Literary Collections

Dealing with the most topical questions of the time, Sofia Tolstaya’s artistic works—from parables to short stories, novellas, and memoirs—show deep insights into the social context of nineteenth-century Russia.

In his lengthy review of My Life (along with other Tolstaya publications) in Canadian Slavonic Papers, the eminent Tolstoy scholar Hugh McLean (2011) laments the fact that it has taken so long (almost a century after her death) to focus academic attention on Sofia Tolstaya, and that there has been no unified publication of her works, scattered as they are among dated journals or not published at all.

This book aims to help fill this lacuna by offering a critical introduction to her literary output as a writer in her own right, and presenting, for the first time, an anthology of her main artistic works, some in fresh English translation, and others never translated before.

Dealing with the most topical questions of the time, Sofia Tolstaya’s artistic works—from parables to short stories, novellas, and memoirs—show deep insights into the social context of nineteenth-century Russia.

In his lengthy review of My Life (along with other Tolstaya publications) in Canadian Slavonic Papers, the eminent Tolstoy scholar Hugh McLean (2011) laments the fact that it has taken so long (almost a century after her death) to focus academic attention on Sofia Tolstaya, and that there has been no unified publication of her works, scattered as they are among dated journals or not published at all.

This book aims to help fill this lacuna by offering a critical introduction to her literary output as a writer in her own right, and presenting, for the first time, an anthology of her main artistic works, some in fresh English translation, and others never translated before.

Le mythe de l’infanticide Médée a toujours connu une fortune littéraire et la littérature féminine contemporaine ne fait pas exception. L’analyse comparée de huit textes de femmes de divers horizons tente de cerner les enjeux de cette figure irréductible pour une pensée féministe actuelle sur la maternité, le sujet et l’écriture mythique. En s’interrogeant sur la pertinence particulière de la tragédie d’Euripide aux reprises médéennes, explicites ou sous-entendues, des femmes, cette étude comparée se penche sur des textes du théâtre de Marie Cardinal, Deborah Porter, Franca Rame et Cherríe Moraga, et des romans de Monique Bosco, Christa Wolf, Bessora et Marie-Célie Agnant. À travers ses incarnations transculturelles, le mythe de Médée éclaire les affres de l’exil et de l’exclusion, ainsi que certaines visions du maternel qui préféreraient peut-être rester dans l’ombre de nos présuppositions et de nos règles sociales. Bien qu’il n’y ait pas plus monstrueux ou fou que l’acte infanticide, Médée, elle, n’est pas monstre, pas folle, mais lucide, humaine à part entière, comme la voulait Euripide, alors qu’elle s’en prend à ses enfants, à la culture défectueuse, à l’histoire des hommes.

La réécriture au féminin de Médée force aussi une conception du sujet qui ne revêt pas facilement sa cohérence. Mais la poétique même de cette Médée retranscrite au féminin fait preuve de sa flexibilité, son indétermination, son pouvoir de transcender la simple répétition de son mythe, vu ici autrement et différemment.

Publié en français

A student at McGill in the mid-1950s, Marian Engel wrote her M.A. thesis under the direction of Hugh MacLennan. Their work together became the basis of a correspondence, the MacLennan half of which survives and is detailed here.

Both personal and professional in nature, MacLennan's letters to Engel provide fascinating insights into his life's pursuit of writing and offer another glimpse of the author of Two Solitudes.

Published in English.

The Gay Grey Moose is a collection of essays presenting a comprehensive view of English poetry in Canada from the early colonial period to the Post-Modern era. From a wide range of poets, this book provides fresh contexts for viewing and discussing three centuries of English Canadian poetry. Both national and regional in its orientation, it seeks to discover the relationship between poetry and landscape in a poetic continuity that stretches from the late 17th century to the present.

Published in English.

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) inspired an outpouring of responses among Canadian cultural producers. Yet, the war and its influence on Canada literature have received little attention in histories of Canadian cultural production. This anthology attempts to remedy this gap and inspire future research into Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. The anthology brings together a selection of diverse literary materials—fiction, poetry, drama, reportage, journalism, pamphlets, memoirs, and other life writing—representing just a fraction of the Canadian cultural production inspired by the Spanish conflict. Many of these texts have never been published before, having been largely dispersed in archives across the world.

