Brings together all of the writings of Northrop Frye, both published and unpublished, on the subject of Canadian literature and culture, from his early book reviews of the 1930s and 1940s through his cultural commentaries of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

One hundred years after Marshall McLuhan’s birth, Elena Lamberti explores a fundamental, yet neglected aspect of his work: the solid humanistic roots of his original ‘mosaic’ form of writing. In this investigation of how his famous communication theories were influenced by literature and the arts, Lamberti proposes a new approach to McLuhan’s thought. Lamberti delves into McLuhan’s humanism in light of his work on media and culture, exploring how he began to perceive literature not just as a subject, but a ‘function inseparable from communal existence.’ Lamberti pays particular attention to the central role played by Modernism in the making of his theories, including the writings of Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis. Reconnecting McLuhan with his literary past, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic is a demonstration of one of his greatest ideas: that literature not only matters, but can help us understand the hidden patterns that rule our environment.

Times change, lives change, and the terms we need to describe our literature or society or condition—what Raymond Williams calls “keywords”—change with them. Perhaps the most significant development in the quarter-century since Eli Mandel edited his anthology Contexts of Canadian Criticism has been the growing recognition that not only do different people need different terms, but the same terms have different meanings for different people and in different contexts. Nation, history, culture, art, identity—the positions we take discussing these and other issues can lead to conflict, but also hold the promise of a new sort of community. Speaking of First Nations people and their literature, Beth Brant observes that “Our connections … are like the threads of a weaving. … While the colour and beauty of each thread is unique and important, together they make a communal material of strength and durability.” New Contexts of Canadian Criticism is designed to be read, to work, in much the same manner.

This volume discusses the autobiographical inclination in Canadian literature, exploring works by such writers as Alice Munro, W.O. Mitchell, Michael Ondaatje, John Glassco, and Susanna Moodie. Others works, including the oral memoirs of a Métis, an Inuit’s account as being civil servant in Ottawa, and the autobiographical writings of pioneer women and French missionaries are examined to show the depth and breadth of this tradition in Canada. These texts act as starting points for an indepth look at the relationships between autobiography, biography and fiction in Canadian literature.

Nortrop Frye differed from other theorists of myth in tracing all of the major literary genres--romance, comedy, satire, not just tragedy--to myth and ritual. This volume is the most thorough presentation of his thinking on the subject.

W. J. Keith has chosen to ignore utterly both the `popular' at the one extreme (Robert Service, Lucy Maud Montgomery) as well as the `avant-garde' at the other (bpnichol, Anne Carson) in favour of those authors whose style lends itself to the simple pleasure of reading, and to that end Keith dedicates his history to `all those -- including those of the general reading public whose endangered status is much lamented -- who recognize and celebrate the dance of words.'

In Blackness and Modernity Foster traces the main philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and mythological arguments that support views of modernity as a failed quest for whiteness. He outlines how these views were implemented as part of a "world history" and shows how Canada became the first country to officially reject this approach by adopting multiculturalism.

Attempts by writers and intellectuals in former colonies to create unique national cultures are often thwarted by a context of global modernity, which discourages particularity and uniqueness. In describing unstable social and political cultures, such "third-world intellectuals" often find themselves torn between the competing literary requirements of the "local" culture of the colony and the cosmopolitan, "world" culture introduced by Western civilization. In Zones of Instability, Imre Szeman examines the complex relationship between literature and politics by exploring the production of nationalist literature in the former British empire. Taking as his case studies the regions of the British Caribbean, Nigeria, and Canada, Szeman analyzes the work of authors for whom the idea of the"nation" and literature are inexorably entwined, such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and V.S. Naipaul. Szeman focuses on literature created in the two decades after World War II, decades in which the future prospects for many colonies went from extreme political optimism to extreme political disappointment. He finds that the "nation" can be read as that space in which literature is thought to be able to conjoin two things that history has separated—the writer and the people. -- Chelva Kanaganayakam

The Reception of Northrup Frye takes a thorough accounting of the presence of Frye in existing works and argues against Frye's diminishing status as an important critical voice.