Canadian Literature: Canons, Histories, Theories

《加拿大文学》是《爱丁堡批评指南》系列丛书中的一卷，它将探讨如何构建、挑战和扩展加拿大英语文学的经典，并分析最常被用来解释其核心特征的不断变化的文化和理论框架。这本书将考察加拿大文学目前是如何被研究和理论化的，并分析后殖民理论、女权主义和同性恋批评、跨大西洋视角、名人理论和后现代主义对加拿大文学研究的影响。引言和结语将明确讨论这些问题，它们还将为我将在四个主题章节中介绍的个别文本的案例研究提供信息。这些章节将提供20位加拿大重要作家的新读物，将他们置于本国文学史的背景下，并探索对他们作品的不同批评方法。第一章“种族、民族和移民”将特别集中于加拿大原住民、移民身份和混血儿的表现。将通过审查殖民文本来探讨白人殖民者和土著人民之间的遭遇，并将大量关注19世纪和20世纪的土著声音以及移民社区的写作。被认为是个案研究的作家将是弗朗西斯·布鲁克、波琳·约翰逊、迈克尔·翁达杰、托马斯·金和汤姆森·卡韦。第二章，《荒野，城市，地区》将以经典的加拿大荒野叙事瓦库斯塔为起点，探索其对后来作家的遗产。荒野和驻军之间的关系，以及后来森林、小镇和城市之间的关系，一直被认为是加拿大文学的中心关注点，近几十年来，这一主题在一系列自我意识的后现代小说中被重新探讨和戏仿。本章还将按地区考察加拿大的文学建设。讨论的作者将是蒙哥马利、埃塞尔·威尔逊、罗伯逊·戴维斯、卡罗尔·希尔兹和爱丽丝·门罗。第三章将介绍一个不那么令人期待的话题，但我认为这个话题是加拿大文学的核心：‘欲望’。加拿大的山水诗学与身体和欲望息息相关，在当代写作中，探索该国历史的冲动也与色情交织在一起。这一章将在加拿大一些最感官的作品中考察土地、性和历史之间的相互关系。它还将解决同性恋欲望，这是加拿大文学中的一个重要线索，直到最近还没有得到足够的评论界关注。被考虑的作家将是玛莎·奥斯滕索、伦纳德·科恩、约翰·格拉斯科、安妮·迈克尔斯和迪翁·布兰德。最后一章《历史与邮报/殖民地》讲述了自19世纪初以来加拿大文学中对历史的迷恋。它将从加拿大长诗的成熟体裁开始，它经常选择一个历史主题，然后继续讨论后现代文本的激增，这些文本使历史和文学之间的关系产生了问题。它还将审查殖民文学和后殖民文学之间的互文联系，考虑到根据后殖民理论阅读加拿大文学的价值和困难。讨论的作者将是EJ·普拉特、玛格丽特·劳伦斯、玛格丽特·阿特伍德、喜悦·小川和达芙妮·马拉特。这本书是一本交叉专著，将借鉴原创研究，推进对加拿大文学的批判性理解，但也将具有教学价值。也就是说，它将关注教学如何形成对加拿大正典的当前理解，并将向学生开放，特别是寻求开发新研究方向的研究生。

Canadian Literature, a volume in the Edinburgh Critical Guides series, will explore the ways in which the canon of English-Canadian literature has been constructed, challenged and expanded, and analyse the shifting cultural and theoretical frameworks most often deployed to account for its central characteristics. The book will examine how Canadian literature is currently studied and theorised, and analyse the bearing of postcolonial theory, feminist and queer criticism, transatlantic perspectives, celebrity theory and postmodernism on Canadian literary studies. The introduction and conclusion will discuss these questions explicitly, and they will also inform the case studies of individual texts which I will present in four themed chapters. The chapters will offer new readings of twenty important Canadian authors, placing them in the context of their national literary history and exploring different critical approaches to their work. The first chapter, 'Race, Ethnicity and Migration', will concentrate in particular on representations of Native Canadians, immigrant identities and hybridity. The encounter between white colonizers and indigenous peoples will be explored through an examination of colonial texts, and substantial attention will be given to Native voices of the 19th and 20th centuries and to the writing of immigrant communities. Authors considered as case studies will be Frances Brooke, Pauline Johnson, Michael Ondaatje, Thomas King and Tomson Highway.Chapter two, 'Wildernesses, Cities, Regions', will take as its starting point the classic Canadian wilderness narrative, Wacousta, and explore its legacy to later writers. The relationship between wilderness and garrison, and later between forest, small town and city, has always been considered a central preoccupation of Canadian literature, and in recent decades this theme has been revisited and parodied in a range of self-conscious, postmodern fictions. The chapter will also examine the literary construction of Canada by region. Authors discussed will be LM Montgomery, Ethel Wilson, Robertson Davies, Carol Shields and Alice Munro. Chapter three will introduce a less expected topic, but one which I see as central to Canadian literature: 'Desire'. The Canadian poetics of landscape is intimately bound up with the body and desire, and in contemporary writing, the impulse to explore the country's history has also become entwined with the erotic. The chapter will examine the interrelationships between land, sexuality and history in some of Canada's most sensual writing. It will also address homosexual desire, an important strand in Canadian literature which has until recently received insufficient critical attention. Authors considered will be Martha Ostenso, Leonard Cohen, John Glassco, Anne Michaels, and Dionne Brand.The last chapter, 'History and the Post/colonial', addresses the fascination with history evident in Canadian literature from the early 19th century onwards. It will begin with the well-established genre of the Canadian long poem, which frequently takes an historical subject, and move on to discuss the proliferation of postmodern texts which problematise the relation between history and literature. It will also examine intertextual connections between colonial and postcolonial literature, considering the value - and the difficulties - of reading Canadian literature in the light of postcolonial theory. Authors discussed will be EJ Pratt, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Joy Kogawa and Daphne Marlatt.A 'crossover monograph', the book will draw on original research and advance critical understanding of Canadian literature, but will also have pedagogical value. That is, it will attend to the ways in which teaching shapes current understandings of the Canadian canon, and it will be accessible to students, particularly postgraduates seeking to develop new research directions.