An important critical study of Canadian literature, placing internationally successful anglophone Canadian authors in the context of their national literary history. While the focus of the book is on twentieth-century and contemporary writing, it also charts the historical development of Canadian literature and discusses important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors. The chapters focus on four central topics in Canadian culture: Ethnicity, Race, Colonisation; Wildernesses, Cities, Regions; Desire; and Histories and Stories. Each chapter combines case studies of five key texts with a broad discussion of concepts and approaches, including postcolonial and postmodern reading strategies and theories of space, place and desire. Authors chosen for close analysis include Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Leonard Cohen, Thomas King and Carol Shields. Key Features * The first critical guide to Canadian literature in English * Authors selected on the basis of their popularity on undergraduate courses * Combines historical and thematic approaches to Canadian writing * Links close reading of key texts with theoretical approaches to Canadian literature * Discusses in detail Obasan by Joy Kogawa, Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery, The Republic of Love by Carol Shields, 'Wilderness Tips' and The Journals of Susanna Moodie by Margaret Atwood, Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso, Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, The Diviners by Margaret Laurence and In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

As mass media burgeoned in the years between the first and second world wars, so did another phenomenon--celebrity. Beginning in Hollywood with the studio-orchestrated transformation of uncredited actors into brand-name stars, celebrity also spread to writers, whose personal appearances and private lives came to fascinate readers as much as their work. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars profiles seven American, Canadian, and British women writers--Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Mae West, L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, and E. M. Delafield--who achieved literary celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s and whose work remains popular even today.

Faye Hammill investigates how the fame and commercial success of these writers--as well as their gender--affected the literary reception of their work. She explores how women writers sought to fashion their own celebrity images through various kinds of public performance and how the media appropriated these writers for particular cultural discourses. She also reassesses the relationship between celebrity culture and literary culture, demonstrating how the commercial success of these writers caused literary elites to denigrate their writing as "middlebrow," despite the fact that their work often challenged middle-class ideals of marriage, home, and family and complicated class categories and lines of social discrimination.

The first comparative study of North American and British literary celebrity, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars offers a nuanced appreciation of the middlebrow in relation to modernism and popular culture.

The print culture of the early twentieth century has become a major area of interest in contemporary Modernist Studies. Modernism's Print Cultures surveys the explosion of scholarship in this field and provides an incisive, well-informed guide for students and scholars alike. Surveying the key critical work of recent decades, the book explores such topics as: - Periodical publishing - from 'little magazines' such as Rhythm to glossy publications such as Vanity Fair - The material aspects of early twentieth-century publishing - small presses, typography, illustration and book design - The circulation of modernist print artefacts through the book trade, libraries, book clubs and cafes - Educational and political print initiatives Including accounts of archival material available online, targeted lists of key further reading and a survey of new trends in the field, this is an essential guide to an important area in the study of modernist literature.

A century ago, the golden age of magazine publishing coincided with the beginning of a golden age of travel. Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture centres on Canada, where commercial magazines began to flourish in the 1920s alongside an expanding network of luxury railway hotels and ocean liner routes. The leading monthlies-among them Mayfair, Chatelaine, and La Revue Moderne-presented travel as both a mode of self-improvement and a way of negotiating national identity. The authors take a new cross-cultural approach to periodical studies, relating both French- and English-language magazines to an emerging culture of aspiration. Mainstream magazines, Hammill and Smith argue, forged a connection between upward mobility and geographical mobility. Fantasies of travel were circulated through fiction, articles, and advertisements, and used to sell fashions, foods, and domestic products as well as holidays. "A major contribution to Canadian studies and the study of print culture in a North American context. This volume should prove useful to scholars in a wide range of fields, including cultural and social history, publishing, literary studies, cultural studies, and communications." -Dr. Gillian Roberts, University of Nottingham