading the Maternal in Jane Urquhart's First Two Novels, The Whirlpool and Changing Heaven Myrl Coulter 2. Motherless Daughters: The Absent Mothers in Margaret Atwood Nancy Peled 3. Writing about Abusive Mothers: Ethics and Auto/biography Kate Douglas 4. ""Red Mother"": The Missing Mother Plot as Double Mystery in Louise Erdrich's Fiction Sheila Hassell Hughes 5. ""This was her punishment"": Jew, Whore, Mother in the Fiction of Adele Wiseman and Lilian Nattel Ruth Panofsky Part 2: Maternal Ambivalence 6. Eden Robinson's ""Dogs in Winter"": Parodic Extremes of Mothering Nathalie Foy 7. Subverting the Saintly Mother: The Novels of Gabrielle Poulin Kathleen Kellett-Betsos 8. ""Opaque with confusion and shame"": Maternal Ambivalence in Rita Dove's Poetry Elizabeth Beaulieu 9. Maternal Blitz: Harriet Lovatt as Postpartum Sufferer in Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child Denys Landry 10. We Need to Talk about Gender: Mothering and Masculinity in Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin Emily Jeremiah Part 3: Maternal Agency 11. Narrating Maternal Subjectivity: Memoirs from Motherhood Joanne S. Frye 12. The Motherhood Memoir and the ""New Momism"": Biting the Hand That Feeds You Andrea O'Reilly 13. ""I had to make a future, willful, voluble, lascivious"": Minnie Bruce Pratt's Disruptive Lesbian Maternal Narratives Susan Driver 14. Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature Gill Rye 15. But She's a Mom! Sex, Motherhood, and the Poetry of Sharon Olds Rita Jones 16. (Grand)mothering ""Children of the Apocalypse"": A Post-postmodern Ecopoetic Reading of Margaret Laurence's The Diviners Di Brandt Part 4: Maternal Communication 17. Colonialism's Impact on Mothering: Jamaica Kincaid's Rendering of the Mother--Daughter Split in Annie John Nicole Willey 18. Mother to Daughter: Muted Maternal Feminism in the Fiction of Sandra Cisneros Rita Bode 19. Cracking (Mother) India Tanja Stampfl 20. Asian American Mothering in the Absence of Talk Story: Obasan and Chorus of Mushrooms Anne-Marie Lee-Loy 21. Baby, Boo-Boo, and Bobs: The Matrilineal Auto/biographies of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, and Eleanor Lanahan Elizabeth Podnieks 22. Revelations and Representations: Birth Stories and Motherhood on the Internet Kim Hensley Owens Coda: ""Stories to Live By"": Maternal Literatures and Motherhood Studies Andrea O'Reilly Notes on the Contributors Index About the Contributors Elizabeth Beaulieu (PhD) is dean of the Core Division at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, where she oversees the design and implementation of a new interdisciplinary curriculum. She is the author or editor of Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered (1999), The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia (2003), and Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and about Women of Color (2006). Rita Bode is associate professor of English literature at Trent University in Oshawa, where she is currently serving as associate dean. Her main area of research is nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American and British literature. She has published on the maternal presence/absence in Melville's Moby-Dick and in the writings of L. M. Montgomery. Di Brandt holds a Canada Research Chair in Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at Brandon University, Manitoba. She is the author of numerous award-winning books of poetry, essays, an opera, and a novel. Her books on mothers and mothering include: questions I asked my mother (1987), mother, not mother (1992), Wild Mother Dancing: Maternal Narrative in Canadian Literature (1993), and So This Is the World & Here I Am in It (1997). Her website address is www.dibrandt.ca. Myrl Coulter (BA, MA, PhD University of Alberta) specializes in Canadian literature and writing practices. Her writing and research interests are feminism, maternal theory, literary nonfiction, and popular culture. Her work explores writing as a highly complex process influenced by social, cultural, political, and environmental forces. Kate Douglas is a senior lecturer in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Australian Studies at Flinders University (South Australia). She is the author of Trauma Texts (with Professor Gillian Whitlock) and Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory. Susan Driver is an assistant professor in communication studies at York University. She has written Queer Girls and Popular Culture and edited the collection Queer Youth Cultures. Nathalie Foy teaches Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. Her most recent project is an examination of motherhood in contemporary Canadian fiction. Joanne S. Frye is professor emerita of English and women's studies at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Author of Living Stories, Telling Lives and Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction, she has recently completed a memoir about her experiences as a single mother, titled Biting the Moon. Sheila Hassell Hughes is associate professor and Chair of English at the University of Dayton, Ohio. Born and raised in British Columbia, she earned her MA (English) from the University of Toronto and PhD (women's studies) from Emory University. Her research focuses on gender and religion in Louise Erdrich's work. Emily Jeremiah is a lecturer in German at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Troubling Maternity: Mothering, Agency, and Ethics in Women's Writing in German of the 1970s and 1980s. Her research interests include mothering, migration, gender, and sexuality. Rita M. Jones (PhD, Washington State University) is the director of the women's centre and affiliate faculty in women's studies at Lehigh University. She was formerly the director of women's studies at the University of Northern Colorado. Her research interests include motherhood in America and connections between feminist movement and literature. Kathleen Kellet-Betsos