Table of Contents
- Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian
Women's Poetry, edited by Di Brandt and Barbara Godard
- A New Genealogy of Canadian Literary Modernism Di Brandt
- The Making of Canadian Literary Modernism
- The Writing Livesays: Connecting Generations of Canadian
Modernism Ann Martin
- Feminist and Regionalist Modernisms in Contemporary Verse, CV1
and CV2 Christine Kim
- P.K. Page: Discovering a Modern Sensibility Sandra Djwa
- Tradition, Individual Talent, and ""a young woman / From
backwoods New Brunswick"": Modernism and Elizabeth Brewster's
(Auto)Poetics of the Subject Bina Toledo Freiwald
- ""And we are homesick still"": Home, the Unhomely, and the
Everyday Anne Wilkinson Kathy Mezei
- Anne Marriott: Modernist on the Periphery Marilyn J. Rose
- Discontinuity, Intertextuality, and Literary History: Gail
Scott's Reading of Gertrude Stein Lianne Moyes
- Literary Modernism as Cultural Act
- ""They cut him down"": Race, Class, and Cultural Memory in
Dorothy Livesay's "";Day and Night"" Pamela McCallum
- Dorothy Livesay and CBC Radio: The Politics of Modernist
Aesthetics, Gender, and Regionalism Peggy Lynn Kelly
- Phyllis Webb as Public Intellectual Pauline Butling
- ""A Collection of Solitary Fragments"": Miriam Waddington as
Critic Candida Rifkind
- ""Our hearts both leapt / in love with metaphor"": P.K. Page's
Professional Elegies Sara Jamieson
- The Passionate and Sublime Modernism of Elizabeth Smart Anna
Quéma
- Jay Macpherson's Modernism Miriam Nichols
- Word, I, and Other in Margaret Avison's Poetry Katherine
Quinsey
- Reading P.K. Page in English/Italian; or, On the Politics of
Translating Modernist Gender Elena Basile
- Contributors
- Index
- Contributors' Bios
- Elena Basile teaches in the English department at York
University, where she is completing her dissertationon questions of
translation and experimental poetic practices. Recent publications
include ""Responding to the Enigmatic Address of the Other: A
Psychoanalytical Approach to the Translator's Labour,"" New Voices
in Translation Studies (2005), and ""Itchy Language Scars:Thoughts
on Translation as a Poetics of Cultural Healing,"" in Traducciòn,
Género y Postcolonialismo:De Signis; Publicaciòn de la Federaciòn
Latinoamericana de Semitiòca (Spring 2008).
- Di Brandt is the award-winning author and editor of more than a
dozen books. Her poetry titles include questions i asked my mother
(1987), Agnes in the sky (1990), Jerusalem, beloved (1995), Now You
Care (2003), and Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt (2006).
Her prose titles include Wild Mother Dancing: Maternal Narrative in
Canadian Literature (1993) and So this is the world & here I am in
it (2007). Her libretto for Emily, the Way You Are, a one-woman
opera about the life and work of Emily Carr, composed by Jana
Skarecky, premiered at the McMichael Gallery, Kleinburg, Ontario,
in April 2008. Her website address is www.dibrandt.ca. Di Brandt
holds a Canada Research Chair at Brandon University, Manitoba.
- Pauline Butling taught Canadian Literature at Selkirk College
in Castelgar, BC, David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, BC,
and at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary. She currently lives
in Vancouver, where she is writing a family history/memoir. Her
publications include Seeing in the Dark: The Poetry of Phyllis Webb
(1997), Poets Talk, with Susan Rudy (2005), and Writing in Our
Time: Canada's Radical Poetries, with Susan Rudy (2005).
- Sandra Djwa, Professor Emerita of Simon Fraser University, has
written extensively on Canadian poetry and Canadian poets. Her
books include E.J. Pratt: The Evolutionary Vision (1974), the
Complete Poems of E.J. Pratt, 2 vols. (1989), and the Selected
Poems of E.J. Pratt (1999), co-edited with Zailig Pollock and W.J.
Keith. Her biographies include F.R. Scott: The Politics of the
Imagination (1987), F.R. Scott: Une vie (translation 2001), and
Professing English: A Life of Roy Daniells (2002), a mini-history
of the discipline of English and the development of a Canadian
literature. She is working on a biography of P.K. Page.
- Bina Toledo Freiwald, graduate program director and professor
of English at Concordia University, teaches and researches on
critical theory, contemporary womens writing across genres and
national literatures, autobiographical practices, and identity
discourses of gender, sexuality, and nation. Recent publications
include chapters in Identity, Community, Nation (2002),
Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject (2004), Tracing the
Autobiographical (2005), Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to
Disease, Disability, and Trauma (2007), and The Jewish Diaspora as
a Paradigm (2008). Her current research project is ""Gender,
Nation, and Self-Narration: The Construction of National and
Diasporic Identities in Jewish Womens Life Narratives in
Palestine/Israel and Canada.""
