The Daughter's Way

Reviews / Votes

"The Daughter's Way is an original, absorbing, and long-overdue critical examination of the way Canadian female poets have written against the grain of the male elegiac tradition. MacDonald's scholarly conversation with these works is an important step in understanding the contrary energies of feminist remembrance." -- Sarah Henstra, Department of English, Ryerson University, author of The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction "'How women are to be--as bodies, as artists, and as elegists--is predicated on their ability to memorialize and inherit,' writes Tanis MacDonald in the introduction to The Daughter's Way. In the carefully theorized and beautifully written chapters that follow, she traces an arc of female paternal elegies with sensitivity and a keen critical and feminist intelligence. Erudite, insightful, nuanced, and continuously engaging, The Daughter's Way is a lucid crystallization of years of study, thought, and felt experience in and around elegies that casts a brilliant light on the texts and on their literary, personal, and social contexts. It is a significant contribution to Canadian literary and feminist studies and, indeed, to studies of the elegiac mode itself." -- D.M.R. Bentley, Department of English, University of Western Ontario, editor of Canadian Poetry Tanis MacDonald's The Daughter's Way represents a new way of understanding Canadian women's poetic elegies. Ranging widely across twentieth- and twenty-first century Canadian women's texts, the study provides a compelling and precisely focused engagement with gender, genre, and nation. MacDonald (herself a poet) brings a rich understanding of the importance of poetic form. She produces insightful analyses in prose that is crystal clear and a pleasure to read, making readers engage with the evocative power of the "literary" all over again. -- Gabrielle Roy Prize jurors "An interesting and careful study." -- Wendy Robbins, University of New Brunswick -- Herizons