This fascinating study explores a remarkable ethnic-Canadian literature in close textual and contextual terms for the first time. It lays a groundwork for future comparative research in the field of ethnic Canadian studies, and challenges assumptions about cultural identity and human experience of the "new."

This volume investigates the reception of a small historical fact with wide-ranging social, cultural and imaginative consequences. Inspired by Leif Eiriksson’s visit to Vinland in about the year 1000, novels, poetry, history, politics, arts and crafts, comics, films and video games have all come to reflect rising interest in the medieval Norse and their North American presence. Uniquely in reception studies, From Iceland to the Americas approaches this dynamic between Nordic history and its reception by bringing together international authorities on mythology, language, film and cultural studies, as well as on the literature that has dominated critical reception. Collectively, the chapters not only explore the connections among medieval Iceland and the modern Americas, but also probe why medieval contact has become a modern cultural touchstone.

This study investigates the connections between nineteenth-century pioneer women in Canada and their putative twentieth-century biographers in Anglo-Canadian women’s fiction by Carol Shields (Small Ceremonies, 1976), Daphne Marlatt (Ana Historic, 1988), and Susan Swan (The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, 1983). These three texts reveal definite problems in the formation of Canadian female identities, but they also revalorise the traditionally underprivileged halves of binary structures such as: female/male, other/self, body/intellect, subjectivity/objectivity, and Canada/imperial centres.

This collection of essays provides a forum in which Canadian ethnicity and literature are explored from a broad range of perspectives. It reveals the many ways in which minority writers not only create a sense of community and ethnic specificity but also open avenues of discourse to adjacent communities.

A Viking statue, a coffee pot, a ghost story, and a controversial cake: What can the things that immigrants treasured tell us about their history? Between 1870 and 1914 almost one-quarter of Iceland’s population migrated to North America, forming enclaves in both the United States and Canada. This book examines the multi-sensory side of the immigrant past through rare photographs, interviews, artefacts, and early recipes. By revealing the hidden histories behind everyday traditions, The Viking Immigrants maps the transformation of Icelandic North American culture over a century and a half.

"The writings collected here all testify to the complexity of Gunnars's literary vision as much as they testify to the sheer pleasures of reading her work. In her interview, Gunnars speaks both as a reader and a writer, describing the form and modes of address of her work, as well as the philosophical and literary traditions she draws from. The nine essays and two poems that follow, organized chronologically according to the publication dates of the primary texts they treat, represent a broad range of approaches to Kristjana Gunnars's work. The contributers are M. Travis Lane, Judith Owens, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Scobie, Anne Malena, Siobhan O'Flynn, K.I. Press, and Christl Verduyn. It is my hope that readers will find in this 'critical community' some productive points of entry into Gunnars's corpus that will stimulate their own thinking about her words and ideas" - from the Introduction by Monique Tschofen.