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.

The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature provides a broad-ranging introduction to some of the key critical fields, genres, and periods in Canadian literary studies. The essays in this volume, written by prominent theorists in the field, reflect the plurality of critical perspectives, regional and historical specializations, and theoretical positions that constitute the field of Canadian literary criticism across a range of genres and historical periods. The volume provides a dynamic introduction to current areas of critical interest, including (1) attention to the links between the literary and the public sphere, encompassing such topics as neoliberalism, trauma and memory, citizenship, material culture, literary prizes, disability studies, literature and history, digital cultures, globalization studies, and environmentalism or ecocriticism; (2) interest in Indigenous literatures and settler-Indigenous relations; (3) attention to multiple diasporic and postcolonial contexts within Canada; (4) interest in the institutionalization of Canadian literature as a discipline; (5) a turn towards book history and literary history, with a renewed interest in early Canadian literature; (6) a growing interest in articulating the affective character of the "literary" - including an interest in affect theory, mourning, melancholy, haunting, memory, and autobiography. The book represents a diverse array of interests -- from the revival of early Canadian writing, to the continued interest in Indigenous, regional, and diasporic traditions, to more recent discussions of globalization, market forces, and neoliberalism. It includes a distinct section dedicated to Indigenous literatures and traditions, as well as a section that reflects on the discipline of Canadian literature as a whole.

This book examines the cultural work of space and memory in Canada and Canadian literature, and encourages readers to investigate Canada within its regional, national, and global contexts. It features seven chapters in English and five in French, with a bilingual introduction. The contributors invite us to recognize local intersections that are so easily overlooked, yet are so important. They reveal the unities and fractures in national understanding, telling stories of otherness and marginality and of dislocation and un-belonging. Ce livre examine l’importance culturelle de l’espace et de la mémoire en contexte canadien et plus spécifiquement dans les littératures du pays, afin d’inviter des lectures neuves des questions régionales, nationales et globales. Il rassemble sept chapitres en anglais et cinq en français, en plus d’une introduction bilingue. Les contributions, favorisant des approches thématiques et théoriques variées, sont réunies par leur désir de mettre en lumière des croisements inédits entre la mémoire et l’espace en tant qu’ils définissent certains des problèmes les plus brûlants de notre époque au Canada. S’y révèle l’équilibre fort instable entre récits unitaires et fractures communautaires, entre altérité et marginalité, ou entre dislocation et désappartenance. Contributors / Collaborateurs: Albert Braz, Samantha Cook, Jennifer Delisle, Lise Gaboury-Diallo, Smaro Kamboureli, Janne Korkka, André Lamontagne, Margaret Mackey, Sherry Simon, Pamela Sing, Camille van der Marel, Erin Wunker

This is the first book monograph devoted to Anglophone Ukrainian Canadian children’s historical fiction published between 1991 and 2021. It consists of five chapters offering cross-sectional and interdisciplinary readings of 41 books – novels, novellas, picturebooks, short stories, and a graphic novel. The first three chapters focus on texts about the complex process of becoming Ukrainian Canadian, showcasing the experiences of the first two waves of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, including encounters with Indigenous Peoples and the First World War Internment. The last two chapters are devoted to the significance of the cultural memory of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933, and the Second World War for Ukrainian Canadians. All the chapters demonstrate the entanglements of Ukrainian and Canadian history and point to the role Anglophone children’s literature can play in preventing the symbolical seeds of memory from withering. This volume argues that reading, imagining, and reimagining history can lead to the formation of beyond-textual next-generation memory. Such memory created through reading is multidimensional as it involves the interpretation of both the present and the past by an individual whose reality has been directly or indirectly shaped by the past over which they have no influence. Next-generation memory is of anticipatory character, which means that authors of historical fiction anticipate the readers – both present-day and future – not to have direct links to any witnesses of the events they discuss and to have little knowledge of the transcultural character of the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora.

The twenty-seven original contributions to this volume investigate the ways in which the First World War has been commemorated and represented internationally in prose fiction, drama, film, docudrama and comics from the 1960s until the present. The volume thus provides a comprehensive survey of the cultural memory of the war as reflected in various media across national cultures, addressing the complex connections between the cultural post-memory of the war and its mediation. In four sections, the essays investigate (1) the cultural legacy of the Great War (including its mythology and iconography); (2) the implications of different forms and media for representing the war; (3) ‘national’ memories, foregrounding the differences in post-memory representations and interpretations of the Great War, and (4) representations of the Great War within larger temporal or spatial frameworks, focusing specifically on the ideological dimensions of its ‘remembrance’ in historical, socio-political, gender-oriented, and post-colonial contexts.

