Anne of Tim Hortons


Book Description

Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature is a study of the work of over twenty contemporary Atlantic-Canadian writers that counters the widespread impression of Atlantic Canada as a quaint and backward place. By examining their treatment of work, culture, and history, author Herb Wyile highlights how these writers resist the image of Atlantic Canadians as improvident and regressive, if charming, folk. After an introduction that examines the current place of the region within the Canadian federation and the broader context of economic globalization, Anne of Tim Hortons explores how Atlantic-Canadian writers present a picture of the region that is much more complex and less quaint than the stereotypes through which it is typically viewed. Through the works of authors such as Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, George Elliott Clarke, Rita Joe, Frank Barry, Alistair MacLeod, and Bernice Morgan, among others, the book looks at the changing (and increasingly corporate) nature of work, the cultural diversification and subversive self-consciousness of Atlantic-Canadian literature, and Atlantic-Canadian writers’ often revisionist approach to the region’s history. What these writers are engaged in, the book contends, is a kind of collective readjustment of the image of the region. Rather than a marginal place stranded outside of time, Atlantic Canada in these works is very much caught up in contemporary economic, political, and cultural developments, particularly the broad sweep of economic globalization.




Anne around the World


Book Description

What makes Anne of Green Gables an international, time-honoured classic? International audiences have described reading L.M. Montgomery's most celebrated novel as an experience in enchantment. Balancing criticism and celebration, Jane Ledwell and Jean Mitchell bring together essays that consider the sources of the wonder that Montgomery's work inspires. The popular appeal of Montgomery's classic is undeniable, but the reasons for its worldwide resonance are less obvious. From a range of perspectives, the contributors to Anne around the World focus on the numerous themes the novel raises, showcasing why it has charmed readers across the globe - from Iran to Australia, and from Sweden to Japan. Essays consider issues of class, race, and colonial history, discuss Anne's place in children's literature, her passion for writing, and the ways in which L.M. Montgomery and her red-haired protagonist are celebrated by legions of fans. Featuring contributions from many international writers, Anne around the World traces the meaning and influence of a story that spread far from its place of origin on a small Canadian island to distant and culturally diverse places. Contributors include Yoshiko Akamatsu (Notre Dame Seishin University, Japan), Doreley Carolina Coll (University of Prince Edward Island), Brooke Collins-Gearing (School of Humanities and Social Science, New South Wales), Margaret Doody (Notre Dame University), Elizabeth R. Epperly (emeritus, University of Prince Edward Island), Barbara Carman Garner (Carleton University), Caroline E. Jones (Texas State University-San Marcos), Paul Keen (Carleton University), Jane Ledwell, Jennie MacDonald (PhD, University of Denver), Susan Meyer (Wellesley College), Jean Mitchell, Mary Henley Rubio (emeritus, University of Guelph), Gholamreza Sami (Sussex University), Wendy Shilton (University of Prince Edward Island), Cynthia Sugars (University of Ottawa), Tanfer Emin Tunc (Hacettepe University, Turkey), Åsa Warnqvist (Stockholm University, Sweden), Elizabeth Hillman Waterston (emeritus, University of Guelph), and Budge Wilson (author).




Reading between the Borderlines


Book Description

Is Superman Canadian? Who decides, and what is at stake in such a question? How is the Underground Railroad commemorated differently in Canada and the United States, and can those differences be bridged? How can we acknowledge properly the Canadian labour behind Hollywood filmmaking, and what would that do to our sense of national cinema? Reading between the Borderlines grapples with these questions and others surrounding the production and consumption of literary, cinematic, musical, visual, and print culture across the Canada-US border. Discussing a range of popular as well as highbrow cultural forms, this collection investigates patterns of cross-border cultural exchange that become visible within a variety of genres, regardless of their place in any arbitrarily devised cultural hierarchy. The essays also consider the many interests served, compromised, or negated by the operations of the transnational economy, the movement of culture's "raw material" across nation-state borders in literal and conceptual terms, and the configuration of a material citizenship attributed to or negotiated around border-crossing cultural objects. Challenging the oversimplification of cultural products labelled either "Canadian" or "American," Reading between the Borderlines contends with the particularities and complications of North American cultural exchange, both historically and in the present.




