The laugh-makers

The Laugh-Makers is an intensive sociological field study of the drive to become a successful stand-up comic in Canada. Robert Stebbins interviewed fifty-seven practising stand-up comedians and fifteen booking agents, show organizers, personal managers, and club managers and owners. He also obser...

Terra nostra, 1550-1950

Maps have been invaluable throughout Canada's history. They promised fame and fortune to early merchant-adventurers and guided army commanders. They legitimized a politician's dominion and allowed businessmen to stake new claims. And they helped ordinary citizens build communities.

Then and now

A fresh account of the British aristocracy's relationship with the classical world.

Objectively engaged journalism

A timely call for a new ethic of journalism engagement for today's troubled media sphere, Objectively Engaged Journalism argues that media should be neither neutral nor partisan but engaged in protecting egalitarian democracy. It shows how journalists, professional or citizen, can be both objecti...

The straits of malacca

For centuries the Straits of Malacca, a narrow waterway between the Malay peninsula and the island of Sumatra, has been both a major conduit for long distance trade between Asia and the West and one of the most dangerous areas for commercial shipping.

John william dawson

In the first full-length biography of John William Dawson (1820-1899), eminent scientist and principal of McGill University, Susan Sheets-Pyenson highlights the extraordinary scope of Dawson's educational and scientific career and his commitment to science, rationality, and the advancement of kno...

The national gallery of canada

In this first critical history of the National Gallery of Canada, Douglas Ord explores how, in the gallery's development, art has consistently been linked to notions of religious truth, national spirit, and hallowed atmosphere, culminating in Moshe Safdie's design for the institution's current bu...

Isuma

Since director Zacharias Kunuk was awarded the Camera d'Or Award at Cannes in 2001, Igloolik Isuma Productions has been among the most well-known and influential indigenous film companies in the world. Isuma's premier movie, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) - the first-ever feature film produced by t...

Housing the north american city

Housing the North American City is the first comprehensive study of the way North Americans have built their cities. Focusing on the provision of housing in Hamilton, Ontario, over the last 150 years and relating this city's experiences to those elsewhere, Michael Doucet and John Weaver have esta...

Silk stocking mats

A lavishly illustrated history of the Grenfell Mission's exquisite hooked mats and the handicraft movement that inspired an international audience.

Outside looking in

Widely sold abroad, Beachcombers and North of 60 are what many international audiences know about Canada. In Outside Looking In Mary Jane Miller traces the evolution of representations of First Nations people in fifty years of Canadian television broadcasts.

Philosophy of language, second edition

Alexander Miller's accessible survey shows that philosophy of language is at the centre of the energetic philosophical activity of this century. By interweaving the historical development of the subject with a thematic overview of radically different approaches to theories of meaning he gives rea...

From drawing to visual culture

A vivid picture of the evolution of art education in Canada from the nineteenth century to the present.

Something new in the air

After decades of distorted stereotyping by the media, Canada's First Peoples began to take control of their own image by creating a broadcast industry to transmit their own representations and perspectives. Something New in the Air charts the development of indigenous television broadcasting with...

Britannia’s palette

The lives and work of British war artists of "the golden age" of naval history from 1793 to 1815.

Pitseolak: pictures out of my life, second edition

Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life is an illustrated oral biography created from recorded interviews by Dorothy Harley Eber in 1970. In these interviews, and through her drawings and prints, Pitseolak makes what Inuit call "the old way" come alive, reflecting on life on the land, its pleasure and...

Keeping the dream alive

Keeping the Dream Alive examines a crucial era in the evolution of the CCF/NDP in Ontario when, after almost a decade of unprecedented popularity, the party experienced a significant decline in support. Dan Azoulay chronicles the party's difficult but inspiring struggle to survive and regain its ...

Minding the public purse

Janice MacKinnon became minister of Finance for the province of Saskatchewan in 1993, under NDP Premier Roy Romanow, just as the province became the first casualty of the debt and deficit crises that dominated both provincial and federal politics throughout the decade. Minding the Public Purse is...

Action

Global journalism ethics

An argument for a new system of ethics in journalism that will take into account its global reach and impact.

The one recipe recipe book

So, who are you? A poet, musician, painter, sculptor, dancer, actor, a singer, or one of the many striving in the cultural sweatshop? Like most slaves to the Muse you are probably cash-poor, but you need a clear head and healthy body to be an artist. Well ... you can do it on $15 a week. Here is ...

A national soul

From Confederation to World War II mural painting was an important tool for Canadian nation-building. In A National Soul, Marilyn McKay shows how, in both Protestant English Canada and Catholic French Canada, these artworks were designed to promote specific civic values.

Charting northern waters

Charting Northern Waters celebrates the achievements and history of the Canadian Hydrographic Service (CHS) and examines a wide range of topics relating to the origins of the CHS and to its subsequent development. Topics include the colonial heritage of hydrography in Canadians waters, the politi...

