Wyndham lewis and the avant-garde

It has always been difficult to determine Wyndham Lewis's position within the Modernist movement. Despite his status as one of the "big five" modernists -- along with W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce -- Lewis is the least read and least understood of significant modern English ...

Graham greene's thrillers and the 1930s

In Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s Brian Diemert examines the first and most prolific phase of Graham Greene's career, demonstrating the close relationship between Greene's fiction and the political, economic, social, and literary contexts of the period. Situating Greene alongside other y...

Documents of protest and compassion

Walter Bauer, a socially committed writer and humanist, emigrated from Germany to Canada in 1952 after becoming disillusioned with social and intellectual developments in Germany. During his progression from dishwasher to university professor, Canada's multicultural outlook allowed him to remain ...

What the thunder really said

C.p. snow and the struggle of modernity

The condition of modernity springs from that tension between science and the humanities which had its roots in the Enlightenment but only reached the height of its impact with the rise of twentieth-century technology. It manifests itself most notably in a crisis of individuality generated by the ...

But for now

An exploration of the hinterland between the havens of faith and the rough terrain of doubt.

The birth of modernism

In The Birth of Modernism Leon Surette challenges our traditional understanding of modernism by situating the origins of modernist aesthetics in the occult.

Conrad's later novels

Credo

The elegance, verbal felicitousness, and subtle crafting that were the signature qualities of Carmine Starnino's debut, The New World, are once again on display in his second book, Credo. Whether the subject is a passport, a clothesline, an antique goblet, prayer, or archaic English words, Starni...

A manner of correspondence

A Manner of Correspondence examines one of the most interesting of literary clubs, the Scriblerus Club, made up of the talented satirists Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Thomas Parnell, and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. Patricia Brückmann explores the Scriblerians as a ...

William blake in the desolate market

The life of a brilliant poet, exquisite painter, and rotten salesman.

The making of the alice books

The Making of the Alice Books includes discussions of the didactic and nursery-rhyme verse traditionally addressed by Carroll's critics while adding and elaborating connections established within and against the continuum of English-language children's literature.

The english housewife

In 1615 Englishman Gervase Markham published a handbook for housewives containing "all the virtuous knowledges and actions both of the mind and body, which ought to be in any complete housewife."

Something i'm supposed to remember

Something I'm Supposed to Remember is the first title in the Harbinger Poetry Series. This fine collection of gritty, thought-provoking works is written with the wisdom and sensitivity of a writer who knows of what she speaks. Holly Kritsch has a knack for drawing the reader "in" with such detail...

The making of the english literary canon

It is widely accepted among literary scholars that canon-formation began in the eighteenth century when scholarly editions and critical treatments of older works, designed to educate readers about the national literary heritage, appeared for the first time. In The Making of the English Literary C...

Kleist's aristocratic heritage and das käthchen von heilbronn

William Reeve provides a detailed textual analysis of Heinrich von Kleist's drama Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, demonstrating that Kleist drew its poetic images, themes, and general atmosphere from the Prussian aristocratic class into which he had been born. Reeve's comprehensive re-reading of Käth...

Joseph brodsky and the baroque

Literary criticism of the work of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky has tended to be biographical, stressing the significance of physical or metaphysical exile, estrangement, and alienation in his poetry. In a welcome move away from previous emphases, David MacFadyen argues that Brodsky's corpus was in...

Henri bergson and british modernism

Mary Ann Gillies shows that French philosopher Henri Bergson played a central role in the development of British literary modernism. While Bergson's influence on modernism has long been debated, this is the first thorough, current examination of the ways in which his ideas are manifest in British...

Sleep is a country

A woman of two worlds explores personal identity, spirituality and relationships in Sleep is a Country, her first collection. Her life has been both prairie and capital, French and English. Le Dressay's often removed observations and sometimes heated interactions are shared in poems connected by ...

The afterlife of trees

Brian Bartlett's poems, both pithy and expansive, bridge nature and human society, humour and elegy. Ranging from Buster Keaton films to a miniature Taj Mahal, from a celebration of sloths to an ironic look at the new millennium, from an urban garden to a ferry at sea, these poems tell stories an...

Bamboo church

Rereading middle english romance

Focusing on features of layout and decoration in manuscripts containing Middle English romances, Murray Evans discusses how these details signal generic and structural relationships among texts. Using a computer-assisted survey to tabulate and quantify features of decoration and presentation in f...

Artists in dylan thomas's prose works

Artists in Dylan Thomas's Prose Works is an exploration of the rich but relatively neglected prose works of Dylan Thomas. Ann Mayer examines Thomas's changing conceptions of language and the creation of meaning as revealed in his numerous self-referential acts of writing and telling.

