This lively and diverse bilingual collection of essays by writers and critics examines contemporary Canadian literary arts. The perspectives range from highly personal and introspective to scholarly and objective, yet each adds significantly to an understanding of the dialogue between writers and readers. Proceedings from a workshop held at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities during the summer of 1982, the volume includes such contributors as E.D. Blodgett, Jacques Brault, Richard Giguère, D.G. Jones, Myrna Kostash, Peter Stevens, Aritha van Herk, and Christopher Wiseman.

The collection will naturally be of interest to any student of Canadian literature, but the essays also forcefully address, both explicitly and implicitly, the question of a nationalism of the arts, an issue of great importance to performers and critics in many fields.

Barbara Belyea has lived, studied and worked in Britain, France and Switzerland as well as in several provinces of Canada. During graduate school she was introduced to editing and medieval literature; her interest in editions of manuscripts, combined with years of hiking and skiing in the Rocky Mountains, led her to edit David Thompson’s Columbia Journals. She is also interested in Amerindian and fur trade cartography.

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Estelle Dansereau taught French language and French-Canadian literature in the Department of French, Italian, and Spanish at the University of Calgary.

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