Mindscapes of Montreal


Book Description

This innovative study of the Montreal novel in French looks at how imaginary and material landscapes come together to produce a city of neighbourhoods.




Photogenic Montreal


Book Description

The agency of photographs is a recurrent concern within the context of the city. Whether found in architectural records, social documentary, photojournalism, or artistic practice, photographic objects are embedded in urban contestation, aesthetically charged by artists, reinserted into social histories, and mobilized to imagine a future city. Photogenic Montreal takes a question initially posed by heritage debates – what does photography preserve? – and creates a rich conversation about the agency of the human actors before and behind the camera, and of the medium itself. The interplay of archives and activisms structures the book. Photographs that appear to be sealed off in newspapers, storage rooms, or archives accrue new meaning when they cross the threshold back into social spaces and circulate anew. It is through the reactivation of archival photographs that submerged traces of urban experience are discovered, and alternate histories of Montreal can be recounted. Multiple forms of activism and artistic expression complement this archival work. Beginning in the 1960s, community-minded and heritage groups responded to the tensions arising from urban reconstruction, gentrification, and the erasure of neighbourhoods; this activism also left its photographic traces. Attentive to the still-changing face of the city’s architecture, neighbourhoods, and street life, Photogenic Montreal participates in debates about who the city belongs to, who speaks on its behalf, and how to picture its past and present.




Equivocal City


Book Description

The study of Montreal as a specific location in French and English writings has long been subordinated to the demands of linguistically divided and politically contentious narratives about national development. In this cross-linguistic study, Patrick Coleman models an inclusive and post-national literary history of the city itself. Tracing a sequence of moments in the emergence of the Montreal novel from World War II to the turbulent 1960s, Equivocal City offers close readings of fourteen key works of fiction, focusing on the inner dynamic of their construction as well as the unexpected convergences and contrasts in the narrative structures they adopt and the aesthetic perspective they seek to achieve. Critically sophisticated but accessibly written, this book gives a sympathetic account of how writers in both languages struggled to give integrated artistic expression to their experience of a city that was still linguistically compartmentalized and culturally insecure. By analyzing the interplay between story and narrative form, the book explores what French and English novelists could – and could not – imagine about the Montreal they sought to portray. From the responsible realism of Hugh MacLennan and Gabrielle Roy to the fractious phantasmagorias of Jacques Ferron and Leonard Cohen, Equivocal City traces the evolution of the Montreal novel with the aim of retrieving a shareable literary past.




The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies provides a comprehensive overview of recent research and a range of innovative ways of thinking literature and geography together. It maps the history of literary geography and identifies key developments and debates in the field. Written by leading and emerging scholars from around the world, the 38 chapters are organised into six themed sections, which consider: differing critical methodologies; keywords and concepts; literary geography in the light of literary history; a variety of places, spaces, and landforms; the significance of literary forms and genres; and the role of literary geographies beyond the academy. Presenting the work of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, each section offers readers new angles from which to view the convergence of literary creativity and geographical thought. Collectively, the contributors also address some of the major issues of our time including the climate emergency, movement and migration, and the politics of place. Literary geography is a dynamic interdisciplinary field dedicated to exploring the complex relationships between geography and literature. This cutting-edge collection will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in both Geography and Literary Studies, and scholars interested in the evolving interface between the two disciplines.




The French Atlantic


Book Description

The French Atlantic is a compelling and timely contribution to ongoing debates about nationhood, culture, and “Frenchness” that have come to define France and its diaspora in light of the diplomatic fracas surrounding the Iraq war and other mass cultural events. With interdisciplinary navigation of fields nearly as diverse as the locations he explores, Bill Marshall considers the cultural history of seven different French Atlantic spaces—from Quebec to the southern Caribbean to North Atlantic territory and back to metropolitan France—in this groundbreaking study of the Atlantic world.




