Originally published in 1973, A Concise History of Canadian Painting has become the definitive volume on Canadian art. Now in its third edition, it remains an invaluable narrative history of Canadian painting from the late seventeenth century to the present.

"First published in 1973, this book quickly became an indispensable short history of Canadian painting and was reprinted many times. For this Second Edition the text has been revised to incorporate new information--and, in some places, new interpretations--and expanded. The First Edition studied Canadian painting to 1965, masterfully combining visual description, anecdotes, and aesthetic evaluation with full accounts of the careers of most of the leading painters, beginning in the French colonial period. This Second Edition covers painting to 1980. A long final chapter treats a crucial fifteen years when there developed in Canada a tremendous interest in other art forms and apparent falling off of interest in painting. In fact the cry was heard--throughout the western world--that painting was dead. It turned out, however, that this was far from true. Dennis Reid discusses the work of established artists who produced steadily in this period--including Jack Bush, Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe, Gershon Iskowitz, John Meredith, Guido Molinari, Jack Shadbolt, and Claude Tousignant--as well as new arrivals on the scene who have since joined the ranks of leading Canadian artists. Among the more recent painters discussed are David Bolduc, John Boyle, David Craven, Paterson Ewen, Ivan Eyre, Yves Gaucher, John Hall, Ron Martin, Michale Morris, Norval Morrisseau, Christopher Pratt, Shirley Wiitasalo, and Tim Zuck. Enriched by this overview, and by many additions to the original text, A Concise History of Canadian Painting in its Second Edition is the widest-ranging and most authoritative handbook available. Lucid, interesting, and informative, it is still a pleasure to read from first to last." -- Back cover

A new edition of Margaret Conrad's lucid account of the diverse, complex, and often contested nation-state of Canada.

In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients. From this early example of tattooing as work, Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detours to the United States, England, and Japan as he traces the evolution of commercial tattooing in Canada over more than one hundred years. Needle Work offers insight into how tattoo artists navigated regulation, the types of spaces they worked in, and the dynamic relationship between the images they tattooed on customers and other forms of visual culture and artistic enterprise. Merging biographical narratives with an examination of tattooing’s place within wider society, Jelinski reveals how these commercial image makers bridged conventional gaps between cultural production and practical, for-profit work, thereby establishing tattooing as a legitimate career. Richly illustrated and drawing on archives, print media, and objects held in institutions and private collections across Canada and beyond, Needle Work provides a timely understanding of a vocation that is now familiar but whose intricate history has rarely been considered.

The unauthorized biography of Canada's most famous artist couple and the rivalry that drove them. She painted as if with pure light, radiant colours making quotidian kitchen scenes come alive with sublimated drama. He painted like clockwork, each stroke precise and measured with exquisite care, leaving no angle unchecked and no subtlety of tone unattended. Some would say Mary Pratt was fire and Christopher, ice. And yet Newfoundland's Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (or Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner...) presented their marriage as a portrait of harmony and balance. But balance off the canvas rarely makes great art, and the Pratts' art was spectacular. As a youth at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Mary pursued her future husband, a prodigious art talent, and supported his determination to study painting instead of medicine. They married and removed themselves to a Newfoundland outport where his painting alone provided the means to raise a family. But as Mary's own talents became evident and she sought her own hours at the easel, when not raising their four children, and as rumours of Christopher's affair with a young model spread, the Pratts' harmonious exterior slowly cracked, to scandal in Newfoundland and fascination across the country. A marriage ended, and gave way to a furious competition for dominance in Canadian art.

From the Roaring Twenties and the Group of Seven to the Automatistes and the early Cold War, Canadian artists lived through and embodied an era of global tumult and change. With an interweaving of historical narrative, lavish illustrations, and writings by many of Canada's most revered cultural figures, Lora Senechal Carney illuminates the lives, perspectives, and works of the era's painters and provides glimpses of the sculptors, poets, dancers, critics, and filmmakers with whom they associated. Canadian Painters in a Modern World gives readers direct access to a carefully curated selection of writings, artworks, photos, and other documents that help to reconstruct the public spheres in which artists including Paul-Émile Borduas, Emily Carr, Alex Colville, Lawren Harris, David Milne, and Pegi Nicol MacLeod circulated. Each of the book’s eight chapters consists of a narrative about a key issue or debate, focusing on the relationship of art to politics and society, and on how these are negotiated in an individual's life. Relating artistic engagement with and responses to the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Cold War, Senechal Carney discovers a common desire for new connections between art and life. Revealing continuities, ruptures, and watershed moments, Canadian Painters in a Modern World showcases artistic production within specific socio-political contexts to shed new light on Canadian art during three decades of conflict and crisis.

The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature introduces the fiction, poetry and drama of Canada in its historical, political and cultural contexts. In this clear and structured volume, Richard Lane outlines: the history of Canadian literature from colonial times to the present key texts for Canadian First Peoples and the literature of Quebec the impact of English translation, and the Canadian immigrant experience critical themes such as landscape, ethnicity, orality, textuality, war and nationhood contemporary debate on the canon, feminism, postcoloniality, queer theory, and cultural and ethnic diversity the work of canonical and lesser-known writers from Catherine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie to Robert Service, Maria Campbell and Douglas Coupland. Written in an engaging and accessible style and offering a glossary, maps and further reading sections, this guidebook is a crucial resource for students working in the field of Canadian Literature.