How does an “outsider” feminist read a contemporary Canadian literature that is profoundly inscribed with the contradictions of late 20th-century capitalism, nationalism and globalism, and with vigorous class, race and gender struggles for access to power and representation? What does “literature” become when its own strategies variously place history, genre, legitimacy and literariness into question?

Through readings of such diverse Canadian writers as Dionne Brand, Alice Munro, Jacqueline Dumas, Frank Davey, Claire Harris, Michael Ondaatje, Elly Danica, Robert Kroetsch, Nourbese Philip, bpNichol, Beatrice Culleton, Margaret Atwood, Rose Dorion, George Bowering, Lola Lemire Tostevin and Daphne Marlatt, Outsider Notes offers tough-minded reappraisals of canonictiy, modernism, postmodernism, marginality, and postcoloniality and opens a challenge to write and read “past the ideology of the nation state.”

Lynette Hunter is Distinguished Professor of the History of Rhetoric and Performance at the University of Calfornia Davis.With a background in the study of rhetoric, philosophy and political theory, Lynette Hunter has conducted research into women’s history and feminism, printing and humanities computing, the history of science and medicine, decolonialism and Canadian Studies, and more recently into performance and practice. A Canadian who has worked primarily in the UK and in the USA, her work is significantly informed by what she has learned from indigenous ways of knowing and daoist epistemology. An early contributor to the Practice a Research pedagogy in Europe, she built the first Performance as Research doctoral program in the USA from 2003. Writer, co-writer and co-editor of 30 books including a performative criticism of Canadian writers Disunified Aesthetics (McGill Queens 2014), she has recently finished Politics of Practice: A Rhetoric of Performativity (Palgrave 2019), and is currently writing on the phenomenology of how performers presence the changes that happen when they interact with the materials of their trained practice.

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Born in Vancouver, Frank Davey was Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario. Upon his retirement in 2005, the conference “Poetics and Public Culture in Canada” was held in his honour. Davey attended the University of British Columbia where he was a co-founder of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. Since 1963, he has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. With fellow TISH poet Fred Wah, Davey founded the world’s first on-line literary magazine, SwiftCurrent in 1984.

A prolific and highly-esteemed author of numerous books and scholarly articles on Canadian literary criticism and poetry, Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it, and the struggles between different identity-based groups in our globalizing society—racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, economic—that drive this play.

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