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The Borders of Nightmare: The Fiction of John Richardson
By Michael Hurley. 1992
John Richardson was Canada's first native-born poet-novelist and 'The Father of Canadian Literature.' Michael Hurley offers the first detailed account…
of Richardson's fiction rather than of his life or sociological importance. Hurley makes a convincing case for Richardson as an important early cartographer of the Canadian imagination and the originator of 'Southern Ontario Gothic.' He explores Richardson's influence on James Reaney, Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Christopher Dewdney, Frank Davey, and Marian Engel. Arguing that Wacousta and The Canadian Brothers hold central places in our literature, Hurley shows how these two works established a set of boundaries that our national literary discourse has largely kept hidden. Focusing on the protean concept of the border in the fiction of this man from the periphery, The Borders of Nightmare underlines the importance of boundaries, margins, shifting edges, and the coincidence of equally matched opposites in necessary balance to both Richardson and subsequent writers. In an age of postmodernism these novels – riddled as they are with discontinuities, paradoxes, ambiguity, and unresolved dualities that problematize the whole notion of a stable, coherent national or personal identity – anticipate and define a number of concerns that preoccupy us today.Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events
By Ryan Netzley. 2016
What’s new about the apocalypse? Revelation does not allow us to look back after the end and enumerate pivotal turning…
points. It happens in an immediate encounter with the transformatively new. John Milton’s and Andrew Marvell’s lyrics attempt to render the experience of such an apocalyptic change in the present. In this respect they take seriously the Reformation’s insistence that eschatology is a historical phenomenon. Yet these poets are also reacting to the Regicide, and, as a result, their works explore very modern questions about the nature of events, what it means for a significant historical occasion to happen. Lyric Apocalypse argues that Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics challenge any retrospective understanding of events, including one built on a theory of revolution. Instead, these poems show that there is no “after” to the apocalypse, that if we are going to talk about change, we should do so in the present, when there is still time to do something about it. For both of these poets, lyric becomes a way to imagine an apocalyptic event that would be both hopeful and new.Practicing the City: Early Modern London on Stage
By Nina Levine. 2016
In late-sixteenth-century London, the commercial theaters undertook a novel experiment, fueling a fashion for plays that trafficked in the contemporary…
urban scene. But beyond the stage’s representing the everyday activities of the expanding metropolis, its unprecedented urban turn introduced a new dimension into theatrical experience, opening up a reflexive space within which an increasingly diverse population might begin to “practice” the city. In this, the London stage began to operate as a medium as well as a model for urban understanding. Practicing the City traces a range of local engagements, onstage and off, in which the city’s population came to practice new forms of urban sociability and belonging. With this practice, Levine suggests, city residents became more self-conscious about their place within the expanding metropolis and, in the process, began to experiment in new forms of collective association. Reading an array of materials, from Shakespeare and Middleton to plague bills and French-language manuals, Levine explores urban practices that push against the exclusions of civic tradition and look instead to the more fluid relations playing out in the disruptive encounters of urban plurality.Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, Volume III (Second Edition)
By Northrop Frye, Desmond Pacey, Claude Bissell, Carl Klinck, Alfred Bailey, Roy Daniells. 1976
Hailed as a landmark in Canadian literary scholarship when it was originally published in 1965, the Literary History of Canada…
is now being reissued, revised and enlarged, in three volumes. This major effort of a large group of scholars working in the field of English-language Canadian literature provides a comprehensive, up-to-date reference work. It has already proven itself invaluable as a source of information on authors, genres, and literary trends and influences. It represents a positive attempt to give a history of Canada in terms of writings which deserve attention because of significant thought, form, and use of language. Volume 3 has been newly written for this edition of the History, and covers the years from about 1960 to 1974. The contributors to this volume are Claude Bissell, Desmond Pacey, Lauriat Lane, jr, Michael S. Cross, Thomas A. Goudge, John Webster Grant, John H. Chapman, William E. Swinton, Henry B. Mayo, Malcolm Ross, Brandon Conron, Clara Thomas, Sheila A. Egoff, John Ripley, William H. New, George Woodcock, and Northrop Frye.The Poetry of Francisco de la Torre
By John Hughes. 1982
Francisco de la Torre has long been praised as an outstanding poet in the mould of Garcilaso de la Vega…
