3 results
The Scottish Invention of Canadian Literature? John Buchan in Canada
- from Part I - The Genesis of Canadian and Comparative North American Studies
- Edited by Eva Gruber, Caroline Rosenthal
-
- Book:
- Gained Ground
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 October 2019
- Print publication:
- 15 October 2018, pp 41-54
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
IN 1935, WHEN JOHN BUCHAN (1875–1940) was appointed Governor General of Canada, he had already been a prolific author for forty years. He had worked as a journalist and war correspondent, and written histories, biographies, and of course the thrillers for which he is still known today; in fact, just prior to his departure for Canada, he had attended the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of his most famous novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps. However, Buchan could also look back upon a distinguished career as an administrator and politician: he had spent two years on the staff of the High Commissioner for South Africa, he had coordinated British First World War propaganda, he had been Deputy- Chairman of Reuter's, and he had served as Member of Parliament for the Scottish Universities. As Governor General, he could draw upon skills acquired in these (and numerous other) roles, most strikingly when handling Canadian, American, and British media so as to maximize public interest in his extensive journeys across the length and width of Canada, or in the charities and other organizations which he patronized.
In the following, it will, of course, not be claimed that Buchan “really” invented Canadian literature, certainly not in the sense in which this claim has been made for English literature, or rather English Literature, in the volume to which the title of this essay alludes, Robert Crawford's The Scottish Invention of English Literature (1998). In Crawford's volume, contributors suggest that English Literature was initially taught as a subject in eighteenth-century Scottish universities, and was then exported to newly independent America, to British colonies such as Canada, India, and Australia, and ultimately to England itself. It will, however, be argued that Buchan did promote the concept of Canadian literature as a distinct tradition with unique features, and, perhaps more controversially, that he contributed to this tradition himself. To this purpose, the essay will first sketch Buchan's engagement with three quintessentially Canadian issues, multiculturalism, the North, and, indeed, “CanLit.” In a second step, it will be shown how Buchan fictionalized these issues in his last novel, Sick Heart River (published posthumously in 1941, cited here from the 2007 edition).
15 - ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott's The Talisman
-
- By Silvia Mergenthal, University of Konstanz
- Edited by Christoph Bode, Jacqueline Labbe
-
- Book:
- Romantic Localities
- Published by:
- Pickering & Chatto
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014, pp 209-220
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The theme of the Crusades attracted Scott throughout his writing career, from his 1796 translation of Gottfried August Bürger's poem ‘Leonore’ (as ‘William and Helen’), the historical background of which he shifted from King Frederick of Prussia's victory over the Austrian army in 1757 to the Third Crusade, to his last, and unfinished, novel The Siege of Malta. Other key texts charting Scott's continuing engagement with Crusading material are his 1805 review of George Ellis's Early English Metrical Romances and his ‘Essay on Chivalry’ of 1818, in which he suggests that the real history of the Crusades was founded on the spirit of chivalry, and that this spirit led to the creation of the earliest chivalric orders, all originally devoted to the service of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Most importantly, there are the four novels Ivanhoe (1819), The Betrothed and The Talisman (published as Tales of the Crusaders in 1825), and Count Robert of Paris (1831). While the first two of these describe the impact of the Crusades on European societies, the other two take their readers to the contested spaces of Palestine and Constantinople, respectively. Thus, The Talisman returns to the Third Crusade, which was led by Richard the Lion-Hearted and had been triggered by the conquest, in 1187, of almost the whole of Palestine, including Jerusalem, by Salahed-Din Yusef ibn Ayub, or Saladin.
Doing Well in the International Thing?: Mavis Gallant, “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” (1963)
-
- By Silvia Mergenthal, University of Constance
- Edited by Reingard M. Nischik, Reingard M. Nischik is Professor and chair of American literature at the University of Constance, Germany.
-
- Book:
- The Canadian Short Story
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 28 April 2017
- Print publication:
- 16 May 2007, pp 191-202
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Mavis Gallant was born Mavis Young in Montreal in 1922. She was educated initially — rather unusually, given her English-speaking family background — in a French-speaking convent school, after which she attended various schools in Canada and in the United States. Upon graduating from High School in Pine Plains, New York, she returned to Canada, where she held various clerical jobs in Montreal and Ottawa, and then worked as a journalist for the Montreal Standard. In 1950 she emigrated to Europe, where she spent extended periods of time in the South of France, Austria, Italy, and Spain, before eventually settling in Paris. She returned to Canada to a post as writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto from 1983 till 1984, but has lived in Paris since then (Schaub 1998, xiii–xiv, 1–7).
In 1950, The New Yorker accepted Gallant's first short story, and subsequently nearly all of her short fiction has appeared in this magazine. Her stories have been collected in The Other Paris: Stories (1956); My Heart Is Broken: Eight Stories and a Short Novel (1964); The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and Five Short Stories (1973); The End of the World and Other Stories (1974); From the Fifteenth District: A Novella and Eight Short Stories (1979); Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981); Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris (1985); In Transit (1988); Across the Bridge: New Stories (1993); The Moslem Wife and Other Stories (1994); and The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (1996). Gallant has also published two novels, Green Water, Green Sky: A Novel (1959) and A Fairly Good Time: A Novel (1970), as well as a play, What Is to Be Done? (1983). Her non-fictional prose has been anthologized in Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews (1988), which includes one of her rare commentaries on her own writing, the essay “What Is Style?” Other autobiographical and autocritical comments can be found in interviews, introductions, and prefaces, for instance to Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories and to Selected Stories.
Numerous critics, most comprehensively Danielle Schaub in a book-length literary biography, have remarked on Gallant's “invisibility” in Canada before the 1980s (Schaub 1998, 6), attributing this variously to her physical absence from Canada and her New Yorker affiliations, her proclaimed indebtedness to European and North American (rather than Canadian) writers, and her seeming unwillingness to align herself with Canadian literary traditions. Schaub explains: