The Maritime region is thus torn between its memory of an earlier, more prosperous and traditional social order and its present experience as a less fortunate modern industrial society. These tensions are embedded in the Maritime character and have affected not only the lives of its people but the imaginations and texts of its writers."--BOOK JACKET.

Margaret Atwood called Ernest Buckler “one of the pathbreakers for the modern Canadian novel,” yet he has slipped into relative obscurity. This new book by Marta Dvořák, Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment breaks new ground in Canadian literary studies by analyzing some of Buckler’s works that have remained unknown or unexplored by critics, and by addressing the formalistic innovations of these texts. It allows a general readership to discover — and an international specialized readership to reassess — the wide, even eclectic scope of an author best known for his first novel, The Mountain and the Valley. Marta Dvořák situates Buckler firmly within his cultural and intellectual environment. She argues the importance of his connections with Emerson and the American transcendental milieu, and demonstrates his links with Romantics such as Schopenhauer and Shelley and modernists like Joyce, Faulkner, and Mansfield, as well as intellectuals from Aristotle to Aquinas. She explores his philosophical vision and his complex, adventurous relationship with language. Extracts from Buckler’s published and unpublished material juxtaposed with those from a wide range of writers (from Henry James to Foucault) offer new illuminating perspectives. The progressive structure of the book will draw readers in to discussions on shared concerns: the nostalgia for a vanished past, the relationship between family and community, the rural and the urban, or the questioning of, and coming to terms with, ethics and the social fabric of today’s rapidly changing technological horizon in which traditional values are eroding.

Canadian literature in English presents a wealth of imaginative experience that belies the colonial status sometimes accorded the world?s second-largest country. This revised and expanded edition of Major Canadian Authors provides an entrance into that realm. Stouck?s carefully integrated essays introduce the life and writings of eighteen foremost Canadian authors, including Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, Sinclair Ross, and Alice Munro. The second edition adds a new chapter on Margaret Atwood, updates the text, and expands the reference guide to include more than sixty Canadian authors.

This compelling history is drawn from the papers of the Crouse-Eikle family, discovered in their ancestral home in Crousetown on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. Millwright John Will Crouse (1844–1914) kept a meticulous diary spanning five decades. Reflective by nature, he recorded the challenges of work, pondered the intricacies of communal life, and wrote movingly of his personal and spiritual struggles. His daughter Elvira Crouse Eikle reported on village events for local newspapers, and her son, Harold Eikle (1912–1977), a gifted teacher and musician, wrote letters and family history. Harold’s correspondence celebrated the social liberations of the 1930s and beyond, but also showed their limits in the suffering he experienced as a gay man in a heterosexual world. Using the family papers, other unpublished documents and oral history, Robert M. Mennel connects the experiences of the Crouse-Eikle family and their community to larger themes of social and cultural change in North America. A story of vivid personalities and episodes, by turns sad, conflicted, joyful, bitter, funny and reflective, Testimonies and Secrets will be read with pleasure by scholars and general readers alike.

Tropes and Territories demonstrates how current debates in postcolonial criticism bear on the reading, writing, and status of short fiction. These debates, which hinge on competing definitions of "trope" (motif vs rhetorical turn) and "territory" (political or aesthetic), lead to studies of space, place, influence, and writing and reading practices across cultural divides. The essays also explore the character of diasporic writing, the cultural significance of oral tale-telling, and interconnections between socio/political issues and strategies of style.

Child language is a subject in which everyone is an expert. All parents study their children's language carefully, if undeliberately, and every family has its precious memories of the unique verbal improvisations of childhood. For writers who continually struggle with and revel in the mysteries of language, the language of children holds a special attraction. Everyday Magic looks at the way Canadian writers have written through, as distinct from for or about, children, at the ways they have used 'child language' and children's models of perception to achieve various literary effects. It describes how texts might be shaped by child usage and speculates that adult artists often find themselves surprised and informed by the child language they seek to create. Ricou examines how the distinctive features of child language described by psycholinguists intersect with the written languages used by writers to suggest, not only a child language, but also the way a child sees and organizes an understanding of the world. The book's subtitle, putting the term 'child language' into the plural, points out that not one, but many written interpretations of the child's perspectives are possible. In order to emphasize this plurality and indicate that there are any number of child languages, the author has organized his study as a series of closely related essays. Each chapter considers the work of a Canadian author or authors, with the book as a whole moving from the more conventional writers to those who step outside the bounds of convention. Ricou proposes analogies with Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas, Proust and Dickens, but he finds his principal subject in the inherent interest of, for example, the Piagetian scheme that W.O. Mitchell seems to adopt in Who Has Seen the Wind; the obsessions with similes in Ernest Buckler; the variations on the Bildungsroman in Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro; and the persistent experiments with presymbolic language in bill bissett. For these and other writers such as Clark Blaise, Emily Carr, Dennis Lee, Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, James Reaney, and Miriam Waddington, Ricou illuminates the particular literary languages appropriate to each author's subject. The result is a fascinating and unique approach to Canadian literature.