Womens Writing In Canada

Collection of essays focusing on issues of ethnicity, race, and gender.

Spanning the period from the Massey Commission to the present and reflecting on the media of print, film, and song, this study attends to the burgeoning energy of women writers across genres. It explores how their work interprets our national story. The questioning, disruptive feminist practice of their fiction, filmmaking, poetry, song-writing, drama, and non-fiction reveals the tensions of colonial society at the same time as it transforms cultural life in Canada. Women’s Writing in Canada resurrects foremothers who were active before and after the mid-century – Ethel Wilson, Gabrielle Roy, Gwen Pharis Ringwood, Dorothy Livesay, and P.K. Page – as well as such forgotten writers as Grace Irwin, Patricia Blondal, and Edna Jaques. Its breadth extends to the contemporary voices and influences of novelists Tracey Lindberg and Heather O’Neill, poets Marilyn Dumont and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, playwrights Hannah Moscovitch and Anna Chatterton, and filmmakers Sarah Polley and Mina Shum. Writing for children as well as memoirs, autobiographies, comic books, and cookbooks illustrate the wide and impressive range of women’s talents.

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.

A search for the sense of identity in the works of fourteen Canadian women writers

Diversity and Change in Early Canadian Women’s Writing is a collection of nine essays, thematically arranged, dedicated to the works of women writing between 1828 and 1914. It is for all those readers who were certain that there had to be diverse, interesting, socially relevant voices in early Canadian women’s writing. It is, equally, for sceptics, who will find that early Canada is not bereft of women writers, or of writing of substance. When Lorraine McMullen published the collection of essays Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers in 1990, she considered the field in its infancy. As keen as literary historians and critics have been to assess the contributions of women to Canada’s early cultural scene, this collection moves beyond listing which women were writing in early Canada, and brings together a study of their journalistic and literary works. For a nation caught up in projects to enhance nation-building, and concerned with the development of its national literature, the essays reconnect with early literary works by women. Eighteen years after McMullen’s, this collection shows the progression along the path that hers initiated. Working with theories of genre, gender, socio-politics, literature, history, and drama, the essayists make cases not only for the women writing, but also for the literary voices they created to work for diversity and social change in Canada.

Cover -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Indigenous Women's Writing, Storytelling, and Law -- Chapter One: Gendering the Politics of Tribal Sovereignty: Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978) and Ceremony (1977) -- Chapter Two: The Legal Silencing of Indigenous Women: Racine v. Woods (1983) and In Search of April Raintree (1983) -- Chapter Three: Colonial Governmentality and GenderViolence: State of Minnesota v. Zay Zah (1977) and The Antelope Wife (1998) -- Chapter Four: Land Claims, Identity Claims: Manypenny v. United States (1991) and Last Standing Woman (1997) -- Conclusion: For an Indigenous-Feminist Literary Criticism -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

Buttressed by a wealth of new, collaborative research methods and technologies, the contributors of this collection examine women's writing in Canada, past and present, with 11 essays in English and 5 in French. Regenerations was born out of the inaugural conference of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory held at the Canadian Literature Centre, University of Alberta, and exemplifies the progress of radically interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and publishing efforts surrounding Canadian women's writing. Researchers and students interested in Canadian literature, Québec literature, women's writing, literary history, feminist theory, and digital humanities scholarship should definitely acquaint themselves with this work. Contributors: Nicole Brossard, Susan Brown, Marie Carrière, Patricia Demers, Louise Dennys, Cinda Gault, Lucie Hotte, Dean Irvine, Gary Kelly, Shauna Lancit, Mary McDonald-Rissanen, Lindsey McMaster, Mary-Jo Romaniuk, Julie Roy, Susan Rudy, Chantal Savoie, Maïté Snauwaert, Rosemary Sullivan, and Sheena Wilson.

An anthology of contemporary Native American women's writing including short stories, poems, essays, and memoirs by writers in Canada's prairie provinces and western Northwest Territories. Introduction by Gloria Bird, preface by Emma La Rocque. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

"Marlene Goldman posits intriguing connections between the act of map-making, postmodern theory, and female identity in this study of the experimental works of five Canadian women writers: Intertidal Life by Audrey Thomas, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World by Susan Swan, Ana Historic by Daphne Marlatt, The Whirlpool by Jane Urquhart and the fictions of Aritha van Herk."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Institut f r Anglistik/Amerikanistik), 64 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Canada has always been associated with its landscape, with a vast and inviolate nature, including prairies, forests with innumerable lakes, idyllic mountain ranges and the Arctic barrens in the far north. With an area of almost 10 million square kilometers, Canada is the second largest country in the world, but with only 31 million people living there and a population density of 3,2 inhabitants per square kilometer, it is also the less populated.1 The theme of nature and wilderness has also been reflected throughout Canadian literary tradition. As Canadian author Aritha van Herk notes, " t]he impact of landscape on artist and artist on landscape is unavoidable" (1992, 139). Adopting the northern concepts of early explorers and settlers, most literature about the Canadian wilderness has been written by male authors. For a long time, the Canadian North served as background for historical romances and adventure stories. The response to the landscape was often very negative, the wilderness was described as being hostile and dangerous. Parallel to that image, the landscape was portrayed in female terms, as being innocent, inviolate and beautiful - the Canadian North appeared as a femme fatale. Especially in its beginnings, Canadian literature was strongly influenced by its American and British predecessors and the early writers reinforced the myth of the Canadian North. In the early twentieth century, the North was mainly a place of retreat for the fictive heroes of the South who went from the city to the wilderness to find themselves. One of the most famous texts of this time is Frederick Philip Grove's autobiography In Search of Myself (1946). His journey to the North became a synonym for the search of the own self.