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This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol
Shields's experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her
fiction. Shields's essays clarify her iconoclastic approach to
rules of narrative and illuminate her revisionist policies,
elucidating the development of her fiction, both novels and
stories, as her writing gradually becomes more explicitly feminist,
as well as more daringly postmodernist. The dozen essays by the
eminent Canadianists included in this edition throw fresh light on
Shields's writing, inviting us to read it with new eyes by
revealing how her essays reflect and refract the brilliance of her
fiction. These essays read Shields's fiction through the lens of
her essays, including those contained in the recent Giardini
edition, wherein the author explains the creative methodologies
involved in her fiction and also offers specific advice to writers
of fiction.
Carol Shields, best known for her fiction writing, received both
the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction
for her novel The Stone Diaries. But she also wrote hundreds of
poems over the span of her career. The Collected Poetry of Carol
Shields includes three previously published collections and over
eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to
Shields’s death in 2003. In a detailed introduction and
commentary, Nora Foster Stovel contextualizes these poems against
the background of Shields’s life and oeuvre and the traditions of
twentieth-century poetry. She demonstrates how poetry influenced
and informed Shields’s novels; many of the poems, which
constitute miniature narratives, illuminate Shields’s fiction and
serve as the testing ground for metaphors she later employed in her
prose works. Stovel delineates Shields’s career-long interest in
character and setting, gender and class, self and other, actuality
and numinousness, as well as revealing her subversive feminism,
which became explicit in Reta Winter’s angry (unsent) letters in
Unless and in the stories of poet Mary Swann and Daisy Goodwill in
Swann and The Stone Diaries. The first complete collection of her
poetry, this volume is essential for all readers of Carol Shields.
Stovel’s detailed annotations, based on research in the Carol
Shields fonds at Library and Archives Canada, reveal the poems in
all their depth and resonance, and the dignity and consequence they
afford to ordinary people.
Carol Shields, best known for her fiction writing, received both
the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General's Award for Fiction for
her novel The Stone Diaries. But she also wrote hundreds of poems
over the span of her career. The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields
includes three previously published collections and over eighty
unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields's death
in 2003. In a detailed introduction and commentary, Nora Foster
Stovel contextualizes these poems against the background of
Shields's life and oeuvre and the traditions of twentieth-century
poetry. She demonstrates how poetry influenced and informed
Shields's novels; many of the poems, which constitute miniature
narratives, illuminate Shields's fiction and serve as the testing
ground for metaphors she later employed in her prose works. Stovel
delineates Shields's career-long interest in character and setting,
gender and class, self and other, actuality and numinousness, as
well as revealing her subversive feminism, which became explicit in
Reta Winter's angry (unsent) letters in Unless and in the stories
of poet Mary Swann and Daisy Goodwill in Swann and The Stone
Diaries. The first complete collection of her poetry, this volume
is essential for all readers of Carol Shields. Stovel's detailed
annotations, based on research in the Carol Shields fonds at
Library and Archives Canada, reveal the poems in all their depth
and resonance, and the dignity and consequence they afford to
ordinary people.
Margaret Laurence, best known for her germinal novels set in the
Canadian prairies, is one of the nation's most respected authors.
She was also an accomplished essayist, yet today her nonfiction
writing is largely unavailable and therefore little known. In
Recognition and Revelation Nora Foster Stovel brings together
Laurence's short nonfiction works, including many that have not
previously been collected and some that have never before been
published. These works, including over fifty essays and addresses
that span Laurence's writing career from the 1960s to the 1980s,
reveal her passionate concern for Canadian literature and for the
land and peoples of Canada. Based on extensive archival research,
Stovel's introduction contextualizes Laurence's nonfiction writings
in her life as a creative artist and political activist and as a
woman writing in the twentieth century. The texts range from essays
on Laurence's own writings and on other works of Canadian
literature to autobiographical essays, several focusing on
environmental concerns, to sociopolitical essays and writing
advocating for peace and nuclear disarmament. By revealing Laurence
as a socially and politically committed artist, this collection of
lively and provocative essays illuminates the undercurrents of her
creative writing and places her fiction - often informed by her
nonfiction writing - in a new light.
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