The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature

1107 Pages·2015·9.815 MB·English

by  Cynthia Sugars

The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature
The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature  
The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature
Edited by Cynthia Sugars
Print Publication Date: Jan 2016 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: Dec 2015
(p. iv)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Oxford handbook of Canadian literature / edited by Cynthia Sugars.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature provides a broad-ranging in­
troduction to
some of the key critical fields, genres, and periods in Canadian literary studies” —
Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978–0–19–994186–5 (cloth) — ISBN 978–0–19–994187–2 (updf) — ISBN 978–
0–19–027454–2 (oso)
1. Canadian literature. 2. Authors, Canadian. 3. Canada—In literature. 4. Cana­
dian literature—History
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The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature
and criticism. 5. National characteristics, Canadian. I. Sugars, Cynthia Conchita,
1963– editor.
PR9180.2.O95 2015
810.9′971—dc23
2015009270
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments  
The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature
Edited by Cynthia Sugars
Print Publication Date: Jan 2016 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: Dec 2015
Acknowledgments
(p. xi)
I would like to thank Oxford University Press for their interest in this collection, particu­
larly my editor, Brendan O’Neill, who expressed enthusiasm for this project from day one.
I am also indebted to my family—Paul, Neve, Abbey, Morgan (more than I can say!)—for
putting up with my increasingly OCD tendencies these last few years as the book neared
its way to completion. Thanks also to Herb Wyile, friend and co-editor with me of Studies
in Canadian Literature, for not commenting on my more distracted moments over the
past year or two (and for saying “yes,” after some persuasion, to my request for a chap­
ter). I am also grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Cana­
da (SSHRCC) for its ongoing support of my research, and for supporting Humanities re­
search in Canada generally. Without the financial support of SSHRCC, I and many of the
scholars represented in this volume could not conduct our research in Canadian literary
studies. I continue to be indebted to this important resource for Humanities scholarship
in Canada. My thanks, as well, to the University of Ottawa for its continued support of my
teaching and research. Most of all, I would like to thank the contributors to this volume,
not only for their dedication and patience in participating in the making of this book, but
for contributing to the field of Canadian literature as a whole, and for sharing in the on­
going debates and enthusiasms of Canadian literary study itself. I have learned an enor­
mous amount about the field from working on these chapters. These scholars—with their
divergent, often contesting, perspectives—make the field of Canadian literature the excit­
ing and compelling discipline that it is today. I feel privileged to be part of a literary com­
munity made up of such tenacious, generous, challenging, dedicated, garrulous, and in­
sightful colleagues. Thanks, everybody! (p. xii)
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Contributors
Contributors  
The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature
Edited by Cynthia Sugars
Print Publication Date: Jan 2016 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: Dec 2015
Contributors
(p. xiii)
Deirdre Baker has been the children’s book reviewer for the Toronto Star since
1998. She is co-author with Ken Setterington of A Guide to Canadian Children’s
Books, and author of the children’s novel Becca at Sea. She reviews and writes regu­
larly for The Horn Book Magazine and Quill and Quire. She is an Assistant Professor
of English literature at the University of Toronto.

Pamela Banting, Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary, found­
ed and served as the inaugural President of the Association for Literature, Environ­
ment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC). She is currently working in the intersection
between ecocriticism and animal studies: her interdisciplinary research is about the
lives of wild animals in petrocultural landscapes. Through an analysis of former park
warden Sid Marty’s nonfiction narrative The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek, she ex­
amines aspects of energy, oil, and automobility from the points of view of bears. Her
article on Karsten Heuer’s Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd,
published in Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context (2013), explores
the ontology and epistemology of walking with wild animals through contested
spaces. She has also published on the grammar of bear-human interactions, reading
geography as an intertext in fiction, cultural and biological diversity in Canadian liter­
ature, animals and sense of place, and other topics.