is associate professor in the Department of French and Spanish Languages and Literatures at Ryerson University, specializing in Franco-Canadian literature. She has published articles on authors such as Louise Maheux-Forcier, Anne Hébert, and Daniel Poliquin in various journals including Québec Studies and Studies in Canadian Literature. Denys Landry is a PhD candidate at the University of Montreal, where he also teaches English composition. His dissertation focuses on prostitution in the work of Tennessee Williams. His fields of interest include drama, American literature, gender studies, and popular culture (with special emphasis on Madonna). Anne-Marie Lee-Loy is assistant professor in the English Department at Ryerson University. Currently she is exploring how Asian Caribbean and Asian American experiences intersect. Her articles and essays have appeared in Asian Studies Review, Anthurium, The Arts Journal, and the collection The Chinese in the Caribbean. Her book Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Literature is forthcoming with Temple University Press. Andrea O'Reilly is associate professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University. She is editor of more than 12 books, including Feminist Mothering. O'Reilly is author of Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart and Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism, and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering. O'Reilly is director of the Association for Research on Mothering, the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, and Demeter Press. She is editor of the first ever encyclopedia on motherhood, forthcoming 2010. Kim Hensley Owens is assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island. She recently developed and taught a graduate seminar entitled Rhetorics of/and Reproduction. Her writing appears in such journals as Written Communication and Pedagogy. Kim is currently at work on a book project focusing on the rhetorics of childbirth. Ruth Panofsky is professor of English at Ryerson University, where she specializes in Canadian literature and culture. She is the author of The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman and At Odds in the World: Essays on Jewish Canadian Women Writers. Her volume of poetry, Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices, received the 2008 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Nancy Peled PhD, teaches literature at Haifa University and coordinates the academic English program at Oranim Academic College in northern Israel. Her research interests include modern female authors and stereotypic paradigms of expression in contemporary narratives. A former Canadian, she lives on a kibbutz where she raised her four children. Elizabeth Podnieks is an associate professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University. Her teaching and research interests include mothering, life writing, modernism, and popular/celebrity culture. She is the author of Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaï Nin and the co-editor of Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and Modernist Aesthetics. Gill Rye (Phd, University College, London) is Reader at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, and director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing. Publications include Reading for Change, Women's Writing in Contemporary France (co-edited), and Narratives of Mothering: Women's Writing in Contemporary France. Tanja Stampfl, a native of Italy, is assistant professor in the English Department at the University of the Incarnate Word. Her research and teaching centre on the convergence of race, gender, and identity in twentieth-century postcolonial and world literature. Nicole Willey is an associate professor of English at Kent State University Tuscarawas, where she teaches African American and other literatures. Her research interests include mothering, memoir, nineteenth-century American literature, and slave narratives. She wrote Creating a New Ideal of Masculinity for American Men: The Achievement of Sentimental Women Writers in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and is currently working on a collection about motherhood memoirs.

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Book Synopsis What are the fictions that shape Canadian engagements with the global? What frictions emerge from these encounters? In negotiating aesthetic and political approaches to Canadian cultural production within contexts of global circulation, this collection argues for the value of attending to narratorial, lyric, and theatrical conventions in dialogue with questions of epistemological and social justice. Using the twinned framing devices of crosstalk and cross-sighting, the contributing authors attend to how the interplay of the verbal and the visual maps public spheres of creative engagement today. Individual chapters present a range of methodological approaches to understanding national culture and creative labour in global contexts. Through their collective enactment of methodological crosstalk, they demonstrate the productivity of scholarly debate across differences of outlook, culture, and training. In highlighting convergences and disagreements, the book sharpens our understanding of how literary and critical conventions and theories operate within and across cultures. Trade Review``This stimulating collection of essays had its origins in a workshop entitled "Voice and Vision: Situating Canadian Culture Globally," held at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2008.... Thankfully...ample cross-references have made Crosstalk a far more unified collection than most conference-generated volumes. In the spirit of the book's title, the contributors have clearly engaged in a considerable amount of post-workshop dialogue and, thanks to this and the careful introduction, the collection does a fine job of answering the questions posed by