Biography & Autobiography Educators
Professing English
A Life of Roy Daniells
- Publisher
- University of Toronto Press
- Initial publish date
- May 2002
- Category
- Educators, General, Canadian
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780802047700
- Publish Date
- May 2002
- List Price
- $91.00
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781442678798
- Publish Date
- Apr 2002
- List Price
- $91.00
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Description
Sandra Djwa has provided readers with a fascinating artifact: a cultural biography with a human face. Roy Daniells (1902-1979), an English professor who finished his career at the University of British Columbia, and an outstanding scholar, teacher and poet, influenced at least four generations of students and is the subject of Professing English. Once established as a professor, Daniells was a key figure - a cultural catalyst - in the consolidation of English as a discipline and the development of Canadian literature as a recognised body of writing and a legitimate focus of scholarship, interacting with major personalities of the era like Earle Birney, Northrop Frye, E.J. Pratt, Sinclair Ross, Margaret Laurence and A.S.P. Woodhouse.
Djwa's examination of his life is a moving personal story as well as a mini-history of literary studies in Canada. It is also the account of an individual struggling against a strict religious upbringing who turned instead to the devotional poets of the seventeenth century. In this biography, Daniells' life becomes a prism refracting aspects of the discipline - the old ties between religion and literature, the making of a professor, mentorship and the way it functioned, women in the academy and changes in the discipline and the professoriate. His devotion to English studies and his unflagging encouragement of young Canadian writers and students makes Daniells one of the greatest unsung heroes in recent history. Thanks to this wonderful biography, he will receive the recognition he so justly deserves.
About the author
Professor Djwa is the author of E.J. Pratt: The Evolutionary Vision and a biography of F. R. Scott, The Politics of the Imagination (1987). She has edited Karl Klinck’s memoirs, Karl Klinck: Giving Canada a Literary History (1991). Her biography of Roy Daniells is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press, and she is now beginning a biography of P.K. Page.
Awards
- Short-listed, Lorne Pierce Medal, Royal Society of Canada
Other titles by
Future Horizons
Canadian Digital Humanities
Journey with No Maps
A Life of P.K. Page
Selected Poems
E.J. Pratt
E.J. Pratt: Selected Poems
E.J. Pratt
Professing English at UBC
The Legacy of Roy Daniells and Garnett Sedgewick
F. R. Scott and His Works
E.J. Pratt
Complete Poems
Saul and Selected Poems
including excerpts from Jephthah's Daughter and Jezebel: A Poem in Three Cantos