D.M.R. Bentley is a Distinguished University Professor and the Carl F. Klinck Profes­
sor in Canadian Literature at Western University. He has published widely in the
fields of Canadian literature and culture and Victorian literature and art, and on the
importance of the arts and humanities in Canadian society. Among his books are The
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Contributors
Gay]Grey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry, 1690–
1990 (1992), Mimic Fires: Accounts of Early Long Poems on Canada (1994), The Con­
federation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880–1897 (2004), and Canadian Architexts: Es­
says on Literature and Architecture in Canada, 1759–2006 (2009). His recent and
forthcoming publications include “Reflections on the Situation and Study of Early
Canadian Literature in the Long Confederation Period” in Home Ground and Foreign
Territory (2014), edited by Janice Fiamengo; an essay on the fin de siècle in Canada in
The Fin-de-Siècle World (2014), edited by Michael Saler; and By Necessity and Indi­
rection: Essays on Modernism in Canada (2013).

Nicholas Bradley is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Uni­
versity of Victoria and the coordinator of the Department’s graduate program in
(p. xiv) Literatures of the West Coast. His areas of research include Canadian litera­
ture and American literature. Among his recent publications is We Go Far Back in
Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947–1987 (Harbour Publishing,
2014).

Jennifer S.H. Brown, FRSC, Professor Emeritus, taught history at the University of
Winnipeg for 28 years and held a Canada Research Chair, Tier 1, in Aboriginal history
from 2004 to 2011. She served as director of the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies,
which focuses on Aboriginal peoples and the fur trade of the Hudson Bay watershed,
from 1996 to 2010. She is general editor of the Rupert’s Land Record Society docu­
mentary series (McGill-Queen’s UP), which publishes original materials on Aboriginal
and fur-trade history. She has published several books and many articles on these top­
ics, on Aboriginal-missionary relations, on Métis history, and also on anthropologist A.
Irving Hallowell and the Berens River Ojibwe—notably Chief William Berens, who
made Hallowell’s fieldwork in the 1930s possible. She now resides in Denver, Col­
orado, where she continues her scholarly work.

Diana Brydon, FRSC, Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies
and Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English, Film, and The­
atre at the University of Manitoba, has published widely on Canadian and postcolo­
nial literary studies and how communities are adjusting to globalizing processes. Her
books include Decolonising Fictions, Timothy Findley, Postcolonialism: Critical Con­
cepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Shakespeare in Canada, Renegotiating Com­
munity, and Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue. She studies how
national and global imaginaries are changing, how they are interconnected, and what
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Contributors
they mean for Canadian culture and research. Current projects include partnership
development with the “Brazil/Canada Knowledge Exchange,” “Concurrences: Archive,
Voice, and Place,” and “Ethical Internationalism in Higher Education.”

Andrea Cabajsky is an Associate Professor of Comparative Canadian literature at the
Université de Moncton. She is the editor of The Manor House of De Villerai by Rosan­
na Mullins Leprohon (Broadview, 2015) and the co-editor of National Plots: Historical
Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010). Her recent publica­
tions have appeared in Canadian Literature (2013), Novel: A Forum on Fiction (2011),
and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel (2011).

Alison Calder is a Professor in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the
University of Manitoba, where she teaches Canadian literature and creative writing.
She has published widely on topics relating to Canadian prairie literature and culture.
Recent publications include critical editions of Settlers of the Marsh and Over Prairie
Trails, both by Frederick Philip Grove. Her second poetry collection, In the Tiger
Park, was published in April 2014. Current research includes rereading early Canadi­
an prairie fiction, and undertaking a critical/creative project centred on materials in
the HBC archives in Winnipeg and Kirkwall, Scotland.

Marie Carrière teaches English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Universi­
ty of Alberta, where she also directs the Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littéra­
ture (p. xv) canadienne. She has authored several articles and books on contemporary
women’s writing, feminist theory, and migrant writing (or écriture migrante) in Cana­
da and Québec. Her latest publications include the monograph Médée, protéiforme (U
of Ottawa P, 2012), and the co-edited essay collection Regenerations: Canadian
Women’s Writing/Régénégrations: Écritures des femmes au Canada (with Patricia De­
mers, U of Alberta P, 2014). With Libe García Zarranz, she recently co-edited a special
issue of Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies on
women’s writing in Canada and Québec today.

