Bookshelf
Bookshelf
Department of English
DAVID LODGE AND THE TRADITION OF THE MODERN NOVEL
J. Russell Perkin argues that liberalism is the defining feature of Lodge's identity as a novelist, critic, and Roman Catholic intellectual, and demonstrates that Graham Greene, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis, Henry James, and H.G. Wells are the key influences on Lodge's fiction. Perkin also considers Lodge's relationship to contemporary British novelists, including Hilary Mantel, Julian Barnes, and Monica Ali. In a study that is both theoretically informed and accessible to the general reader, Perkin shows that Lodge's work is shaped by the dialectic of modernism and the realist tradition.
Through an approach that draws on diverse theories of literary influence and history, David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel provides the most thorough treatment of the novelist's career to date.
“A wonderful study of Lodge that also makes valuable observations about twentieth-century British literature.”
Brian Diemert, Department of English, Brescia University College at the University of Western Ontario
“David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel demonstrates the virtues of careful scholarship, lucidity, and intelligence. Perkin has produced an exemplary book that provides a knowledgeable, enjoyable, and thorough introduction to Lodge’s work.” Allan Hepburn, Department of English, McGill University
J. Russell Perkin is professor of English at Saint Mary's University and the author of Theology and the Victorian Novel.
Ringing Here & There A Nature Calendar
In his first book of prose, distinguished Canadian poet Brian Bartlett offers a book of days, a daily diary from spring to spring. In the tradition of John Clare's notebooks and letters, Henry David Thoreau's Walden and his voluminous journals, and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Bartlett looks out at his local surroundings with a poet's eye for detail, his ear attuned to the ringings of the natural world. Grounded in Nova Scotia, but reflecting travels further afield to Alberta, Nebraska, New York City and Ireland, the entries take on the qualities of field reports, sketches, commentaries, tributes and laments, quotations and collages. Over 366 daily entries, Bartlett shows that the resonance between human life and nature is there waiting to be heard.
Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets
In Poetic Sisters, Deborah Kennedy explores the personal and literary connections among five early eighteenth-century women poets: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; Elizabeth Singer Rowe; Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford; Sarah Dixon; and Mary Jones. Richly illustrated and elegantly written, this book brings the eighteenth century to life, presenting a diverse range of material from serious religious poems to amusing verses on domestic life. The work of Anne Finch, author of “A Nocturnal Reverie,” provides the cornerstone for this well informed study. But it was Elizabeth Rowe who achieved international fame for her popular religious writings. Both women influenced the Countess of Hertford, who wrote about the beauty of nature, centuries before modern Earth Day celebrations. Sarah Dixon, a middle-class writer from Kent, had a strong moral outlook and stood up for those whose voices needed to be heard, including her own. Finally, Mary Jones, who lived in Oxford, was praised for both her genius and her sense of humor. Poetic Sisters presents a fascinating female literary network, revealing the bonds of a shared vocation that unites these writers. It also traces their literary afterlife from the eighteenth century to the present day, with references to contemporary culture, demonstrating how their work resonates with new generations of readers.
Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Bucknell University Press 2013) was awarded a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award.
Canadian Historical Writing: Reading the Remains
Presenting an archaeology of contemporary Canadian literature, Canadian Historical Writing: Reading the Remains situates ideas of history circulating in literary culture within the theory and practice of historiography. Drawing on international debates within the fields of literary studies and history, the book focuses on the roles played by time, evidence, and interpretation in defining the historical. Renée Hulan analyzes this aesthetic form using case studies of Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, and Armand Garnet Ruffo's Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney.
Review
"A very timely and welcome contribution to current discussions about the representation of Canadian history. Hulan lucidly integrates theoretical and material aspects of archival research. Her analysis of writers' uses of textual and oral records and their creation of fictional documents, alongside close examination of the writers' own archives, casts fresh light on the different strategies developed by a wide range of late twentieth-century literary authors to narrate the past." - Carole Gerson, Professor of English, Simon Fraser University, Canada "Hulan practices deeply what should be the first rule of all interdisciplinary scholarship: respect the disciplines we make contact with. Hulan ponders the odd presentism of literary scholarship about historical fiction and its lack of interest in the responses of contemporary historians after Hayden White. In this book, she remedies both deficits and produces a study that changes the conversation about the 'historical turn' in Canadian fiction." - Lorraine York, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Canada "Impressively researched and firmly grounded in a sophisticated understanding of the dramatic shifts in historiography and historical fiction over the last four decades, Hulan challenges literary critics in Canada and elsewhere to see historical fiction through new eyes by paying greater attention to the process of 'reading the remains.' Through extended investigations of the work of Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and Armand Garnet Ruffo, Hulan restyles critical interpretation of historical fiction as a materialist enterprise and offers a timely call for a broader grounding in theories of history and for a more informed and nuanced critical practice." - Herb Wyile, Acadia University, Canada, author of Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History
The Turkish Embassy Letters
In 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's husband Edward Montagu was appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. Montagu accompanied her husband to Turkey and wrote an extraordinary series of letters that recorded her experiences as a traveller and her impressions of Ottoman culture and society.
