A History of Canadian Fiction is the first one-volume history to chart its development from earliest times to the present day. Recounting the struggles and the glories of this burgeoning area of investigation, it explains Canada's literary growth alongside its remarkable history. Highlighting the people who have shaped and are shaping Canadian literary culture, the book examines such major figures as Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Thomas King, concluding with young authors of today whose major successes reflect their indebtedness to their Canadian forbearers.

"New offers an unconventionally structured overview of Canadian literature, from Native American mythologies to contemporary texts." Publishers Weekly A History of Canadian Literature looks at the work of writers and the social and cultural contexts that helped shape their preoccupations and direct their choice of literary form. W.H. New explains how – from early records of oral tales to the writing strategies of the early twenty-first century – writer, reader, literature, and society are interrelated. New discusses both Aboriginal and European mythologies, looking at pre-Contact narratives and also at the way Contact experience altered hierarchies of literary value. He then considers representations of the "real," whether in documentary, fantasy, or satire; historical romance and the social construction of Nature and State; and ironic subversions of power, the politics of cultural form, and the relevance of the media to a representation of community standard and individual voice. New suggests some ways in which writers of the later twentieth century codified such issues as history, gender, ethnicity, and literary technique itself. In this second edition, he adds a lengthy chapter that considers how writers at the turn of the twenty-first century have reimagined their society and their roles within it, and an expanded chronology and bibliography. Some of these writers have spoken from and about various social margins (dealing with issues of race, status, ethnicity, and sexuality), some have sought emotional understanding through strategies of history and memory, some have addressed environmental concerns, and some have reconstructed the world by writing across genres and across different media. All genres are represented, with examples chosen primarily, but not exclusively, from anglophone and francophone texts. A chronology, plates, and a series of tables supplement the commentary.

Highways of Canadian Literature contains the complete history of Canadian literature in the English language. You will enjoy this study of a brilliant array of well-known Canadian authors like Joseph Howe, Charles G.D. Roberts, and William Henry Drummond.

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.

Much of the scholarship on twentieth-century Canadian literature has argued that English-Canadian fiction was plagued by backwardness and an inability to engage fully with the movement of modernism that was so prevalent in British and American fiction and poetry. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction re-evaluates Canadian literary culture to posit that it has been misunderstood because it is a distinct genre, a regional form of the larger international modernist movement. Examining literary magazines, manifestos, archival documents, and major writers such as Frederick Philip Grove, Morley Callaghan, and Raymond Knister, Colin Hill identifies a 'modern realism' that crosses regions as well as urban and rural divides. A bold reading of the modern-realist aesthetic and an articulate challenge to several enduring and limiting myths about Canadian writing, Modern Realism in English- Canadian Fiction will stimulate important debate in literary circles everywhere.

“Speaking in the Past Tense participates in an expanding critical dialogue on the writing of historical fiction, providing a series of reflections on the process from the perspective of those souls intrepid enough to step onto what is, practically by definition, contested territory.” — Herb Wyile, from the Introduction The extermination of the Beothuk ... the exploration of the Arctic ... the experiences of soldiers in the trenches during World War I ... the foibles of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister ... the Ojibway sniper who is credited with 378 wartime kills—these are just some of the people and events discussed in these candid and wide-ranging interviews with eleven authors whose novels are based on events in Canadian history. These sometimes startling conversations take the reader behind the scenes of the novels and into the minds of their authors. Through them we explore the writers’ motives for writing, the challenges they faced in gathering information and presenting it in fictional form, the sometimes hostile reaction they faced after publication, and, perhaps most interestingly, the stories that didn’t make it into their novels. Speaking in the Past Tense provides fascinating insights into the construction of national historical narratives and myths, both those familiar to us and those that are still being written.