Enabling engagements

An insightful reading of Edmund Spenser, demonstrating his poetic and political stance through his engagements with patrons.

The complete plays of frances burney

This two-volume set of the comedies and tragedies of Frances Burney (1752-1840) reveals her remarkable, yet little-known, talent as a dramatist. Compiled from the original manuscripts, it includes a substantial general introduction, headnotes to each play, explanatory notes, and variant readings.

A lovely gutting

Salvaging beauty from grief's wreckage in the towns and wilds of post-cod Newfoundland.

Blindfold

Blinded by a grenade in Lebanon as a teenager, poet John Asfour came to Canada armed with James Joyce's words, "For the eyes, they bring us nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create and I am only losing one of them." Blindfold investigates the ways in which disability influences our lives and is...

Ars americana, ars politica

A penetrating look at modern American politics and the partisan culture that feeds off its turmoil.

The ishtar gate

The clockmaker

In 1835 Thomas Chandler Haliburton introduced Samuel Slick of Slicksville, Connecticut, into the pages of the Novascotian in order to awaken his fellow citizens to the economic opportunities of their province. From this Halifax newspaper trotted out the C

Thackeray's cultural frame of reference

Thackeray's The Newcomes has been described as one of the richest of Victorian fictions. In Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference, R.D. McMaster unveils the magnitude of this richness.

Labour, love, and prayer

Labour, Love, and Prayer explores the construction of female stereotypes during a period of mounting religious tension in Ireland by examining the central role played by Protestant and Catholic women in establishing the religious faith of their children a

Swinging the maelstrom

Swinging the Maelstrom is a collection of new critical essays on the work and life of Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957). An international group of literary critics and artists examines a wide range of Lowry's work from the diverse perspectives of biography, correspondence, translation, manuscript editing...

A silent revolution?

This book explores how urban women managed wealth at a time when they were thought to have little independence, showing that women were in fact important players in the world of capital. It situates women in their immediate gendered and familial environments as well as broader legal, financial, s...

Storm still

Marked by reflectiveness and mature insight, O'Meara's keen sense of lyric structure and subtle cadences explore in contexts both historical and personal the tension between established knowledge and discovery - the centre and horizon of our unfixed selves. These poems - ambitious, rooted, exuber...

Kleist on stage, 1804-1987

Until now, there has been no general reference work that describes the various stagings of Kleist's plays since the first performance of Die Familie Schroffenstein in 1804. Several dissertations dealing with the stage history of individual works appeared between 1920 and 1932 and some articles di...

Treading fast rivers

This collection of linked poems takes us on a journey where angels ride bicycles, wounds both grieve and heal, and "our will / diving through the shuddering / wet world, carries us." Resonant with "a longing so ardent and spacious," these are poems of place and displacement, sickness and health. ...

Chaucer and language

Geoffrey Chaucer is increasingly recognized as a writer whose work is particularly congenial to modern tastes. The essays in Chaucer and Language are at the forefront of present-day interest in Chaucer as a highly self-conscious manipulator of language and theorist of signification in the broades...

Anxious allegiances

The early Canadian long poem has often been faulted for its lack of aesthetic integrity. Often described as little more than poorly "versified rhetoric," these works have never been submitted to rigorous rhetorical analysis. In Anxious Allegiances C.D. Mazoff investigates the rhetorical devices u...

The strict metrical tradition

In the recent surge of interest in metre on the part of theorists in different disciplines and of practicing poets, the central issue has been that of variations in the iambic pentameter. Keppel-Jones approaches this subject in a way that somewhat resembles Derek Attridge's, but is in fact very d...

Swinburne and his gods

In this richly detailed study, Margot Louis combines close readings of Swinburne's poetry with a wide-ranging analysis of the pressures which influenced the poet. Louis not only examines the ways in which Swinburne was affected by English and French Romantics but comments on the powerful impact o...

The old english elegies

Bringing together some of the most important poetic texts of the Anglo-Saxon period, Anne Klinck presents the poems both as discrete entities and as members of an elegiac group, all inspired by the sense of separation from one's desire that is at the heart of elegiac poetry in Old English. Klinck...

Hugh macdiarmid

Christopher Grieve, writing under the name of Hugh MacDiarmid, was a major modern poet and founder of the Scottish literary Renaissance. In this study of his poetry, John Baglow eliminates what has been a stumbling block for most MacDiarmid scholars by showing the very real thematic and psycologi...

Designed words for a designed world

Reading concrete poetry as the world’s first global literary movement.

The picturesque prison

This study of the life and works of Evelyn Waugh traces the novelist's pursuit of his vocation and his long retreat from a world which he came to regard as a spiritual dungeon. Jeffrey Heath explores the paradoxical elements in Waugh's career: his quest for a refuge itself proved to be a prison a...