the editors at the outset.... The success of this timely collection owes much to the work of the two editors.... Both have clearly put in long hours to ensure that the book's attempt to broaden the models used to debate Canadian imaginaries has become a significant intervention. The net result is impressive and one comes away from Crosstalk feeling that the multiple directions taken by the individual authors...have been long routes that have converged at a common crossroads.'' -- John Thieme -- Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2, Spring 2013`` Crosstalk is a challenging intervention that demonstrates the impact of globalization on debates about Canadian culture by highlighting the transformative role that various forms of creative dissonance and collaboration can play. The essays challenge accepted forms of national intelligibility by invoking the productive pedagogical disruption of transnational âcross-talk.â The global context that underscores this collection privileges circulation over emplacement, dialogue over the illusion of creative autonomy, and friction over the stultifying appeal of consensus within entrenched disciplinary frameworks. The international contributors produce an essay collection that is distinguished as much by its range as by its important treatment of emergent spheres of political engagement.'' -- Cynthia Sugars, University of Ottawa, editor (with Gerry Turcotte) of Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic (WLU Press, 2009)Table of Contents Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue, edited by Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák 1. Introduction: Negotiating Meaning in Changing Times Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák 2. ""Whirlwinds Coiled at My Heart"": Voice and Vision in a Writer's Practice"" Olive Senior Section One: Collaboration, Crosstalk, Improvisation 3. Voicing the Unforeseeable: Improvisation, Social Practice, Collaborative Research Ajay Heble and Winfried Siemerling 4. Epistemological Crosstalk: Between Melancholia and Spiritual Cosmology in David Chariandy's Soucouyant and Lee Maracle's Daughters Are Forever Daniel Coleman 5. Native Performance Culture, Monique Mojica, and the Chocolate Woman Workshops Ric Knowles 6. Collaboration and Convention in the Poetry of Pain Not Bread Alison Calder Section Two: Dialogism, Polyphony, Voice 7. Rejoinders in a Planetary Dialogue: J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Lloyd Jones et al. in Dialogue with Absent Texts Marta Dvořák 8. Not Just Representation: The Sound and Concrete Poetries of the Four Horsemen Frank Davey 9. Portraits of the Artist in Dionne Brand's What We All Long For and Madeleine Thien's Certainty Pilar Cuder-Domínguez 10. Unsettling Voices: Dionne Brand's Cosmopolitan Cities Sandra Regina Goulart Almeida 11. Questions of Voice, Race, and the Body in Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms and Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand Charlotte Sturgess Section Three: Space, Place, and Circulation 12. The Artialisation of Landscape in Jane Urquhart's The Whirlpool Claire Omhovère 13. Ghostly Voices and Arctic Blanks: From Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to Jane Urquhart's Changing Heaven Catherine Lanone 14. ""You must see to understand..."": Orientalist Clichés and Transformation in Robert Lepage's The Dragons' Trilogy Christine Lorre-Johnston 15. Diasporic Appropriations: Exporting South Asian Culture from Canada Chelva Kanaganayakam 16. Negotiating Belonging in Global Times: The Hérouxville Debates Diana Brydon Works Cited Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisWhat do literary dystopias reflect about the times? In Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase, contributors address this amorphous but pervasive genre, using diverse critical methodologies to examine how North America is conveyed or portrayed in a perceived age of crisis, accelerated uncertainty, and political volatility. Drawing from contemporary novels such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road , Neil Gaiman's American Gods , and the work of Margaret Atwood and William Gibson (to name a few), this book examines dystopian literature produced by North American authors between the signing of NAFTA (1994) and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (2011). As the texts illustrate, awareness of and deep concern about perceived vulnerabilitiesâends of water, oil, food, capitalism, empires, stable climates, ways of life, non-human species, and entire human civilizationsâhave become central to public discourseover the same period. By asking questions such as "What are the distinctive qualities of post-NAFTA North American dystopian literature?" and "What does this literature reflect about the tensions and contradictions of the inchoate continental community of North America?" Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase serves to resituate dystopian writing within a particular geo-social setting and introduce a productive means to understand both North American dystopian writing and its relevant engagements with a restricted, mapped reality.Trade Review``With an introduction and twenty-five separate essays, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase covers impressive ground.... The rewards of engaging the text as a whole are great.... The effect produced is one of cycling defamiliarization, a shuffling of imagined destinies and short-circuited hopes that comprise a dauntingly heterogeneous futurity.... Whether for teaching or research, I anticipate this collection will prove an invaluable reference, opening up new pathways and connections for those well versed in science fiction's dystopian variants as well as for those newly embarking down the pathways of the future.'' -- Brent Bellamy -- English Studies in Canada, 40.2-3, January 2015, 201503Not only does it have the coolest title, but Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase