The Canadian Short Story: Interpretations

Front Cover
Reingard M. Nischik
Camden House, 2007 - Literary Criticism - 426 pages
Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. It continues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genre and the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism and theory has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This collection redresses that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of a range of thirty well-known and often-anthologized Canadian short stories from the genre's beginnings through the twentieth century. A historical survey of the genre introduces the volume and a timeline comparing the genre's development in Canada, the US, and Great Britain via representative examples completes it. The collection is geared both to specialists in and to students of Canadian literature. For the latter it is of particular benefit that the volume provides not only a collection of interpretations, but a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Canadian short story. Reingard M. Nischik is professor and chair of American Literature at the University of Constance, Germany.

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Contents

Tory Humanism Ironic Humor and Satire Stephen Leacock
53
The Beginnings of Canadian Modernism Raymond Knister
67
From Old World Aestheticist Immoralist to Prairie Moral
83
Modernism Prairie Fiction and Gender Sinclair Ross
105
Social Realism and Compassion for the Underdog
129
The Perils of Human Relationships Joyce Marshall
141
The Social Critic at Work Mordecai Richler Benny
149
Myth and the Postmodernist Turn in Canadian Short Fiction
163
Realism and Parodic Postmodernism Audrey
247
The Problem Is to Make the Story Rudy Wiebe
261
The Canadian Writer as Expatriate Norman Levine
271
Canadian Artist Stories John Metcalf The Strange
283
A Literature of a Whole World and of a Real World
299
Failure as Liberation Jack Hodgins The Concert
313
The Translation of the World into Words and
331
Nativeness as Third Space Thomas King
353

The Modernist Aesthetic Hugh Hood
175
Doing Well in the International Thing? Mavis Gallant
191
UnDoing Gender Alice Munro Boys and Girls 1964
203
Collective Memory and Personal Identity in the Prairie
219
Out of Place Clark Blaise A Class of
233
A Sentimental Journey Janice Kulyk Keefer
375
The Short Story in the USA Canada
389
Index
405
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About the author (2007)

Reingard M. Nischik is Professor and chair of American literature at the University of Constance, Germany.

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