Margaret Laurence's collection of travel essays, written between 1964 and 1975, the period when she composed her Manawaka cycle, not only chronicles her travels; it also constitutes a concealed autobiography and reveals how her travels inspired her fiction. Professor Nora Foster Stovel's new introduction, 'Heart of a Traveller: Margaret Laurence's Life Journey', explores how Laurence's experiences in Somalia and Nigeria, Greece and Egypt, England and Scotland influenced and informed her Canadian fiction.

The unusual marriage of Romantic ballet and artificial intelligence is an intriguing idea that led a team of interdisciplinary researchers to design iGiselle, a video game prototype. Scholars in the fields of literature, physical education, music, design, and computer science collaborated to revise the tragic narrative of the nineteenth-century ballet Giselle, allowing players to empower the heroine for possible "feminine endings." The eight interrelated chapters chronicle the origin, development, and fruition of the project. Dancers, gamers, and computer specialists will all find something original that will stimulate their respective interests. Contributors: Vadim Bulitko, Wayne DeFehr, Christina Gier, Pirkko Markula, Mark Morris, Sergio Poo Hernandez, Emilie St. Hilaire, Nora Foster Stovel, Laura Sydora

Bruce Stovel championed Jane Austen studies and blues music with equal measures of expertise and passion. The outpouring of affection at the celebration of Bruce's life and at a subsequent musical tribute inspired the plan for a book that would celebrate Bruce as teacher, Austen scholar, and blues aficionado. "Jane Austen Sings the Blues "gathers essays by established Austen scholars (Margaret Drabble, Isobel Grundy, Juliet McMaster, and Peter Sabor) and some of his exemplary students, together with blues lyrics, poetry, and memoir. The companion CD features some of Bruce's favorite blues performers (Ann Rabson, Maurice John Vaughn, Graham Guest, and many others).

Here we come to know Jane Austen by the company she keeps: her predecessors Fielding, Sterne, Lennox, and Burney, her contemporary Scott, and her successors Waugh and Amis--comic novelists all. And comedy is the connection between these twelve elegant essays by the distinguished academic Bruce Stovel, who most lovingly engages Austen herself through his studies of her comic novels, her art of conversation, her pleasure principle, and her prayers. Edited by Nora Foster Stovel, the collection includes an introduction by Juliet McMaster and an afterword by Isobel Grundy.