bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Translation of Antiquity: Virgil, Pliny, and the Landscape Garden
Authors: Chambers Douglas
Published: March 2013

All gardening is in some sense an act of translation. Even at its most basic it involves the literal 'translation' or physical movement of plants from one place to another. But a figurative 'translation' is also involved: the translation of an idea or a text or a picture or even of a garden elsewhere. In each case a text of some kind is 'translated' on to the landscape. As with all translations, the enterprise is open to argument and debate as to which version more accurately represents the original 'text' or its intention. As Annabel Patterson has observed: 'any translation is an act of interpretation, and no one any longer doubts that all translation is culturally determined.'
Fictional Titles: A Classification
Authors: Sawyer Richard
Published: March 2013

The title of Henry James's celebrated ghost story The Turn of the Screw was ultimately derived from a figurative expression current in the author's day. (Dickens, it may be noted, had already appropriated the same idiom for a chapter title to Bleak House. However, since the title phrase also appears within the text of James's narrative, its meaning is more closely circumscribed by its use therein.
A Postmodern Genealogy: John Barth's Sabbatical and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Authors: Carmichael Thomas
Published: March 2013

For those who would seek to define a distinctly postmodern discourse, no question is more vexed than the relationship of postmodern culture to the claims of tradition. Ihab Hassan, for example, has urged upon us the view that 'we are all ... a little Victorian, Modern and Postmodern at once: but this conciliatory attitude is not typically postmodern; more representative is the remark, attributed to John Lennon, that forms the epigraph to Arthur Kroker's Panic Encyclopedia: 'Before Elvis ... there was nothing.' Taken together, these assertions are characteristic of a postmodern ambivalence with respect to the presence of the past, which often finds its expression through parody. The same impulse motivates the interrogation of authority and tradition in postrnodern discourse, and it is also reflected in strategies of representation in postrnodern narrative, particularly those we find in the postmodern fiction of John Barth.
Reviews
Authors: Merivale Patricia , Zeitlin Irving , Cairns John , Hutcheon Linda
Published: March 2013

Mihoko Suzuki, The Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic, reviewed by Patricia Merivale

Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber, reviewed by Irving M. Zeitlin

Carole Fink, Marc Bloc, A Life in History, reviewed by John C. Cairns

Robert Siegle, Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency, reviewed by Linda Hutcheon
The Medieval Fictions of Thomas Warton and Thomas Percy
Authors: Donatelli Joseph
Published: March 2013

The enthusiasm for the culture of the Middle Ages during the latter half of the eighteenth century finds various forms of expression. Yet the visitors who flocked to Walpole's Strawberry Hill instead of Glastonbury Abbey, the readers who purchased Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry instead of Joseph Ritson's scholarly editions, and the antiquarians who preferred Matthew Prior's prettified and sentimental version of 'The Nut-Brown Maid' to the original remind us that the pseudo-medieval was often more attrative than the genuine article. For the past was invested with a significance that might prove offensive to contemporary beliefs, tastes, and values: A medieval building carried an objectionable taint of Catholicism, and medieval poems wre considered to be ill-formed compositions of 'wild fancy' and 'rude meter.' These are but two of the qualities that offened an age which, as William Shenstone had repeatedly adivised Thomas Percy had little taste for 'unadulterated antiquity.' One writer expressed this predilection whe he declared that a'happy imitation is of much more value than a defective original.'
Tono-Bungay: A Study in Suicide
Authors: Allett John
Published: March 2013

It would be difficult to prove a direct influence of the famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1859–1917) upon H.G. Wells. No substantive references to Durkheim, for example, appear in Wells's own works of sociological speculation. Nor is any such connection suggested in the major biographies of Wells. Nevertheless, Wells's own keen interest in the then nascent discipline of sociology is well documented, as is the fact of his membership in the Sociological Society (founded in May 1903), where Durkheim was generally an important influence. This would suggest at the least, that Wells had both the inclination and the opportunity to learn the gist of certain of Durkheim's key ideas. Moreover, given Wells's own personal interestin the subject of suicide, he undoubtedly would have been especially attentive to any discussion of Durkheim's famous treatise, Suicide, first published in 1897. Wells's sensitivity to the topic was likely sparked by his childhood suspicion that his father, Joseph Wells, had attempted suicide in October, 1877, when the family forrunes had taken a serious downturn. Moreover, it was only within a few years that an adolescent Wells, now made despondent by his life as a drapery assistant, would find himself similarly contemplating suicide if his father did not take action to get him released from his articles or apprenticeship.
Reviews
Authors: Boris Kenneth , Warkentin Germaine , Cavaliero Glen , Martin Robert , Keith
Published: March 2013

John D. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, reviewed by Kenneth Boris

Thomas P.Roche, Jr., Petrarch and the Tnglish Sonnet Sequences, reviewed by Germaine Warkentin

W. J. Keith, Regions of the Imagination: The Development of British Rural Fiction, reviewed by Cavaliero

Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James, reviewed by Robert K. Martin

Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the 'Woman Business', reviewed by Robert K. Martin

David McWhirter, Desire and Love in Henry James: A Study of the Late Novels, reviewed by Robert K. Martin

David Solway, Education Lost: Reflections on Contemporary Pedagogical Practice, reviewed by W. J. Keith
Theatre
Authors: McEwen Barbara
Published: March 2013

Reviews of French-Canadian books on theatre published in 1990.
Fiction 1
Authors: Craig
Published: March 2013

Reviews of fiction published in Canada in 1990.
Fiction 2
Authors: Thorpe Michael
Published: March 2013

Reviews of fiction published in Canada in 1990.
Romans 2
Authors: Hébert Pierre
Published: March 2013

Reviews of French-Canadian novels published in Canada in 1990.
Drama
Authors: Wasserman Jerry
Published: March 2013

Reviews of drama published in Canada in 1990.
Writing the coastline of Australia: Emigrants' Diaries and 'The Long Looked For Shores'
Authors: Hassam Andrew
Published: March 2013

The danger and deprivation of the voyage to Australia made the nineteenth-century emigrant's first sight of land particularly sweet. In the days of sail; emigrant ships took on average three months to complete the voyage from Britain to Australia. To be sure, the ships carrying emigrants to Australia had a far better safety record than those on the North American route, which was not controlled by the British government, but nonetheless during these months passengers were well aware of the possibility of their ship's being sunk by icebergs, gutted by fire, or swept by fever. At the very least, these people were deprived of fresh food, fresh water, and fresh company; they had been becalmed on the equator and battened below deck in storms close to the Antarctic. As the months wore on, the emigrants' desire and impatience to catch a glimpse of their new homeland understandably intensified.
Writing in Books and Other Marginal Activities
Authors: Jackson
Published: March 2013

Margins and the marginal are, as we paradoxically say, so central to academic writing these days that we are liable to forget that when we use these words we are trading in metaphors. There can be no doubt that bringing forward the socially or historically neglected and disadvantaged has been a welcome development in literary criticism. It gratifies the liberal politics of most academic readers and at the same time it enlarges their field of study; it is worthy and interesting, or as tradition puts it, useful and pleasing. It is therefore surely peculiar that there should have been no public discussion of texts that are literally marginal, those words that readers write on the edges of the pages of manuscripts or printed books. This essay aims to initiate such discussion. The first section proposes a description of the typical features of marginalia, drawing on examples from the last two centuries or so and distinguishing marginalia from related kinds of writing; the second considers the specific case of the best known of literary marginalists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the third tries to cope with the collision of the general and the particular.
Reformed Eloquence: Inability, Questioning, and Correction in Paradise Lost
Authors: Cooley Ronald
Published: March 2013

Milton's attitude towards rhetoric and humanist rhetorical education is a subject of continuing critical debate. Irene Samuel, for instance, insists that 'when Milton compared Satan-in-the-Serpent ... to "some orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome, where eloquence / Flourished, since mute" (PL 9.670–72), he was hardly equating eloquence with trickery.' According to Samuel, '[Milton's] supposed distrust of rhetoric has been foisted on him by those unwilling to make distinctions such as he himself habitually made' (177), distinctions between the art itself, and its abuses and misuses. Thomas O. Sloane, on the other hand, resurrects the anti-rhetorical Milton when he associates 'Miltonic Form' with 'The Disintegration of Humanist Rhetoric' (209, 211), and suggests that the rhetorical mode of thinking, 'revelling in ambiguity and skepticism,' is 'exemplified by the character of Milton's Satan' (249). I propose here to mediate between these views by describing the ways in which Paradise Lost attempts both to define and to practise a reformed eloquence, a rhetoric clearly dependent on classical and humanist conventions, but stripped of the duplicity characteristic of Satan's discourse.
After Modernism: Alternative Voices in the Writings of Dionne Brand, Claire Harris, and Marlene Philip
Authors: Hunter Lynette
Published: March 2013

As Lorris Elliott notes in the introduction to Literary Writing by Blacks in Canada, there has been an 'outburst of literary activity by Blacks in Canada' since the 1970s, and the three writers discussed here are part of that 'outburst.' Some of this recent activity comes from Canadian-born writers such as Maxine Tynes and George Elliott Clarke, part comes from immigrants from the United States, England, South America, and Africa, and part comes from the community arriving from the Caribbean. Dionne Brand, Claire Harris, and Marlene Philip, whose work I approach in this essay, all come from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago,and each develops a writing that raises three tightly associated issues: race, access, and the appropriateness of the verbal tradition, literary or linguistic, to their writing.
'Of Plain Signification': Darwin's World in the First Edition of The Origin of Species
Authors: Shaw Ian
Published: March 2013

