Carole Gerson

Christine van der Mark

Janice Dowson

In Due Season

Canadian Women in Print, 1750—1918 is the first historical examination of women’s engagement with multiple aspects of print over some two hundred years, from the settlers who wrote diaries and letters to the New Women who argued for ballots and equal rights. Considering women’s published writing as an intervention in the public sphere of national and material print culture, this book uses approaches from book history to address the working and living conditions of women who wrote in many genres and for many reasons. This study situates English Canadian authors within an extensive framework that includes francophone writers as well as women’s work as compositors, bookbinders, and interveners in public access to print. Literary authorship is shown to be one point on a spectrum that ranges from missionary writing, temperance advocacy, and educational texts to journalism and travel accounts by New Woman adventurers. Familiar figures such as Susanna Moodie, L.M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, Pauline Johnson, and Sara Jeannette Duncan are contextualized by writers whose names are less well known (such as Madge Macbeth and Agnes Laut) and by many others whose writings and biographies have vanished into the recesses of history. Readers will learn of the surprising range of writing and publishing performed by early Canadian women under various ideological, biographical, and cultural motivations and circumstances. Some expressed reluctance while others eagerly sought literary careers. Together they did much more to shape Canada’s cultural history than has heretofore been recognized.

Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918

"In a sense, we haven’t got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real."--Robert Kroetsch in Creation Spanning a period of nearly eighty years, the stories in this collection present the experience of living in Vancouver as filtered through the imagination of many of Canada’s most famous writers. The romantic attitude of some of the early writers is balanced by the more sombre version of many later authors, some of whom show the city as a place of loneliness and corruption. In tone, the stories range from the grimness of Dorothy Livesay’s account of Depression misery, to the irony of Ethel Wilson’s narrative of an evening garden party, to the playfulness of George Bowering’s ellipticla story of student life. Other well-known atuhors include Pauline Johnson, Emily Carr, Malcolm Lowry, Audrey Thomas, Alice Munro, and Joy Kogawa--as well as some who have been undeservedly consigned to obscurity--M.A. Grainger, Bertrand Sinclair, Jean Burton, and William McConnell. The more prolific among the younger writers--Frances Duncan, Cynthia Flood, and Kevin Roberts--are in the process of achieving national recognition. The stories evoke a strong sense of place, of Vancouver’s essential relation to its natural setting--forest, mountains, and sea--and its existence as a modern urban centre. Individual episodes recall the great fire of 1886, turn-of-the-century loggers on Cordova Street, rum-running in the twenties, the internment of Japanese-Canadians after Pearl Harbor, the hippie era, and the modern sub-culture of beer parlours and drugs. Particular locales include downtown streets, the east end, the North Shore, U.B.C, Stanley Park, Kitsilano, and the Vancouver Aquarium. Stories of the city’s social and cultural life describe the process of growing up and growing old, family and marital matters, the Chinese community, and the legends and reality of Native Americans. Vancouver Short Stories indicates some of the ways that a particular locality has been transformed into art that, in turn, enriches our understanding of its reality and enhances our sense of identity.

Vancouver Short Stories

Patricia Fleming

Yvan Lamonde

Jacques Michon

History of the Book in Canada: 1918-1980

Veronica Jane Strong-Boag

Bibliogr.: p. 281-313. és a jegyzetekben: p. 237-280.

The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake)

Paddling Her Own Canoe

Veronica Strong-Boag

Frequently dismissed as a 'nature poet' and an 'Indian Princess' E. Pauline Johnson (1861-1913) was not only an accomplished thinker and writer but a contentious and passionate personality who 'talked back' to Euro-Canadian culture. Paddling Her Own Canoe is the only major scholarly study that examines Johnson's diverse roles as a First Nations champion, New Woman, serious writer and performer, and Canadian nationalist. A Native advocate of part-Mohawk ancestry, Johnson was also an independent, self-supporting, unmarried woman during the period of first-wave feminism. Her versatile writings range from extraordinarily erotic poetry to polemical statements about the rights of First Nations. Based on thorough research into archival and published sources, this volume probes the meaning of Johnson's energetic career and addresses the complexities of her social, racial, and cultural position. While situating Johnson in the context of turn-of-the-century Canada, the authors also use current feminist and post-colonial perspectives to reframe her contribution. Included is the first full chronology ever compiled of Johnson's writing. Pauline Johnson was an extraordinary woman who crossed the racial and gendered lines of her time, and thereby confounded Canadian society. This study reclaims both her writings and her larger significance.

Carole Gerson

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