Adam Carter is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Universi­
ty of Lethbridge. He specializes in critical theory and the history of criticism with re­
lated interests in Romantic and Canadian literatures. His research currently engages
the intersections of aesthetic theory and nationalism.
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Contributors

Richard Cavell is author of McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (2002), the edi­
tor of Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada’s Cold War (2004), and the co-editor (with Peter
Dickinson) of Sexing the Maple (2006). He has also written the critical performance
piece Marinetti Dines with the High Command, published in the Essential Drama se­
ries of Guernica Press (2014). Professor of English at the University of British Colum­
bia, he is the founder of the International Canadian Studies Centre and the principal
founder of the Bachelor in Media Studies Program.

Paul Chafe teaches in the Department of English at Ryerson University. His project
to “flip” the introductory writing course has received funding from Ryerson’s Learn­
ing and Teaching Enhancement Fund (LTEF) and the National Center for Academic
Transformation (NCAT). He continues to write about the literature of Newfoundland
and Labrador, and his latest analysis, “ ‘Where the Mysterious and the Undefined
Breathes and Lives’: Kathleen Winter’s Annabel as Intersex Text,” has appeared in the
special “Literary Ecologies” issue of Studies in Canadian Literature (2014).

David Chariandy is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Simon
Fraser University. He specializes in English-Canadian, Anglo-Caribbean, and African
Diasporic literatures, and has published repeatedly on Black Canadian literature and
culture in academic journals and books. His first novel, entitled Soucouyant (Arsenal
Pulp, 2007), was nominated for 11 literary prizes internationally, and was translated
into German and French. In the spring of 2014, Transition Magazine (Harvard) pub­
lished an interview on his development as both an academic critic and fiction writer
entitled “Straddling Shifting Spheres,” as well as an excerpt from his novel Brother,
forthcoming in 2017 from McClelland and Stewart.

Sally Chivers is Professor of English Literature at Trent University. Author of From
Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives and The
Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema, and co-editor of The Problem
Body: Projecting Disability on Film, her current research focuses on the interplay be­
tween aging and disability in the public sphere, with a focus on care narratives in the
context of austerity.

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Contributors
(p. xvi) Lily Cho is an Associate Professor of English at York University. Her research
focuses on diasporic subjectivity within the fields of cultural studies, postcolonial lit­
erature and theory, and Canadian literature. Her book, Eating Chinese: Culture on the
Menu in Small Town Canada, examines the relationship between Chinese restaurants
and Canadian culture. She is currently conducting research on a set of Chinese-Cana­
dian head tax certificates known as “C.I. 9’s.” These certificates mark one of the first
uses of identification photography in Canada. Drawing from this archive, this re­
search explores the relationship between citizenship, photography, and anticipation
as a mode of agency. She is also co-editor, with Jody Berland, of TOPIA: Canadian
Journal of Cultural Studies.

Bruno Cornellier is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Universi­
ty of Winnipeg, where he teaches courses in film and cultural studies. He is the au­
thor of La “chose indienne”: Cinéma et politiques de la représentation autochtone au
Québec et au Canada (Nota Bene, 2015). He has also published articles in Settler
Colonial Studies, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, the London Journal of Canadi­
an Studies, and Nouvelles Vues.

Elizabeth Dahab is Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Com­
parative World Literature and Classics at California State University, Long Beach. She
has published extensively on the topic of Arab-Canadian literature. She published a
monograph entitled Voices of Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Litera­
ture (Lexington Books, 2009/11). Her edited anthology, Voices in the Desert: An An­
thology of Arabic-Canadian Women Writers, appeared in Toronto in 2002. She has al­
so published a children’s book (Hurly and the Bone) and a translation into English ti­
tled Comparative Literature Today: Methods and Perspectives. She is presently work­
ing on a novel and a collection of poems. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from McGill
University and her Master’s from the University of Alberta. She received her doctorat
de littérature comparée in Comparative Literature from the Université de Paris IV-
Sorbonne.