William James, at the end of his Psychology: Briefer Course, says 'from the common sense point of view (which is that of all the natural sciences) knowledge is an ultimate relation between two mutually external realities, the knower and the known.' And he writes elsewhere in the same volume [that] 'Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger) always comes out of our own mind.' James's remarks point the way that my paper will take: Darwin in the Origin shows that his science establishes no exception to James's observation that the point of view of the natural sciences is that of common sense. Darwin oes not use the term 'common sense' to describe his approach to his subject, but he does put his faith in what he calls the 'plain signification' of facts. His view is that facts seen clearly—their plain meaning of significance recognized—speak for themselves, and make, we infer, common sense.
The Confidence Man in Modern Film
Authors: Michaels Lloyd
Published: March 2013

Although his literary origins can be traced at least as far back as Chaucer's Pardoner, the confidence man has generally been regarded as a modern character type, a development of the trickster figure reflecting and ultimately subverting the growing diversity, literacy, and self-assurance of a new urban culture. His history, in this regard, rather neatly parallels the development of the movies during the past century. Certainly,Georges Méliès may stand as cinema's first great confidence man, both as an actor transforming his own image on the screen and as a director exploiting his audience's faith in that image. While an affinity with the confidence man has stirred the imagination of numerous writers including Melville, Twain, Nathanael West, Mann, and Fowles, filmmakers following in the expressionist tradition of Méliès may have sensed this identification even more strongly.
Reviews
Authors: Stephanson Raymond , Rosenberg Aubrey
Published: March 2013

G. S. Rousseau, Enlightenment Crossings: Pre- and Post-modern Disocurses: Antropological (vol 1), reviewed by Raymond Stephanson

G. S. Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders: Pre- and Post-modern Discourses: Medical, Scientific (vol 2), reviewed by Raymond Stephanson

G. S. Rousseau, Perilous Enlightenment: Pre- and Post-modern Discourses: Sexual, Historical (vol 3), reviewed by Raymond Stephanson

Raymond Trousson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Bonheur et liberté , reviewed by Aubrey Rosenberg
The Modern/Postmodern Divide and Urban Planning
Authors: Irving Allan
Published: March 2013

One way of trying to establish connections between the humanities and urban planning is to explore some of the meanings of planning within the philosophical and cultural contexts of modernity and postmodernity. Modernists call it urban planning; postmodernists call it urban design. The difference signifies a transition, from the twentieth-century modernist ideal of large-scale, technical, and efficient city plans, and the International Style of functionalist, no-frills architecture, guided by the 'less-is-more' and 'form follows function' aesthetic of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to a late twentieth-century postmodernist conception of urban life as being highly resistant to this approach. Urban design is preoccupied instead with a collage or pastiche of past styles within a fragmented, ephemeral, diverse environment. Derrida, for example, sees collage/montage as the essential form of postmodern discourse.
Colonization and Decolonization in The Blithedale Romance
Authors: Mackenzie Manfred
Published: March 2013

In what follows I offer a reading of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance under a postcolonial perspective. Before beginning, however, I should like to situate my reading critically, and sketch out a certain difficulty entailed by it, namely that of being caught between two apparently conflicting discourses: the established and familiar ones we designate as 'American Studies'; and the novel, trialling one that now accompanies the prodigious body of writing in English outside the Anglo-American sphere, and that comprises what has come to be called 'post-colonial study.'
Reviews
Authors: Smith Bruce , Miraglia Anne Marie
Published: March 2013

A. C. Hamilton, ed., The Spenser Encyclopedia, reviewed by Bruce R. Smith

Patricia Smart, Ècrire dans la maison du père, reviewed by Anne Marie Miraglia

Patricia Smart, Writing in the Father's House, reviewed by Anne Marie Miraglia
Chaucer, Humanism, and Printing: Conditions of Authorship in Fifteenth-Century England
Authors: Carlson David
Published: March 2013

Geoffrey Chaucer was not a professional writer. He could be vain about his literary work (this is called 'authorial self-consciousness'), fretting over the vicissitudes of publication in 'Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, his own Scriveyn,' for example, and listing and classifying his opera repeatedly. Nevertheless, the 'Father of English Poetry' was occupied most of the time with jobs other than literary paternity. He was a royal servant and official, successively a personal attendant on members of England's royal family, an envoy, Controller of the Wool and Petty Customs, justice of the peace and member of Parliament for Kent, and Clerk of the King's works—increasingly important positions which brought Chaucer increasingly great responsibility and prominence in the affairs of the realm.
The Contested Terrains of Politics and Pleasure in Cultural Studies
Authors: Leckie Ross
Published: March 2013

At the recent `Cultural Studies in Canada Conference' at the University of Toronto in the spring of 1994, two phenomena emerged that marked the territory of cultural studies in a distinctive and telling fashion. The first was the proliferation of cultural studies genealogies, attempts to create originary histories that, while admittedly not intended to be proprietary, were clearly intended to manage, or one might even say stage-manage, the production of the space that cultural studies occupies. And if this tendency contains an implicit patrolling of the borders of cultural studies, then the second phenomenon, the inscription of spaces at the boundaries of cultural studies from which one might position oneself as simultaneously outside of cultural studies and in the vanguard of cultural studies' theoretical developments, suggested an unease and even an open defiance of the potential hegemony of cultural studies, as a single cultural entity with its own heritage, over marginalized activist groups. The genealogies tended to come from tenured professors who seemed concerned with delineating their positions in relation to the institutional spaces that cultural studies might invade. Those positioned at the margins of cultural studies tended to be sessionals and students engaged in identity politics and concerned with how gay and lesbian, feminist, minority, or postcolonial activism might be promoted or resisted by an institutionalized cultural studies umbrella.
Retailing Petits Récits or Retooling for Revolution? Cultural Studies and the Knowledge Industries in Candada
Authors: Findlay
Published: March 2013

In this paper I attempt to clarify and strengthen connections between cultural studies and left politics in the contemporary Canadian context, employing first an extended scare tactic and then re-narrativizing a few of the scenes of reason. Rather than engaging continuously and directly with Canadian practice, I revisit the Nazification of Germany, following the lead of those remarkable advocates of a working-class public sphere, Negt and Kluge (1994), whose `point of departure [for contemporary cultural studies and production] remains the public sphere of 1933 that could be conquered by National Socialism' (Negt, qtd Polan, 38). I rely mainly on historical implication followed by summary exhortation, counting on others to develop or discard or critically translate my views and strategically Eurocentric emphasis as part of their own efforts to stimulate cultural studies inside and outside the Canadian academy. As they do so, I hope that these others will continue to attend to precedents like the Birmingham School's work in England, bearing in mind Stuart Hall's caution about the portability of cultural studies across the Atlantic (Hall, 285) and the consequences of the Thatcherite assault on institutions and disciplines insufficiently aligned with competitiveness and personal independence; and that these others will continue to look south of `the' border too, but even more warily, to a country without much of a political left but with a booming culture of criminality and a thriving crime control industry which at least one criminologist sees as threatening a reprise of the Holocaust (Christie, 79ff, 163ff), a country with entrenched habits of intimidating or co-opting other sovereign states, yet a country which, as Sara Suleri acerbically remarks in Profession 93, abounds in and acts upon `standard clichés about cultural studies, which would have [American scholars] looking only at weather, advertisements, and pincushions when [they] are not too busy buying extravagant costumes to wear at the MLA convention' (17). Academic dissent can only too readily be reduced to mendicancy or transform itself into décor. Meanwhile, complicity remains a taint from which none of us is free.
Marginal Notes on Cultural Studies in Canada
Authors: Berland Jody
Published: March 2013

In recent years, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and environmental thought have challenged the practice and study of culture and catalysed richly productive methodological and political debates. Artists and scholars have been encouraged to explore what it means to speak on behalf of a specific community of interests: for/about women, people of colour, gays or lesbians, non-human others; even about Canada, when academics organize international conferences in order to hear and orchestrate representative marginalia from diverse locations. At such events I have found that the term `cultural studies' disguises a multiplicity of concepts and vocabularies, and have found myself compelled to map my own thinking in terms of Canadian conceptual resources. This paper seeks to present a brief portrait of the history of discourses about culture, politics, and the nation in Canada that in my view contribute to the shaping of cultural studies in this country. This is not the same, I hope I need not point out, as setting out a nationalist agenda for culture in the traditional sense. This distinction identifies one of the great tasks of cultural studies today. .
Cautious Optimism: The Alliance of Women's Studies and Cultural Studies
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: March 2013

As the millennium approaches, post-secondary education in Canada is in crisis. The giddy optimism of the mid-1980s, which projected a future in which retirements would allow universities to make new appointments from the ranks of the by now several generations of not-so-young junior scholars, has become the melancholic realization that the government's fiscal woes mean that the funding for post-secondary education has decreased and will continue to do so. Consequently, university administrators are in a frenzied quest to secure new sources of funding, most often by turning to the private sector. For the humanities, which seem not to be the favoured beneficiary of corporate largesse, this shift in funding has several implications, most obviously that money for research in the humanities inevitably will decline. Universities seem to ignore the effect that this shift in funding will have on the production of knowledge, for presumably the inclination of business is to support research that has the potential to enhance profit rather than that which critiques the social costs of the accumulation of profit. Within the current social climate, cultural studies has a particularly important role, for at its best it is a discipline which engages in a critique which aims to understand 'the ways in which power relations are regulated, distributed, and deployed within industrial societies'
Narrating the Subject: Cultural Studies and Postmodernism
Authors: Heslop Jackie
Published: March 2013