and his simplicity of style and soft, gentle, Arcadian environment of his poetry have been emphasized. In this volume Professor Hughes attempts to define more accurately the position of Francisco de la Torre's verse in the evolution of Spanish poetry in the sixteenth century, revealing that Torre's vision of the pastoral world and his poetic language show him to be a transitional poet of considerable quality and substance and not merely an imitator of Garcilaso. Hughes demonstrates that while some of Torre's poetry follows a general pastoral pattern, his descriptions are characterized by a sense of movement through a shifting perspective and that even in poems with a traditional pastoral setting, the descriptions sometimes negate the pastoral qualities. The author also shows that Torre, rather than looking back towards Garcilaso and his contemporaries, is already anticipating – especially in his stylistic technique and in his view of nature – the attitude of the seventeenth century.The U.E.: A Tale of Upper Canada
By William Kirby. 1973
A long narrative written in rhyming couplets and presented in 12 cantos, The U.E. tells the story of Walwyn and…
his sons, Ethwald and Eric, who come to Upper Canada from Yorkshire in the late 1820s, and the United Empire Loyalist Ranger John and his sons, Herman, Hendrick, Simcoe, and Hugh. The poem reaches its climax during the rebellions of 1837-38 when Hugh returns from the United States as a leader of a band of Americans intent on helping the rebels in order “to ourselves annex our glorious gains, / The Forest Land and all that it contains!”Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot
By Hannes Opelz, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. 2016
Published posthumously, Ending and Unending Agony is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s only book entirely devoted to the French writer and essayist Maurice…
Blanchot (1907–2003). The place of Blanchot in Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought was both discreet and profound, involving difficult, agonizing questions about the status of literature, with vast political and ethical stakes. Together with Plato, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, Blanchot represents a decisive crossroads for Lacoue-Labarthe’s central concerns. In this book, they converge on the question of literature, and in particular of literature as the question of myth—in this instance, the myth of the writer born of the autobiographical experience of death. However, the issues at stake in this encounter are not merely autobiographical; they entail a relentless struggle with processes of figuration and mythicization inherited from the age-old concept of mimesis that permeates Western literature and culture. As this volume demonstrates, the originality of Blanchot’s thought lies in its problematic but obstinate deconstruction of precisely such processes. In addition to offering unique, challenging readings of Blanchot’s writings, setting them among those of Montaigne, Rousseau, Freud, Winnicott, Artaud, Bataille, Lacan, Malraux, Leclaire, Derrida, and others, this book offers fresh insights into two crucial twentieth-century thinkers and a new perspective on contemporary debates in European thought, criticism, and aesthetics.Bibliographie critique du roman canadien-francaise, 1837-1900
By David Hayne, Marcel Tirol. 1968
Cette bibliographie constitue la liste la plus complete jusqu'a ce jour des romans canadiens-francais publies avant 1900. Les compilateurs presentent…
une description exacte et detaillee de chaque edition publiee en volume separe, avec indication des bibliotheques ou un exemplaire de l'edition est conserve. La description est suivie d'une liste des etudes et articles qui ont ete consacres au roman en question, et dans la plupart des cas, de note bibliographiques ou biographiques. Un index des noms d'auteurs et des titres facilite la consultation des 1100 références que contient le volume. A l'heure actuelle les etudes de litterature canadienne-française sont en pleine expansion non seulement dans les universites canadiennes mais aussi dans de nombreux centres aux Etats-Unis. Par consequent cet ouvrage de reference, fruit de longues annees des recherches consacrees a l'histoire du roman canadien-francais, rendra de grands services aux professeurs et aux etudiants, aux bibliothecaires et bibliographes, aux libraires et aux amateurs du livre canadien.Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism
By Sara Guyer. 2016
Reading with John Clare argues that at the heart of contemporary biopolitical thinking is an insistent repression of poetry. By…
returning to the moment at which biopolitics is said to emerge simultaneously with romanticism, this project renews our understanding of the operations of contemporary politics and its relation to aesthetics across two centuries. Guyer focuses on a single, exemplary case: the poetry and autobiographical writing of the British poet John Clare (1793–1864). Reading Clare in combination with contemporary theories of biopolitics, Guyer reinterprets romanticism’s political legacies, specifically the belief that romanticism is a direct precursor to the violent nationalisms and redemptive environmentalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Guyer offers an alternative account of many of romanticism’s foundational concepts, like home, genius, creativity, and organicism. She shows that contemporary critical theories of biopolitics, despite repeatedly dismissing the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of power as a culpable ideology, emerge within the same rhetorical tradition as the romanticism they denounce. The book thus compels a rethinking of the biopolitical critique of poetry and an attendant reconsideration of romanticism and its concepts.In Dante's Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition
By Danielle Callegari, John Freccero, Melissa Swain. 2015
Waking to find himself shipwrecked on a strange shore before a dark wood, the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy realizes…
he must set his sights higher and guide his ship to a radically different port. Starting on the sand of that very shore with Dante, John Freccero begins retracing the famous voyage recounted by the poet nearly 700 years ago. Freccero follows pilgrim and poet through the Comedy and then beyond, inviting readers both uninitiated and accomplished to join him in navigating this complex medieval masterpiece and its influence on later literature. Perfectly impenetrable in its poetry and unabashedly ambitious in its content, the Divine Comedy is the cosmos collapsed on itself, heavy with dense matter and impossible to expand. Yet Dante’s great triumph is seen in the tiny, subtle fragments that make up the seamless whole, pieces that the poet painstakingly sewed together to form a work that insinuates itself into the reader and inspires the work of the next author. Freccero magnifies the most infinitesimal elements of that intricate construction to identify self-similar parts, revealing the full breadth of the great poem. Using this same technique, Freccero then turns to later giants of literature— Petrarch, Machiavelli, Donne, Joyce, and Svevo—demonstrating how these authors absorbed these smallest parts and reproduced Dante in their own work. In the process, he confronts questions of faith, friendship, gender, politics, poetry, and sexuality, so that traveling with Freccero, the reader will both cross unknown territory and reimagine familiar faces, swimming always in Dante’s wake.Figures of a Changing World: Metaphor and the Emergence of Modern Culture
By Harry Berger. 2016
Figures of a Changing World offers a dramatic new account of cultural change, an account based on the distinction between…
two familiar rhetorical figures, metonymy and metaphor. The book treats metonymy as the basic organizing trope of traditional culture and metaphor as the basic organizing trope of modern culture. On the one hand, metonymies present themselves as analogies that articulate or reaffirm preexisting states of affairs. They are guarantors of facticity, a term that can be translated or defined as fact-like-ness. On the other hand, metaphors challenge the similarity they claim to establish, in order to feature departures from preexisting states of affairs. On the basis of this distinction, the author argues that metaphor and metonymy can be used as instruments both for the large-scale interpretation of tensions in cultural change and for the micro-interpretation of tensions within particular texts. In addressing the functioning of the two terms, the author draws upon and critiques the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Roman Jakobson, Christian Metz, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Edmund Leach, and Paul de Man.Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish
By Jeffrey Sacks. 2016
In a series of exquisite close readings of Arabic and Arab Jewish writing, Jeffrey Sacks considers the relation of poetic…
statement to individual and collective loss, the dispossession of peoples and languages, and singular events of destruction in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Addressing the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Elias Khoury, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Shimon Ballas, and Taha Husayn, Sacks demonstrates the reiterated incursion of loss into the time of life—losses that language declines to mourn. Language occurs as the iteration of loss, confounding its domestication in the form of the monolingual state in the Arabic nineteenth century’s fallout. Reading the late lyric poetry of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in relation to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, Sacks reconsiders the nineteenth century Arabic nahda and its relation to colonialism, philology, and the European Enlightenment. He argues that this event is one of catastrophic loss, wherein the past suddenly appears as if it belonged to another time. Reading al-Shidyaq’s al-Saq ‘ala al-saq (1855) and the legacies to which it points in post-1948 writing in Arabic, Hebrew, and French, Sacks underlines a displacement and relocation of the Arabic word adab and its practice, offering a novel contribution to Arabic and Middle East Studies, critical theory, poetics, aesthetics, and comparative literature. Drawing on writings of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Theodor Adorno, and Edward W. Said, Iterations of Loss shows that language interrupts its pacification as an event of aesthetic coherency, to suggest that literary comparison does not privilege a renewed giving of sense but gives place to a new sense of relation.Dante and Islam
By Jan M. Ziolkowski. 2014
