You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Using a wide range of scholarly evidence to support his argument that most poets of the first Canadian Modernist generation were strongly influenced by the ideas and practice of literary Aestheticism, Brian Trehearne provides new readings of Canadian poets such as Robert Finch, John Glassco, W.W.E. Ross, A.J.M. Smith, and F.R. Scott.
Editor and publisher, workaholic and romantic, idealist and pioneer, Lorne Pierce once described his editorial desk as "an altar at which I serve - the entire cultural life of Canada." Pierce laboured at his altar between 1920 and 1960 as the driving force behind Ryerson Press, the leading publisher of Canadian works during the mid-twentieth century. In Both Hands, Sandra Campbell captures the inimitable cultural role of a remarkable man whose work paved the way for the creation of a national identity. Both Hands delves into the encounters, trials, and triumphs that inspired Pierce's vision of cultural nationalism - from his rural upbringing in eastern Ontario, to the philosophical ideals he...
Winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English and the Raymond Klibansky Prize, The Picturesque and the Sublime is a cultural history of two hundred years of nature writing in Canada, from eighteenth-century prospect poems to contemporary encounters with landscape. Arguing against the received wisdom (made popular by Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood) that Canadian writers view nature as hostile, Susan Glickman places Canadian literature in the English and European traditions of the sublime and the picturesque. Glickman argues that early immigrants to Canada brought with them the expectation that nature would be grand, mysterious, awesome – even terrifying – and welcomed scenes that confor...
Born of Irish immigrant stock, Kennedy earned his own living from the age of fourteen after his formal education ended at Grade Six. In a circle of privilege, he was the outsider. Despite this, his intelligence, imagination, and wit, coupled with an intense love of language and learning, opened many doors. Kennedy's choices in religion, friendship, marriage, and business were deeply influenced by the same yearning for justice and defence of humane values that informed his verse, stories, and essays. A successfully published poet at the age of 26 (The Shrouding, 1933), Kennedy soon left his literary world for that of the emerging business of advertising in order to support his family during t...
Keepers of the Code explores the complex network of associations and negotiations that influenced the development of literary anthologies in English Canada from 1837 to the present. Lecker shows that these anthologies are deeply conflicted narratives that embody the tensions and anxieties felt by their editors when faced with the challenge of constructing or rejecting national ideals. He argues that these are intensely self-conscious works with their own literary mechanisms and architecture. In reading the history of these anthologies, he witnesses a complex narrative of nation, a compelling story about the values and interests informing English-Canadian literary history.