This selected anthology joins Ted Allan’s This Time a Better Earth, Hugh Garner’s Best Stories, and Charles Yale Harrison’s Meet Me on the Barricades in the Spanish Civil War subseries of the University of Ottawa Press’s Canadian Literature Collection. Together, these edited texts are now re-circulating under a common banner to establish what we consider to be the first stage in the recovery of anglophone Canadian literature about the Spanish Civil War. To further situate the literary texts included here, we include a scholarly introduction, and a full apparatus of author biographies, textual notes, and explanatory notes. The introduction provides an historical-cultural overview of the 1930s to contextualize Canadian involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the cultural production the war generated. After establishing a historical and cultural context, we explain the rationale we’ve applied to the selection of texts for inclusion. The notes explain specific historical-cultural terms and trace the publication histories and editorial evolutions of each text.

Includes works by Ted Allan, Norman Bethune, Jean Watts, Neil Bissoondath, Dyson Carter (Jack Parr), Hugh Garner, George Gordo, A.M. Mowat, Kathryn Peck, Alfonso Rojo, Milton Acorn, Patrick Anderson, George Elliott Clarke, Stephen Collis, Margaret Day, Brian Dedora, Louis Dudek, Dorothy Livesay, Leo Kennedy, Eldon Grier, Ron Hawkins, Jesús López-Pacheco, L.A. Mackay, Seymour Mayne, Lionel Reid, F.R. Scott, Miriam Waddington, Patrick Waddington, J.A. Wainwright, J.S. Wallace, and many others.

Dans la vie des collectivités comme dans celle des individus, les lieux de rencontre sont toujours porteurs de renouvellement. C’est pourquoi les déplacements, les aires de contacts interculturels, les approches comparatistes et traductives du savoir et les récits migratoires provoquent aujourd’hui un tel intérêt chez les chercheurs. Aux confins de l’étude des sociétés modernes et de leurs processus de sédimentation se poserait donc une anthropologie de la rencontre. Confrontées à la différence, forcées de se penser comme cette différence même, les sociétés modernes savent que les itinéraires croisés qui les travaillent de l’intérieur entraînent des transformations décisives. La vie des individus et plus largement celle des collectivités sont structurées par une poétique de l’étonnement que de nombreux écrits tentent aujourd’hui d’élucider. Ce numéro de Francophonies d’Amérique rassemble diverses études dans une variété de disciplines sur les lieux de rencontre : espaces touristiques, théâtres, intégration des immigrants en milieu scolaire, débats parlementaires, zones de contact et de friction dans le récit et le film. Dans chacun des cas, une problématique de l’ouverture est aussitôt posée. C’est alors que l’étonnement survient et s’impose comme une méthodologie.

Ce numéro de Francophonies d’Amérique rassemble diverses études dans une variété de disciplines sur les lieux de rencontre : espaces touristiques, théâtres, intégration des immigrants en milieu scolaire, débats parlementaires, zones de contact et de friction dans le récit et le film.

Publié en français

Claude was eminently skilled in conversation. Because he listened. He listened attentively and intently. He measured the words he heard and thought long before risking an answer. So long, in fact, that in the beginning it confused the narrator. This man was clearly not one of those people who, in the words of La Bruyère, “speak one moment before they think.”

And so here we have a paradox: a book of conversations with someone who hardly spoke! Yet, despite everything, bonds have been forged: encounters between people who, at least initially, posed a dilemma for one another—a nearly illiterate but wise man on the one hand, and an academic, a literary man to boot, made verbose through professional deformation on the other…

As a genre, the dialogue has a long and venerable history in literature. It was especially popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, but the history of this literary form can be traced back to the Platonic dialogues with Socrates and various other interlocutors.

To be sure, this small book makes no claim to join in the august ranks of the dialogues of Plato, Seneca, Diderot, Fontenelle, David Hume, Marguerite de Navarre, or even Voltaire and his satirical approach.

It simply tells of an encounter.

Published in French.

Diplomacy. Suspicion. Surveillance. Espionage. Doubt.

