This collection of essays deals with the multiple aspects of cultural identities in literature from a postcolonial perspective. The questions raised are at the crossroads of Canadian cultural identity as they address gender, language, race, nationalism, and ethnicity, making this book a valuable reference for researchers, scholars, and students who work in the expanding fields of cultural studies, minority or gender studies, and Canadian studies. Les textes réunis dans cet ouvrage ainsi que la diversité des contributeurs qui proviennent d'horizons culturels variés (Europe, Afrique, Asie, Russie, Acadie, Québec, Haïti...) permettent de mieux apprécier la richesse de ces apports pour les littératures du Canada. Dans cette perspective, l'objectif de ce recueil d'essais n'est pas de répondre à l'éternelle question de l'existence d'une identité canadienne mais plutôt d'affirmer les multiples identités qui composent le Canada actuel et de contribuer ainsi à poser les jalons de nouvelles cartographies de l'imaginaire.

La presente tesis se centra en el género novelístico en lengua inglesa como paradigma de la Identidad literaria canadiense con el fin de analizar su construcción restrictiva por medio de la Recuperación de contribuciones de mujeres y autores étnicos que han sido bien relegadas o bien infravaloradas como agentes literarios relevantes. Esta investigación abarca un periodo que comprende desde la publicación de la primera novela canadiense en inglés, The History of Emily Montague de Frances Brooke en 1769, hasta 1904 año en el que la obra de Sara Jeannette Duncan titulada The Imperialist vió la luz; es decir, desde los comienzos del género en inglés hasta la primera novela modernista. La primera parte engloba el marco teórico general del Nuevo Historicismo, el Feminismo y los Estudios Étnicos puesto que resaltan el papel crucial de la historización de la literatura en la creación de tradiciones e identidades literarias, e impulsan una visión crítica tanto de la producción literaria de mujeres y escritores étnicos como de su consideración. La segunda parte se centra en la historia, tradición e identidad literarias canadienses. Por medio de la novela, se analiza el proceso de antologización de la literatura canadiense en inglés a través de un estudio detallado sobre la presencia/ausencia de autoras y autores étnicos en antologías publicadas entre 1920 y 2004. También se incluyen las contribuciones de críticos/as feministas y/o étnicos puesto que cuestionan axiomas establecidos en la historia, tradición e identidad canadienses y posibilitan el acceso a las obras de estos escritores/as alternativos cuyos diversos sentidos identitarios, de otro modo silenciados, son revelados. Precisamente estos diferentes sentidos de la identidad son el eje de la tercera parte. Desde 1769 a 1904 existen: una primera novela frecuentemente infravalorada escrita Frances Brooke; novelas olvidadas de autoras con gran reconocimiento como Susanna (Strickland) Moodie; escritoras relevantes en la ficción juvenil como es el caso de Agnes Maule Machar, Margaret Murray Robertson y Margaret Marshall Saunders; contribuciones tempranas de autores étnicos como Martin Robinson Delany y Winnifred Eaton; así como novelistas de éxito de la talla Agnes Early Fleming, Lily Dougall, Susan Frances Harrison y Sara Jeannette Duncan. Dándoles voz y resaltando su relevancia, este trabajo demuestra que la literatura canadiense temprana está plagada de autoras y autores étnicos inteligentes, poderosos y reconocidos cuyas aportaciones deben ser re-consideradas si se pretende seguir manteniendo el carácter multicultural y no patriarcal de las letras canadienses. Estas novelas de un autor afroamericano y residente temporal en Canadá, de una mujer canadiense de ascendencia chino-inglesa, y un amplio espectro de mujeres inmigrantes o nativas pone de manifiesto no sólo que Canadá cuenta con un pasado literario sólido y forjado desde la diversidad sino que cuestiona el hecho de que esta herencia literaria todavía necesita ser recuperada.

Covering the works of Canadian authors Alistair Macleod, Michael Ondaatje, Jane Urquhart, Margaret Atwood and Drew Hayden Taylor, the author explores how the themes of memory, storytelling and identity develop in their fiction. For the narrative voices in these works, the past is embedded in the present and a wider cultural history is written over with personal significance. The act of storytelling shapes the characters' lives, letting them rewrite the past and be haunted by it. Storytelling becomes an existential act of everyday connection among ordinary people and daily (often unrecognized) acts of heroism.