is also among the best-edited volumes on SF published last year ... As a study of North American texts, it addresses the continent's tri-lingual colonial heritage, including five essays on Spanish-language and two on French-language texts. Reasonably priced for its heft, rigorous in its approach, this volume offers an extended interrogation of how contemporary writers extrapolate the detrimental effects of neoliberalism, the ongoing vicissitudes of European colonization of the Americas, and the dehumanizing aspects of global capitalism. At the same time, it covers a staggering array of texts and writers; above all, like NAFTA itself, it seeks to erase the national borders that all too often artificially compartmentalize literary studies, ultimately decentring the US by forcing readers to rethink the equation US = America. -- Amy J. Ransom -- SFRA Review, 20150601Table of ContentsTable of Contents Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature , edited by Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee Introduction | Brett Josef Grubisic, Giséle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee PART I Altered States The Man in the Klein Blue Suit: Searching for Agency in William Gibson's Bigend Trilogy | Janine Tobeck The Cultural Logic of Post-Capitalism: Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Popular Dystopia | Carl F. l. Miller Logical Gaps and Capitalism's Seduction in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl | Sharlee Reimer âThe Dystopia of the Obsoleteâ: Lisa Robertson's Vancouver and the Poetics of Nostalgia | Paul Stephens Post-Frontier and Re-Definition of Space in Tropic of Orange | Hande Tekdemir Our Posthuman Adolescence: Dystopia, Information Technologies, and the Construction of Subjectivity in M.T. Anderson's Feed | Richard Gooding PART II Plastic Subjectivities Woman Gave Names to All the Animals: Food, Fauna, and Anorexia in Margaret Atwood's Dystopian Fiction | Annette Lapointe The End of Life as We Knew It: Material Nature and the American Family in Susan Beth Pfeffer's Last Survivors Series | Alexa Weik von Mossner âThe Treatment for Stirringsâ: Dystopian Literature for Adolescents | Joseph Campbell Imagining Black Bodies in the Future | Gregory Hampton Brown Girl in the Ring as Urban Policy | Sharon DeGraw PART III Spectral Histories Archive Failure? Cielos de la Tierra's Historical Dystopia | Zac Zimmer Love, War, and Mal de Amores : Utopia and Dystopia in the Mexican Revolution | MarÃ-a Odette Canivell Culture of Control/Control of Culture: Anne Legault's Récits de Médilhault | Lee Skallerup Bessette The Sublime Simulacrum: Vancouver in Douglas Coupland's Geography of Apocalypse | Robert McGill Neoliberalism and Dystopia in U.S.âMexico Borderlands Fiction | Lysa Rivera America and Books are âNever Going to Dieâ: Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story as a New York Jewish âUstopiaâ | Marleen S. Barr In Pursuit of an Outside: Art Spiegelman's In The Shadow of No Towers and the Crisis of the Unrepresentable | Thomas Stubblefield Homero Aridjis and Mexico's Eco-Critical Dystopia | Adam Spires PART IV Emancipating Genres Lost in Grand Central: Dystopia and Transgression in Neil Gaiman's American Gods | Robert Tally Which Way is Hope? Dystopia into the (Mexican) Borgian Labyrinth | Luis Gómez Romero Dystopia Now: Examining the Rach(a)els in Automaton Biographies and Player One | Kit Dobson The Romance of the Blazing World: Looking back from CanLit to SF | Owen Percy âIt's not power, it's sexâ: Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook and Nicole Brossard's Baroque at Dawn | Helene Staveley Another Novel is Possible: Muckraking in Chris Bachelder's U.S.! and Robert Newman's The Fountain at the Center of the World | Lee Konstantinou About the Contributors

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Book SynopsisReading Faulkner: Introductions to the First Thirteen Novels is a collection of lectures by Harvard University professor and nationally known novelist and biographer Richard Marius. Marius had been charged with the task of teaching an introductory course on Faulkner to undergraduates in 1996 and 1997. Combining his love of Faulkner's writing with his own experiences as an author and teacher, Marius produced a series of delightful lectures-which stand on their own as sparkling, well-rounded essays-that help beginning students in understanding the sometimes difficult work of this celebrated literary master. An expository treatment of Faulkner's major works, Reading Faulkner comprises essays that are arranged in roughly chronological order, corresponding to Faulkner's development as a writer. In a way sure to captivate the imagination of a new reader of Faulkner, Marius explicates themes in Faulkner's work, and he sheds light on the larger social history that marked Faulkner's literary production. In addition, Marius is a southerner who grew up a couple of generations after Faulkner and, like Faulkner, turned his own world into the setting for his fiction. This unique perspective, combined with Marius's thorough readings of the novels, grounded in basic Faulkner criticism, provides an engaging and accessible self-guided tour through Faulkner's career. Reading Faulkner is perfect for students from high school through the undergraduate level and will be enjoyed by general readers as well. Richard Marius (1933-1999) taught at the University of Tennessee before heading Harvard's expository writing program from 1978 to 1998. He was the author of Thomas More, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death, and four novels about his native East Tennessee. Nancy Grisham Anderson is an associate professor of English at Auburn University, Montgomery. She is the author of The Writer's Audience: A Reader for Composition and the editor of They Call Me Kay: A Courtship in Letters, and Wrestling with God: The Meditations of Richard Marius. She was a longtime friend of Richard Marius.