This Broadview edition includes a broad selection of related historical documents on Turkey, women in the Arab world, Islam, and "Oriental" tales written in Europe.
Comments:
"What a treat to see this indispensable and versatile text again available, lovingly edited by Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O'Quinn. They have followed the first edition, 1763 (illicitly published after a secret all-night copying session), while correcting their text from Montagu's own manuscript. Her idiosyncratic, open-minded, proto-feminist responses to Islamic civilization are more fascinating today than ever, and the context that the editors supply for them is simply the best yet." - Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta
"Montagu's famous Letter-book has at last received the attention it has long deserved as an important piece of eighteenth-century travel literature. The lively introduction constructs the historical and literary context of the work, while an impressive set of appendices illustrates not just her world, but also that of her interlocutors and her contemporaries." - Virginia H. Aksan, McMaster University
"In their superb Introduction to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's The Turkish Embassy Letters, Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O'Quinn write that "much like her letters, it is only more recently that her strategic and intelligent engagement with Ottoman culture is being mined." Their edition is a timely and compelling reminder of the reasons why we should pay attention to the writing of this remarkable woman. They have produced what will no doubt be the definitive teaching edition for years to come." - Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsylvania
"Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O'Quinn's remarkable edition of The Turkish Embassy Letters illuminates the intercultural dimensions of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's account of her travels through the Ottoman Empire. Heffernan and O'Quinn's critical introduction offers a nuanced account of the text's production and circulation and of the various discourses— about the East, about women, about Islam— that shaped its reception. Judiciously annotated, the volume offers an impressive range of well-selected contextual materials, embracing contemporary reviews, polemics from the small-pox engrafting controversy, selections from travel writings on the Ottoman empire, British accounts of Islam, contemporary portraits of Eastern women and the harem, and Oriental tales. This is sure to become the go-to edition for scholars and teachers interested in women's writing, the history of cross-cultural contact, and the shifting thresholds dividing— and conjoining— Occident and Orient in the eighteenth century." - Lynn Festa, Rutgers University
Teresa Heffernan is Associate Professor of English at St. Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Daniel O'Quinn is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.
When Language Breaks Down
Doctors, nurses, and other caregivers often know what people with Alzheimer's disease or Asperger's 'sound like' - that is they recognise patterns in people's discourse, from sounds and silences, to words, sentences and story structures. Such discourse patterns may inform their clinical judgements and affect the decisions they make. However, this knowledge is often tacit, like recognising a regional accent without knowing how to describe its features. This is the first book to present models for comprehensively describing discourse specifically in clinical contexts and to illustrate models with detailed analyses of discourse patterns associated with degenerative (Alzheimer's) and developmental (autism spectrum) disorders. The book is aimed not only at advanced students and researchers in linguistics, discourse analysis, speech pathology and clinical psychology but also at researchers, clinicians and caregivers for whom explicit knowledge of discourse patterns might be helpful.
Review
" ... an important contribution to demonstrating the value of discourse analysis for clinical diagnosis and for the study of patients with neurological and affective disorders ... a welcome synthesis of traditional, neuro-imaging, and linguistic methods." --Jay Lemke, University of Michigan
" ... provides theoretical and descriptive tools for analyzing language in clinical syndromes that are clear but solidly grounded. The emphasis is on the autistic spectrum and Alzheimer's disease but beyond these disorders and the specific analysis, the authors provide a way of thinking about language in clinical impairments. It presents numerous worked out linguistic analysis and offers suggestions for further specific research." --Jonathan Fine, Department of English, Bar-Ilan University
Book Description
Presents new models for comprehensively describing discourse specifically in clinical contexts, illustrating these models with detailed analyses of discourse patterns associated with degenerative (Alzheimer's) and developmental (autism spectrum) disorders.
Beckett and Ireland
Seventeenth-Century Poetic Genres as Social Categories: A New Reading of John Donne
Through the reading records of Donne's poems and the concept of multiple referentiality, this study examines the social dimensions of early modern genres and the relationship among poetics, rhetoric and the Renaissance doctrines of imitation, placing systematic attention on how the differences oral and written modes of expression influences the process of reading and the early modern understanding of genre.