Yellow crocodiles and blue oranges

Political positions come and go but talking animals, evil witches, and mythical princesses endure. David MacFadyen argues that Soviet socialist animation between 1936 and 1999 was a fundamentally emotional, not propagandistic, enterprise that requires a reconsideration of Soviet art in general. O...

Rewind and search

Taking the reader behind the cameras, Mary Jane Miller traces the history of television drama on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) English network over four decades. She combines interviews with forty CBC personnel with her own commentary to explore how programs were made and why.

Ambitions tamed

Entrepreneurship and the promise of a better city in an age of powerful ideas, eager moves, and mixed results.

The theatre of apollo

Literary critics have consistently marginalized the role of Apollo in Sophocles' Oedipus the King: some declare him to be inscrutable, others ignore him, and still others deny his existence altogether. In defiance of this long-standing critical consensus, Drew Griffith offers a new interpretation...

An american by degrees

A personal and cultural portrait of Ambassador Jules Jusserand who provided a vital link between France and the United States before, during, and after the First World War.

People from our side

Peter Pitseolak, the first native Baffin Island photographer, was born in the eastern Canadian Arctic in 1902. As a child he lived the nomadic camp life his ancestors had known, but during his lifetime missionaries, fur traders, law, government, schools, and alcohol came to Baffin Island. Peter P...

The cultivated landscape

By the late twentieth century, idyllic depictions of eighteenth-century manorial landscapes had become artistic expressions of dislocation. Western agricultural paradigms had shifted, as had the relationship between art and agriculture. The Cultivated Landscape uses over seventy illustrations to ...

The roots of culture, the power of art

An engaging history of the Canada Council for the Arts that marks its sixtieth anniversary.

John ford

Pierrot in petrograd

Commedia dell'arte was an essential ingredient of the revolution in Russian art in the early twentieth century. During this colourful and creative period artists sought inspiration in surprising places - icon painting, primitive art, and (in the theatre) circus, music-hall, and commedia dell'arte...

Beyond wilderness

The legacy of the Group of Seven and the reinvention of Canadian landscape art since the 1960s.

Quebec

A collection of writings on a painting representing more than four centuries of Quebec history.

Mediated associations

Mediated Associations builds upon current debates over the relationship between society and the cinema, and extends the critical dialogue that has been emerging between cinematic concepts and methods of social analysis. Drawing from a broad range of philosophical, sociological, cultural, media, a...

Challenge for change

An examination of the radical politics and cinema of the legendary documentary film program devoted to social change.

Art and work

A notable addition to the growing body of work that examines art and work as social constructs, Art and Work traces the development of commercial illustration and the graphic arts industry in Canada from the late eighteenth century to the 1940s.

Works by a.y. jackson from the 1930s

This volume by A.Y. Jackson's niece provides fascinating insights into the man and his work at a time the author calls "a rugged-romantic high point in A.Y.'s life." The illustrations reproduced and discussed come mainly from the Carleton University Art Collection. Groves places the works in the ...

Political choices and electoral consequences

The creation of the NDP out of the CCF in 1961 was intended to strengthen Canada's left-wing political party through a closer alliance with organized labour. This strength has failed to materialize. In Political Choices and Electoral Consequences, Keith Archer reveals why.

Canada's vegetation

Following an ecoclimatic approach, Geoffrey Scott reviews vegetation formations found in Canada in relation to physical geography.

The perils of pedagogy

The first book to examine the works of controversial film and video-maker, queer activist, and agent provocateur, John Greyson.

Russian entrepreneur

Not only did Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin build Sytin & Co. into the largest publishing concern in Russia prior to the Revolution, he also transformed Russian Word from an obscure, conservative newspaper into Russia's leading daily, with a circulation of over o

Staging strife

A candid look at anthropological research methods, political theatre, and advocacy.

A portrait of the artist as australian

Best known to his fans for the flamboyant character Dame Edna Everage, the Australian actor and comedian Barry Humphries is also a painter, composer, and critically acclaimed author. Taking outrageousness to new heights by borrowing from the British Music Hall tradition and the Dada art movement,...

Precarious visualities

The transformation of our relation to images in contemporary visual culture.

George costakis

This splendid book paints a rich portrait of the Russian avant-garde and the intrigues which it saved for posterity. Roberts has written a fascinating history of the famous Costakis collection and its creator George Costakis who, for nearly thirty years, was an administrative clerk in the Canadia...

Visibly canadian

A ground-breaking study revealing how culture shaped citizenship and belonging in nineteenth-century Ontario and Quebec.

