Christl Verduyn – författare

Christl Verduyn analyses Engel''s work from a feminist literary perspective, examining Engel''s concern with women''s experiences and perception of the world, female identity and the social constraints on its development, female subjectivity and self, the mother-daughter relationship, and forces opposing women''s artistic self-expression. Verduyn presents in-depth readings of both the novels and Engel''s reflections on her experiences as a woman and a writer as found in her personal journals and other writings. Verduyn demonstrates the extent to which Engel''s work not only deserves to be ranked with the best of Canadian literature but also enriches our understanding of women''s experiences and broadens our view of women''s worlds. Lifelines makes an important contribution to Canadian literature, women''s studies, and the growing genre of life writing.

Rains, a former soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, immigrated to Canada at the same period as Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. He brought with him his wards, sisters Frances and Elizabeth. The three settled on St Joseph Island in northern Ontario, where their unusual domestic arrangement caught the attention and imagination of, among others, the nineteenth-century British travel-writer Anna Jameson, the Swiss born naturalist and explorer Louis Agassiz, the American poet William Cullen Bryant, and the Canadian novelist Marian Engel.

Rains, a former soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, immigrated to Canada at the same period as Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. He brought with him his wards, sisters Frances and Elizabeth. The three settled on St Joseph Island in northern Ontario, where their unusual domestic arrangement caught the attention and imagination of, among others, the nineteenth-century British travel-writer Anna Jameson, the Swiss born naturalist and explorer Louis Agassiz, the American poet William Cullen Bryant, and the Canadian novelist Marian Engel.

Marian Engel was a writer's writer – an iconoclast, deeply admired and loved by a generation of Canadian authors and critics. Informal gatherings were often held at Engel's Toronto house, and it was there that Engel's many literary friendships were first nurtured, later to blossom through the exchange of numerous and extraordinary letters, which are variously funny, insightful, irreverent, and moving. Engel's lively epistolary practice offers a view of the literary landscape in Canada from 1965 to 1985 as seen through her correspondence with mentor Hugh MacLennan, and friends and colleagues Robertson Davies, Dennis Lee, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Matt Cohen, Robert Weaver, and Graeme Gibson, to name but a few.In the spring of 2001, the Marian Engel Archive in Hamilton, Ontario received an exciting and unexpected new installment of Engel correspondence. Marian Engel: Life in Letters is born of that gift. In making their selection, Christl Verduyn and Kathleen Garay have chosen correspondence that specifically captures Engel's life as a writer, a narrative that spans her early youthful travels in Europe to her early death in 1985. In addition to the letters sent to her friends, this startling and important collection includes letters by Engel to critics, to editors, to granting officers, to publishers, and a brilliant letter to a chief librarian lambasting him for, among other pungent criticisms, the library's prejudice against 'Domesticity' amongst other categories. Thoughtfully presented and accompanied by insightful commentary, these letters are rich in their detail, filling in the fine points in the life of not only one Canadian writer, but of a nation of writers.

Every nation has stories that help to define the country and its people. Focusing on widely varied written sources, Archival Narratives for Canada is an examination of the stories that have defined Canada. Professional archivists, scholars and other researchers working with archives – from the local and regional to national and international – explore the changing landscape of archival resources in Canada and in particular the role of archives in shaping the country’s narratives. They examine, among other topics, the politics of archiving, the process of archival documentation, the particular challenges of small and regional collections, the role of new technologies and digitization, and new conceptualizations of the archive. This collection also includes a variety of case studies which demonstrate the value of archival research, both traditional and assisted by digital resources and search engines, in reconstructing Canadian texts and authors from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Canadian Studies: Past, Present, Praxis provides an overview of the development and evolution of Canadian Studies as a field of research and teaching, from the landmark Symons Report in 1975 to current reflections on directions, relevance and challenges of the field. The collection includes key historical documents – which remain forward-looking and consequential and whose aims and challenges are reflected in present-day considerations of and commentaries on Canadian Studies – as well as new writings that examine the most important contemporary issues and practices in the field, such as its social relevance and political activism, its international dimension and its place in contemporary scholarship. Bringing together historical and current perspectives and established and new scholars, this volume offers a frank and critical assessment of the contributions of Canadian Studies, its ongoing potential and its challenges for the future.

Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography explores some of the latest developments in the literary and cultural practices of Canadians of Asian heritage. While earlier work by ethnic, multicultural, or minority writers in Canada was often concerned with immigration, the moment of arrival, issues of assimilation, and conflicts between generations, literary and cultural production in the new millennium no longer focuses solely on the conflict between the Old World and the New or the clashes between culture of origin and adopted culture. No longer are minority authors identifying simply with their ethnic or racial cultural background in opposition to dominant culture. The essays in this collection explore ways in which Asian Canadian authors (such as Larissa Lai, Shani Mootoo, Fred Wah, Hiromi Goto, Suniti Namjoshi, and Ying Chen) and artists (such as Ken Lum, Paul Wong, and Laiwan) have gone beyond what Françoise Lionnet calls autoethnography, or ethnographic autobiography. They demonstrate the ways representations of race and ethnicity, particularly in works by Asian Canadians in the last decade, have changed have become more playful, untraditional, aesthetically and ideologically transgressive, and exciting.

Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies is the third volume of essays produced as part of the TransCanada conferences project. The essays gathered in Critical Collaborations constitute a call for collaboration and kinship across disciplinary, political, institutional, and community borders. They are tied together through a simultaneous call for resistance - to Eurocentrism, corporatization, rationalism, and the fantasy of total systems of knowledge - and a call for critical collaborations. These collaborations seek to forge connections without perceived identity - linking concepts and communities without violating the differences that constitute them, seeking epistemic kinships while maintaining a willingness to not-know. In this way, they form a critical conversation between seemingly distinct areas and demonstrate fundamental allegiances between diasporic and indigenous scholarship, transnational and local knowledges, legal and eco-critical methodologies. Links are forged between Indigenous knowledge and ecological and social justice, creative critical reading, and ambidextrous epistemologies, unmaking the nation through translocalism and unsettling histories of colonial complicity through a poetics of relation. Together, these essays reveal how the critical methodologies brought to bear on literary studies can both challenge and exceed disciplinary structures, presenting new forms of strategic transdisciplinarity that expand the possibilities of Canadian literary studies while also emphasizing humility, complicity, and the limits of knowledge.

Public Poetics is a collection of essays and poems that address some of the most pressing issues of the discipline in the twenty-first century. The collection brings together fifteen original essays addressing ""publics,"" ""poetry,"" and ""poetics"" from the situated space of Canada while simultaneously troubling the notion of the nation as a stable term. It asks hard questions about who and what count as ""publics"" in Canada. Critical essays stand alongside poetry as visual and editorial reminders of the cross-pollination required in thinking through both poetry and poetics. Public Poetics is divided into three thematic sections. The first contains essays surveying poetics in the present moment through the lens of the public/private divide, systematic racism in Canada, the counterpublic, feminist poetics, and Canadian innovations on postmodern poetics. The second section contains author-specific studies of public poets. The final section contains essays that use innovative renderings of ""poetics"" as a means of articulating alternative communities and practices. Each section is paired with a collection of original poetry by ten contemporary Canadian poets. This collection attends to the changing landscape of critical discourse around poetry and poetics in Canada, and will be of use to teachers and students of poetry and poetics.