Dante put Muhammad in one of the lowest circles of Hell. At the same time, the medieval Christian poet placed…
several Islamic philosophers much more honorably in Limbo. Furthermore, it has long been suggested that for much of the basic framework of the Divine Comedy Dante was indebted to apocryphal traditions about a “night journey” taken by Muhammad. Dante scholars have increasingly returned to the question of Islam to explore the often surprising encounters among religious traditions that the Middle Ages afforded. This collection of essays works through what was known of the Qur’an and of Islamic philosophy and science in Dante’s day and explores the bases for Dante’s images of Muhammad and Ali. It further compels us to look at key instances of engagement among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.Poems and Essays
By Joseph Howe, M. G. Parks. 1973
This volume, containing a selection of the poetry and prose of Joseph Howe, presents various aspects of a fascinating man…
who few Canadian know as other than the 'tribune of Nova Scotia' and a political giant of colonial times. Yet Howe was also a writer, and a good one. His intuitive grasp and pragmatic skill in political affairs were combined with wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, strong moral idealism, and a lively imagination. He revealed a vigorous strength in journalism and politics, in public life in general, and in his prose. His poetry admittedly was minor and colonial — he cultivated eighteenth-century verse models and habits of diction, which made him a second-generation Romantic in attitude and tone rather than in style — and its merit, according to David Munroe, Dalhousie Review, XX, 1941, 'lies principally in the deep sincerity which is characteristic of all good verse.' However, to understand the man and his times it is essential to understand the full extent of his endeavours; hence the significance of this book. The selections in this volume were assembled after Howe's death by his ninth child, Sydenham. They include the unfinished poem 'Acadia,' various serious and sentimental poems, five essays originally written and delivered as speeches, and a moral tale entitled 'The Locksmith of Philadelphia.'Useless Joyce: Textual Functions, Cultural Appropriations
By Tim Conley. 2017
Tim Conley’s Useless Joyce provocatively analyses Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and takes the reader on a journey exploring the…
perennial question of the usefulness of literature and art. Conley argues that the works of James Joyce, often thought difficult and far from practical, are in fact polymorphous meditations on this question. Examinations of traditional textual functions such as quoting, editing, translating, and annotating texts are set against the ways in which texts may be assigned unexpected but thoroughly practical purposes. Conley’s accessible and witty engagement with the material views the rise of explication and commentary on Joyce’s work as an industry not unlike the rise of self-help publishing. We can therefore read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as various kinds of guides and uncover new or forgotten “uses” for them. Useless Joyce invites new discussions about the assumptions at work behind our definitions of literature, interpretation, and use.Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew
By Jeffrey S. Librett. 2014
Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew proposes a new way of understanding modern Orientalism. Tracing a path of modern…
Orientalist thought in German across crucial writings from the late eighteenth to the mid–twentieth centuries, Librett argues that Orientalism and anti-Judaism are inextricably entangled. Librett suggests, further, that the Western assertion of “material” power, in terms of which Orientalism is often read, is overdetermined by a “spiritual” weakness: an anxiety about the absence of absolute foundations and values that coincides with Western modernity itself. The modern West, he shows, posits an Oriental origin as a fetish to fill the absent place of lacking foundations. This fetish is appropriated as Western through a quasi-secularized application of Christian typology. Further, the Western appropriation of the “good” Orient always leaves behind the remainder of the “bad,” inassimilable Orient. The book traces variations on this theme through historicist and idealist texts of the nineteenth century and then shows how high modernists like Buber, Kafka, Mann, and Freud place this historicist narrative in question. The book concludes with the outlines of a cultural historiography that would distance itself from the metaphysics of historicism, confronting instead its underlying anxieties.Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century
By Padma Rangarajan. 2014
At the heart of every colonial encounter lies an act of translation. Once dismissed as a derivative process, the new…
