Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro explores the representation of embodied ethics and affects in Alice Munro's writing. The collection illustrates how Munro's short stories powerfully intersect with important theoretical trends in literary studies, including affect studies, ethical criticism, age studies, disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism. These essays offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated in acts of national pedagogy with her Nobel Prize win; they ponder, instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort. In Munro's fiction, unruly embodiments and affects interfere with normative identity and humanist conventions of the human based on reason and rationality, destabilizing prevailing gender and sexual politics, ethical responsibilities, and affective economies. As these essays make clear, Munro's fiction reminds us of the consequences of everyday affects and the extraordinary ordinariness of the ethical encounters we engage again and again.

Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro explores the representation of embodied ethics and affects in Alice Munro's writing. The collection illustrates how Munro's short stories powerfully intersect with important theoretical trends in literary studies, including affect studies, ethical criticism, age studies, disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism. These essays offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated in acts of national pedagogy with her Nobel Prize win; they ponder, instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort. In Munro's fiction, unruly embodiments and affects interfere with normative identity and humanist conventions of the human based on reason and rationality, destabilizing prevailing gender and sexual politics, ethical responsibilities, and affective economies. As these essays make clear, Munro's fiction reminds us of the consequences of everyday affects and the extraordinary ordinariness of the ethical encounters we engage again and again.

In this book, Lorraine York examines the figure of the celebrity who expresses discomfort with his or her intense condition of social visibility. Bringing together the fields of celebrity studies and what Ann Cvetkovich has called the "affective turn in cultural studies", York studies the mixed affect of reluctance, as it is performed by public figures in the entertainment industries. Setting aside the question of whether these performances are offered "in good faith" or not, York theorizes reluctance as the affective meeting ground of seemingly opposite emotions: disinclination and inclination. The figures under study in this book are John Cusack, Robert De Niro, and Daniel Craig-three white, straight, cis-gendered-male cinematic stars who have persistently and publicly expressed a feeling of reluctance about their celebrity. York examines how the performance of reluctance, which is generally admired in celebrities, builds up cultural prestige that can then be turned to other purposes.

Celebrity Cultures in Canada is an interdisciplinary collection that explores celebrity phenomena and the ways they have operated and developed in Canada over the last two centuries. The chapters address a variety of cultural venues--politics, sports, film, and literature--and examine the political, cultural, material, and affective conditions that shaped celebrity in Canada and its uses both at home and abroad. The scope of the book enables the authors to highlight the trends that characterize Canadian celebrity--such as transnationality and bureaucracy--and explore the regional, linguistic, administrative, and indigenous cultures and institutions that distinguish fame in Canada from fame elsewhere. In historicizing and theorizing Canada's complicated cultures of celebrity, Celebrity Cultures in Canada rejects the argument that nations are irrelevant in today's global celebrityscapes or that Canada lacks a credible or adequate system for producing, distributing, and consuming celebrity. Nation and national identities continue to matter--to celebrities, to fans, and to institutions and industries that manage and profit from celebrity systems--and Canada, this collection argues, has a vibrant, powerful, and often complicated and controversial relationship to fame.

ReCalling Early Canada is the first substantial collection of essays to focus on the production of Canadian literary and cultural works prior to WWI. Reflecting an emerging critical interest in the literary past, the authors seek to retrieve the early repertoire available to Canadian readers-fiction and poetry certainly, but family letters, photographs, journalism, and captivity narratives are also investigated. Filling a significant gap in Canadian criticism, the authors demonstrate that to recall the past is not only to shape it, but also to reshape the present. This fresh interest in the cultural past, informed by new approaches to historical inquiry, has resulted in a unique and diverse investigation of more than two centuries of a little known "early Canada."

In this book, Lorraine York examines the figure of the celebrity who expresses discomfort with his or her intense condition of social visibility. Bringing together the fields of celebrity studies and what Ann Cvetkovich has called the "affective turn in cultural studies", York studies the mixed affect of reluctance, as it is performed by public figures in the entertainment industries. Setting aside the question of whether these performances are offered "in good faith" or not, York theorizes reluctance as the affective meeting ground of seemingly opposite emotions: disinclination and inclination. The figures under study in this book are John Cusack, Robert De Niro, and Daniel Craig-three white, straight, cis-gendered-male cinematic stars who have persistently and publicly expressed a feeling of reluctance about their celebrity. York examines how the performance of reluctance, which is generally admired in celebrities, builds up cultural prestige that can then be turned to other purposes.

For every famous author there is a score of individuals working behind the scenes to promote and maintain her celebrity status. This timely and thoughtful book considers the particular case of internationally renowned writer Margaret Atwood and the active agents working in concert with her, including her assistants and office staff, her publicists, her literary agents, and her editors. Lorraine York explores the ways in which the careers of famous writers are managed and maintained and the extent to which literary celebrity creates a constant tension in these writers' lives between the need of solitude for creative purposes and the give-and-take of the business of being a writer of significant public stature. Making extensive use of unpublished material in the Margaret Atwood Papers at the University of Toronto, York demonstrates the extent to which celebrity writers must embrace and protect themselves from the demands of the literary world, including by participating in - or even inventing - new forms of technology that facilitate communication from a slight remove. This informative study calls overdue attention to the ways in which literary celebrity is the result not only of a writer's creativity and hard work, but also of an ongoing collaborative effort among professionals to help maintain the writer's place in the public eye.

The dismantling of "Understanding Canada"-an international program eliminated by Canada's Conservative government in 2012-posed a tremendous potential setback for Canadianists. Yet Canadian writers continue to be celebrated globally by popular and academic audiences alike. Twenty scholars speak to the government's diplomatic and economic about-face and its implications for representations of Canadian writing within and outside Canada's borders. The contributors to this volume remind us of the obstacles facing transnational intellectual exchange, but also salute scholars' persistence despite these obstacles. Beyond "Understanding Canada" is a timely, trenchant volume for students and scholars of Canadian literature and anyone seeking to understand how Canadian literature circulates in a transnational world. Contributors: Michael A. Bucknor, Daniel Coleman, Anne Collett, Pilar Cuder-Dominguez, Ana Maria Fraile-Marcos, Jeremy Haynes, Cristina Ivanovici, Milena Kalicanin, Smaro Kamboureli, Katalin Kurtosi, Vesna Lopicic, Belen Martin-Lucas, Claire Omhovere, Lucia Otrisalova, Don Sparling, Melissa Tanti, Christl Verduyn, Elizabeth Yeoman, Lorraine York

Collaborative writing is not a new phenomenon, nor is it specific to a particular genre of writing. In "Rethinking Women's Collaborative Writing," Lorraine York presents an eminently readable study of the history of collaborative writing and common critical reactions to it. From Early Modern playwrights and poets to nineteenth-century novelists to contemporary writers and literary critics, York's survey focuses on women's collaborative writing in order to expose the long-standing prejudice against this form and to encourage readings of these works that take into account the personalities of the collaborators and the power dynamics of their authorial relationships.

York explores collaborative writing from women in Britain, the United States, Italy and France, illuminating the tensions in the collaborative process that grow out of important cultural, racial, and sexual differences between the authors. Current scholarship on collaborative writing is growing and "Rethinking Women's Collaborative Writing" presents a strong, thoughtful addition to the literature in the field.