Criticism & Essays

Loving the Difficult

When her first novel, Desert of the Heart, was published in 1964, Jane Rule’s academic career was threatened because of its content. In that book, a May-December romance between two women unfolds against the backdrop ... Read More »

September 26, 2008 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

My Life As a Dame: The Personal and the Political in the Writings of Christina McCall

By Christina McCall; Stephen Clarkson, ed.

The most touching parts of My Life As a Dame, a collection of punditry and feature writing from journalist Christina McCall, who died in 2005, are the brief but heartfelt introductions to each chapter penned ... Read More »

June 25, 2008 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

★ Join the Revolution, Comrade: Journeys and Essays

By Charles Foran

Charles Foran’s first collection of essays is an eclectic compilation of travel and literary writings that reveals a preoccupation, not always clearly articulated, with establishing a connection to the present age and feeling the truth ... Read More »

June 25, 2008 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

A Report on the Afterlife of Culture

By Stephen Henighan

Literary criticism in Canada suffers from a plague of timidity. There are many reasons for this, but one of the primary ones is the misguided notion that a vibrant literary culture depends on blind boosterism ... Read More »

April 7, 2008 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Criticism & Essays

The City of Words

By Alberto Manguel

“Language is our common denominator.” This sentence, the opener of The City of Words, the 2007 edition of the CBC Massey Lectures, is at once a rhetorical salvo, an overly broad generalization (surely humanity, not ... Read More »

January 18, 2008 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

★ Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking

By Robert Bringhurst

Poet, philosopher, translator, linguist, critic, typographer, ethnographer – Robert Bringhurst is a rare sort of person: an independent scholar and a non-specialist. As such, he is just the sort of voice we should be listening ... Read More »

December 20, 2007 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

Polaroids from the Dead

By Douglas Coupland

The “Polaroids” that give Douglas Coupland’s new collection of essays and short stories its title are a series of 10 vignettes, each focusing on the experiences of different people attending a Grateful Dead concert in ... Read More »

October 10, 2007 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

Notes from Canada’s Young Activists: A Generation Stands Up for Change

By Severn Cullis-Suzuki et al., eds.

The “activist” label can serve both as an honorific – especially when applied to figures such as the late June Callwood – and as a derisive epithet directed against those who agitate for social change ... Read More »

July 27, 2007 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

So This Is the World & Here I Am in It

By Di Brandt

Manitoba poet Di Brandt’s So This Is the World & Here I Am in It is the 10th book in NeWest’s Writer as Critic series. The book consists of 12 essays written over 10 years ... Read More »

June 14, 2007 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

The Age of Confession: The Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecture

By Neil Bissoondath

Neil Bissoondath’s The Age of Confession was the inaugural Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecture, delivered in Moncton in April 2006 as part of the Northrop Frye Festival. The objective of this new lecture series, according to ... Read More »

May 18, 2007 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

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