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Book SynopsisIn this groundbreaking book, Ken Parille seeks to do for nineteenth-century boys what the past three decades of scholarship have done for girls: show how the complexities of the fiction and educational materials written about them reflect the lives they lived. While most studies of nineteenth-century boyhood have focused on post-Civil War male novelists, Parille explores a broader archive of writings by male and female authors, extending from 1830-1885. Boys at Home offers a series of arguments about five pedagogical modes: play-adventure, corporal punishment, sympathy, shame, and reading. The first chapter demonstrates that, rather than encouraging boys to escape the bonds of domesticity, scenes of play in boys' novels reproduce values associated with the home. Chapter 2 argues that debates about corporal punishment are crucial sources for the culture's ideas about gender difference and pedagogical practice. In chapter 3, ""The Medicine of Sympathy,"" Parille examines the affective nature of mother-daughter and mother-son bonds, emphasizing the special difficulties that ""boy-nature"" posed for women. The fourth chapter uses boys' conduct literature and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women -the preeminent chronicle of girlhood in the century -to investigate not only Alcott's fictional representations of shame-centered discipline but also pervasive cultural narratives about what it means to ""be a man."" Focusing on works by Lydia Sigourney and Francis Forrester, the final chapter considers arguments about the effects that fictional, historical, and biographical narratives had on a boy's sense of himself and his masculinity. Boys at Home is an important contribution to the emerging field of masculinity studies. In addition, this provocative volume brings new insight to the study of childhood, women's writing, and American culture.

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Book SynopsisIn any age, humans wrestle with apparently inexorable forces. Today, we face the threat of global terrorism. In the aftermath of September 11, few could miss sensing that a great evil was at work in the world. In Flannery O’Connor’s time, the threats came from different sources—World War II, the Cold War, and the Korean conflict—but they were just as real. She, too, lived though a “time of terror.” The first major critical volume on Flannery O’Connor’s work in more than a decade, Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism explores issues of violence, evil, and terror—themes that were never far from O’Connor’s reach and that seem particularly relevant to our present-day setting. The fifteen essays collected here offer a wide range of perspectives that explore our changing views of violence in a post-9/11 world and inform our understanding of a writer whose fiction abounds in violence. Written by both established and emerging scholars, the pieces that editors Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo have selected offer a compelling and varied picture of this iconic author and her work. Included are comparisons of O’Connor to 1950s writers of noir literature and to the contemporary American novelist Cormac McCarthy; cultural studies that draw on horror comics of the Cold War and on Fordism and the American mythos of the automobile; and pieces that shed new light on O’Connor’s complex religious sensibility and its role in her work. While continuing to speak fresh truths about her own time, O’Connor’s fiction also resonates deeply with the postmodern sensibilities of audiences increasingly distant from her era—readers absorbed in their own terrors and sense of looming, ineffable threats. This provocative new collection presents O’Connor’s work as a touchstone for understanding where our culture has been and where we are now. With its diverse approaches, Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism will prove useful not only to scholars and students of literature but to anyone interested in history, popular culture, theology, and reflective writing.

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Book SynopsisBarbara Kingsolver's books have sold millions of copies. The Poisonwood Bible was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and her work is studied in courses ranging from English-as-a-second-language classes to seminars in doctoral programs. Yet, until now, there has been relatively little scholarly analysis of her writings. Seeds of Change: Critical Essays on Barbara Kingsolver, edited by Priscilla V. Leder, is the first collection of essays examining the full range of Kingsolver's literary output. The articles in this new volume provide analysis, context, and commentary on all of Kingsolver's novels, her poetry, her two essay collections, and her full-length nonfiction memoir, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Professor Leder begins Seeds of Change with a brief critical biography that traces Kingsolver's development as a writer. Leder also includes an overview of the scholarship on Kingsolver's oeuvre. Organised by subject matter, the 14 essays in the book are divided into three sections that deal with recurrent themes in Kingsolver's compositions: identity, social justice, and ecology. The pieces in this ground-breaking volume draw upon contemporary critical approaches—ecocritical, postcolonial, feminist, and disability studies—to extend established lines of inquiry into Kingsolver's writing and to take them in new directions. By comparing Kingsolver with earlier writers such as Joseph Conrad and Henry David Thoreau, the contributors place her canon in literary context and locate her in cultural contexts by revealing how she re-works traditional narratives such as the Western myth. They also address the more controversial aspects of her writings, examining her political advocacy and her relationship to her reader, in addition to exploring her vision of a more just and harmonious world. Fully indexed with a comprehensive works-cited section, Seeds of Change gives scholars and students important insight and analysis which will deepen and broaden their understanding and experience of Barbara Kingsolver's work.

