Study of three North American women novelists combining the standpoints of gender studies and narratology. By analyzing the works of Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich through the lenses of subjectivity, gender studies, and narratology, Caroline Rosenthal brings to light new perspectives on their writings. Although all three authors write metafictions that challenge literary realism and dominant views of gender, the forms of their counter-narratives vary. In her novel Intertidal Life, Thomas traces the disintegration of an identity through narrative devices that unearth ruptures and contradictions in stories of gender. In contrast, Marlatt, in Ana Historic, challenges the regulatory fiction of heterosexuality. She offers her protagonist a way out into a new order that breaks with the law of the father, creating a "monstrous" text that explores the possibilities of a lesbian identity. In her tetralogy of novels made up of Love Medicine, Tracks, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace, Erdrichresists definite readings of femininity altogether. By drawing on trickster narratives, she creates an open system of gendered identities that is dynamic and unfinalizable, positing the most fragmented worldview as the most enduring. By applying gender and narrative theory to nuanced analysis of the texts, Rosenthal's study elucidates the correlation between gender identity formation and narrative. Caroline Rosenthal is Professor and Chair of American Literature at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her book Narrative Deconstructions of Gender was published by Camden House in 2003.

Cities are material and symbolic spaces through which nations define their cultural identities. The great cities that have arisen on the North American continent have stimulated the imaginations of the United States and Canada in very different ways. This first comparative study of North American urban fiction starts out by delineating the sociohistorical and literary contexts in which cities grew into diverging symbolic spaces in American and Canadian culture. After an overview of recent developments in the cultural conception of urban space, the book takes New York and Toronto fiction as exemplary for exploring representations of the urban after postmodernism. It analyzes four twenty-first-century novels: two set in New York - Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved and Paule Marshall's The Fisher King - and two set in Toronto - Carol Shields's Unless and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For. While these texts continue to echo the specific traditions of nation building and canon formation in the United States and Canada, they also share certain features. All of them investigate the affective crossroads of the city while returning to a more realistic mode of representation. Caroline Rosenthal is Professor of American Literature at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany.

The development of literature in Canada with an eye to its multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual nature. From modest colonial beginnings, literature in Canada has arrived at the center stage of world literature. Works by English-Canadian writers -- both established writers such as Margaret Atwood and new talents such as Yann Martel -- make regular appearances on international bestseller lists. French-Canadian literature has also found its own voice in the North American and francophone worlds. "CanLit" has likewise developed into a staple of academic interest, pursued in Canadian Studies programs in Canada and around the world. This volume draws on the expertise of scholars from Canada, Germany, Austria, and France, tracing Canadian literature from the indigenous oral tradition to thedevelopment of English-Canadian and French-Canadian literature since colonial times. Conceiving of Canada as a single but multifaceted culture, it accounts for specific characteristics of English- and French-Canadian literatures, such as the vital role of the short story in English Canada or that of the chanson in French Canada. Yet special attention is also paid to Aboriginal literature and to the pronounced transcultural, ethnically diverse character ofmuch contemporary Canadian literature, thus moving clearly beyond the traditions of the two founding nations. Contributors: Reingard M. Nischik, Eva Gruber, Iain M. Higgins, Guy Laflèche, Dorothee Scholl, Gwendolyn Davies, Tracy Ware, Fritz Peter Kirsch, Julia Breitbach, Lorraine York, Marta Dvorak, Jerry Wasserman, Ursula Mathis-Moser, Doris G. Eibl, Rolf Lohse, Sherrill Grace, Caroline Rosenthal, Martin Kuester, Nicholas Bradley, Anne Nothof, Georgiana Banita, Gilles Dupuis, and Andrea Oberhuber. Reingard M. Nischik is Professor of American Literature at the University of Constance, Germany.

Recycling the Remnants of the Literary Text: Verandas for the Residual and the Emergent addresses literary recycling as a creative endeavour that supplements meaning through appropriating remnants of texts and transforming them into traces or echoes of their former selves within a new narrative design. It approaches recycling as a process that extends verandas of meanings and creates sites for ongoing discursive accretion of signification through the dialogic encounter between the old and the new, “the residual” and “the emergent.” Whether seen as markers of the capacity of the literary text to surprise and haunt it readers, or residues of systems of representations predicated on selective inclusion and strategies of exclusion, remnants can offer rich material for setting in motion new cycles of renewal. The contributors of this volume propose recycling as writing and reading strategies. The first grants the remnants an afterlife and allow for an opening up of new narrative possibilities; while the second constructs alternative readings by allowing unwanted remnants to return and fill in gaps and silences. These oddments of the literary text are essential to question the iniquities of cultural, racial, and class prejudices. They are unavoidable in the construction of an emergent literary and cultural matrix for disruption and change.

"A revised and expanded, comprehensive guide to the novels of Native American author Louise Erdrich from Love Medicine to The Painted Drum. Includes chronologies, genealogical charts, complete dictionary of characters, map and geographical details about settings, and a glossary of all the Ojibwe words and phrases used in the novels"--Provided by publisher.

Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. It continues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genre and the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism and theory has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This collection redresses that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of a range of thirty well-known and often-anthologized Canadian short stories from the genre's beginnings through the twentieth century. A historical survey of the genre introduces the volume and a timeline comparing the genre's development in Canada, the US, and Great Britain via representative examples completes it. The collection is geared both to specialists in and to students of Canadian literature. For the latter it is of particular benefit that the volume provides not only a collection of interpretations, but a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Canadian short story. Reingard M. Nischik is professor and chair of American Literature at the University of Constance, Germany.

This book brings together for the first time nine groundbreaking historical novels by women from the United States, Canada and Latin America, united by their focus on female adventurers. These novels introduce the neglected women of history, real and imagined, who accompanied their menfolk to the New World, and enabled its settlement or colonisation. Familiar novelists include Isabel Allende, Audrey Thomas and Jane Smiley, but this book also introduces less familiar writers who have produced richly textured and densely historical novels. In addition to putting women back into history, these writers engage with the literature of the past, including the American canon of male fiction which dominated literary history before the intervention of feminist scholars. The book begins with an introduction to the history of historical fiction and provides a theoretical, historical and geographical context for the novels themselves.

One number each year includes Annual bibliography of Commonwealth literature.

This study portrays how Louise Erdrich’s writing extends Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and the novel through an investigation of a selection of her works, as well as her practices of writing, co-writing, re-writing, and reading novels. Erdrich’s hallmark dialogic literary style and practice encompasses writing a series of books; re-cycling protagonists, narrators, events, themes and settings; re-writing previously published novels; employing heteroglossia and polyglossia; co-authoring texts, blogging about books; translating different epistemologies for different audiences; and spotlighting families as the main thematic concern in dialogue with her own parenting experiences as depicted in her memoirs. She writes a growing series of novels, compost pile-like, capitalizing on former novels, as well as adding new elements and new stories in the process. Thus, a dialogic intra-textual microcosm emerges. Erdrich suffuses her writing with an incessant quality of changing and becoming. Her novels resist closure, while protagonists return and demand attention, and the author answers dialogically by penning new tales. Erdrich’s writing can be accessed because it concerns shared human experiences and relationships, both their ambivalence and their beauty. Erdrich includes instead of alienating, sympathizes instead of judging, which makes her an internationally acclaimed author, with her work crossing topographies, epistemologies, and identities.