Review
"This study has a simple, but bold and consequential, argument: that, in an age of widespread manuscript transmission of texts, readers... participated in process of literary creation through their appropriation of the texts they received and freely interpreted poems according to their own social positions and needs." - Prof. Arthur F. Marotti Wayne State University "Should this dialogue continue, and continue to produce results such as Takseva's work, I have no doubt that Donne studies will continue to be as fruitful in this century as they were in the previous." - Prof. David Galbraith University of Toronto"
Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde
In Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Sara Malton insists that we fully account for the prominence of forgery in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination. Examining a range of works from Dickens to Wilde, she considers how social and legal contexts inform the shifting representation of the crime and its varied perpetrators throughout the nineteenth century. Distinct in its historical attentiveness, Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Cultureilluminates the breadth of cultural issues to which this “crime of the first magnitude” is linked.
Praise
“Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture offers a fascinating, wide-ranging account of Victorian preoccupations with forgery. In the surprising persistence of that concern Malton discovers the rich figurative power of forgery, within which worries over the integrity of money and finance could be extended to virtually any system of value, including personal identity. ‘Fictions of finance’ thus include a remarkable array of Victorian novels, and Malton’s treatment of those works offers new evidence of the power of fiction to articulate the deepest concerns of social life.”—James Eli Adams, Cornell University, author of A History of Victorian Literature
“This carefully researched study provides the first extended analysis of criminal forgery in Victorian literature. While others have examined forgery as a metaphor for fraudulent literary commerce, Malton shows how the crime of forgery haunts the plots of Victorian novels. By examining the interplay between a changing legal regime and the fictional representations it provoked and responded to, Malton makes an important contribution to research in law and literature.”—Simon Stern, Faculty of Law & Department of English, University of Toronto"Malton has written a provocative, thoughtful, and engaging book that makes a solid case for giving forgery its due critical respect. Focusing on the metaphorical elements of her topic, her approach offers vivid, resonant readings of novels by Gaskell, Dickens, Trollope, Hardy, Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Malton's book contributes meaningfully to the growing canon of Victorian financial criticism and has made this reader eager to know still more."--Rebecca Stern, University of South Carolina, Victorian Studies (Volume 52, Number 1)
Theology and the Victorian Novel
Reclaiming the Victorian novel from presumed secularity.
Beginning with a wide-ranging introduction that explains why a theological reading of Victorian fiction is both rewarding and timely, Perkin also addresses religion's return to prominence in the twenty-first century, confounding earlier predictions of its imminent demise. Chapters on William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy are followed by a concluding discussion of Mary Ward and Walter Pater that relates Pater's Marius the Epicurean to postmodern theology and shows how it remains a religious classic for our own time.
Informed by extensive knowledge of the religion and culture of the period, Theology and the Victorian Novel significantly alters the way that the Victorian novel should be read.
The Watchmaker's Table
In his most personal collection to date, Brian Bartlett meditates upon time and family. We share his son's discovery of newborn spiders and his daughter's first grasp of infinity as a concept. In companion poems on the births of his mother and father, Bartlett makes you feel as if you were alive at those moments in history. The opening poem, "All the Train Trips," displays an uncanny sense of homes and families lost and the casual friendships struck up in conversations in the "bar car." "Pearly Everlasting" expresses a longing to register the world in the body through the naming of flowers.
Books and the history of poetry shape time for Bartlett, whether in found poems woven from the words of books inherited from ancestors or in the words of great poets that, despite the distance, convey a shared sense of humanity. Wrestling with time as if he were both Jacob and the angel, Bartlett speaks both for time's dominion and for human mutability.
Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel
In Post-Apocalyptic Culture, Teresa Heffernan poses the question: what is at stake in a world that no longer believes in the power of the end? Although popular discourse increasingly understands apocalypse as synonymous with catastrophe, historically, in both its religious and secular usage, apocalypse was intricately linked to the emergence of a better world, to revelation, and to disclosure.
In this interdisciplinary study, Heffernan uses modernist and post-modernist novels as evidence of the diminished faith in the existence of an inherently meaningful end. Probing the cultural and historical reasons for this shift in the understanding of apocalypse, she also considers the political implications of living in a world that does not rely on revelation as an organizing principle.
With fascinating readings of works by William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, Ford Madox Ford, Toni Morrison, E.M. Forster, Salman Rushdie, D.H. Lawrence, and Angela Carter, Post-Apocalyptic Culture is a provocative study of how twentieth-century culture and society responded to a world in which a belief in the end had been exhausted.
Aboriginal Oral Traditions: Theory, Practice, Ethics
Oral traditions are a distinct way of knowing and the means by which knowledge is reproduced, preserved and transferred from generation to generation. The conference from which these essays were selected created an opportunity for people to come together and exchange information and experiences over three days. The scholarship may be grouped into three broad areas: oral traditions and knowledge of the environment, economy, education and/or health of communities; oral traditions and continuance of language and culture; and the effects of intellectual property rights, electronic media and public discourse on oral traditions.
