Christl Verduyn

Before her death in 1985 at the age of fifty-one, Marian Engel had published seven novels, two collections of short stories, and numerous essays and articles. Despite this impressive output and various literary honours, including a Governor General's Award for her novel Bear, Engel's writing has not received the critical attention it deserves. A comprehensive study of Engel's body of work, Lifelines fills a major gap in Canadian literary criticism.

Marian Engel's Writings

Lifelines

Edna Staebler

Long before she became the renowned author of the best-selling Schmecks cookbooks, an award-winning journalist for magazines such as Macleans, and a creative non-fiction mentor, Edna Staebler was a writer of a different sort. Staebler began serious diary writing at the age of sixteen and continued to write for over eighty years. Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries draws from these diaries selections that map Staebler’s construction of herself as a writer and documents her frustrations and struggles, along with her desire to express herself, in writing. She felt she must write—that not to write was a “denial of life”—while at the same time she doubted the value of her scribblings. Spanning much of the twentieth century—each decade is introduced by an overview of key events in the author’s life during that period—the diaries vividly illuminate both her intensely personal experiences and her broader social world. The volume also presents four key examples of Staebler’s public writing: her first published magazine article; her first award-winning publication; the opening chapter of her book Cape Breton Harbour; and her lively account of the Great Cookie War. Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries portrays an ordinary woman’s struggle to write in the context of her lived experience. “All my life I have talked about writing and kept scribbling in my notebook, as if that makes me a writer,” wrote Staebler in 1986. This volume argues that the very act of writing the diaries, with all their contradictory accounts of writerly ambition, success, and conflict, made Staebler the writer she yearned to be.

Edna Staebler’s Diaries

Must Write

Literary Pluralities is a collection of essays on the connections between literature and society in Canada, focusing on the topics of race, ethnicity, language, and cultures. The essays explore a nexus of related issues, including the dynamics between race, ethnicity, class, gender and generation; Canadian multiculturalism, and its meaning within Aboriginal and Quebec communities; the politics of language; the new field of life writing; and international dimensions of the debates. Together, they present a valuable picture of Canadian and Quebecois cultural and literary criticism at the century’s end. Contributors include: Himani Bannerji, George Elliott Clarke, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Hiromi Goto, Sneja Gunew, Jean Jonaissant, Smaro Kamboureli, Eva Karpinski, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Myrna Kostash, Lucie Lequin, Nadine Ltaif, Arun Mukherjee, Enoch Padolsky, Nourbese Philip, Joseph Pivato, Armand G. Ruffo, Tamara Palmer Seiler, Drew Hayden Taylor, Aritha van Herk, Maïr Verthuy, and Christl Verduyn. This is a co-publication of Broadview Press and the Journal of Canadian Studies.

Literary Pluralities

"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 and artists have gone beyond what Francoise 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 changedhave become more playful, untraditional, aesthetically and ideologically transgressive, and exciting."--Résumé de l'éditeur.

Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography

From Defiant Monarchy to Reluctant Republic

Smaro Kamboureli

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.

Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies

Critical Collaborations

Marian Engel emerged as a writer during that period in Canada when nationalism increased and “new feminism” dawned. Although she is recognized as a distinguished woman of letters, she has not been widely studied; consequently we know relatively little about her and her craft. The material collected in Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute...” is a major step in redressing that neglect. Extracts carefully chosen by Christl Verduyn from Marian Engel’s forty-nine notebooks — notebooks Engel began in the late 1940s and which she maintained until her death in 1985 — track Engel’s creative development, illustrate her commitment to the craft of writing and document her growth as a major Canadian writer. The notebooks also portray Engel’s surprising leaps of logic, her fascination with the bizarre, the eclecticism of her reading and the depth and variety of her thinking. Finally, they present moving documentation of a woman facing cancer and early death. Christl Verduyn’s illuminating introductory discussions to each of the notebooks unobtrusively guide us in the reading of these sometimes difficult writings. Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute...” leaves readers with a vivid sense of Canadian culture during the 1960s and 1970s. It provides insight into the literary life of one of Canada’s significant woman writers, including her connections with other Canadian writers, and will be of special interest to scholars working in the field of literature.

Christl Verduyn

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