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Book SynopsisFeaturing the work of twenty-five fiction writers and poets, this anthology is a captivating introduction to the finest of contemporary Appalachian literature. Here are short stories and poems by some of the region’s most dynamic and best-loved authors: Barbara Kingsolver, Ron Rash, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Morgan, Lisa Alther, and Lee Smith among others. In addition to compelling selections from each writer’s work, the book includes illuminating biographical sketches and bibliographies for each author.These works encompass a variety of themes that, collectively, capture the essence of Appalachia: love of the land, family ties, and the struggle to blend progress with heritage. Readers will enjoy this book not just for the innate value of good literature but also for the insights it provides into this fascinating area. This book of fiction is an enlightening companion to non-fiction overviews of the region, including the Encyclopedia of Appalachia and A Handbook to Appalachia: An Introduction to the Region, both published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2006. In fact the five sections of this book are the same as those of the Encyclopedia. Educators and students will find this book especially appropriate for courses in creative writing, Appalachian studies and Appalachian literature. Editor George Brosi’s foreword presents an historical overview of Appalachian Literature, while Kate Egerton and Morgan Cottrell’s afterword offers a helpful guide for studying Appalachian literature in a classroom setting.

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Book SynopsisFirst published in 1937, Thomas Wolfe’s The Lost Boy gives name to the theme of lost children that has permeated much of southern literature and provides a template for telling their stories. In Thomas Wolfe and Lost Children in Southern Literature, which grew out of many years of teaching The Lost Boy and other works of southern literature, Paula Gallant Eckard uses Wolfe’s novel as a starting point to trace thematic connections among contemporary southern novels that are comparably evocative in their treatment of lostness. Eckard explores six authors and their works: Fred Chappell’s I Am One of You Forever, Mark Powell’s Prodigals, Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, Bobbie Anne Mason’s In Country, Robert Olmstead’s Coal Black Horse, and Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill. Though each novel is unique and a product of its own time period, all the novels explored here are cast against the backdrop of the South during eras of conflict and change. Like The Lost Boy, these novels reflect a sense of history, a sense of loss associated with that history, and an innate love of story and narrative, as well as representations of work that historically have defined the lives of individuals and families throughout the South. In its artistic treatment of lostness, The Lost Boy creates a significant literary legacy. As Eckard demonstrates, that legacy continues in the form of these six contemporary authors who, in writing about the South, perpetuate Wolfe’s efforts as they also create or find the lost child in new ways.

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Book SynopsisHow often does a novel earn its author both the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to Harper Lee by George W. Bush in 2007, and a spot on a list of “100 best gay and lesbian novels”? Clearly, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning tale of race relations and coming of age in Depression-era Alabama, means many different things to many different people. In Mockingbird Passing, Holly Blackford invites the reader to view Lee’s beloved novel in parallel with works by other iconic American writers—from Emerson, Whitman, Stowe, and Twain to James, Wharton, McCullers, Capote, and others. In the process, she locates the book amid contesting literary traditions while simultaneously exploring the rich ambiguities that define its characters.Blackford finds the basis of Mockingbird’s broad appeal in its ability to embody the mainstream culture of romantics like Emerson and social reform writers like Stowe, even as alternative canons—southern gothic, deadpan humor, queer literatures, regional women’s novels—lurk in its subtexts. Central to her argument is the notion of “passing”: establishing an identity that conceals the inner self so that one can function within a closed social order. For example, the novel’s narrator, Scout, must suppress her natural tomboyishness to become a “lady.” Meanwhile, Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, must contend with competing demands of thoughtfulness, self-reliance, and masculinity that ultimately stunt his effectiveness within an unjust society. Blackford charts the identity dilemmas of other key characters—the mysterious Boo Radley, the young outsider Dill (modeled on Lee’s lifelong friend Truman Capote), the oppressed victim Tom Robinson—in similarly intriguing ways. Queer characters cannot pass unless, like the narrator, Miss Maudie, and Cal, they split into the “modest double life.”In uncovering To Kill a Mockingbird’s lively conversation with a diversity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and tracing the equally diverse journeys of its characters, Blackford offers a myriad of fresh insights into why the novel has retained its appeal for so many readers for over fifty years. At once Victorian, modern, and postmodern, Mockingbird passes in many canons.