Re-envisioning multiculturalism in Canada In 1971, Canada became the first nation in the world to officially declare its bilingual and multicultural policies. Reconstructions of Canadian Identity examines what has changed over the past fifty years, highlighting the lived experiences of marginalized Canadians and offering insights into the critical work that lies ahead. Editors Vander Tavares and Maria João Maciel Jorge bring together a wide range of disciplines and perspectives to investigate inclusion and exclusion within the processes, discourses, and practices that forge and frame Canadian identity. Chapters analyze ways current multicultural policies continue to benefit the dominant groups and (further) harm minoritized ones. Exposing the pitfalls of established notions of Canadian identity, this volume moves traditionally othered identities—immigrant, racialized, hybridized, Indigenous, and women—to the forefront. In doing so, it reveals how these identities negotiate and claim legitimacy, arguing for a reconceptualization from the margins that truly fosters diversity and inclusion. Illustrating both the shortcomings of and possibilities for a more inclusive multiculturalism in Canada, Reconstructions of Canadian Identity invites readers to reflect on what it means to be Canadian in the twenty-first century.

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.

This book examines how concepts of citizenship have been negotiated in Anglophone Canadian literature since the 1970s. Katja Sarkowsky argues that literary texts conceptualize citizenship as political “co-actorship” and as cultural “co-authorship” (Boele van Hensbroek), using citizenship as a metaphor of ambivalent affiliations within and beyond Canada. In its exploration of urban, indigenous, environmental, and diasporic citizenship as well as of citizenship’s growing entanglement with questions of human rights, Canadian literature reflects and feeds into the term’s conceptual diversification. Exploring the works of Guillermo Verdecchia, Joy Kogawa, Jeannette Armstrong, Maria Campbell, Cheryl Foggo, Fred Wah, Michael Ondaatje, and Dionne Brand, this text investigates how citizenship functions to denote emplaced practices of participation in multiple collectives that are not restricted to the framework of the nation-state.

"On our way home, we stopped in Vegreville for one last look at the Pysanka-and, posing in front of it while my dad pulled out his camera, I wanted to cry. Are we doomed? Click. Is this all we are? Click. How do we drag ourselves out from under the shadow of the giant egg? Click." Conceived in a fervent desire for fresher, sexier images of Ukrainian culture in Canada, and concluding with a new reading of enduring cultural stereotypes, Leaving Shadows is the first Canadian book-length monograph on English Ukrainian writing, with substantive analysis of the writing of Myrna Kostash, Andrew Suknaski, George Ryga, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Vera Lysenko, and Maara Haas.

This collection of essays studies the cultural and literary contexts of narrative texts produced in English Canada over the last forty years. It takes as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses on the cultural identity of the country. That type of metaphor provided the nation with the distinctive elements it was looking for and contributed to the creation of a sense of tradition that has survived to the present. In the decades following the 1970s, however, critics, artists, and writers have repeatedly questioned such a model of national identity, still fragile and in need of articulation, by reading the nation from alternative perspectives such as multiculturalism, environmentalism, (neo)regionalism, feminism, or postcolonialism. These contributors suggest that the artistic and cultural flowering Canada is experiencing at the beginning of the twenty-first century is, to a great extent, based on the dismantlement of the images constructed to represent the nation only forty years ago. Through their readings of representative primary texts, their contextual analysis, and their selected methodological tools, the authors offer a tapestry of alternative approaches to that process of dismantlement. Together, they read as an unruly Penelopiad, their unravelling readings self-consciously interrogating Canada’s (lack of) ghosts.

Margaret Laurence is justly famous for her Manawaka cycle of Canadian novels, but her work extends from Canada to Africa and includes poetry and prose, children's and adult literature, memoir and travel-writing.

Peter B. Morgan's Explanation of Constrained Optimization for Economists is an accessible, user-friendly guide that provides explanations, both written and visual, of the manner in which many constrained optimization problems can be solved.