cultural turn in translation studies has opened the field to dynamic considerations of the contexts that shape translations and that, in turn, reveal translation’s truer function as a locus of power. In Imperial Babel, Padma Rangarajan explores translation’s complex role in shaping literary and political relationships between India and Britain. Unlike other readings that cast colonial translation as primarily a tool for oppression, Rangarajan’s argues that translation changed both colonizer and colonized and undermined colonial hegemony as much as it abetted it. Imperial Babel explores the diverse political and cultural consequences of a variety of texts, from eighteenth-century oriental tales to mystic poetry of the fin de siecle and from translation proper to its ethnological, mythographic, and religious variants. Searching for translation’s trace enables a broader, more complex understanding of intellectual exchange in imperial culture as well as a more nuanced awareness of the dialectical relationship between colonial policy and nineteenth-century literature. Rangarajan argues that while bearing witness to the violence that underwrites translation in colonial spaces, we should also remain open to the irresolution of translation, its unfixed nature, and its ability to transform both languages in which it works.Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital
By Evan Watkins. 2016
In recent years, a number of books in the field of literacy research have addressed the experiences of literacy users…
or the multiple processes of learning literacy skills in a rapidly changing technological environment. In contrast to these studies, this book addresses the subjects of literacy. In other words, it is about how literacy workers are subjected to the relations between new forms of labor and the concept of human capital as a dominant economic structure in the United States. It is about how literacies become forms of value producing labor in everyday life both within and beyond the workplace itself. As Evan Watkins shows, apprehending the meaning of literacy work requires an understanding of how literacies have changed in relation to not only technology but also to labor, capital, and economics. The emergence of new literacies has produced considerable debate over basic definitions as well as the complexities of gain and loss. At the same time, the visibility of these debates between advocates of old versus new literacies has obscured the development of more fundamental changes. Most significantly, Watkins argues, it is no longer possible to represent human capital solely as the kind of long-term resource that Gary Becker and other neoclassical economists have defined. Like corporate inventory and business management practices, human capital—labor—now also appears in a “just-in-time” form, as if a power of action on the occasion rather than a capital asset in reserve. Just-in-time human capital valorizes the expansion of choice, but it depends absolutely on the invisible literacy work consigned to the peripheries of concentrated human capital. In an economy wherein peoples’ attention begins to eclipse information as a primary commodity, a small number of choices appear with an immensely magnified intensity while most others disappear entirely. As Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital deftly illustrates, the concentration of human labor in the digital age reinforces and extends a class division of winners on the inside of technological innovation and losers everywhere else.Victorian Jesus: J.R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity
By Ian Hesketh. 2017
Ecce Homo: A Survey in the Life and Work of Jesus Christ, published anonymously in 1865, alarmed some readers and…
delighted others by its presentation of a humanitarian view of Christ and early Christian history. Victorian Jesus explores the relationship between historian J. R. Seeley and his publisher Alexander Macmillan as they sought to keep Seeley’s authorship a secret while also trying to exploit the public interest. Ian Hesketh highlights how Ecce Homo's reception encapsulates how Victorians came to terms with rapidly changing religious views in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hesketh critically examines Seeley’s career and public image, and the publication and reception of his controversial work. Readers and commentators sought to discover the author’s identity in order to uncover the hidden meaning of the book, and this engendered a lively debate about the ethics of anonymous publishing. In Victorian Jesus, Ian Hesketh argues for the centrality of this moment in the history of anonymity in book and periodical publishing throughout the century.Responding to Loss
By Robert Mugerauer. 2014
Much recent philosophical work proposes to illuminate dilemmas of human existence with reference to the arts and culture, often to…
the point of submitting particular works to preconceived formulations. In this examination of three texts that respond to loss, Robert Mugerauer responds withclose, detailed readings that seek to clarify the particularity of the intense force such works bring forth. Mugerauer shows how, in the face of what is irrevocably taken away as well as of what continues to be given, the unavoidable task of interpretation is ours alone. Mugerauer examines works in three different forms that powerfully call on us to respond to loss: Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum Berlin, and Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire. Explicating these difficult but rich works with reference to the thought of MartinHeidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas, the author helps us to experience the multiple and diverse ways in which all of us are opened to the saturated phenomena of loss, violence, witnessing, and responsibility.