On the Other Side(s) of 150


Book Description

On the Other Side(s) of 150 explores the different literary, historical and cultural legacies of Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations. It asks vital questions about the ways that histories and stories have been suppressed and invites consideration about what happens once a commemorative moment has passed. Like a Cubist painting, this modality offers a critical strategy by which also to approach the volume as dismantling, reassembling, and re-enacting existing commemorative tropes; as offering multiple, conditional, and contingent viewpoints that unfold over time; and as generating a broader (although far from being comprehensive) range of counter-memorial performances. The chapters in this volume are thus provisional, interconnected, and adaptive: they offer critical assemblages by which to approach commemorative narratives or showcase lacunae therein; by which to return to and intervene in ongoing readings of the past from the present moment; and by which not necessarily to resolve, but rather to understand the troubled and troubling narratives of the present moment. Contributors propose that these preoccupations are not a means of turning away from present concerns, but rather a means of grappling with how the past informs or is shaped to inform them; and how such concerns are defined by immediate social contexts and networks.




Re-exploring Canadian Space


Book Description

A variety of productions and representations of Canadian identities are the central theme that runs through this book. The different contributions explore imagined spaces by considering Canadian music, poetry and novels; they engage with political space by addressing various ways in which the people of Canada have made claims to different regions in the distant and recent past; and they address lived spaces, and their actual and symbolic meanings. It is an unusual book as it encompasses the writings by those studying the arts and literature as well as writings by social scientists, and it includes both English and French-speaking scholars. The richness that can be found in this multitude of perspectives and approaches to exploring Canadian space is characteristic of the way in which Canadian Studies is practiced nowadays. It is therefore an appropriate volume to celebrate 20 years of Canadian Studies in the Netherlands.




The Routledge Introduction to Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Canadian Poetry


Book Description

When asked the question "what is the power of poetry?," writer Ian Williams said "poetry punctures the surface." Williams' statement—that poetry matters and that it does something—is at the heart of this book. Building from this core idea that poetry perforates the everyday to give greater range to our lives and our thinking, the practical and pedagogical aim of this book is twofold: the first aim is to provide students with an introduction to the key cultural, political, and historical events that inform twentieth- and twenty-first-century Canadian poetry; and to familiarize those same readers with poetic movements, trends, and forms of the same time period. This book addresses the aesthetic and social contexts of Canadian poetry written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: it models for its readers the critical and theoretical discourses needed to understand the contexts of literary production in Canada. Put differently, readers need a sense of the "where" and "how" of poetic production to help situate them in the "what" of poetry itself. In addition to offering a historically contextualized overview of the significant movements, developments, and poets of this time period, this book also familiarizes readers with key moments of reflection and rupture, such as the effects of economic and ecological crisis, global conflicts, and debates around appropriation of culture. This book is built on the premise that poetry in Canada does not happen outside of political, social, and cultural contexts.




Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador


Book Description

The Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador is a mythologized place that resonates with tragic adventure, polar expeditions and Grand Banks fishing; a real and imagined geography with an incredible artistic output that calls for critical discussion. This book examines the diversity of this province’s literature and culture, taking into consideration the expertise of scholars and writers who have first-hand knowledge of its unique context. Chapters on history, travel, fiction, autobiography, poetry, theatre, storytelling, filmmaking, and the visual arts provide an up-to-date survey across a broad range of artistic endeavours, as well as close readings of selected texts. The questions that fill the pages of Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador arise from the awareness its contributors have of historically shared experiences, but also of shared delusions, and their essays provoke contemplation beyond the labels local/global, Newfoundlander/Come-From-Away. Aboriginal histories and writing come to the foreground in this panoramic view that balances descriptions of mainstream, vernacular and Indigenous cultural productions. The final chapter is organized as a multi-voiced interview which serves as a supplement to the academic essays. Here, themes are revisited and personalized as several writers express their feelings about what it means to be a Newfoundlander and an artist. As such, this book will encourage dialogue about Newfoundland and Labrador’s literary and artistic achievements within the international community of readers and researchers.