Unbound

Inspired by mystical traditions, birdwatching, tree planting, ethics, neuropsychology, and quantum physics, Gabrielle McIntire's poems draw us in with their passionate attention to what it means to be human in a still-wondrous natural environment. Unbound stirs us to re-evaluate our place amidst ...

The iron wedge/l'appel de la race

Originally published in 1922, and set in Ottawa, this tells the story of an Anglicized French-Canadian, Jules de Lantagnac, who goes back to French roots in mid-life and in the process sacrifices his English-speaking wife and three children.

The voices of medieval english lyric

An innovative edition of Middle English lyric poems that takes voice as its main principle of arrangement.

Sexual enjoyment in british romanticism

How British Romantic writers reimagined sexual enjoyment and invented psychoanalysis in the process.

Ancestral recall

A comparative modernist study of the connections between Irish and Japanese literature, opening up uncharted avenues of cross-cultural exchange.

Antoinette de mirecourt or secret marrying and secret sorrowing

A moral exemplum about courtship and marriage, this "essentially Canadian" tale, which takes place in the 1760s, reflects its author's profound and sometimes disturbing knowledge of the bicultural and bilingual society in which she lived.

Self, nation, text in salman rushdie's "midnight's children"

Many non-Indian readers find the historical and cultural references in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children demanding. In his close reading of the novel, Neil ten Kortenaar offers post-colonial literary strategies for understanding Midnight's Children that also challenge some of the prevailing in...

Palilalia

Don't you know that mine too was the ventriloquist's thrown voice, and that what I spoke was a stirred echo?

Milton acorn

In the first major biography of Milton Acorn, the voice of one of Canada's leading poets resounds across the years since it was first raised, impassioned and protesting, in the 1950s and 1960s. This compelling study traces Acorn's essential patriotism to his roots in Prince Edward Island and show...

Sincere ideal

Transformation of sin

Woman's songs in ancient greece

By considering women's voices in performance, Anne Klinck provides a new perspective on women's "writing." She shows that our understanding of femininity in ancient Greece can be expanded by going beyond poetry composed by women poets like Sappho to explore girls' and women's choral songs from th...

Wacousta or, the prophecy

Set on the northwest frontier during the Pontiac conspiracy of the 1760s, this story of false identity, wasted love, diabolic vengeance and unquenchable hatred articulates themes and mythologies relevant to French, British, Canadian and American history.

The mind in creation

The Mind in Creation celebrates the career of Ross G. Woodman, one of Canada's finest teachers and critics. During his more than forty-one years in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario he has profoundly influenced scores of graduate and undergraduate students. From his i...

Four contemporary novelists

Four Contemporary Novelists offer accounts of the fiction of Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, and V. S. Naipaul. The author has charted the development of each writer; identified dominant themes, controlling techniques, and informing sensibility; explained what each has tried to accomplish...

A selection of modern italian poetry in translation

What was Italian poetry like in the years of historical, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual change between the 1860s and the Unification of Italy and the 1960s? In A Selection of Modern Italian Poetry in Translation Roberta Payne provides a bilingual collection of ninety-two poems by thirty-f...

St. ursula's convent or the nun of canada

In 1824, when the novel was issued in Kingston, Upper Canada, it became not only the first work of fiction written by a native-born Canadian and published in what is now Canada, but also a significant early attempt by a Canadian of English and French heri

The silver palace restaurant

The flowering of modern chinese poetry

A collection of early twentieth-century vernacular poetry that foreshadows the emergence of the modern Chinese nation.

All the god-sized fruit

Shawna Lemay scrutinizes some of the best-known art masterpieces of the Western world, alerting her readers to the power and peril of seduction. All the God-sized Fruit melds the sister arts - poetry and painting - in a sensual exploration of history, forgery, and violation. In poems rich with se...

Tales for an unknown city

Tales for an Unknown City is a vibrant selection of almost fifty stories from among the many told at One Thousand and One Friday Nights of Storytelling, a weekly open gathering in Toronto begun by Dan Yashinsky in 1978 and still going strong. There are tales from Canada and many other parts of th...

Carlyle and the economics of terror

Thomas Carlyle's difficult and obscure prose - the bane of every reader who has attempted to come to terms with his works - has often been interpreted as a reflection of the author's temperament or idiosyncrasies. Mary Desaulniers, however, argues that Carlyle's language is a deliberate strategy ...

A dream of sulphur

From childhood scenes in Deep Creek to the restless migrations across Canada, A Dream of Sulphur explores the relationship between memory, language, and geography. As a grandmother battles memory loss, a Hungarian is exiled to Canada, the Tofino fishing industry collapses, or August fire in the S...

