History, Literature and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies
History, Literature and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies

Author: Alison Calder

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2005-05-16

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0887553249

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The Canadian Prairie has long been represented as a timeless and unchanging location, defined by settlement and landscape. Now, a new generation of writers and historians challenge that perception and argue, instead, that it is a region with an evolving culture and history. This collection of ten essays explores a more contemporary prairie identity, and reconfigures "the prairie" as a construct that is non-linear and diverse, responding to the impact of geographical, historical, and political currents. These writers explore the connections between document and imagination, between history and culture, and between geography and time.The subjects of the essays range widely: the non-linear structure of Carol Shield's The Stone Diaries; the impact of Aberhart's Social Credit, Marshall McLuhan, and Mesopotamian myth on Robert Kroetsch's prairie postmodernism; the role of document in long prairie poems; the connection between cultural tourism and heritage; the theme of regeneration in Margaret Laurence's Manawaka writing; the influence of imagination on geography in Thomas Wharton's Icefields; and the effects on an alpine climber of pre-WWII ideological concepts of time and individualism.

The Prairie West: Historical Readings
The Prairie West: Historical Readings

Author: R. Douglas Francis

Publisher: University of Alberta

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 776

ISBN-13: 9780888642271

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This collection of 35 readings on Canadian prairie history includes overview interpretation and current research on topics such as the fur trade, native peoples, ethnic groups, status of women, urban and rural society, the Great Depression and literature and art.

The Canadian Prairies
The Canadian Prairies

Author: Gerald Friesen

Publisher:

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13:

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Professor Gerald Friesen of the University of Manitoba presents an authoritative interpretation of the Canadian prairie experience, beginning in 1600.

The Black Prairie Archives
The Black Prairie Archives

Author: Karina Vernon

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2020-02-19

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13: 1771123753

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The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology recovers a new regional archive of “black prairie” literature, and includes writing that ranges from work by nineteenth-century black fur traders and pioneers, all of it published here for the first time, to contemporary writing of the twenty-first century. This anthology establishes a new black prairie literary tradition and transforms inherited understandings of what prairie literature looks and sounds like. It collects varied and unique work by writers who were both conscious and unconscious of themselves as black writers or as “prairie” people. Their letters, recipes, oral literature, autobiographies, rap, and poetry- provide vivid glimpses into the reality of their lived experiences and give meaning to them. The book includes introductory notes for each writer in non-specialist language, and notes to assist readers in their engagement with the literature. This archive and its supporting text offer new scholarly and pedagogical possibilities by expanding the nation’s and the region’s archives. They enrich our understanding of black Canada by bringing to light the prairies' black histories, cultures, and presences.

Prairie Fairies
Prairie Fairies

Author: Valerie J. Korinek

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2018-01-01

Total Pages: 527

ISBN-13: 0802095313

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Prairie Fairies draws upon a wealth of oral, archival, and cultural histories to recover the experiences of queer urban and rural people in the prairies. Focusing on five major urban centres, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton, and Calgary, Prairie Fairies explores the regional experiences and activism of queer men and women by looking at the community centres, newsletters, magazines, and organizations that they created from 1930 to 1985.? Challenging the preconceived narratives of queer history, Valerie J. Korinek argues that the LGBTTQ community has a long history in the prairie west, and that its history, previously marginalized or omitted, deserves attention. Korinek pays tribute to the prairie activists and actors who were responsible for creating spaces for socializing, politicizing, and organizing this community, both in cities and rural areas. Far from the stereotype of the isolated, insular Canadian prairies of small towns and farming communities populated by faithful farm families, Prairie Fairies historicizes the transformation of prairie cities, and ultimately the region itself, into a predominantly urban and diverse place.

Making it Home
Making it Home

Author: Deborah Keahey

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 1998-12-01

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0887550606

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Traditional approaches to Prairie literature have focussed on the significance of "the land" in attempts to make a place into a home. The emphasis on the importance of landscape as a defining feature ignores the important roles played by other influences brought to the land such as history, culture, gender, ethnicity, religion, community, family, and occupation. Deborah Keahey considers over 70 years of Canadian Prairie literature, including poetry, autobiography, drama, and fiction. The 17 writers range from the well-established, like Martha Ostenso and Robert Kroetsch, to newer writers, like Ian Ross and Kelly Rebar. Through their works, she asks whether the Prairies are a physical or a political creation, whether "home" is made by what you bring with you, or what you find when you arrive, and she incorporates the influences and effects far beyond landscape to understand what guides the "home-making" process of both the writers and their creations. Her study acknowledges that "home" is a complicated concept, and making a place into a home place is a complicated process. Informed by current linguistic, feminist, postcolonial, and cultural theory, Keahey explores these concepts in depth and redefines our understanding of place, home, and the relationship between them.

The Black Prairies: History, Subjectivity, Writing
The Black Prairies: History, Subjectivity, Writing

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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This dissertation contributes to the fields of Canadian literature and black cultural studies in Canada a new regional archive of literature, the black prairie archive. It unearths and brings critical attention, for the first time, to the unknown history and cultural production of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black pioneer writers on the Canadian prairies, and connects this historical literature to the work of contemporary black prairie authors. The black prairie archive thus brings together one hundred and thirty five years of black writing on the prairies, from 1873-2008. Theorized in terms of what Pierre Nora calls a lieu de mémoire, or a site of memory, the black prairie archive operates as a site of collective black-inflected memory on the prairies. It retrieves memory of a repressed but important black history and culture and brings it into consciousness of the present historical moment. In its ability to remember what has been repressed and forgotten, the archive functions as a literary counterhistory, calling attention to the aggressive exclusions and erasures involved in the historical, social, critical, and legal construction of the prairies as an ideological--not a geographic--space in relation to race. In addition to bringing a new regional black literature to light, this study offers the black prairie archive as a discursive formation that points to a new methodology, a methodology capable of addressing the limits of certain critical debates in Canada. Specifically, it offers a strategy for theorizing black belonging and territoriality in terms other than the problematic metaphors of black indigeneity; for reading the regional particularities of black prairie literature and subjectivity; and for overcoming the impasse at the centre of black Canadian cultural studies, represented by the debate between Rinaldo Walcott and George Elliott Clarke, regarding which model, the archival or diasporic, best articulates the space of black Canada. The.

Toward Defining the Prairies
Toward Defining the Prairies

Author: Robert Wardhaugh

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2001-04-30

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0887553885

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New ways of thinking about literature and history have radically changed how we think about or even "define" a region like the Prairie West. In fact, the very concept of "defining" has come into question by new theoretical approaches and it may now seem a hopeless endeavour. But the process of defining can be just as important as the actual production of a definition.Toward Defining the Prairies highlights recent approaches to thinking about the Prairie West. Bounded by pieces from well-known historian Gerald Friesen and Governor-General's Award-winning writer Robert Kroetsch, these 13 essays are as diverse as the region itself. In their examination of different aspects of Prairie history, literature, climate, society, culture, and identity, they help to provide a new understanding of this place and of the complexities of its definition.