Landscapes and Landmarks of Canada


Book Description

The image of the “land” is an ongoing trope in conceptions of Canada—from the national anthem and the flag to the symbols on coins—the land and nature remain linked to the Canadian sense of belonging and to the image of the nation abroad. Linguistic landscapes reflect the multi-faceted identities and cultural richness of the nations. Earlier portrayals of the land focused on unspoiled landscape, depicted in the paintings of the Group of Seven, for example. Contemporary notions of identity, belonging, and citizenship are established, contested, and legitimized within sites and institutions of public culture, heritage, and representation that reflect integration with the land, transforming landscape into landmarks. The Highway of Heroes originating at Canadian Forces Base Trenton in Ontario and Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site in Québec are examples of landmarks that transform landscape into a built environment that endeavours to respect the land while using it as a site to commemorate, celebrate, and promote Canadian identity. Similarly in literature and the arts, the creation of the built environment and the interaction among those who share it is a recurrent theme. This collection includes essays by Canadian and international scholars whose engagement with the theme stems from their disciplinary perspectives as well as from their personal and professional experience—rooted, at least partially, in their own sense of national identity and in their relationship to Canada.




Popular Music and the Poetics of Self in Fiction


Book Description

The volume explores the various intersections and interconnections of the self and popular music in fiction; it examines questions of musical taste and identity construction across decades, spaces, social groups, and cultural contexts, covering a wide range of literary and musical genres.




The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies


Book Description

Over the past decades, the growing interest in the study of literature of the city has led to the development of literary urban studies as a discipline in its own right. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides a methodical overview of the fundamentals of this developing discipline and a detailed outline of new directions in the field. It consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new debates in the field. The three focal issues are key concepts and genres of literary urban studies; a reassessment and critique of classical urban studies theories and the canon of literary capitals; and methods for the analysis of cities in literature. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to the city in literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on city literature. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com




The Undiscovered Country


Book Description

In this sequence of essays, Ian Angus engages with themes of identity, power, and the nation as they emerge in contemporary English Canadian philosophical thought, seeking to prepare the groundwork for a critical theory of neoliberal globalization. The essays are organized into three parts. The opening part offers a nuanced critique of the Hegelian confidence and progressivism that has come to dominate Canadian intellectual life. Through an analysis of the work of several prominent Canadian thinkers, among them Charles Taylor and C. B. Macpherson, Angus suggests that Hegelian frames of reference are inadequate, failing as they do to accommodate the fact of English Canada's continuing indebtedness to empire. The second part focuses on national identity and political culture, including the role of Canadian studies as a discipline, adapting its critical method to Canadian political culture. The first two parts culminate in the positive articulation, in Part 3, of author's own conception, one that is at once more utopian and more tragic than that of the first two parts. Here, Angus develops the concept of locative thought--the thinking of a people who have undergone dispossession, "of a people seeking its place and therefore of a people that has not yet found its place."




Global Realignments and the Canadian Nation in the Third Millennium


Book Description

With aggravating global realignments, the dynamics and contradictions of a world (risk) society are looming ahead in the unfolding Third Millennium while globalization is gaining further steam. To this bears witness a potpourri of often frightening geopolitical, social, cultural, economic, demographic, ecological and other changes and challenges that gives substantial cause for concern about getting lost in a 'trans-whatever' sea of turmoil, uncertainty and indeterminateness. The resultant current backlash or rather renewed interest in the nation as a collective identity-establishing category is an effort to gain some anchorage in ever more disintegrating times and proves especially those theoreticians wrong for whom the whole concept of the nation has worn off since long. In 16 resourceful essays internationally distinguished Canadian and European experts from a variety of fields take a fresh look at these developments by focussing on one of the most fascinating multicultural and multifaceted nation(-state)s in the world, Canada in the Third Millennium. The topics they discuss include, among others, Canada's difficult dissociation from Europe and the USA; the reframing and reclaiming of the Canadian story; the role of nations within the nation; the efforts to transcend the nation; pending geopolitical and (geo)ecological crises; glocal issues and new wars. Collectively, the entries prove that Canada is a very progressive nation and opens up new perspectives for other collectives currently reassessing their national identities in a global environment. Thus, the book reaches well beyond the study of 'Canada' and will be valuable to academics, professionals, teachers and students of various disciplines coping with the issue at stake as well as the general reader.