Alice Munro’s short story “Royal Beatings” explores the world of a depression era family weighted down by poverty and longing in rural Ontario. This coming-of-age story focuses on the central character, Rose; her father; her stepmother, Flo; and her half… Read More ›
An innovative and oft-anthologized story that demonstrates the arbitrariness of any author’s choice of an ending, “Happy Endings” offers six different endings from which the reader may choose. “Happy Endings” was first published in the Canadian collection Murder in the… Read More ›
In “Death by Landscape,” Margaret Atwood rewrites early American stories about the wilderness from her own trenchant perspective. At the same time, the story finds literary ancestors in Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories, especially the locked-room mystery (“The Murders in the… Read More ›
It is difficult to find appropriate words to define Margaret Atwood’s (born November 18, 1939) significance in Canadian culture and literature. Atwood is a prolific writer who not only blazes a trail for contemporary Canadian writers but also helps Canadian… Read More ›
The often somber tone of Mavis Gallant’s (11 August 1922 – 18 February 2014) work is strengthened by the combination of acute lucidness and understated stylistic richness. Gallant is a remarkable observer. She succeeds in creating worlds that are both… Read More ›
Saul Bellow’s (1915 – 2005) stature in large measure owes something to the depths to which he plumbed the modern condition. He addressed the disorder of the modern age, with all its horror and darkness as well as its great… Read More ›
One of Margaret Atwood’s (born November 18, 1939) central themes is storytelling itself, and most of her fiction relates to that theme in some way. The short-story collections each focus on key issues. Dancing Girls is primarily concerned with otherness,… Read More ›
Alice Munro (born 10 July 1931) is first and foremost a writer of short fiction. However, the line between long and short fiction is sometimes blurred in her writings. She has published one book that is generally classified as a… Read More ›
Michel Tremblay (born 25 June 1942) is part of a new generation of playwrights that emerged in Quebec during the 1960’s and 1970’s, a time of profound political and cultural change for this province. Led by Tremblay, these writers saw… Read More ›
Hugh MacLennan (1907-1990) began as a historian, and, in a sense, he remained one throughout his long writing career. His doctoral dissertation, Oxyrhynchus, discussing the history of an area in Egypt during the seven hundred years that it was subject… Read More ›
Ross Macdonald’s (1915–1983) twenty-four novels fall fairly neatly into three groups: Those in which Lew Archer does not appear form a distinct group, and the Archer series itself, which may be separated into two periods. His first four books, The… Read More ›
The major emphasis of Margaret Laurence’s (1926- 1987) fiction changed considerably between her early and later works. In a 1969 article in Canadian Literature, “Ten Years’ Sentences,” she notes that after she had grown out of her obsession with the… Read More ›
Among Frederick Grove’s (February 14, 1879 – September 9, 1948) primary themes, the foremost is the issue of free will. Through his characters, Grove asks how much freedom anyone has in the face of often accidental but usually overwhelming pressures… Read More ›
At the core of Robertson Davies’ (1913-1995) novels is a sense of humor that reduces pompous institutional values to a refreshing individuality. Interplays of the formal with the specific—officious academia versus lovable satyr-professor, self-important charitable foundation versus reclusive forger-artist, elaborately… Read More ›
For Atwood, an unabashed Canadian, literature became a means to cultural and personal self-awareness. “To know ourselves,” she writes in Survival, “we must know our own literature; to know ourselves accurately, we need to know it as part of literature… Read More ›
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