If cultural studies—despite its distinguishing claim of an inherent resistance to disciplinarity—is nevertheless emerging as a 'discipline,' it would seem incumbent to investigate the discursive borders by which it seeks to position itself. Narratives of the institutionalization of cultural studies already exist in abundance; many of the papers delivered at the conference from which this special issue derives, as well as by those presented at the 1990 'Cultural Studies Now and in the Future' conference at the University of Illinois attest to the seductive pull of narrative origins and teleologies that disciplinarity would suggest. Ironically, such narratives signal cultural studies' sedimentation as a discipline, contrary to the refusal of disciplinarity often espoused by these same genealogists. These stories betray a paternalistic drive to delineate a progressive evolution of cultural studies and to legislate who can speak under its name. Marxism, in these narratives, is appealed to as the 'discursive limit[]' of cultural studies—a nostalgic recollection of origins guarding its institutional boundaries.
The Everyday Life of Cultural Studies
Authors: Cuthbert David
Published: March 2013

The migration of the tag 'cultural studies' across national borders and onto an increasing number of book jackets, course calendars, conference notices, and journal issues suggests the possibility of an emerging consensus on the kind of practice that is to be performed under this rubric. Yet when confronted with its rising institutional and international currency, many people working in the field insist on the importance of keeping its official definition open. The success of cultural studies prevails in tension with its emergence from a politically charged critique of the inherited assumptions that have guided the organization and production of knowledge in the academy. Consequently, a common refrain within cultural studies warns that if the field is to maintain its oppositional stance against the elastic forces of hegemony, it cannot merely provide a venue for interdisciplinary study, but must remain 'actively and aggressively anti-disciplinary,' stubbornly resisting its own formalization within an institutional apparatus (Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler, 2). By withholding the declaration of its proper place within the university, cultural studies stays in touch with the politics of a domain that historically has been bracketed off from academic scrutiny. This domain provides cultural studies, in the absence of a defined disciplinary frame, with a kind of rallying cry. The field's theoretical limits are almost always invoked with an appeal to its phantom substratum, with an affirmation that cultural studies exists in the name of everyday life or it had best not exist at all.
The Thing of Culture
Authors: Aoki Doug
Published: March 2013

While cultural studies is fond of ruminating over its deinition of itself, perhaps the prior problem is the definition of its presumed object: culture. Raymond Williams once wrote famously, if a bit obviously, that 'culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.' The sea-changes in anthropology since the 1960's and the rise of cultural studies and postcolonial theory have only complicated things much further. Today, the erstwhile notion of culture as a shared thing—a sysetm of customs, vaues, pratices, beliefs, symbols, or meanings, or a whole way of life subsuming all of these—appears both politically naïve and poltically suspect. Consequently, this paper's ultimately Lacanian critique of that beleaguered notion must at first glance seem a quintessential instance of eating a dead horse. However, the disquieting and illuminating thing about the Lacanian dead is that they always come back. This essay is about how the shared thing of culture does indeed uncannily return, and how it returns in the end as a Lacanian Thing.
Derek Jarman and the Colour of the Mind's Eye
Authors: Schwenger Peter
Published: March 2013

The screen is a rectangle of raw white light; it would seem to be a projectionist's error were it not for the voice narrating, describing, chanting, musing. After a few minutes the screen switches abruptly to blue and remains so for the rest of the film. We are watching Derek Jarman's Blue—his last film, directed while he was going blind as a result of AIDS. The film describes this descent into blindness and death: the repeated visits to the hospital, the memories of friends already claimed by the disease, the attempts to come to terms with what is happening. It is a sadly familiar and nevertheless unassimilable story; the featureless screen reflects our blank incomprehension. Yet by the end of the film, something has come out of this nothing. Out of the narrator's words images have been born, images in the mind's eye. And that imaging process ultimately implies not an easy escapism but a politics of vision. This explains why a film that is explicitly and movingly about AIDS devotes much of its time to meditations on vision, both physical and psychical, and on the mutifoliate significance of a single color, blue.
Reading the Rugs of Shelburne County: The Art of Scraps
Authors: McLauchlan Laura , Young Joan
Published: March 2013

In October of 1927, Cecil Garrett—son of the founder of the Garretts Company, of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, producers of 'Bluenose Patterns' stamped burlap backings for hooked rugs—decided to enliven what he saw as a 'fairly hard' topic on which to give an interesting talk. He spoke not of his assigned topic, the family business of selling patterns for hooked rugs, but of Adam and Eve and a first rug: "History tells us that when Adam was accused of having stolen the apple from the tree, he immediately 'passed the buck' and blamed it on Eve, and that she, to retaliate, swiped his best Sunday suit, cut it into small strips, and worked it into a hooked rug. (Ryan and Wright, 4). The evocative images of Adam's shredded Sunday suit and of an angry but resourceful Eve making the first rug have lingered in this Nova Scotian parody of paradise lost. Perhaps Garrett sensed that Eve's female progeny would one day follow their own designs and put the male pattern-maker out of business. And indeed, rather than endorse a paradigm which privileges men as the pattern-makers—an approach which echoes the traditional androcentric bias of art history (Parker and Pollock, 169)—it is time to count Maritime women's rugs into the record of a culturally and materially consequential tradition.
The Libidinal Politics of Fur
Authors: Emberley Julia
Published: March 2013

During the 1980s the fur-trapping and fur fashion industries came under increasing criticism from animal-rights and welfare organizations for the cruel procedures used to obtain furs. This debate entered the public domain through various media and marketing strategies. Consider, for example, the spray-painted 'X' on the back of a luxurious fur coat in a scene in Stephen Frears's film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987). Notice the anti-fur media campaign and alternative marketing options launched in England in 1984 by Lynx, which made use of television commercials and billboard signs to depict not only the cruelty of the fur fashion industry but, by virtue of her complicity in purchasing the fur coat, of the female bourgeois consumer. Ponder a newspaper article in the Globe and Mail on the cosmetic industry and its ecological correctness which ran with the following headline, 'For today's fashion, we'd rather dance with wolves than skin them.' Or observe Dennis Patterson, former leader of the government of the Northwest Territories, wearing his sealskin vest to promote its continued commercial value in Dene and Inuit economies. It is not hard to see that a struggle over the meaning and value of fur is taking place all around us.
The Electrical Hopkins
Authors: Gordon John
Published: March 2013

When Randall Jarrell said that a poet is someone standing in a thunderstorm hoping to be struck by lightning, he might have been speaking for Gerard Manley Hopkins. Indeed he might just possibly have been thinking of the Hopkins sonnet beginning 'The shepherd's brow,' in which the poet envies the epic vision supposedly granted shepherds exposed to an electrical storm's 'horror' and 'havoc.' No less than the poets of Jarrell's generation, Hopkins was heir to the Romantic hunger for unmediated experience, figured as direct contact between the poet and some powerful, often dangerous reality, and like a number of them was given to representing such contact as the closing of a circuit—a visionary act of electrification, perhaps of electrocution. This essay will explore the implications of distinctively electrical inspiration, as developed in Hopkins' two best-known poems, The Wreck of the Deutschland and 'The Windhover.'
Reading Stones: Travels to and in Canada
Authors: Runte Roseann
Published: March 2013

Whether perambulating authors set out to write travelogues, to describe their visits to Canada as part of secret spying missions (surveying the cod stocks as long ago as the seventeenth century), to write novels or romances set in the Canadian wilderness, to compose letters, not only for the edification of those left behind but to create an epistolary bridge linking the writer to the reader and the very surroundings the author has escaped or lost,or to write poetry, all share the desire for discovery. All share the realities of instability and seek to render permanent their impressions. This is as true today as it was several centuries ago. As Northrop Frye writes,'The feeling of nomadic movement over great distances persists even into the age of the aeroplane.' Furthermore, as Dennis Porter has noted, despite the fact that Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques declares the end of travel, travel writing continues today. Current critics like Jacques Derrida still wax eloquent over voyages, such as that of Bougainville in the eighteenth century. Others, including Roland Barthes, attempt, in their own travels and in their resulting writings, to 'go beyond essentialism in the European relation to otherness through a practice of "writing" which was intransitive.' However, while their writing is intentionally intransitive, it is inevitably subjective. Barthes's erotic reading of a Japanese meal, while going beyond the typical European discovery of and reaction to difference, still defines difference with regard to self and interprets these signs according to the only codes accessible to the writer, that is, his own cultural background. To varying degrees, this is the reaction of the travellers, early and late, who 'discovered' Canada.
Reflections on Being Born in a Group of Seven Canvas That Is Magically Transformed into a Sensuous Eleanor Bond Painting
Authors: Watkins Mel
Published: March 2013

Unbeknownst to me as a child, I was born in Group of Seven country. (Colleagues who know me as a political economist rather than as an art critic, please note that I am not talking about Canada's membership in the so-called Group of 7 a.k.a. the G-7 that is presently running the world if anyone is, where Canada is allowed in, the cynics say, to make sure that a U.S. motion always has a seconder.) At the time, growing up on a farm near Parry Sound on Georgian Bay, it simply seemed like a place where there was too much rock and too much wind.
Autour de Sereine carrière de Paul-Émile Borduas : une obscure clarté venue du fond d'un espace intérieur en transformation continuelle
Authors: Lord Michel
Published: March 2013

La vie de Paul-Émile Borduas prend la forme vertigineuse d'une série de transformations qui confèrent à son parcours existentiel l'allure d'une comète s'effritant au contact de l'air dans sa chute vers la terre. Mais dans le fond, cette chute est également une ascension,comme une montée de l'artiste vers l'ascèse, une ascèse paradoxale, car dans sa course, Borduas cherche tout autant la possession de la terre tout entière, comme si cet Icare des arts québécois se transformait en Phénix, cet oiseau qui renait de ses cendres. Ce serait là une des caractéristiques de l'oruvre finalement protéiforme de cet homme qui, avant de se dépouiller de tout apparat, aura cherché à se nourrir aux sources les plus diverses.
Reviews
Authors: Ball John Clement , Blisset William , Hayne David , McKay Kenneth
Published: March 2013

Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction, reviewed by John Clement Ball

Jonathan Miles, Backgrounds to David Jones: A Study in Sources and Drafts, reviewed by William Blissett

