Nora Foster Stovel – författare

Margaret Laurence, best known for her germinal novels set in the Canadian prairies, is one of the nation's most respected authors. She was also an accomplished essayist, yet today her nonfiction writing is largely unavailable and therefore little known. In Recognition and Revelation Nora Foster Stovel brings together Laurence's short nonfiction works, including many that have not previously been collected and some that have never before been published. These works, including over fifty essays and addresses that span Laurence's writing career from the 1960s to the 1980s, reveal her passionate concern for Canadian literature and for the land and peoples of Canada. Based on extensive archival research, Stovel's introduction contextualizes Laurence's nonfiction writings in her life as a creative artist and political activist and as a woman writing in the twentieth century. The texts range from essays on Laurence's own writings and on other works of Canadian literature to autobiographical essays, several focusing on environmental concerns, to sociopolitical essays and writing advocating for peace and nuclear disarmament. By revealing Laurence as a socially and politically committed artist, this collection of lively and provocative essays illuminates the undercurrents of her creative writing and places her fiction - often informed by her nonfiction writing - in a new light.

Carol Shields, best known for her fiction writing, received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General's Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. But she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career.The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields's death in 2003. In a detailed introduction and commentary, Nora Foster Stovel contextualizes these poems against the background of Shields's life and oeuvre and the traditions of twentieth-century poetry. She demonstrates how poetry influenced and informed Shields's novels; many of the poems, which constitute miniature narratives, illuminate Shields's fiction and serve as the testing ground for metaphors she later employed in her prose works. Stovel delineates Shields's career-long interest in character and setting, gender and class, self and other, actuality and numinousness, as well as revealing her subversive feminism, which became explicit in Reta Winter's angry (unsent) letters in Unless and in the stories of poet Mary Swann and Daisy Goodwill in Swann and The Stone Diaries.The first complete collection of her poetry, this volume is essential for all readers of Carol Shields. Stovel's detailed annotations, based on research in the Carol Shields fonds at Library and Archives Canada, reveal the poems in all their depth and resonance, and the dignity and consequence they afford to ordinary people.

Carol Shields, best known for her fiction writing, received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General's Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. But she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career.The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields's death in 2003. In a detailed introduction and commentary, Nora Foster Stovel contextualizes these poems against the background of Shields's life and oeuvre and the traditions of twentieth-century poetry. She demonstrates how poetry influenced and informed Shields's novels; many of the poems, which constitute miniature narratives, illuminate Shields's fiction and serve as the testing ground for metaphors she later employed in her prose works. Stovel delineates Shields's career-long interest in character and setting, gender and class, self and other, actuality and numinousness, as well as revealing her subversive feminism, which became explicit in Reta Winter's angry (unsent) letters in Unless and in the stories of poet Mary Swann and Daisy Goodwill in Swann and The Stone Diaries.The first complete collection of her poetry, this volume is essential for all readers of Carol Shields. Stovel's detailed annotations, based on research in the Carol Shields fonds at Library and Archives Canada, reveal the poems in all their depth and resonance, and the dignity and consequence they afford to ordinary people.

The unusual marriage of Romantic ballet and artificial intelligence is an intriguing idea that led a team of interdisciplinary researchers to design iGiselle, a video game prototype. Scholars in the fields of literature, physical education, music, design, and computer science collaborated to revise the tragic narrative of the nineteenth-century ballet Giselle, allowing players to empower the heroine for possible ”feminine endings.” The eight interrelated chapters chronicle the origin, development, and fruition of the project. Dancers, gamers, and computer specialists will all find something original that will stimulate their respective interests.Contributors: Vadim Bulitko, Wayne DeFehr, Christina Gier, Pirkko Markula, Mark Morris, Sergio Poo Hernandez, Emilie St. Hilaire, Nora Foster Stovel, Laura Sydora

This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields’s experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her fiction.