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Book SynopsisToward the end of his career, Robert Penn Warren wrote, “It may be said that our lives are our own supreme fiction.” Although lauded for his writing in multiple genres, Warren never wrote an autobiography. Instead, he created his own “shadowy autobiography” in his poetry and prose, as well as his fiction and nonfiction. As one of the most thoughtful scholars on Robert Penn Warren and the literature of the South, Joseph Millichap builds on the accepted idea that Warren’s poetry and fiction became more autobiographical in his later years by demonstrating that that same progression is replicated in Warren’s literary criticism. This meticulously researched study reexamines in particular Warren’s later nonfiction in which autobiographical concerns come into play—that is, in those fraught with psychological crisis such as Democracy and Poetry.Millichap reveals the interrelated literary genres of autobiography, criticism, and poetry as psychological modes encompassing the interplay of Warren’s life and work in his later nonfiction. He also shows how Warren’s critical engagement with major American authors often centered on the ways their creative work intersected with their lives, thus generating both autobiographical criticism and the working out of Warren’s own autobiography under these influences. Millichap’s latest book focuses on Warren’s critical responses to William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Theodore Dreiser. In addition, the author carefully considers the black and female writers Warren assessed more briefly in American Literature: The Makers and the Making.Robert Penn Warren, Shadowy Autobiography, and Other Makers of American Literature presents the breadth of Millichap’s scholarship, the depth of his insight, and the maturity of his judgment, by giving us to understand that in his writing, Robert Penn Warren came to know his own vocation as a poet and critic—and as an American.

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Book SynopsisThough perhaps best known for his 1947 Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s final phase of poetry from the 1960s through the 1980s demonstrates a maturity of thought not previously seen in his work. By wrestling with the fundamental questions of language and articulation throughout his work in this period, Warren seeks to understand how the poet can “say the unsayable.”Poetic Creation is John C. Van Dyke’s plunge into this liminal moment in Warren’s career, exploring Warren’s poetry from his 1969 Audubon: A Vision through his later works. By reading this late poetry in light of several of Warren’s critical essays—most notably his work on Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner—Van Dyke traces the development of Warren’s struggle with language through his unrelenting attention to the act of poetic creation itself. Warren’s open confrontation with language is marked by a shift from utilizing language as a tool toward understanding it as a play of difference, locating his later poetic creation within a postmodern discourse on language and the unsayable. Questions about the power and limitations of language color Warren’s later poetry with an earnest struggle only hinted at in his earlier works.Poetic Creation reads Robert Penn Warren’s later poetry in a unique way that places his work at the heart of contemporary discourses on language and the unsayable. Van Dyke invites the reader to return to the poems themselves to participate in Warren’s pursuit of poetry’s unique power to speak the unsayable into the world.

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Book SynopsisBorn Elsie Dunn in 1893 Clarksville, Tennessee, Evelyn Scott lived a tumultuous life that took her to New York, Brazil, western Europe, and the Caribbean. She published twelve novels during her lifetime and was a notable literary figure in the 1920s and 1930s. Published in 1937 alongside her penultimate novel, Background in Tennessee is an autobiographical work devoted to Scott's Tennessee birthplace, her family's history, and her broad view of Southern history. Her wide-ranging exploration of the south interweaves Scott's personal history with discussions of colonial settlement of the region, local leadership of Clarksville and the larger Nashville area, and race relations. In this new edition, Bill Hardwig provides an analytical introduction that guides the reader through Scott's intricate and winding exploration of early twentieth-century Tennessee and her own past. He notes at once Scott's ambivalence toward her native South and yet the nostalgia with which she recounts personal memories. Complicated yet critical to a full understanding of Evelyn Scott and her literary legacy, this edition of Background in Tennessee makes available an important voice in Tennessee's literary history for a new generation.

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Book SynopsisEvelyn Scott’s first novel, The Narrow House, depicts a family stricken by dysfunctional domesticity. Revolving around troubled members of the Farley family, Scott exposes notions of romantic love, longing, and the image of the Southern belle as damaging, unrealistic constructs, all against the backdrop of a seemingly normal middle-class existence that in previous decades had been idealized in Southern writing. Published to high praise when it appeared in 1921, The Narrow House vaulted Scott to literary celebrity in her day.In this new critical edition, Mary E. Papke contextualizes Scott’s first and possibly best writing effort with an astute introduction that discusses Scott and her contemporaries, the work’s importance to the genre of the novel, and the small but ongoing reclamation of Scott’s place in literary history. Completely updated and formatted for a modern readership, this critical edition of The Narrow House is sure to find its way into classrooms and onto bookshelves.