Frank Davey is Professor Emeritus and former Carl F. Klinck Chair of Canadian Liter­
ature at Western University. From 1965 to 2013 he edited and published Open Letter:
A Journal of Canadian Writing and Theory, and from 1975 to 1999 was an editor at
Coach House Press. He was chair of the York University Department of English
(1985–90), and president of the Association of Canadian College and University
Teachers of English (1996–98). His books include Surviving the Paraphrase (1983),
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Contributors
Reading Canadian Reading (1988), Post-National Arguments: The Anglophone-Canadi­
an Novel since 1967 (1993), Canadian Literary Power (1994), and the biography aka
bpNichol (2012), as well as poetry collections such as The Abbotsford Guide to India
(1986), Bardy Google (2010), and Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions
(2014).

Cecily Devereux is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the
University of Alberta. Her research focuses on questions of femininity in the nine­
teenth-century Anglo-imperial context across a range of categories, including the ma­
ternal body, ideologies of imperial motherhood, eugenic feminism, the figure of the
“white slave,” the “Indian maiden,” and the burlesque dancer. She has published a
book (p. xvii) on first-wave feminist Nellie L. McClung and an edition of L.M.
Montgomery’s 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables.

Jonathan Dewar is descended from Huron-Wendat, Scottish, and French-Canadian
grandparents. He currently serves as the Director of the Shingwauk Residential
Schools Centre and Special Advisor to the President at Algoma University in Sault
Ste. Marie, Ontario, site of the former Shingwauk Indian Residential School. From
2007 to 2012, he served as Director of Research at the Aboriginal Healing Foundation
and as an advisor to the Legacy of Hope Foundation. His research explores the roles
of art and artists in truth, healing, and reconciliation.

Kate Eichhorn is Associate Professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New
School University in New York City. She is the author of Adjusted Margin: Xerography,
Art and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 2016) and The Archival
Turn in Feminism (Temple UP, 2013). As a literary critic, she has published the co-
edited anthology Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Writing (Coach
House, 2009), and dozens of essays and reviews on feminist poetics and digital poet­
ics.

Julia Emberley, FRSC, is a Professor in the Department of English and Writing Stud­
ies at Western University. She has published four books and several articles on vari­
ous topics related to Indigenous literature and other cultural practices such as film
and fashion. Her recent book is The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling,
Knowledge, and Reparative Practices (SUNY Press, 2014).
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Contributors

Janice Fiamengo is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, where she
teaches Canadian literature. She is the author of The Woman’s Page: Journalism and
Rhetoric in Early Canada (2008), and the editor of Home Ground and Foreign Territo­
ry: Essays on Early Canadian Literature (2014).

Lee Frew teaches in the Department of English at Glendon College, York University,
where he specializes in Canadian and postcolonial literatures. He has published arti­
cles on Margaret Atwood, Dionne Brand, and Ernest Thompson Seton. He is currently
working on a critical edition of the works of Seton, founder of the woodcraft move­
ment and a key figure in both Canadian and American environmental history.

Carole Gerson is a Professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser Universi­
ty and was a co-editor of the multivolume project, History of the Book in Canada. She
has published many articles on various aspects of Canada’s literary and cultural histo­
ry. With historian Veronica Strong-Boag she has issued two books on Pauline Johnson.
Her recent book, Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918 (2010), which applies princi­
ples of print culture analysis to a wide range of early authors, received the Gabrielle
Roy Prize for Canadian criticism. In 2013 she received the Marie Tremaine medal
from the Bibliographical Society of Canada.

Terry Goldie is author of The Man Who Invented Gender: Engaging the Ideas of John
Money (UBC Press, 2014), queersexlife: Autobiographical Notes on Sexuality, Gender
(p. xviii) and Identity (Arsenal Pulp, 2008), Pink Snow: Homotextual Possibilities in
Canadian Fiction (Broadview, 2003), and Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indi­
gene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures (McGill-Queen’s UP, 1989).
He is editor of In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context
(Arsenal Pulp, 2001) and co-editor, with Daniel David Moses and Armand Garnet Ruf­
fo, of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Oxford, 2013). He is
working on a book tentatively titled Are We Men Yet?: Straight, Gay, Trans and Other
Masculinities.

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