The Fiddlehead Moment


Book Description

For many Canadians, the small province of New Brunswick on Canada's scenic east coast is "a nice place to visit but no place to live," plagued for generations by outmigration and economic stagnation. In The Fiddlehead Moment Tony Tremblay challenges this potent stereotype by showcasing the work of a group of literary modernists who set out to change the meaning of New Brunswick in the national lexicon. Alfred Bailey, Desmond Pacey, Fred Cogswell, and a formidable group of local poets and cultural workers - collectively, New Brunswick's Fiddlehead School - sought to restore New Brunswick's literary reputation by adapting avant-garde modernist practices to the contours of the province, opening it to the contemporary world while also encouraging writers to make it their subject. The result was a non-urban form of modernism that was as responsive to technical innovation as to the human geographies of New Brunswick. By placing New Brunswick writers and critics at the forefront of Canadian literature in the midcentury modernist project, Tremblay adds an important new chapter to our understanding of Canadian modernism. The Fiddlehead Moment is the first critical examination of this group's considerable influence. Whether through Bailey's ethnomethodology, Pacey's critical ordering, or Cogswell's editorial eclecticism in the Fiddlehead magazine and Fiddlehead Poetry Books, authors in New Brunswick, Tremblay argues, had a profound impact on writing in Canada.




Nights below Foord Street


Book Description

According to its licence plates, tourist brochures, and commercials, Nova Scotia is Canada's Ocean Playground – an idyllic vacation spot brimming with traditional cultural experiences. Yet this picturesque and welcoming ad-friendly façade overlooks the province's history of industrial development, the impact of resource extraction on its landscape, and the effects of its painful and still unfinished period of deindustrialization. Recounting Nova Scotia's struggle to come to terms with its extractive and industrial past, Nights below Foord Street focuses on the spaces ignored by the province's annual Doers and Dreamers tourist guide. Drawing on literary texts by Lynn Coady, Leo McKay, Sarah Mian, and Jonathan Campbell, popular television shows such as Trailer Park Boys, and films including Blackbird, Cottonland, and Poor Boy's Game, Peter Thompson examines the ways in which contemporary authors, filmmakers, and artists explore the lingering consequences of the boom-and-bust cycles of mining and manufacturing. As he demonstrates, these narratives depict a legacy of environmental exploitation, pollution, intermittent disasters, and labour violence left behind by the industrial era, all of which contrast starkly with the romantic and nostalgic portrait of Nova Scotia's industrial heritage promoted in museums, monuments, and tourist sites. As Donald Trump and other populist politicians appeal to working-class nostalgia and international attention converges on environmental racism in northern Nova Scotia, Nights below Foord Street intervenes into debates over the cultural and social effects of the post-industrial economy.




Margin of Interest


Book Description

As Shane Neilson writes in Margin of Interest, ‘Maritime poetry is the sum of what’s come before, a unique history, and yes, a unique place.’ In Margin of Interest Neilson examines representation, identity, power, and the politics of literary history, from the creative traditions of the Mi’kmaq to the work of young poets today. He pays due homage to iconic Maritime writers (Milton Acorn, Alden Nowlan, George Elliott Clarke), shines a critical spotlight on lesser-known masters from the region (Travis Lane, Wayne Clifford) and provides a glimpse inside the ‘diverse ecosystem’ of poets under 40 writing in or about the Maritimes (Rebecca Thomas, Lucas Crawford, El Jones). He also combats the prejudices so often applied to writers from Atlantic Canada—stigma associated with mental illness, rigid gendering, vernacular language and even poetic form—and advocates for a long-overdue reappropriation of the regionalist stance, as well as a proper recognition of the region’s writers and their contribution to the Canadian literary landscape. For as Neilson wisely asks, ‘What’s the matter with taking pride in any kind of regional identity that we articulate?’