The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature introduces the fiction, poetry and drama of Canada in its historical, political and cultural contexts. In this clear and structured volume, Richard Lane outlines: the history of Canadian literature from colonial times to the present key texts for Canadian First Peoples and the literature of Quebec the impact of English translation, and the Canadian immigrant experience critical themes such as landscape, ethnicity, orality, textuality, war and nationhood contemporary debate on the canon, feminism, postcoloniality, queer theory, and cultural and ethnic diversity the work of canonical and lesser-known writers from Catherine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie to Robert Service, Maria Campbell and Douglas Coupland. Written in an engaging and accessible style and offering a glossary, maps and further reading sections, this guidebook is a crucial resource for students working in the field of Canadian Literature.

Slavery, both in its historical and modern forms, continues to be a matter of undiminished political and social relevance. This is mirrored by an increasing interest in scholarly research as well as by critical statements from within the field of contemporary art. The present volume is designed to bring together artists and scholars from various fields of study discussing trauma and visuality, or more precisely, memory and denial of traumatic history within visual discourses. The purpose of this project is to put the phenomenon of contemporary art production dealing with the issue of slavery into a wider, interdisciplinary and transcultural context. The book covers current case studies focusing on different media and including visual, literary and performative approaches of dealing with the history of slavery in West-African, American and European cultures.

The uncertainties and newness that surround us today prompt radical questions about ourselves and our relationship with the external world. How do and can we belong to the places and spaces of today? Movement and Belonging: Lines, Places, and Spaces of Travel describes current realities and suggests ways in which you can define yourself in an ever-changing world. Using the travel writings of V. S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick White, and D. H. Lawrence, Movement and Belonging demonstrates that «authentic» travel - embracing changing boundaries and cultures - enables you to create sites of belonging where you can find your sense of self.

In the second volume of a series that will ultimately include four, the authors consider Irish diasporic memory and memory practices. While the Irish diaspora has become the subject of a wide range of scholarship, there has been little work focused on its relationship to memory. The first half of the volume asks how diasporic memory functions in different places and times, and what forms it takes on. As an island nation with a history of emigration, Ireland has developed a rich diasporic cultural memory, one that draws on multiple traditions and historiographies of both "home" and "away." Native traditions are not imported wholesale, but instead develop their own curious hybridity, reflecting the nature of emigrant memory that absorbs new ways of thinking about home. How do immigrants remember their homeland? How do descendants of immigrants "remember" a land they rarely visit? How does diasporic memory pass through families, and how is it represented in cultural forms such as literature, festivals, and souvenirs? In its second half, this volume shifts its attention to the concept of "memory practices," ways of cultural remembering that result from and are shaped by particular cultural forms. Many of these cultural forms embody memory materially through language, music, and photography and, because of their distinctive expressions of culture, give rise to distinctive memory practices. Gathering the leading voices in Irish studies, this volume opens new pathways into the body of Irish cultural memory, demonstrating time and again the ways in which memory is supported by the negotiations of individuals within wider cultural contexts. Contributors include: Aidan Arrowsmith, Hasia Diner, Joep Leerssen, Paul Muldoon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

The present volume contains general essays on: the relevance of 'Commonwealth' literature; the treatment of Dalits in literature and culture; the teaching of African literature in the UK; 'sharing places' and Drum magazine in South Africa; black British book covers as primers for cultural contact; Christianity, imperialism, and conversion; Orang Pendek and Papuans in colonial Indonesia; Carnival and drama in the anglophone Caribbean; issues of choice between the Maltese language and Its Others; and patterns of interaction between married couples in Malta. As well as these, there are essays providing close readings of works by the following authors: Chinua Achebe, André Aciman, Diran Adebayo, Monica Ali, Edward Atiyah, Margaret Atwood, Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Amit Chaudhuri, Austin Clarke, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Antjie Krog, Hanif Kureishi, Naguib Mahfouz, David Malouf, V.S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Tayeb Salih, Zadie Smith, Ahdaf Soueif, Yvonne Vera. Contributors: Jogamaya Bayer, Katrin Berndt, Sabrina Brancato, Monica Bungaro, Judith Lütge Coulli, Robert Cribb, Natasha Distiller, Evelyne Hanquart-Turner, Marie Herbillon, Tuomas Huttunen, Gen'ichiro Itakura, Jacqueline Jondot, Karen King-Aribisala, Ursula Kluwick, Dorothy Lane, Ben Lebdai, Lourdes López-Ropero, Amin Malak, Daniel Massa, Concepción Mengibar-Rico, Susanne Reichl, Brigitte Scheer-Schaezler, Lydia Sciriha, Jamie S. Scott, Andrea Strolz, Peter O. Stummer, Cynthia vanden Driesen, Clare Thake Vassallo.