Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral

The Shepheardes Calender (1579) signalled Spenser's desire to assume the role of an English Virgil and at the same time his readiness to leave behind the pastoral world of his apprenticeship and his early persona, Colin Clout. Yet Spenser was twice to return to the pastoral world of Colin Clout, ...

At Home in Time

Patrick Deane argues that modern English poetry, in some key aspects, is deeply indebted to the classical tradition and, more particularly, to the attitudes and modes of the eighteenth century. He illustrates how neo-Augustan values are apparent in the works of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNe...

Milton's Leveller God

David Williams advances a progressive and democratic interpretation of Milton's epics to show they are more relevant than ever. He traces echoes between Milton's texts and Leveller writings that advocated for popular rule, extended suffrage, and religious tolerance, arguing that Milton's God is s...

Last Child to Come Inside

These are poignant, at times strangely quirky entries into a world filled with sharpness, the sense of imminent danger, and a sensual urge that seems to sweep all danger before it. the border between exterior and interior life is diffuse. One can find oneself in unexpected places. Two little girl...

The Landing

The poems in The Landing, Sinnett's first collection, reflect on a life divided in two by a move from England to Canada. Ontario's glacial landscape is the backdrop for a darkly humorous, often unsettling look at the nature of love and commitment at the end of the twentieth century. This is a tim...

The Tantramar Re-Vision

Inspired by the literary landscape of the late poet John Thompson, Kevin Irie's The Tantramar Re-Vision presents a portrait of nature where the benign and the bedevilled coexist, collude, or collide. The lyrical poems in this collection charts routes of discovery as it follows trails, waterways, ...

whereabouts

In this riddling and seeking book of poems, Edward Carson navigates the emotional, often contradictory intelligence of the heart and mind. In three interrelated segments, whereabouts powerfully charts the tight emotional spaces between thinking and language, beauty and perception, love and the po...

Kingsley Amis

Uncovering Kingsley Amis's hidden artistic agenda.

The Selected Essays of Sean O'Faolain

The first collection of essays by one of the most important public intellectuals in Ireland.

Mosaic Orpheus

Maturing reflections on a changing world.

The Birth of New Criticism

A groundbreaking account of the origins of the twentieth century's most influential method for studying poetry.

David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel

An engaging study of one of the most popular contemporary British novelists.

Fear of the Ride

The Asparagus Feast

Once she woke me in the streaky dark to savour one of her delights - "larks against bells," she called it. We carried our coffees down to the minty garden and waited ankle-deep in dew. Across the shallow valley, the early traffic crept in glimmers through the groundmist. At dawn the cannonade of ...

Autumn Harvest

Autumn Harvest brings a decade of Stanley Frost's poems together in one anthology that is varied in both style and content.

Archibald Lampman

How Archibald Lampman articulated the Canadian response to nature and introduced radical politics into the nation's literary salon.

True Poetry

Ontario is not a homogeneous culture, but rather a conglomerate of ethnic cultures and rural and urban populations. In True Poetry: Traditional and Popular Verse in Ontario, Pauline Greenhill describes and evaluates the significance of folk verse, suggesting that it provides a method for creating...

Poetic Argument

Poetic Argument studies argument as both a theme and a technique of poetry. Jonathan Kertzer considers how poets argue for, rather than merely assert, their truths. In a theoretical essay and detailed analysis of the works of five poets - Marianne Moore, Edward Thomas, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, a...

The Language of the Senses

In this stimulating and original analysis of some of the most important nineteenth-century poems in English, Kerry McSweeney offers an alternative to non-referential and New Historicist critical methods.

Wavelengths of Your Song

Intuitive environmentalism from the Canadian North is carried forth into creative global adventuring.

Coming to Canada

In a record breaking "hat trick," Carol Shields was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel,The Stone Diaries, the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. Carleton University Press is pleased to release a newly designed ...

Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad

Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad is a structural and thematic analysis of early modern British fiction with an intellectual foundation consisting of political theory, sociology, and philosophy. Key theoreticians include Charles Darwin, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Karl Mannh...

Her Festival Clothes

The Road to Egdon Heath

Many people spend considerable sums of money on arduous trekking holidays in frozen wastelands or through scorched deserts. These places, which would once have been considered cursed and avoided at all cost, are now sought out or seen as the epitome of a

Stages and Playgoers

Stages and Playgoers demonstrates the long, vital tradition of dialogue between stage and audience from medieval, through Tudor, to Jacobean drama. Janet Hill offers new insights into techniques of addressing playgoers from the stage and how they might have operated under particular staging condi...

Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and Their Places in Langland's Poetics

In Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and Their Place in Langland's Poetics John Chamberlin helps readers of Piers Plowman understand some of the most characteristic and inventive elements of Langland's work. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Chamberlin brings together an examination of Lang...

A Reader of Modern Urdu Poetry

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

Signature

The Enterprises of Robert Hamilton

John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance

As a working-class poet, born in 1793 to an impovisherished family in rural England, John Clare has often been considered of interest for the unusual nature of his life and career rather than for his poetry. In this book, Johanne Clare argues that he should be taken seriously both as a poet and a...

The Canadian Brothers

The Canadian Brothers or the Prophecy Fulfilled is a fictionalized narrative of events, people and places from the author's childhood and adolescence in Amherstburg, Upper Canada, that reflects foundation myths about Ontario and Canada and reveals their d

Aristotle's Poetics

George Whalley's English translation of the Poetics breathes new life into the study of Aristotle's aesthetics by allowing the English-speaking student to experience the dynamic quality characteristic of Aristotle's arguments in the original Greek.

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.

Wet Apples, White Blood

In Wet Apples, White Blood, nursing, as a constant creative act dependent on the baby's demand, is a trope for the creative process and for questions of biology, psychology, and spirituality.

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 ...