Anthology of australian aboriginal literature

A rich collection of writing - poetry, prose, and drama - from some of the greatest Australian Aboriginal authors.

Franklin's passage

Ripping down half the trees

One out of every twenty students in the adult education classes Evan J teaches in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, dies every year; the surviving students are often afflicted by severe racism, poverty, addictions, and violence. Ripping down half the trees engages with these struggles, offering a catalogue...

Fresh strange music

A new approach to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art through the music of her poetry and its social and political implications.

Flexible design

Vala or The Four Zoas is one of William Blake's few surviving manuscripts and affords a unique opportunity to examine a significant evolution in his poetic practice. While the poem itself exhibits a consistent thematic interest, the modes and methods of representing these interests underwent a ra...

Coleridge and the inspired word

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the central figure in the dissemination of higher criticism, the analytical and historical study of the Bible begun in Germany in the late eighteenth century by Lessing, Herder, and Eichorn.

Small fires

Poems that illustrate the stories that lie buried in landscapes and in human lives.

The shapes of silence

The Shapes of Silence examines fiction, memoir, and autobiographical writing by marginalized women whose stories give voice to the gendered dimensions of colonial violence.

Hurt thyself

Between The Sexes What is the chance she smiles on this rivalry declared in the unspoken as chivalry, even one glance shot in the glass, while ahead he waits holding the door half-open, half-closed. Andrew Steinmetz's second collection of poetry turns a clinical eye on his favourite subjects - lo...

Essays for richard ellmann

Richard Ellmann's scholarly work is notable for its striking liveliness and clarity and its genuine illumination of the writers and works with which he dealt. His life of James Joyce, published in 1959, received more commendation and critical praise than any previous literary biography.

Outside, inside

A humble admission that while we can't know it all, we keep asking.

Some dance

Some Dance is a meditation on stories, the intersection of stories, of things made up, of things imagined, and of things perhaps lived.

Dust blown side of the journey

Global migrations and music create a symphonic journey where nature ignites wildfires and love fully lived.

Chaucer, spenser, milton

The art of dying

A satirical look at the euphemistic practices of dying today.

Short histories of light

Vivid, haunting, and rhythmical, these poems illuminate the struggles of mental illness and uncover the sinister side of religion.

Transcanadian feminist fictions

A cutting-edge feminist study of borders and transnational ethics in Canadian literature since the turn of the twenty-first century.

What's the import?

Two conspicuous features of the radical transformation of literary studies over the past three decades have been the dominance of theory-based interpretative discourse and cultural studies contextualizations. Both have greatly energized literary studies - but they have done so at a cost.

Giving my body to science

I bow and hand Sensei her arrows. All but one that I can't find, though I combed the long grass with my fingers. One arrow gone. Perhaps underground you hold it in your hand against the broken dawn. You are the wandering arrow, the bow unstrung. Your sudden absence has startled the partridges fro...

First crack

This collection comes from an alternate world of poetry running close beside our own, one which is always chugging away at shaping meaning and adding substance to our feelings. These poems are usually a study in near-solitude: domestic scenes, Michelangelo's Last Judgement, the myths of Egypt, sk...

Canadian crusoes

This absorbing story about three children of Scottish and French origin who become lost on the Rice Lake Plains in the late eighteenth century provides the author with an opportunity to contemplate important themes of Canadian literature and identity.

Ganymede's dog

A collection of prose poems that mingles tales from the classical past with contemporary sexuality and timeless dogs.

The winter count

Challenging the "official story" about the role of First Nations in the 1885 Rebellion and the medical commission that sealed Louis Riel’s fate.

Tablature

Dazzling poems about landscape, music, and the course of love that go straight to the heart.

The mirror of the worlde

An authoritative and comprehensive edition of the first known English translation of the first atlas of the world.

Knots

Poems sculpted from the persuasive mind, erratic heart, and enigmatic art of love’s most devious puzzles.

The swailing

Firmly rooted in frostbitten, fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness.

The complete poems of george whalley

The poems of a Canadian modernist best known for his investigations into poetic process.

Nuclear family

Jean Van Loon’s father was a metallurgist in an Ottawa lab that contributed to the Manhattan Project. Unbeknownst even to the family, her mother worked for Canada’s Cold War intelligence service. Rooted in memory and history, Loon carries the reader into the sense of impending nuclear doom and th...

Full moon of afraid and craving

Confronting addiction, compulsions, and anxieties, this collection explores the combination of wonder and longing that makes a life. Melanie Power’s poems commemorate ordinary moments and everyday characters – a roadside shopkeeper, a neighbourhood linden tree, a great-uncle’s hooch – tracing the...