Internationally acclaimed novelist Aritha van Herk takes geography and fiction and creates of them a geografictione�a fiction mapped on the lines of geography, a geography following the course of fiction. A new reading of Tolstoy's tragic heroine Anna Karenina and a sojourn at Ellesmere Island come together, and the North becomes an incomparably beautiful place, a living, unread, feminine landscape.
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.
In Challenging Canada Gabriele Helms examines novels by Jeannette Armstrong, Joy Kogawa, Daphne Marlatt, Sky Lee, Aritha van Herk, Thomas King, and Margaret Sweatman. As resistance literature, these novels question the idea of a homogeneous Canadian culture based on the idea of "a peaceable kingdom." Helms shows how narrative techniques can contribute to or impede a text's challenges to hegemonic discourses and social injustices; novels become valuable sources for cultural studies because cultural experiences are translated into and meanings are produced by their narrative forms.Challenging Canada is the first book-length study to bring a Bakhtinian approach to bear on Canadian literature. Gabriele Helms develops a cultural narratology to argue that the contemporary Canadian novels in English considered in this book challenge dominant constructions of Canada from positions of difference and resistance, inscribing previously oppressed and silenced voices through dialogic relations. She makes Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism amenable to textual analysis and problematizes its ideological forces by emphasizing elements of struggle and conflict. Challenging Canada rejects dialogism as a normative liberal pluralism and understands the inequality between voices as historically and socially constructed.
The concept of 'wilderness' as a foundational idea for environmentalist thought has become the subject of vigorous debates. Myths of Wilderness in Contemporary Narratives offers a taxonomy of the forms that wilderness writing has taken in Australian and Canadian literature, re-emphasizing both country's origins as colonies.
A re-evaluation of regionalism in Canadian and American writing, A Sense of Place provides a comparative approach to the issue within a continental framework. The contributors to this collection-including Frank Davey, Marjorie Pryse, and Jonathan Hart-look at a broad range of writers. They explore regionalism on both sides of the border in light of the central political, cultural, literary, and theoretical debates of our times.
This innovative study explores diverse aspects of Canadian and European identity on the information highway and reaches beyond technical issues to confront and explore communication, culture and the culture of communication. Published in English.
This book of critical rural geography breaks new ground by drawing attention to sex and sexualities outside the metropolis. It explores sexualities and sexual experiences in a variety of rural and marginal spaces with international contributions from a wide range of disciplines. These include: literary and cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, geography, history and law. Among the topics uncovered are: * a lesbian in rural England * sexual life in rural Wales * sexuality in rural South Africa * scandal in the American South: sex, race and politics * nature and homosexuality in literature * Derry/Londonderry as a sexual space * how 'country folk' are sexualised in popular culture.
Canada and the Idea of North examines the ways in which Canadians have defined themselves as a northern people in their literature, art, music, drama, history, geography, politics, and popular culture. From the Franklin Mystery to the comic book superheroine Nelvana, Glenn Gould's documentaries, the paintings of Lawren Harris, and Molson beer ads, the idea of the north has been central to the Canadian imagination. Sherrill Grace argues that Canadians have always used ideas of Canada-as-North to promote a distinct national identity and national unity. In a penultimate chapter - "The North Writes Back" - Grace presents newly emerging northern voices and shows how they view the long tradition of representing the North by southern activists, artists, and scholars. With the recent creation of Nunavut, increasing concern about northern ecosystems and social challenges, and renewed attention to Canada's role as a circumpolar nation, Canada and the Idea of North shows that nordicity still plays an urgent and central role in Canada at the start of the twenty-first century.
The North American entertainment industry is rapidly consolidating, and new modes of technological delivery challenge Canadian content regulations. An understanding of how Canadian culture negotiates its rapport with American genres has never been more timely. West/Border/Road offers an interdisciplinary analysis of contemporary Canadian manifestations of three American genres: the western, the border, and the road. It situates close readings of literary, film, and television narratives from both English Canada and Quebec within a larger context of Canadian generic borrowing and innovation. Katherine Ann Roberts calls upon canonical works in Canadian studies, theories of genre, and a wide range of scholarship from border studies, cultural studies, and film studies to examine how genre is appropriated and sometimes reworked and how these cultural narratives engage with discourses of contemporary Canadian nationhood. The author elucidates Guy Vanderhaeghe’s rewriting of the codes of the historical western to include the trauma of Aboriginal peoples, Aritha van Herk’s playful spoof on American western iconography, the politics and perils of the representation of the Canada-US border in CBC-produced crime television, and how the road genre inspires and constrains the Québécois and Canadian road movie. A reminder of the power and limitations of American genres, West/Border/Road provides a nuanced perspective on Canadian engagement with cultural forms that may be imported but never foreign.
