Hazard Lepage, the last of the studhorse men, sets out to breed his rare blue stallion, Poseidon. A lusty trickster and a wayward knight, Hazard's outrageous adventures are narrated by Demeter Proudfoot, his secret rival, who writes this story while sitting naked in an empty bathtub. In his quest to save his stallion’s bloodline from extinction, Hazard leaves a trail of anarchy and confusion. Everything he touches erupts into chaos, necessitating frequent convalescences in the arms of a few good women, except for those of Martha, his long-suffering intended. Told with the ribald zeal of a Prairie beer parlor tall tale and the mythic magnitude of a Greek odyssey, The Studhorse Man is Robert Kroetsch’s celebration of unbridled character set against the backdrop of rough-and-ready Alberta emerging after the Second World War. Introduction by Aritha van Herk.

This book undertakes a detailed reading of Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man, examining this Canadian novel in its transnational historical and socio-cultural context. Key subject headings are biology and culture, sex and gender, eugenics and contraception, writing and reading. The overarching theme is «disenchanted modernity» in the twentieth-century, the systematic displacement of the divine and natural order by a humanly ordained social regime, and by forms of social engineering that brought to bear the full force of modern science, invasively to alter the most fundamental conditions of human life. The more immediate literary frames of reference are Greek mythology, early Christian debates on the body and marriage, and the lore of the North American Aboriginal trickster, as these are deployed and alluded to in Kroetsch's novel. In establishing the sources and contexts of The Studhorse Man, this study examines Robert Kroetsch's early drafts of the novel, and his many notes taken and clippings assembled during its composition. An effort has been made to appeal to a wide range of general and academic readers alike by avoiding specialized jargon and adopting a cross-disciplinary approach. This book will be of interest to scholars of literature and literary theory, and of use in courses on literature and the novel, on masculinity and gender studies, and on cultural history in the twentieth century.

Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference is a book of both practical and theoretical criticism. Some chapters are feminist deconstructive readings of a broad range of the writings of contemporary Canadian poet-critic-novelist Robert Kroetsch, from But We are Exiles to Completed Field Notes. Other chapters self-consciously examine the history and possibility of feminist deconstruction and feminist readings of Kroetsch’s writing by analyzing Kroetsch, Derrida, and Freud on subjectivity and sexuality; Neuman, Hutcheon, and van Herk on Kroetsch. As such, the book speaks out of and about a number of contemporary theoretical discourses, including particular positions within Canadian literary criticism, feminism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism. Written by a woman reader whose theoretical and methodological orientations are both feminist and poststructuralist, Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference problematizes notions of writing, reading, gender, sexuality, and subjectivity in and through Robert Kroetsch’s writings. In this critical study of one writer’s work the author also challenges the traditionally subservient relationship of reader to text and so empowers the feminist reader as well as, if not rather than, the male writer.

The Present book is critical study of the novels of Robert Kroetsch. Kroetsch often bases his novels on myths while exploring such themes as exile, loss, gender roles and selfhood. He is considered one of Canada’s foremost practitioners and theoreticians of postmodern literature. He engages with the idea of technological modernization, indicating that this version of progress conceals the loss of an organic relationship between humanity and the world. Quests in modern literature do not always lead to one answer, be they in Eliot’s Wastleand or in Kroetsch’s Alibi.

Re-inventing/Re-presenting Identities in a Global World is a collection of twelve selected essays which address the concepts of cultural identity formation and enactment, immigration, diaspora and repatriation, and gender politics within a globalized context. With the peripheral having now become the center of contemporary culture, this volume examines cultural and literary diversities that have emerged from the reciprocal traffic of ideas and influences between cultures, politics, aesthetics and disciplines, with an emphasis on cultural identity as a site of crisis and fragmentation. Written in an accessible way, this volume addresses several audiences, from postgraduate researchers and scholars in the fields of Anglo-American and cross-cultural studies, women’s studies, minority and ethnic literature studies, to scholars, students and specialists of American, cross-Atlantic and even global studies. Because of the numerous theoretical concerns which underpin this work and its interdisciplinary approach, the publication is also aimed at researchers and scholars in the fields of trans-atlantic studies and cultural geography, as well as the general reader who is interested in globality and cultural identity.

The road trip genre, well established in the literatures of Canada, is a natural outcome of the nation’s obsession with geography. Divided Highways examines road narratives by Anglo-Canadian, Québécois and Indigenous authors and the sense of place and nationhood in these communities. Geography describes the land, and history peoples it, just as memories connect us to place. This is why road trips are such a feature of writing in Canada, allowing the travellers to claim, at least symbolically, the terrain they have traversed. Macfarlane examines works by a variety of writers from each of these communities, including Gilles Archambault, Jeannette Armstrong, Jill Frayne, Tomson Highway, Claude Jasmin, Robert Kroetsch, Jacques Poulin, Aritha van Herk and Paul Villeneuve, to name but a few. Studying a diversity of road narratives from Anglo-Canadian, Québécois and Indigenous populations not only demonstrates the existence of a very specific road genre, but is also revelatory of very diverse and often conflicting perceptions of nationhood. It is these expressions of sovereignty that are integral to ongoing discussions of reconciliation and decolonization. This book is published in English. - Cet ouvrage étudie l’existence et la tradition du roman de la route au Canada. La géographie décrit le territoire et l’histoire lui insuffle vie, tout comme les souvenirs sont des points d’attache à un lieu donné. Voilà pourquoi les road trips ont une place privilégiée dans l’écriture d’expression anglaise, française et autochtone du Canada : ils permettent aux voyageurs de revendiquer, du moins symboliquement, le terrain qu’ils ont couvert. C’est l’intersection de l’histoire et de la géographie qui confère toute sa signification à un voyage, qui alimente cet esprit des lieux, ou qui permet d’en constater l’absence. Les voyages sont révélateurs des intérêts propres aux trois groupes examinés dans le cadre de cette étude. Le désir, et parfois la nécessité, d’entreprendre un voyage, les compagnons de voyage ainsi que les destinations, de même que l’histoire qui s’écrit au fil des distances parcourues sont autant d’indicateurs de cette notion de l’espace et du concept de nation au sein du pays. Pour illustrer ce phénomène, ce livre examine des oeuvres littéraires d’une gamme d’écrivains anglophones, québécois et autochtones, dont Gilles Archambault, Jeannette Armstrong, Jill Frayne, Tomson Highway, Linda Hogan, Scott Gardiner, Claude Jasmin, Robert Kroetsch, Lee Maracle, Jacques Poulin, Aritha van Herk et Paul Villeneuve. L’approche comparative aux littératures du Canada est le prolongement logique aux études postcoloniales dans la mesure où elle révèle les complexités de même que les spécificités de diverses communautés, contribuant ainsi à une meilleure compréhension de collectivités nationales. Elle propose, en outre, des histoires qui font le contrepoids aux études transnationales. Ce livre est publié en anglais.