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Book SynopsisMargaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada is the first book to examine how Laurence addresses decolonization and nation building in 1950s Somalia and Ghana, and 1960s and 1970s English Canada.Focusing on Laurence's published works as well as her unpublished letters not yet discussed by critics, the book articulates how Laurence and her characters are poised between African colonies of occupation during decolonization and the settler-colony of English Canada during the implementation of Canadian multiculturalism. Laurence's Canadian characters are often divided subjects who are not quite members of their ancestral ""imperial"" cultures, yet also not truly ""native"" to their nation. Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada shows how Laurence and her characters negotiate complex tensions between ""self"" and ""nation,"" and argues that Laurence's African and Canadian writing demonstrates a divided Canadian subject who holds significant implications for both the individual and the country of Canada.Bringing together Laurence's writing about Africa and Canada, Davis offers a unique contribution to the study of Canadian literature. The book is an original interpretation of Laurence's work and reveals how she displaces the simple notion that Canada is a sum total of different cultures and conceives Canada as a mosaic that is in flux and constituted through continually changing social relations.Table of Contents Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada by Laura K. Davis Introduction: Writing and Region Part One: Writing About Africa Chapter One: Conflicts of Culture in The Prophet's Camel Bell and This Side Jordan Chapter Two: Toward Cross-Cultural Understanding: Margaret Laurence's Africa in The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories Part Two: Writing About Canada Chapter Three: Community and the Canadian Nation in The Stone Angel and A Bird in the House Chapter Four: Narrating Nation in The Diviners Conclusion: Essays, Letters, and Politics Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisCatching the Torch examines contemporary novels and plays written about Canada's participation in World War I. Exploring such works as Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers, Jack Hodgins's Broken Ground, Kevin Kerr's Unity (1918), Stephen Massicotte's Mary's Wedding, and Frances Itani's Deafening, the book considers how writers have dealt with the compelling myth that the Canadian nation was born in the trenches of the Great War.In contrast to British and European remembrances of WWI, which tend to regard it as a cataclysmic destroyer of innocence, or Australian myths that promote an ideal of outsize masculinity, physical bravery, and white superiority, contemporary Canadian texts conjure up notions of distinctively Canadian values: tolerance of ethnic difference, the ability to do one's duty without complaint or arrogance, and the inclination to show moral as well as physical courage. Paradoxically, Canadians are shown to decry the horrors of war while making use of its productive cultural effects.Through a close analysis of the way sacrifice, service, and the commemoration of war are represented in these literary works, Catching the Torch argues that iterations of a secure mythic notion of national identity, one that is articulated via the representation of straightforward civic and military participation, work to counter current anxieties about the stability of the nation-state, in particular anxieties about the failure of the ideal of a national ""character.Trade Review"Using McCrae as a point of entry, Gordon proceeds to argue that the works of literature she examines, including Jack Hodgin's Broken Ground , Frances Itani's Deafening , Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road , and Vern Thiessen's Vimy , among others, paradoxically disparage the mass destruction and loss of the First World War while simultaneously insisting on its cultural significance. As a result, instead of questioning the historical record, contemporary literary responses to the First World War, according to Gordon, endorse a national myth that 'promotes the collective by simply enlarging the category of the homogenous,' a tendency that is propelled by an anxiety about the instability of Canadian national identity. As a whole, Gordon's analysis is insightful and compelling." -- Alicia Fahey -- Canadian Literature" Catching the Torch , which examines numerous recently published novels and plays about Canadians' contributions to the First World War, underscores that war does not always take place during specific time periods or on specifically militarized fronts, but may require redefinition of temporal limits and settings to take into account the tales of traumatized veterans or, as was the case after the Great War, victims of influenza. It further insists that the stories of those previously excised from the canon, such as aboriginals, French Canadians, nurses, women volunteers serving on home fronts and battlefronts, and artists, are valid and valuable. Offering numerous insights into the ways contemporary Canadian writers commemorate their nation's participation in the Great War, this thoroughly researched and cogently argued book promises to be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of literature and history." -- Donna Coates, University of Calgary, editor (with Sherrill Grace) of Canada and the Theatre of War, vols. I and II"The work is ... highly convincing in its analysis of how depictions of the war function to shape concepts of the nation and authorial resistance to essentialist understandings of national characters.... The book's opening literature review will be helpful for many scholars, and, in its narrative development of critical understandings of the way in which the First World War figures in contemporary Canadian literature, Catching the Torch is unlikely to be superseded any time soon." -- James Gifford, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Vancouver -- BC StudiesTable of Contents Catching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian Literary Responses to World War I by Neta Gordon Acknowledgements Introduction: Contemporary Canadian First World War Narratives: Remembering Canada's Best Self Chapter One: The Dead Speak: Considering the Use of Prosopopoeia in Dancock's Dance, Mary's Wedding, and The Deep Chapter Two: The War and Concepts of Nation in Jack Hodgins's Broken Ground and Frances Itani's Deafening Chapter Three: Abandoning the Archivist: Commemorating the War Insider and Outsider in the World War One Novels of Alan Cumyn and Jane Urquhart Chapter Four: Other Canadians: The Representation of Alternate Versions of the War in Vimy, Unity (1918), Three Day Road, and A Secret Between Us Conclusion: Representations of the First World War and Wishing Notes Biblography Index

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