The Daughter's Way

Reviews / Votes

"An interesting and careful study. - Wendy Robbins, University of New Brunswick, Herizons The Daughters 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. MacDonalds 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 Tanis MacDonalds The Daughters Way represents a new way of understanding Canadian womens poetic elegies. Ranging widely across twentieth- and twenty-first century Canadian womens 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. - Sarah Henstra, Department of English, Ryerson University, author of The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction, Gabrielle Roy Prize jurors How women are to beas bodies, as artists, and as elegistsis predicated on their ability to memorialize and inherit, writes Tanis MacDonald in the introduction to The Daughters 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 Daughters 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, Herizons