Undeniably attractive, Paul has had his share of success with women, with no regrets. Recently promoted to the prestigious position of Director of Foreign Affairs, he is perfectly adapted to the world of political and other intrigues of the diplomatic corps.

Until, that is, the day he happens to notice a woman who obviously works in the same stifling office building. Who is this beautiful stranger? Where is she from? What is she thinking, as she strolls by, taking no notice of him? Why does she fascinate him so?

With each interminable day that goes by, Paul becomes increasingly obsessed. How far will he go to meet this woman, to conquer the feminine ideal that seems forever out of reach?

Published in French.

Maurice Henrie’s new collection of essays is one that transgresses conventions in order to assert a freedom of thought, expression, and criticism. Henrie provokes opinion and ventures to wherever his lines of argument lead.
From existential contemplation to challenging diatribes, Henrie reveals his thoughts in a journey of revelation, exploring and finessing those topics he feels great affinity for – philosophy, politics, and history.
His wry and detached perspective on America sits next to his impatience with a perceived weakness of government and its ability to get things done. He takes a clear view of the damaging migrations of francophone populations, particularly the catastrophic deportation of the Acadians and the exodus from Quebec to the United States from 1840 to the 1930s.
These essays are a tribute to the written word and a testament to their changing role in contemporary society.
This book attempts to contain a whirlwind of thoughts by a writer who is fearless yet conscious of his legacy.

Philippe, a young neurology prodigy, is desperate to unravel the mystery of Alzheimer’s disease. His sole motivation—which he keeps closely guarded—is to prove his father’s innocence at all costs. His father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, has been accused of hatching a terrorist plot, and this cost his mother her life.

His relentlessness leads him to cross ethical and moral lines, to the great disappointment of his older sister, Camille, who has a secret of her own.
The young researcher’s slow and difficult progress takes an unexpected turn when he crosses paths with William, a man at the head of a private neuroscience company, but who is somehow shrouded in mystery. William offers Philippe financial support, enabling him to make the breakthrough he’s been working towards for years: he is finally able to access his father’s memory.

By peering into the dark reaches of his father’s brain, will he indeed find proof he needs to prove his father’s innocence? And will he be able to identify the actual terrorist?

Published in French.

Writing, for Henrie, rhymes with musing, and with existing. Short, succinct and intense, these twenty-five philosophical essays intertwine contemplation, opinion, and memory, splendidly crowned with epigraphs foraged from world literature. They reflect an existential urgency to immortalize thought in black and white, a restlessness barely concealed by the hand that holds the pen, defying the passage of time.

From one essay to the next, Henrie explores the subjects dearest to him: the ageing of the mind, acceptance of those laws of nature that determine our destinies, theories of opacity, hardness and acoustics, and the struggle against the scattering of the being.

The author also voices his opinion on more contemporary topics, such as the hall-of-fame phenomenon, robotics and society, and the mystery that is art appreciation. He is particularly clear-sighted in his observations regarding meritocracy and plight of artists in society, particularly that of writers.

Donc je suis is a remarkable work, where imagination and philosophical contemplation meet in a dream-like state. Best enjoyed by the light of a flickering candle…

Discover this unabridged audio book in French, read by Étienne Panet-Raymond.

Susanna Moodie is, of course, best known for her books Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings, which are largely comprised of short sketches that she had previously published. What is not widely known, however, is that Moodie had a long and prolific literary career in which short sketches and tales were among her favoured genres.

This book offers a selection of these narratives, most of which have been unavailable in print since the 19th century. This collection will give the reader a new understanding of Susanna Moodie's work.

Published in French.

This is a collection of the published and previously unpublished short stories by Thomas Murtha, a Canadian writer born and raised in Ontario. Murtha was one of the notable experimental writers of the 1920s, but his work has been largely ignored by literary historians. Thomas Murtha was a classmate and colleague of other notable Canadians including former prime minister Paul Martin, Morley Callaghan, and Raymond Knister. Callaghan, Murtha, and Knister greatly influenced each other’s work. Complete with a biographical introduction from Murtha's son, William, this collection provides insight into the work and life of one of Canada's most talented writers.

Published in English.