- Barbara Godard, Historical Chair of Canadian Literature at York
University, has published widely on Canadian and Québec literatures
and on feminist and literary theory. Her translations and essays on
translation theory have contributed to the ""cultural turn"" in
translation studies. Among her publications are the edited volumes
Gynocritics/Gynocritiques: Feminist Approaches to the Writing of
Canadian and Québec Women (1987); Collaboration in the Feminine:
Writings on Women and Culture from Tessera (1994); Intersexions:
Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian Women's Writing (1996); and
Re:Generations: Canadian Women Poets in Conversation, with Di
Brandt (2005). Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language
and Culture, a volume of her essays, appeared in 2008. For more
information, see her website at www.yorku.ca/bgodard/.
- Sara Jamieson is an assistant professor in the Department of
English at Carleton University where her research interests include
intersections of Victorian and modernist poetic practice in the
work of twentieth-century Canadian women poets, as well as
representations of aging in Canadian writing. She has published
articles in Canadian Literature, Canadian Poetry, and Studies in
Canadian Literature. She is currently working on a book manuscript
entitled Soundless Grieving: Women Poets, Mourning, and Modernism
in Canada.
- Peggy Lynn Kelly specializes in Canadian women's writing. She
has published in Atlantis, Open Letter, Canadian Poetry, Studies in
Canadian Literature, Literary Encyclopedia Online, The History of
the Book in Canada, Framing Our Past: Canadian Women's History in
the Twentieth Century, and Limited Edition: Voices of Feminism,
Voices of Women. She is editor of the second edition of Shackles by
Madge Macbeth (2005), and associate general editor for Tecumseh
Press's Early Canadian Women Writers Series. Peggy Kelly teaches
English literature and composition at Algonquin College and the
University of Ottawa.
- Christine Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of
English at Simon Fraser University. Her teaching and research focus
on Asian North American literature and theory, contemporary
Canadian literature, and diasporic writing. She has published
articles in Mosaic, Open Letter, and Studies in Canadian
Literature. She is currently working on a book-length project
titled From Multiculturalism to Globalization: The Cultural
Politics of Asian North American Writing.
- Ann Martin is an assistant professor in the Department of
English at the University of Saskatchewan, where she teaches
twentieth-century British literature. She is the author of Red
Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales (2006),
and is currently researching the role of the automobile in the
fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers.
- Pamela McCallum is professor of English at the University of
Calgary. She recently co-edited, with Wendy Faith, Linked
Histories: Postcolonial Studies in a Global World (2005) and
published an edited and annotated edition of Raymond Williams's
Modern Tragedy (2006). Her research interests are focussed on
representations of history, materiality, and globalization in
literature and other cultural texts.
- Kathy Mezei teaches in the Department of Humanities at Simon
Fraser University. She has published articles on translation
studies, Canadian literature, narrative theory, and modern British
women writers, and has edited special issues on domestic space for
Signs (2002) and BC Studies (2003–2004). Her translations of French
and Quebec poets have appeared in ellipse and La Traductiére. Her
most recent book, co-written with Chiara Briganti, is Domestic
Modernism, the Inter-war Novel, and E.H. Young (2006). She runs a
website on domestic space at www.sfu.ca/domestic-space. She is a
participant in the project Bibliography of Comparative Studies in
Canadian, Quebec and Foreign Literatures, based at the Université
de Sherbrooke (www.compcanlit.ca).
- Lianne Moyes, associate professor of English at Université de
Montréal, specializes in Canadian and Quebec literature. She is
editor of Gail Scott: Essays on Her Works (2002); co-editor, with
Domenic A. Beneventi and Licia Canton, of Adjacencies: Minority
Writing in Canada (2004); and, from 1993 to 2003, was co-editor of
the bilingual feminist journal Tessera. Her work on Anglo-Montreal
writing has appeared in Études canadiennes, Voix et images, and
Canadian Literature, as well as in the collections Un certain genre
malgré tout: Pour une réflexion sur la différence sexuelle à
l'oeuvre dans l'écriture (2007), Language Acts: Anglo-Québec
Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (2007), and Trans.Can.Lit:
Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (2007).
- Miriam Nichols teaches contemporary literature and literary
theory at the University College of the Fraser Valley. She has
published numerous articles on Canadian and American poets and is
the editor of Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings and Archival
Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser (2002).
Recently she edited The Fire: The Collected Essays of Robin Blaser
(2006) and The Holy Forest: The Collected Poems of Robin Blaser
(2006). She is working on Radical Affections, a book that re-reads
the poetry of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Jack
Spicer, Robin Blaser and Susan Howe.
- Anne Quéma teaches at Acadia University. A specialist of
theories of criticism and twentieth-century British literature, she
has published The Agon of Modernism: Wyndham Lewis's Allegories,
Aesthetics, and Politics (1999), as well as articles in
Contemporary Literary Criticism, English Studies in Canada, The
Canadian Modernists Meet, Studies in Canadian Literature,
Philosophy and Literature, West Coast Line, Gothic Studies, and the
International Journal of Law in Context. The recipient of a SSHRC
grant, she is currently working on a project on contemporary
twentieth-century Gothic fiction and English family law.
