"With more than fifty period photos and documents, countless letters and a foreword by E. D. Blodgett, F. P. Grove in Europe and Canada represents the definitive biography of the writer Northrop Frye called a "Canadian Dreiser." This work will prove an invaluable resource for scholars in Canadian and German literature, comparative literature, modernism, publishing history and translation studies."--BOOK JACKET.
Much of the scholarship on twentieth-century Canadian literature has argued that English-Canadian fiction was plagued by backwardness and an inability to engage fully with the movement of modernism that was so prevalent in British and American fiction and poetry. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction re-evaluates Canadian literary culture to posit that it has been misunderstood because it is a distinct genre, a regional form of the larger international modernist movement. Examining literary magazines, manifestos, archival documents, and major writers such as Frederick Philip Grove, Morley Callaghan, and Raymond Knister, Colin Hill identifies a 'modern realism' that crosses regions as well as urban and rural divides. A bold reading of the modern-realist aesthetic and an articulate challenge to several enduring and limiting myths about Canadian writing, Modern Realism in English- Canadian Fiction will stimulate important debate in literary circles everywhere.
Provides the first history of the North American farm novel, a genre which includes John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, and Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine. From John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese to Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine, some of the most famous works of American, English Canadian, and French Canadian literature belongto the genre of the farm novel. In this volume, Florian Freitag provides the first history of the genre in North America from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century to its apogee in French Canada around the middleof the twentieth. Through surveys and selected detailed analyses of a large number of farm novels written in French and English, Freitag examines how North American farm novels draw on the history of farming in nineteenth-centuryNorth America as well as on the national self-conceptions of the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, portraying farmers as national icons and the farm as a symbolic space of the American, English Canadian, and FrenchCanadian nations. Turning away from traditional readings of farm novels within the frameworks of regionalism and pastoralism, Freitag takes a comparative look at a genre that helped to spatialize North American national dreams. Florian Freitag is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany.
W. J. Keith has chosen to ignore utterly both the `popular' at the one extreme (Robert Service, Lucy Maud Montgomery) as well as the `avant-garde' at the other (bpnichol, Anne Carson) in favour of those authors whose style lends itself to the simple pleasure of reading, and to that end Keith dedicates his history to `all those -- including those of the general reading public whose endangered status is much lamented -- who recognize and celebrate the dance of words.'
In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of Canadian authors were revealed to have faked the identities that made them famous. What is extraordinary about these writers is that they actually "became," in everyday life, characters they had themselves invented. Many of their works were simultaneously fictional and autobiographical, reflecting the duality of their identities. In Literary Impostors, Rosmarin Heidenreich tells the intriguing stories, both the "true" and the fabricated versions, of six Canadian authors who obliterated their pasts and re-invented themselves: Grey Owl was in fact an Englishman named Archie Belaney; Will James, the cowboy writer from the American West, was the Quebec-born francophone Ernest Dufault; the prairie novelist Frederick Philip Grove turned out to be the German writer and translator Felix Paul Greve. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Onoto Watanna, and Sui Sin Far were the chosen identities of three mixed-race writers whose given names were, respectively, Sylvester Long, Winnifred Eaton, and Edith Eaton. Heidenreich argues that their imposture, in some cases not discovered until long after their deaths, was not fraudulent in the usual sense: these writers forged new identities to become who they felt they really were. In an age of proliferating cyber-identities and controversial claims to ancestry, Literary Impostors raises timely questions involving race, migrancy, and gender to illustrate the porousness of the line that is often drawn between an author's biography and the fiction he or she produces.
This volume presents an Anglo-American research matrix radiating in various directions and transcending traditional academic boundaries and modes of perception. It offers a diverse and multi-facetted approach, covering topics from freemasonry to the documentaries of Michael Moore, from the Scottish best seller Trainspotting to German-American literature in the US, from anarchical traces in British novels to the influence of Laurence Sterne on Philipp Emanuel Bach, from postcolonial fiction to intercultural awareness, from Canadian literary beginnings to Casablanca Revisited. This collection of thirteen contributions reflects the scope, vitality and relevance of English and American Studies inside and outside the university.
