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Literary Criticism Canadian

Beyond "Understanding Canada"

Transnational Perspectives on Canadian Literature

edited by Melissa Tanti, Jeremy Haynes, Daniel Coleman & Lorraine York

Publisher
The University of Alberta Press
Initial publish date
Mar 2017
Category
Canadian, Cultural Policy
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781772122695
    Publish Date
    Mar 2017
    List Price
    $54.99
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781772123258
    Publish Date
    Apr 2017
    List Price
    $39.99

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Description

The dismantling of “Understanding Canada”—an international program eliminated by Canada’s Conservative government in 2012—posed a tremendous potential setback for Canadianists. Yet Canadian writers continue to be celebrated globally by popular and academic audiences alike. Twenty scholars speak to the government’s diplomatic and economic about-face and its implications for representations of Canadian writing within and outside Canada’s borders. The contributors to this volume remind us of the obstacles facing transnational intellectual exchange, but also salute scholars’ persistence despite these obstacles. Beyond “Understanding Canada” is a timely, trenchant volume for students and scholars of Canadian literature and anyone seeking to understand how Canadian literature circulates in a transnational world.

Contributors: Michael A. Bucknor, Daniel Coleman, Anne Collett, Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Jeremy Haynes, Cristina Ivanovici, Milena Kaličanin, Smaro Kamboureli, Katalin Kürtösi, Vesna Lopičić, Belén Martín-Lucas, Claire Omhovère, Lucia Otrísalová, Don Sparling, Melissa Tanti, Christl Verduyn, Elizabeth Yeoman, Lorraine York

About the authors

Melissa Tanti is a PhD candidate in English at McMaster University. Her area of specialization is contemporary women’s literature and feminist critical theory.

Melissa Tanti's profile page

Jeremy Haynes is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University where he studies Canadian, Indigenous, and diasporic literatures with an interest in Indigenous methodologies.

Jeremy Haynes' profile page

Daniel Coleman is a recently retired English professor who is grateful to live in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. He taught in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He has studied and written about Canadian Literature, whiteness, the literatures of Indigeneity and diaspora, the cultural politics of reading, and wampum, the form of literacy-ceremony-communication-law that was invented by the people who inhabited the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence–Hudson River Watershed before Europeans arrived on Turtle Island.

Daniel has long been fascinated by the poetic power of narrative arts to generate a sense of place and community, critical social engagement and mindfulness, and especially wonder. Although he has committed considerable effort to learning in and from the natural world, he is still a bookish person who loves the learning that is essential to writing. He has published numerous academic and creative non-fiction books as an author and as an editor. His books include Masculine Migrations (1998), The Scent of Eucalyptus (2003), White Civility (2006; winner of the Raymond Klibansky Prize), In Bed with the Word (2009) and Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place (2017, shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize).

Daniel Coleman's profile page

Lorraine York is Senator William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her most recent books are Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity (2013) and Literary Celebrity in Canada (2007). She is currently at work on a project on reluctant celebrity.

Lorraine York's profile page

Editorial Reviews

"Beyond 'Understanding Canada' takes its name and impetus from the Canadian government’s 2012 cancellation of the “Understanding Canada” program, which ended nearly forty years of financial support for interdisciplinary studies of Canada around the world. As the title suggests, the collection quickly moves beyond the Understanding Canada program to examine a broader range of questions regarding the transnational circulation of Canadian literature.... [The collection] succeeds admirably, overcoming the 'material challenges' of international scholarship not only to argue for but also to demonstrate convincingly the transnational nature of Canadian literary studies." Canadian Literature 235, Winter 2017 [Full article at http://canlit.ca/article/transnational-nationalism]

Robert Zacharias

"The editors draw a number of important conclusions from the collection: that the popularity of Canadian women writers abroad must be linked to their power politics; that Canada has a set of ‘less laudable links’ (Collett) that need to be examined too; that indigenous writing needs to be more visibly worked into transnational contexts, that ‘transing [as in ‘transnational’] provides an opportunity to unsettle the profitability of any singular notion of national identity’."

Oxford University Press Journals, Volume 98, Issue 1

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