Kathleen Henderson Staudt, At the Turn of a Civilization: David Jones and Modern Poetics, reviewed by William Blissett

John Lennox and Janet M. Paterson, eds., Challenges, Projects, Texts: Canadian Editing. Défis, projets et textes dan's l'édition critique au Canada, reviewed by David M. Hayne

Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century, reviewed by Kenneth M. McKay
Tragedy and the Nation: Othello
Authors: Cohen Derek
Published: March 2013

A nation as a nation is, among other things, a collectivity of people made aware by its own history of the possibility of a catastrophe capable of threatening its existence. Dramatic tragedy with its vast and encompassing reach, its deliberate inclusion of each character in its catastrophic effects, is a kind of mirror of the society's need for tragedy as a means of defining, containing, and representing the awareness of the historical fragility of national identity. In other words, tragedies as representations of society in extremis are products of the social organism. Their value is therapeutic and admonitory. Tragedy teaches of the constant and imminent possibility of the triumph of injustice and accident. It contains those possibilities within a form that both shelters us from and reassures us of their outsideness to ourselves and, paradoxically, their direct and tangible relevance to and possibility in our lives. Many a nation has been defined by its leaders in precisely these fearful terms: its existence as a nation is made directly contingent upon its possible extinction.
Tall Cows and Tapestries: A Perspective on the English-Canadian Canon
Authors: Levene Mark
Published: March 2013

There is a long and (depending on theoretical disposition) noble tradition in Canadian literary studies of pursuing patterns or syndromes. But in keeping with the aquatic psychology of so many writers in our too frozen land, the preference here is to record currents, strong currents in the fiction that eddy around origins, in family and social group, in the evolutionary home, in the historical past. Since the focus of this paper is the centrality of origins for many of the canonical writers this century — Ross, Watson, Davies, Laurence, Richler, Atwood, Ondaatje, among others — an initial notation about my own sense of origin with the literature is appropriate. My sharpest recollection is not of a particular work or constellation of works, but of a cbc public affairs program on which Morley Callaghan would regularly appear and would discuss issues such as nato, national economic policy, occasionally even a question about art.My dismay became more concentrated when, soon after, I read Hugh MacLennan, who, for all his skill, had taken on the role of recording secretary to the emerging nation. Both instances seemed obscurely unnerving and decidedly unhealthy expressions of the compulsion to see literature as a mutated species of moral instruction, the writer a purveyor of public knowledge, a voice of communal understanding. Later, Northrop Frye's remark about `the obvious and unquenchable desire of the Canadian cultural public to identify itself through its literature' (823) and, one should add, its literary figures arrived with a luminous `shock of recognition.'
In the Skin of a Lion as a Cubist Novel
Authors: Simmons Rochelle
Published: March 2013

In a 1984 interview, Michael Ondaatje declared that he would `pick up and read anything by John Berger' (328). Although some critics have taken note of this interest, they have not explored the dense web of intertextual reference to Berger's writing that can be discerned in Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion. Yet, this text refers directly to works by Berger on a couple of occasions. One of two epigraphs is taken from Berger's novel G.: `Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one' (149). Ondaatje also weaves the title of an art criticism essay by Berger into his narrative when he describes Nicholas Temelcoff building the Prince Edward Viaduct: `He floats at the three hinges of the crescent-shaped steel arches. These knit the bridge together. The moment of Cubism' (34). Berger wrote an account of Cubist painting called `The Moment of Cubism,' which was published in a collection of the same name (1969). Far from being incidental to In the Skin of a Lion, I will argue that these two references form the basis for considering this a Cubist novel after Berger.2 For, just as G. could be said to translate Berger's perceptions about Cubist painting into novelistic form, echoing them verbally and conceptually, to the extent that G. becomes a literary Cubist work, so too does Ondaatje's narrative echo Berger's art critical and fictional interpretations of Cubism.
Un personnage problématique: Mathilde de la Mole
Authors: Vercollier Claudine
Published: March 2013

Tout en affirmant à plusieurs reprises la visée réaliste dans Le rouge et le noir, Stendhal, lorsqu'il crée le personnage de Mathilde de la Mole, semble contredire cet objectif. Nous nous proposons d'étudier comment l'introduction du personnage Mathilde suscite une tension entre deux esthétiques divergentes et d'analyser comment cette tension est reflétée dans la structure du roman.
Can We Believe What the Newspapers Tell Us? Missing Links in Alias Grace
Authors: Knelman Judith
Published: March 2013

In the summer of 1843 a bachelor farmer and his housekeeper were found dead in the basement of their home in Richmond Hill, a village just north of Toronto. Their two servants were implicated by the coincidence of their own disappearance and that of some silver plate. One of the servants was Grace Marks, whose reputation is rescued in Alias Grace. Contemporary newspaper accounts of the murder and then the trial left a number of tantalizing questions that others before Margaret Atwood have tried to answer, but never before with material clearly labelled `imaginary.'
Probing Shakespeare's Idiolect in Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.1-29
Authors: Lancashire Ian
Published: March 2013