The adventures of priscilla, queen of the desert

Renée Middlemost provides valuable insight into the production, reception, and continued relevance of the iconic film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Variable conditions

Variable Conditions recovers Canadian instances of early encounters between computational media and contemporary art in the late twentieth century. The book provides valuable new perspectives and new contexts for understanding computer art pioneers, sketching a new landscape of surprising connect...

In search of expo 67

An imaginative revisiting of Expo 67 by contemporary artists and scholars.

Midnight cowboy

An iconic and controversial film, Midnight Cowboy is given its due as a classic of queer cinema. By shifting the perspective away from interpretations of Midnight Cowboy as homophobic, Jon Towlson argues for a new interpretation of the film as a proto-queer buddy movie and portrait of a friendship.

Expo 67 and its world

Expo 67 and Its World brings together Québécois, Canadian, First Nations, and international scholars to propose a reappraisal of Expo 67 as an opportunity for collective re-imagining across a range of social spaces, from the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples to the increasingly global ambit of ...

Dawn of a new feeling

Dawn of a New Feeling acknowledges that computers have become a formidable tool for creating art but contends that virtual reality is not conducive to meditations on the aesthetic object. Virtual or augmented reality, Raffaele Milani argues, is illusory and prevents the viewer from feeling a genu...

Scott, brandtner, eveleigh, webber

Four artists who are today relatively or almost entirely unknown – Marian Dale Scott, Fritz Brandtner, Henry Eveleigh, and Gordon Webber – nevertheless played a part in the aesthetic upheavals that led to abstraction in 1940s Montreal. This book reinstates the oeuvres of these forgotten protagoni...

Patriarchy's remains

Analysing a series of Iberian cinematic dark comedies from the 1950s to the present day, Patriarchy’s Remains argues that the cinematic trope of patriarchal death symbolises the lingering remains of a regime of patriarchy and neoliberalism that has outlived the Francisco Franco dictatorship in Sp...

Atiqput

Atiqput is the first book-length study of Project Naming, the photo-based history research initiative established by the Inuit school Nunavut Sivuniksavut in collaboration with Library and Archives Canada. Through oral testimony and photography, Atiqput rewrites settler societies’ historical reco...

Gabor szilasi

Presenting twenty years of Gabor Szilasi's candid and personal documentation of Montreal art openings.

Singular creatures

In Singular Creatures Mark Kingwell plumbs the depths of cultural and political meaning in the apparent transition to posthuman life. Can humans and their own creations co-exist in a cyberflesh world, or is a struggle for superiority inevitable? Singular Creatures is an attempt at sketching the f...

What television remembers

What Television Remembers explores the relationship between the medium of TV and the city of Toronto. In a close reading of CBC dramas from the 1960s to 2010, VanderBurgh explains how the city has functioned as a strategic location in CBC programming, reflecting changing ideas about Canadian iden...

City symphonies

This book explores the unheard sonic dimensions of the city symphony. Instead of looking at the city symphony as a narrowly defined silent film genre, it turns its ear to the city symphony as an audible phenomenon, one that encompasses a multitude of works beyond the cinema and that treats the ci...

À la recherche d'expo 67

Retour sur Expo 67 avec des artistes et des chercheurs contemporains.

The shape of thought

Building on inquiries spanning three decades, The Shape of Thought shows that by understanding the many different things that people achieve with computers, we can improve and diversify AI to allow for richer, more beneficial human-computer interaction.

Untimely bodies, untimely aesthetics

Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics examines the fluidity of time in eight contemporary films by focusing on characters who struggle for connection in an environment shaped by heteronormative temporality and intimacies. The book proposes a model for viewing non-normative relationality through th...

My vancouver dance history

A compelling personal account of the artists and works that have established Vancouver as a dance-making capital.

Translation effects

A revealing look at the place of translation in modern Canadian culture.

The word and its ways in english

An exploration of how the mind creates words and, in turn, how words represent intended meanings.

The devout hand

Exploring the role of women artists in creating visual imagery during the Renaissance.

From the theater to the plaza

This innovative study sketches the physical and imaginary contours of Lavapiés, one of Madrid’s most iconic neighbourhoods. By linking its role as a site and subject of Madrid’s theatre tradition with its contemporary struggles over gentrification, Feinberg offers new approaches for understanding...

Family ties

How Victorian house museums anchor and transmit mythic interpretations of the past.

The movers

The Movers investigates the deeper historical roots and wider social contexts of key Israeli artworks and their public reception.

Out of the studio

Photographic innovators at home in nineteenth-century Quebec and abroad, Charles and John Smeaton have flown beneath the radar in studies of the history of photography in Canada. Out of the Studio is the first comprehensive biographical study detailing the innovation and imagination of the Smeato...

The invention of journalism ethics, second edition

An innovative theory of pragmatic objectivity to guide journalism today.

A truffaut notebook

An unconventional and deeply engaging introduction to a major figure in modern film.