- Katherine Quinsey teaches at the University of Windsor, where
she was the 2007 Humanities Research Fellow. She has published
widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets, Canadian poet
Margaret Avison, and Biblical tradition in English literature. She
is editor of Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration
Drama (1996) and Lumen: Selected Proceedings of the Canadian
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (1998), and co-editor, with
David Kent, of an issue of Canadian Poetry devoted to the work of
Margaret Avison. Following her SSHRC-funded project, Tempting
Grace: The Religious Imagination of Alexander Pope, and a related
project, Rhyme and Print: Pope, Poetry, and the Material Text, she
will research women and religion in England 1640–1740 for Under the
Veil: Faith, Freedom, and Feminism in Early Modern Britain.
- Candida Rifkind is an assistant professor in the Department of
English at the University of Winnipeg, where she specializes in
modernism, women writers, and Canadian popular culture. She has
published articles in Studies in Canadian Literature, Essays on
Canadian Writing, the Journal of Canadian Studies, TOPIA: Canadian
Journal of Cultural Studies / Revue d'études canadiennes, Open
Letter, and in the critical anthology, The Canadian Modernists Meet
(2005). Her book Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the
Left in 1930s Canada appeared in 2009. She is currently conducting
a major research project into popular and pulp fictions written in
and about Canada in the twenties and thirties.
- Marilyn Rose is a professor in the Department of English
Language and Literature and dean of Graduate Studies at Brock
University. A specialist in Canadian literature, she has published
and presented numerous conference papers on the work of Canadian
women poets, including Anne Marriott, Lorna Crozier, P.K. Page,
Florence Livesay, and Pauline Johnson, as well as on Canadian
novelists such as Joy Kogawa and Sinclair Ross. With graduate
student Erica Kelly, she developed and maintains a website on
Canadian women poets at www.brocku.ca/canadianwomenpoets. In
addition, she participates in Brock's MA program in Popular Culture
and, with Professor Jeannette Sloniowski, undertakes research in
and maintains a scholarly website on the study of detective fiction
at www.brocku.ca/crimefictioncanada.
About the Author
Di Brandt has received numerous awards for her poetry,
including the CAA National Poetry Prize, the McNally Robinson Book
of the Year Award, and the Gerald Lampert Award. She holds a Canada
Research Chair in Creative Writing at Brandon University.
Barbara Godard, was Historica Chair of Canadian Literature
and a professor of English, French, social and political thought,
and women's studies at York University. She published widely on
Canadian and Quebec cultures and on feminist and literary theory.
As translator, she introduced works by Quebec women writers to an
English readership, including Nicole Brossard's Picture Theory
(1991, revised edition 2006) and France Théoret's The Tangible Word
(1991).
Reviews
``Wider Boundaries of Daring borrows its title from Dorothy
Livesay's poem 'We Are Alone', written in the 1930s, as Di Brandt
informs her readers in her comprehensive introductory essay. Here
Brandt explains the rationale behind this collection, which is an
attempt to reassess the artistry and relevance of Canadian women
poets in the modernist period given the neglect they have suffered
from in their own country.... Given the in-depth analysis one finds
in every single essay in this collection, the book well deserves
the recognition it received. It was the winner, in 2009, of the
Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism.'' -- Eleonora Rao,
University of Salerno, Italy -- British Journal of Canadian
Studies, Volume 24, #2, 2011, 201110
``Wider Boundaries of Daring is an important new book which
reimagines literary modernism in Canada--an overdue historical
revision which responds to calls issued by David Arnason in 1983,
by Barbara Godard in 1984, and by Carole Gerson in 1992....
Together, the essays in this collection reveal that these women
were not passive participants in modernism, nor were they the
followers of male leaders; among other things, they did not
subscribe to the 'masculinist model of aestheticism divorced from
the challenges and the obligations of personal life.''' -- Linda
Quirk -- Canadian Literature, 290, Summer 2011, 201201
``Utilizing criticism of gender, biography, and semiotics--among
the usual suspects--the generally jargon-free scholarship will be a
treat for those who have gotten bogged down in postmodern feminist
criticism. This book may entice US readers whose knowledge of
Canadian literature is limited primarily to the work of Margaret
Atwood to look northward.... Recommended.'' -- R.H. Solomon,
formerly, University of Alberta -- CHOICE, February 2010,
201004
``The editors of Wider Boundaries of Daring have collected essays
by some of the finest scholars of Canadian literature on the
subject of critically marginalized poets and modernist poetry, and
in so doing they have produced an important collection, one that
revises not only the erroneous and discriminatory genealogy of
Canadian modernism but also re-imagines the very nature of
modernism.'' -- Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen, University of
Manitoba -- Prairie Fire, Vol. 10, #4, 2010, 201105