When asked the question "what is the power of poetry?," writer Ian Williams said "poetry punctures the surface." Williams' statement—that poetry matters and that it does something—is at the heart of this book. Building from this core idea that poetry perforates the everyday to give greater range to our lives and our thinking, the practical and pedagogical aim of this book is twofold: the first aim is to provide students with an introduction to the key cultural, political, and historical events that inform twentieth- and twenty-first-century Canadian poetry; and to familiarize those same readers with poetic movements, trends, and forms of the same time period. This book addresses the aesthetic and social contexts of Canadian poetry written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: it models for its readers the critical and theoretical discourses needed to understand the contexts of literary production in Canada. Put differently, readers need a sense of the "where" and "how" of poetic production to help situate them in the "what" of poetry itself. In addition to offering a historically contextualized overview of the significant movements, developments, and poets of this time period, this book also familiarizes readers with key moments of reflection and rupture, such as the effects of economic and ecological crisis, global conflicts, and debates around appropriation of culture. This book is built on the premise that poetry in Canada does not happen outside of political, social, and cultural contexts.

The Routledge Introduction to Gender and Sexuality in Literature in Canada charts the evolution of gender and sexuality, as they have been represented and performed in the literatures of Canada for more than three centuries. From early colonial texts by Frances Brooke, to settler texts by Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill, to more contemporary texts by Jane Rule, Alice Munro, Joshua Whitehead, Ivan Coyote, and others, this volume will introduce readers to how gender and sexuality have been variably conceived in Canada and the work they perform across multiple genres. Calling upon recent currents of gender theory and examining the composition, structure, and history of selected literary texts—that is, the “literary sediments” that have accumulated over centuries—readers of this book will explore how those representations shift over time. By examining literature in Canada in relation to crucial cultural, political, and historical contexts, readers will better apprehend why that literature has significantly transformed and broadened to address racialized and fluid identities that continue to challenge and disrupt any stable notion of gendered and sexualized identity today.

The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada explores the exciting world of nonfiction writing about the self, designed to give teachers and students the tools they need to study both canonical and lesser-known works. The volume introduces important texts and contexts for interpreting life narratives, demonstrates the conceptual tools necessary to understand what life narratives are and how they work, and offers an historical overview of key moments in Canadian auto/biography. Not sure what life writing in Canada is, or how to study it? This critical introduction covers the tools and approaches you require in order to undertake your own interpretation of life writing texts. You will encounter nonfictional writing about individual lives and experiences—including biography, autobiography, letters, diaries, comics, poetry, plays, and memoirs. The volume includes case studies to provide examples of how to study and research life narratives and toolkits to help you apply what you learn. The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada provides instructors and students with the contexts and the critical tools to discover the power of life writing, and the skills to study any kind of nonfiction, from Canada and around the world.

"This study introduces the history, themes, and critical responses to Canadian fantastic literature. Taking a chronological approach, this volume covers the main periods of Canadian science fiction and fantasy from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century. The book examines both the texts and the contexts of Canadian writing in the fantastic, analyzing themes and techniques in novels and short stories, and looking at both national and international contexts of the literature's history. This introduction will offer a coherent narrative of Canadian fantastic literature through analysis of the major texts and authors in the field and through relating the authors' work to the world around them"--

The Handbook systematically charts the trajectory of the English novel from its emergence as the foremost literary genre in the early twentieth century to its early twenty-first century status of eccentric eminence in new media environments. Systematic chapters address ̒The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genreʼ, ̒The Novel in the Economy’, ̒Genres’, ̒Gender’ (performativity, masculinities, feminism, queer), and ̒The Burden of Representationʼ (class and ethnicity). Extended contextualized close readings of more than twenty key texts from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) supplement the systematic approach and encourage future research by providing overviews of reception and theoretical perspectives.

The Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry draws on an international selection of authors to ask what the cultures of poetry and medicine may gain from reciprocal critical engagement. The volume celebrates interdisciplinary inquiry, critique, and creative expansion with an emphasis upon amplifying provocative and marginalized voices. This carefully curated collection offers both historical context and future thinking from clinicians, poets, artists, humanities scholars, social scientists, and bio-scientists who collectively inquire into the nature of relationships between medicine and poetry. Importantly, these can be both productive and unproductive. How, for example, do poet-doctors reconcile the outwardly antithetical approaches of bio-scientific medicine and poetry in their daily work, where typically the former draws on technical language and associated thinking and the latter on metaphors? How does non-narrative lyrical poetry engage with narrative-based medicine? How do poets writing about medicine identify as patients? Central to the volume is the critical investigation of the consequences of varieties of medical pedagogy for clinical practice. Presenting a vision of how poetic thinking might form a medical ontology this thought-provoking book affords an essential resource for scholars and practitioners from across medicine, health and social care, medical education, the medical and health humanities, and literary studies.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.