This book charts the significant changes in contemporary Canada's literary profile since the mid-1990s, within a context of the new national rhetoric of multiculturalism. By looking closely at a representative range of fictions in English by women from a variety of ethnocultural backgrounds, Howells examines the complexities embedded within Canadian identity. What does 'Refiguring Identities' mean for these writers, given their individual agendas and the multiple affiliation of any woman's identity construction? All these writers are engaged in rewriting history across generation, and Howells argues that woman's fiction negotiates new possibilities for cultural change, introducing more heterogeneous narratives of identity in multi-cultural Canada.
This book revives and revitalises the literary Gothic in the hands of contemporary women writers. It makes a scholarly, lively and convincing case that the Gothic makes horror respectable, and establishes contemporary women’s Gothic fictions in and against traditional Gothic. The book provides new, engaging perspectives on established contemporary women Gothic writers, with a particular focus on Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. It explores how the Gothic is malleable in their hands and is used to demythologise oppressions based on difference in gender and ethnicity. The study presents new Gothic work and new nuances, critiques of dangerous complacency and radical questionings of what is safe and conformist in works as diverse as Twilight (Stephenie Meyer) and A Girl Walks Home Alone (Ana Lily Amirpur), as well as by Anne Rice and Poppy Brite. It also introduces and critically explores postcolonial, vampire and neohistorical Gothic and women’s ghost stories.
A landmark in the literary works of women of color in Canada. This book confirms the growing stature of some emerging and outstanding scholars. Contributors examine themes of race, class, gender/sexuality, displacement and alienation.
This volume offers challenging assessments of the reconfigurations that have shaped Anglophone and Francophone Canadian literatures in the last decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on the pursuit of an ever-elusive «Canadianness» in literary texts, it documents the astonishing range of Canadian diasporic identities that have recently emerged in the Canadian literary landscape. The contributors to this volume boldly transgress the widely held critical assumptions of postcolonialism in their examination of the literary representations of contemporary Canada's many «Others». Ce volume rassemble nombre d'analyses innovatrices des reconfigurations qui ont caractérisé les littératures canadiennes anglophones et francophones durant les dernières décennies du vingtième siècle. Tout en se concentrant sur la quête de l'insaisissable «Canadianité» en littérature, l'ouvrage démontre l'étonnante diversité des identités diasporiques qui ont récemment émergé dans le paysage littéraire canadien. Les contributeurs de ce volume transgressent audacieusement les certitudes généralement acquises du postcolonialisme afin de mieux décrire les représentations littéraires des nombreux «Autres» du Canada actuel.
Master short story writer and novelist Lisa Moore brings her talents to The Penguin Book of Contemporary Canadian Women's Short Stories, spanning the last two decades of the twentieth century to the present. An enthralling and irresistible collection of twenty-two established writers and talented new voices who attest to the richness and continued popularity of the short story. The authors featured include Margaret Atwood, Bonnie Burnard, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, and Carol Shields, among others.
Ian McEwan once said, 'When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.' This book explains how precious fiction is to contemporary women readers, and how they draw on it to tell the stories of their lives. Female readers are key to the future of fiction and—as parents, teachers, and librarians—the glue for a literate society. Women treasure the chance to read alone, but have also gregariously shared reading experiences and memories with mothers, daughters, grandchildren, and female friends. For so many, reading novels and short stories enables them to escape and to spread their wings intellectually and emotionally. This book, written by an experienced teacher, scholar of women's writing, and literature festival director, draws on over 500 interviews with and questionnaires from women readers and writers. It describes how, where, and when British women read fiction, and examines why stories and writers influence the way female readers understand and shape their own life stories. Taylor explores why women are the main buyers and readers of fiction, members of book clubs, attendees at literary festivals, and organisers of days out to fictional sites and writers' homes. The book analyses the special appeal and changing readership of the genres of romance, erotica, and crime. It also illuminates the reasons for British women's abiding love of two favourite novels, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Taylor offers a cornucopia of witty and wise women's voices, of both readers themselves and also writers such as Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Katie Fforde, and Sarah Dunant. The book helps us understand why—in Jackie Kay's words—'our lives are mapped by books.'
First published in 1987, this is an introductory study of the most widely read Canadian women novelists of the 1970s and 1980s. At its centre lies the question of how the search for a distinctive cultural identity relates to the need for a national cultural identity in the post-colonial era. Coral Ann Howells argues that Canadian women’s fiction throughout the period of study represents how the Canadian cultural identity exceeds its geographical limits, and those traditional structures of patriarchal authority need revision if women’s alternative views are to be taken into account. Including short biographical sketches and a complete list of the books published by the authors under discussion, writers examined include Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Margaret Laurence.
This volume takes up the challenge of Canadian women's writing in its diversity, in order to examine the terms on which subjectivity, in its social, political and literary dimensions, emerges as discourse. Work from writers as diverse as Dionne Brand, Hiromi Goto and Margaret Atwood, among others, are studied both in their specific dimensions and through the collective focus of cultural and textual revision which characterizes Canadian writing in the feminine. Current theorizing on the postcolonial imaginary is brought to bear in the interests of forging or unpacking those links which tie the Self to culture. As such, Redefining the Subject sets out to discover the limits of the aesthetic in its encounter with the political: the figures and designs which envisage textual reimaginings as statements of a contemporary Canadian reality.
