ReCalling Early Canada
Reading the Political in Literary and Cultural Production
Published on 1. May 2005
Book
Paperback/Softback
440 pages
978-0-88864-443-5 (ISBN)
Description
ReCalling Early Canada is the first substantial collection of essays to focus on the production of Canadian literary and cultural works prior to WWI. Reflecting an emerging critical interest in the literary past, the authors seek to retrieve the early repertoire available to Canadian readers-fiction and poetry certainly, but family letters, photographs, journalism, and captivity narratives are also investigated. Filling a significant gap in Canadian criticism, the authors demonstrate that to recall the past is not only to shape it, but also to reshape the present. This fresh interest in the cultural past, informed by new approaches to historical inquiry, has resulted in a unique and diverse investigation of more than two centuries of a little known "early Canada." Foreword by Carole Gerson.
Reviews / Votes
"ReCalling Early Canada positions the act of recall not as simplistic retrieval but rather as a dynamic interaction between past and present. The essays collected in this book aim to look to the past not necessarily to participate in the protect of nation building, but rather to query the methodology, politics and ends of historical engagement; the processes of selection through which certain texts, objects and figures are deemed to be worthy of study; the frames through which we analyze the past; and the provisional characteristics of such frames..ReCalling Early Canada begins with a lengthy and insightful introduction that draws attention to the complexities of the 'politics of recollection' (xvi) upon which this project is based. The editors emphasize the importance of reading the non-canonical together with the canonical in order to challenge the contingencies of value upon which such a distinction is based. They foreground the limitations of the nation as an organizational category by reading Canada as a 'site of conflicting confederacies' located within, and sometimes poised against, the nation as a geopolitical entity (xxiii). The introduction also draws attention to the tendency of the archive to shape how we recall early Canada..[T]he essays collected in ReCalling Early Canada indicate a welcome shift away from the 'colony to nation' paradigm towards a more nuanced engagement with history, place and nation." Heather Milne, TOPIA 15, Spring, 2006. "[The editors] have provided a solid body of work that can be analysed from a variety of perspectives." George Melnyk, The Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 87, No. 3, September 2006 "[T]he essays cover terrain as varied as Theresa Gowanlock's captivity narrative, the documentation of the Aboriginal 'family' by white photographers, and conflicting national identities as portrayed in French and English fiction. This collection is highly recommended for both undergraduate and graduate collections in academic libraries." Allison Sivak, Canadian Book Review Annual, 2006More details
Series
Edition
First edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Edmonton
Canada
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
550 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-88864-443-5 (9780888644435)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Jennifer Blair is a doctoral student in the Department of English at McMaster University. Her dissertation explores the connections between literature and architecture in early Canada. Daniel Coleman is Professor Emeritus of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He was born and raised in Ethiopia and came to Canada to go to college. After BEd and MA degrees from the University of Regina, and a PhD from the University of Alberta, he went on to teach at McMaster University. He has written scholarly books about literature, masculinity, migration, and whiteness in Canada, and he has written literary non-fiction books about his upbringing among missionaries in Ethiopia, about the spiritual and cultural politics of reading, and about eco-human relations in Hamilton, Ontario, the post-industrial city where he lives. Daniel Coleman has edited books on early Canadian literary cultures, postcolonial masculinities, race, Caribbean-Canadian literature, the state of the humanities in Canadian universities, the creativity and resilience of refugee-d and Indigenous peoples, and international scholarship on Canadian literatures. Some of these books have won awards. He is grateful to live in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. Kate Higginson's doctoral work examines the writing of colonial captivities and indigenous internments in Canada. Her latest article maps Mohawk or Haudenosaunee nationalism and the memorialization of Joseph Brant in the photography of Shelley Niro (Essays on Canadian Writing, Fall 2003). Lorraine York teaches Canadian literature at McMaster University. She has written books on Timothy Findley, Canadian fiction and photography, women's collaborative writing, and has edited a book of essays on Margaret Atwood. She is currently finishing a book on Canadian literary celebrity.