John Heminge and Henry Condell first speak of Shakespeare's idiolect — his personal language behaviour — in their preface to the 1623 folio: `His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers.' They echo Shakespeare, who said, of his `noted weed,' that `every word doth almost [tell] my name, / Showing their birth, and where they did proceed' (sonnet 76.6–8). For these three men, style is more than `an elegant fourme or order in writynge or speakinge,' and invention more than rhetorical inventio, where one finds material in `loci or ``places, seats'' in one's notebooks.' Idiolect reflects `mind' and should be approached through cognition. Descartes notwithstanding, mind is now analysable biologically by scientific methods. Even in the humanities, authorship attribution now uses quantitative profiles of lexical, grammatical, metrical, and syntactic regularities, such as function-word combinations, rare words, and affix usage, as markers of idiolect. Computer text-analysis charts these regularities in concordance, graph, and table and distinguishes the random from the statistically significant, but understanding these textual objects gets us only partway towards idiolect because writing does not exhaust an author's uttering.
The Way the World Ends: The Scientism of Catastrophic Imagery in the English Eighteenth Century
Authors: Wilson Milton
Published: March 2013

Today's environmentally self-conscious age is, of course, not the first to be much concerned with devastating natural catastrophes, with the ways in which our physical world can get changed decisively for the worse and even brought to an end. When people today find themselves looking back on past environmental disasters and anticipating even greater (and perhaps ultimate) ones in the future, they are following a long-established tradition, religious and scientific. But the specific context for such fears and speculations has varied a good deal from one age to another. This article's main historical emphasis will be on the English Restoration and eighteenth century — roughly speaking, on the Newton-and-after era — and its main intellectual focus will be on areas where works of natural philosophy or natural history with some scientific pretensions (primarily for what we now call physics, geology, chemistry, and physiology) merge with other kinds of writing. These other kinds include Christian biblical commentary, popular science and religion, and that hard-to-define field which we still like to call literature. I shall quote from a good many poems. Indeed, I think of this article as much less concerned with the history of science or the history of religion than with the wide-ranging use for various purposes of some fascinating and insistent images of potentially world-ending catastrophe. In my discussion the concept of 'world' will, however, following the loose and shifty practice of the period itself, be used very casually, moving between universe, galaxy, earth, life, and humankind indiscriminately and without warning. I shall also discuss two positive (creative rather than destructive) topics with naturalistic aspects and scientific relations — topics that Christians liked to involve in such a catastrophe: the physical formation of an earthly millennium and (before the last judgment) the resurrection of the body. As a very limited topic, which can anticipate, but not too elaborately, some of my later concerns, in particular the role of atomic physics, the latter will provide a convenient introductory section.
Reviews
Authors: Chambers Douglas , Munk Linda
Published: March 2013

Michael Hunter, ed., Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe, reviewed by Douglas Chambers

Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr, ed., Francis Junius F.F. and His Circle, reviewed by Douglas Chambers

A.D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake, reviewed by Linda Munk
De «La gorge de Minerve » à L'Ogre: les conditions de la reconnaissance littéraire
Authors: Olscamp Marcel
Published: March 2013

En mai 1949, alors qu’il se trouve au sanatorium de Saint-Agathe pour soigner une tuberculose importune, Jacques Ferron reçoit une lettre de sa sœur Marcelle, peintre automatiste, qui a décidé de prendre en charge les affaires littéraires de son aîné pendant son absence de la métropole. Aprèsavoir vainement tenté, au cours des années précédentes, de faire publier trois de ses manuscrits, l’écrivain s’est finalement résolu à éditer à ses propres frais son premier livre, dans le cadre de la collection « Les cahiers de la file indienne » animée par son ami Gilles Hénault : « Tu parles dans le dernier mot reçu [...] d’éditer L’Ogre, écrit Marcelle; à ta place j’éditerais Salvarsan ». Rappelons que « Salvarsan » est l’un des titres envisagés par Ferron pour son premier roman, encore inédit à ce jour, et mieux connu sous le titre de « La gorge de Minerve ». Quant à L’Ogre, il s’agit on le sait d’une pièce en quatre actes, dont la majeure partie a été rédigée par le médecin au cours de l’hiver précédent, durant les heures de loisir forcé que lui laissait sa pratique infructueuse dans son cabinet de consultation du quartier Rosemont.
'If One Green Bottle...': Audrey Thomas Looks Back on the Cauldron of History
Authors: Kleiman Ed
Published: March 2013

Audrey Thomas's first published short story, 'If One Green Bottle ...' — later to be included in her first book, Ten Green Bottles (1967) — initially appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (June 1965), where it immediately served to announce the arrival of a strikingly original talent. In fact the story, some thirty-five years later, has proven to be seminal to the now considerable body of work by this major Canadian writer. For it is here, in this early work, that one initially glimpses the startling results of her experiments with the short-story genre — experiments that were later to be carried forward into her novels.