Irene Gammel – författare

Since the publication of Anne of Green Gables in 1908, L.M. Montgomery and the world of Anne have propelled themselves into a global cultural phenomenon, popular not only in Canada, but in places as diverse as Japan, the United States, and Iran. Making Avonlea, the first study to focus on Montgomery and her characters as popular cultural icons, brings together twenty-three scholars from around the world to examine Montgomery's work, its place in our imagination, and more specifically its myriad spin-offs including musicals, films, television series, t-shirts, dolls, and a tourist industry.Invoking theories of popular culture, film, literature, drama, and tourism, the essayists probe the emotional attachment and loyalty of many generations of mostly female readers to Montgomery's books while similarly scrutinizing the fierce controversies that surround these books and their author's legacy in Canada. Twenty-five illustrations of theatre and film stills, artwork, and popular cultural artefacts, as well as snapshot pieces featuring personal reflections on Montgomery's novels, are interwoven with scholarly essays to provide a complete picture of the Montgomery cultural phenomenon. Mythopoetics, erotic romance, and visual imagination are subjects of discussion, as is the commercial success of various television series and movies, musicals, and plays based on the Anne books. Scholars are equally concerned with the challenges and disputes that surround the translation of Montgomery's work from print to screen as well as the growth of tourist sites and websites that have themselves moved Avonlea into new cultural landscapes. Making Avonlea allows the reader to travel to these sites and to consider Canada's most enduring literary figures and celebrity author in light of their status as international icons almost one hundred years after they first arrived on the scene.

Creative Resilience and COVID-19 examines arts, culture, and everyday life as a way of navigating through and past COVID-19. Drawing together the voices of international experts and emerging scholars, this volume explores themes of creativity and resilience in relation to the crisis, trauma, cultural alterity, and social change wrought by the pandemic.The cultural, social, and political concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19 are inextricably intertwined with the ways the pandemic has been discussed, represented, and visualized in global media. The essays included in this volume are concerned with how artists, writers, and advocates uncover the hope, plasticity, and empowerment evident in periods of worldwide loss and struggle—factors which are critical to both overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and fashioning the post-COVID-19 era. Elaborating on concepts of the everyday and the outbreak narrative, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 explores diverse themes including coping with the crisis through digital distractions, diary writing, and sounds; the unequal vulnerabilities of gender, ethnicity, and age; the role of visuality and creativity including comics and community theatre; and the hopeful vision for the future through urban placemaking, nighttime sociability, and cinema. The book fills an important scholarly gap, providing foundational knowledge from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic through a consideration of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In doing so, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 expands non-medical COVID-19 studies at the intersection of media and communication studies, cultural criticism, and the pandemic.

Creative Resilience and COVID-19 examines arts, culture, and everyday life as a way of navigating through and past COVID-19. Drawing together the voices of international experts and emerging scholars, this volume explores themes of creativity and resilience in relation to the crisis, trauma, cultural alterity, and social change wrought by the pandemic.The cultural, social, and political concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19 are inextricably intertwined with the ways the pandemic has been discussed, represented, and visualized in global media. The essays included in this volume are concerned with how artists, writers, and advocates uncover the hope, plasticity, and empowerment evident in periods of worldwide loss and struggle—factors which are critical to both overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and fashioning the post-COVID-19 era. Elaborating on concepts of the everyday and the outbreak narrative, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 explores diverse themes including coping with the crisis through digital distractions, diary writing, and sounds; the unequal vulnerabilities of gender, ethnicity, and age; the role of visuality and creativity including comics and community theatre; and the hopeful vision for the future through urban placemaking, nighttime sociability, and cinema. The book fills an important scholarly gap, providing foundational knowledge from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic through a consideration of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In doing so, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 expands non-medical COVID-19 studies at the intersection of media and communication studies, cultural criticism, and the pandemic.

Writing COVID-19 Lives examines how people turned to life writing—often in fragile, makeshift forms—to make sense of the pandemic. Across poetry, memoir, autofiction, photography, sketchbooks, diaries, postcards, and digital storytelling, the collection traces a pandemic aesthetic marked by brevity, fracture, and pause: an autobiographical “I” that is unsettled, doubled, or dispersed. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in Notes on Grief, “You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.” That grasping—the search for a voice that could still speak—threads through these essays.Spanning case studies from Canada, the United States, China, Latvia, Peru, the United Kingdom, and Spain, the volume situates these works amid uneven conditions of care, precarity, surveillance, and loss. We encounter poetry written into silence; memoirs shaped by Zoom-mediated mourning; autofiction working through trauma; and photographic diaries—such as Marvin Heiferman’s Photographic Shiva—that turn domestic objects into charged residues of grief.Rather than offering a single story of “the pandemic,” the volume assembles a textured archive of how lives were written—tenderly, urgently, and sometimes beautifully—under unprecedented constraint.

Writing COVID-19 Lives examines how people turned to life writing—often in fragile, makeshift forms—to make sense of the pandemic. Across poetry, memoir, autofiction, photography, sketchbooks, diaries, postcards, and digital storytelling, the collection traces a pandemic aesthetic marked by brevity, fracture, and pause: an autobiographical “I” that is unsettled, doubled, or dispersed. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in Notes on Grief, “You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.” That grasping—the search for a voice that could still speak—threads through these essays.Spanning case studies from Canada, the United States, China, Latvia, Peru, the United Kingdom, and Spain, the volume situates these works amid uneven conditions of care, precarity, surveillance, and loss. We encounter poetry written into silence; memoirs shaped by Zoom-mediated mourning; autofiction working through trauma; and photographic diaries—such as Marvin Heiferman’s Photographic Shiva—that turn domestic objects into charged residues of grief.Rather than offering a single story of “the pandemic,” the volume assembles a textured archive of how lives were written—tenderly, urgently, and sometimes beautifully—under unprecedented constraint.

The recent 100 year anniversary of the first publication of L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables has inspired renewed interest in one of Canada's most beloved fictional icons. The international appeal of the red-haired orphan has not diminished over the past century, and the cultural meanings of her story continue to grow and change. The original essays in Anne's World offer fresh and timely approaches to issues of culture, identity, health, and globalization as they apply to Montgomery's famous character and to today's readers.In conversation with each other and with the work of previous experts, the contributors to Anne's World discuss topics as diverse as Anne in fashion, the global industry surrounding Anne, how the novel can be used as a tool to counteract depression, and the possibility that Anne suffers from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Anne in translation and its adaptation for film and television are also considered. By establishing new ways to examine one of popular culture's most beloved characters, the essays of Anne's World demonstrate the timeless and ongoing appeal of L.M. Montgomery's writing.