The interactive documentary in canada

In the 2010s Canada was a world leader in creating interactive documentaries. By the 2020s many of these celebrated i-docs were rendered inaccessible by obsolete technology. This collection examines the short-lived past and the imagined future of the i-doc and emphasizes its impact on the contemp...

Desire change

Correcting an absence of writing about contemporary feminist work by Canadian artists, Desire Change considers the resurgence of feminist art, examining works that respond to themes of diversity and desire. Historians, artists, and curators cover a range of artistic practices including performanc...

I'm not myself at all

Is there an alternative to paradigms of identity in women’s art history?

Cinephemera

An investigation of the challenges faced by Canadian cinema in the digital age.

Women, environment, and networks of empire

Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire is the first detailed study of the art and correspondence of Elizabeth Gwillim and her sister Mary Symonds in South India. The book explores what their work reveals about natural history, the natural environment, colonialism, and women’s lives at the tur...

The art of collectivity

What tensions and what potential emerge when a community art program seeks to promote collectivity in the present era?

Voluntary detours

After visiting hundreds of museums across Alberta, Lianne McTavish chronicles some of the most challenging and unexpected sites where the idea of the museum is being reshaped. Honouring local, rural, and Indigenous knowledge, Voluntary Detours enriches critical accounts of the past, present, and ...

Habitations et milieu de vie

Habitations et milieu de vie est le fruit d'un projet conçu par la Société canadienne d'hypothèques et de logement (SCHL) afin d'examiner les progrès accomplis en matière de logement au Canada. Dans le cadre d'une expérience inusitée, un consortium de vingt-deux auteurs comprenant des universitai...

Illustrating el cid, 1498 to today

The first critical examination of a literary hero and complex historical figure through book illustration.

Wendat women's arts

Breaking new ground in Indigenous art histories, Wendat Women’s Arts is the first book to bring together a full, richly illustrated history of the Wendat embroidery artform. De Stecher argues for the central role of Wendat women artists in the narrative of community events and ceremony to challen...

Time and space, second edition

Surveying both historical debates and modern physics, Barry Dainton evaluates the central arguments in a clear and unintimidating way that keeps conceptual issues comprehensible to students with little scientific or mathematical training and makes the philosophy of space and time accessible to an...

Making sense out of meaning

Exploring the universe of meaning and how it enables us to put thoughts and experiences into words.

Samuel de champlain before 1604

The definitive edition of writings by and about the great French explorer.

Boys don't cry

The Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry (1999) offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America. This book relocates the film within historical and conceptual contexts that influenced its ambivalent reception while emphasizing the importance of trans visibilities an...

The ancient books of ireland

Ireland's ancient books are among the most fascinating and beautiful in the world but, with the exception of the magnificent Book of Kells, little is known about them. Michael Slavin lifts these ancient volumes from the obscurity of library and museum vaults to bring them into the public domain f...

Canada's cold environments

Eleven of Canada's leading geographers, geologists, and ecologists provide an authoritative, readable collection of scientific essays about the physical nature of Canada's coldness. They focus on the distinctive attributes of Canada's cold environments, their temporal and spatial variability, and...

Stage-bound

Since the 1990s many of Canada's best-known filmmakers, such as Denys Arcand, John Greyson and Robert Lepage, have looked to the stage for inspiration. While feature-film adaptations of Canadian plays have become increasingly common, the practice of turning drama into film began in Canada in 1942...

Seeking new horizons

Geography is often introduced to schoolchildren by having them look at maps as formal, conventional objects rather than as tools for analysing and communicating ideas about geographic relationships. But how effective is this? Recent research in cartographic communication and map perception sugges...

In praise of nonsense

A speculative exploration of theory, subjectivity and art in an age of uncertainty.

Emergence and empire

A ground-breaking look at the writings and philosophy of pioneering Canadian thinker Harold Adams Innis.

Feelings of structure

How places, objects, fantasies, histories, and memories get under our skin and how we understand their affective connections.

Art, medicine, and femininity

Rampant morphine addiction in Third Republic France captured the imagination of artists in Paris. However, while the majority morphine users were male medical professionals, artists almost always pictured a female addict. Art, Medicine, and Femininity explores the societal impact of the feminizat...

Orlando

A film that transcends time, Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) follows its titular character through nearly four hundred years of British history. Orlando starts life as a young man in the 1600s and then, mid-film, becomes a woman in the 1800s. Russell Sheaffer meticulously charts the distinct shift ...

Anders als die andern

Released in 1919, Anders als die Andern is a remarkable artefact of the pre-Stonewall homosexual rights movement of early-twentieth-century Germany. Ervin Malakaj shows how the film’s “mournful cinema” is key to its endurance, fostering connection through emotions and acting as a springboard to e...