Pioneering Women is an anthology of short fiction written before 1880 by Canadian women, including Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, and Rosanna Mullins Leprohon. From the Maritimes to Upper Canada, from backwoods to the drawing room, this collection demonstrates the variety that exists in stories by women of early British North America.

Published in English.

New Women is an anthology of short fiction written by Canadian women between 1900 and 1920.

The carefully selected stories by writers such as L.M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, and Marjorie Pickthall provide dramatic and imaginative glimpses of Canadian society and of the women who lived during those momentous years.

Published in English.

In this collection of short, sometimes incisive, essays, the author allows his mind to wander from one subject, or one approach, to the next, much in the esteemed tradition of the French essayists: Montaigne’s essays, Pascal’s thoughts and Paul Valéry’s reflections.

These are Henrie’s musings on key issues, most notably on politics—because for years, Maurice Henrie worked in the shadow of federal parliamentarians, but also on literature and on topics of a socioeconomic nature. Here, the pen is as free and uncensored as the thought that drives it. It broaches any number of subjects, and the presentation of these unbridled short texts is thematic. In terms of politics, for instance, Henrie explores the affinity between an elected official and his constituents, the traditional regime of checks and balances in House of Commons debates, and the vicissitudes that characterize all ruling parties. Turning to literature, Henrie contemplates the mysteries of literary success, the misunderstandings that dominate literature, and the woes of writing in an electronic world.

Discover this unabridged audio book in French, read by Étienne Panet-Raymond.

Published in French.

This anthology brings together, for the first time, the complete published works of Jewish Canadian poet Miriam Waddington and features a rare selection of previously unpublished poems. Miriam Waddington's verse is deceptively accessible: it is personal but never private, emotional but not confessional, thoughtful but never cerebral. The subtlety of her craft is the hallmark of a modernist poet whose work opens to the world and its readers. She details intoxicating romance and mature love, the pleasures of marriage and motherhood, the experience of raising two sons to adulthood, and the ineffable pain of divorce. As she moved through life, she wrote clearly and uncompromisingly about the vast sweep of Canada, her travels to new lands, the passage of time, the death of her ex-husband, the loss of close friends and, later, of growing old.

Miriam Waddington's verse is deceptively accessible: it is personal but never private, emotional but not confessional, thoughtful but never cerebral. The subtlety of her craft is the hallmark of a modernist poet whose work opens to the world and its readers. She details intoxicating romance and mature love, the pleasures of marriage and motherhood, the experience of raising two sons to adulthood, and the ineffable pain of divorce. As she moved through life, she wrote clearly and uncompromisingly about the vast sweep of Canada, her travels to new lands, the passage of time, the death of her ex-husband, the loss of close friends and, later, of growing old.

Supplementary material is available here:
https://press.uottawa.ca/en/supplementary-material-the-collected-works-of-miriam-waddington/

Over the past forty years, Canadian literature has found its way to the silver screen with increasing regularity. Beginning with the adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God to the Hollywood film Rachel, Rachel in 1966, Canadian writing would appear to have found a doubly successful life for itself at the movies: from the critically acclaimed Kamouraska and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in the 1970s through to the award-winning Love and Human Remains and The English Patient in the 1990s. With the more recent notoriety surrounding the Oscar-nominated Away from Her, and the screen appearances of The Stone Angel and Fugitive Pieces, this seems like an appropriate time for a collection of essays to reflect on the intersection between literary publication in Canada, and its various screen transformations. This volume discusses and debates several double-edged issues: the extent to which the literary artefact extends its artfulness to the film artefact, the degree to which literary communities stand to gain (or lose) in contact with film communities, and perhaps most of all, the measure by which a viable relation between fiction and film can be said to exist in Canada, and where that double-life precisely manifests itself, if at all.

Published in English.

Forest and other Gleanings reclaims for the contemporary reader a number of stories and sketches written by Catharine Parr Traill after her emigration to Canada in 1832. While most pieces collected here appeared in magazines in Britain, the United States, and Canada, a few have been drawn from archival holdings and make their first appearance here.

This collection seeks, as it were, to complete her aspirations and to offer readers interested in Traill and 19th-century Upper Canada a "gleaning" of her better sketches and stories.

Published in English.