The Canadian Short Story: InterpretationsReingard M. Nischik 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. |
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 |
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