Welcome to Canadian Literature!
Canadian Literature aims to foster a wider academic interest in the Canadian literary field, and publishes a wide range of material from Canadian and international scholars, writers, and poets. Each issue contains a variety of critical articles, an extensive book reviews section, and a selection of original poetry.
www.canlit.ca's Online Exclusives section offers supplementary content like Interviews with Canadian authors and poets, our databases of Canadian scholars, Canadian publishers, and Canadian Literary Magazines/Journals; and Letters & Reflections—a place for commentary that is not published in the print journal.
News
Last chance to fill out our readership survey
Wednesday, July 07th, 2010
Our Readership survey will be running for another three weeks. It takes about five minutes to complete and you will be entered into a draw for one of five free subscriptions to Canadian Literature.
Current Issue: 50th Anniversary Interventions, #204 (Spring 2010)
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
Canadian Literature's Spring 2010 issue (CL#204), "50th Anniversary Interventions", looks back on Canadian Literature's 50th Anniversary Gala, and celebrates Canadian culture with papers about Duncan Campbell Scott, book policies, copyright, civil war poetry, and new Québecois literature.
We are still dining out on stories of the 50th Canadian Literature Anniversary Gala, which was a rich literary and intellectual feast. We have titled this issue after the interventions provided by many of those who came to our workshop. Laura Moss, who took the lead on this wonderful event, has more to say about these pieces below. However, suffice it to say here that we asked the participants to comment on the future both of the field of Canadian literature and the journal. They provided us with many specific suggestions on how the journal might meet the challenges to come. With the help of our Editorial Board (many of whom were present), we will consider all of this advice seriously.
—Margery Fee, "Past, Present, and Future"
The written interventions compiled here showcase some of the round-the-room conversations we had in October, but they are incomplete. The sessions were ninety minutes long, with five or six interventions presented in each, and an hour of discussion. We can’t capture those conversations here, or the ones we shared around the sushi, salmon, tea, or cookies. For instance, a good deal of time was spent noting very practical ways to combat funding cuts to the arts and culture, and to universities, other time was spent discussing the logistics of an academic life, and still other time was passed in conversations about new works of fiction and poetry. Not all interveners opted to submit their interventions for publication here either: David Chariandy spoke of the concept of being "post-race," Jeff Derksen focused on the dangers of neoliberalism, Sneja Gunew commented on cosmopolitanism, Julia Emberley deconstructed promotional material for Canadian Girl dolls, Judy Brown modelled the value of slowing down in the classroom, Richard Cavell noted the presence and absence of Marshall McLuhan in the journal, Glenn Deer talked about the politics of reviewing, and Manina Jones highlighted the need for close readings. And here we do not have the keynote addresses beautifully delivered by Aritha van Herk, Reingard Nischik, or W.H. New, or the important research being done by the graduate students at the workshop: Matthew Hiebert (on George Woodcock), Margo Gouley (on Isabella Valancy Crawford), Brenna Clarke Gray (on Douglas Coupland), Paul Huebener (on time), Kathryn Grafton (on reading publics), Cristina Ivanovici (on European Atwoods), Allison Hargreaves (on indigenous reconciliation), David Gaertner (on limits of reconciliation), and Samuel Martin (on Alistair MacLeod and Wayne Johnston). Eight students were selected, first by their home universities and then by our adjudication panel, to receive travel awards to present fifteen-minute papers on their doctoral research at the workshop. Their contributions to the event were invaluable. So, these interventions should be read as important segments of the myriad conver- sations that occurred in a glass-walled room surrounded by cedars on the unceded Musqueum territory of the UBC campus in the fall of 2009.
—Laura Moss, "Introduction: Generous and Grounded Connections"
See our Media page for pictures and video from the Gala.
Website news
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
There have been a few changes at canlit.ca over the past few months and I want to give a quick update:
Cumulative search engine
Major changes have been made to our Cumulative search engine. You can search our back issues in a number of different ways and, when available, will be linked directly to content. Bonus infographic of our most popular search terms here.
Back issues archive
We put downloadable PDF versions of issues #1 - #155 in our archive. They are broken up in to full issues, individual articles, and the books reviews section.
Readership survey
We are conducting a readership survey. It takes about 5 minutes to complete, and you have the option to enter yourself into a draw for 1 of 5 free subscriptions to Canadian Literature.
CanLit Poets
CanLit Poets has been given a makeover and new content has been added. A new administrative application that allows updates from the poets themselves is almost done and will be released, along with a new batch of invitations, very soon.
Real-time canlit.ca
On the right side of every page is the "Real-time canlit.ca" sidebar that lets you see what (and where!) other people are reading.
Call for papers
Lots of interesting research ideas are in our Call for papers section. See our submissions details if you are interesting in submitting an article on any of those (or any other) subjects.
Social media
We are on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Vimeo. For a trial period, Facebook "like" buttons have been added to Book Reviews and CanLit Poets pages.
—Matthew
Possible downtime today
Friday, April 30th, 2010
Canlit.ca might be inaccessible today for maintenance. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Readership Survey
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
We are conducting a readership survey at canlit.ca/survey. It takes about 5 minutes to complete, and you will be entered into a draw for 1 of 5 free subscriptions to Canadian Literature.
Interview with Thomas King
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
Jordan Wilson interviews Thomas King during our 50th Anniversary Gala celebration.
[W]riting is a maturation process. It's a journey. You don't know where it's going to take you.
—Thomas King
See the interview page for the second part of the video and a full transcript.
Steven Galloway's Dorothy Black Lecture
Thursday, March 04th, 2010
As part our 50th Anniversary celebration, we presented the 2010 Dorothy Black Lecture on September 30, 2009.
Introduction by Judy Brown, associate book review editor at Canadian Literature and professor at UBC's English department
Current Issue: Home, Memory, Self, #203 (Winter 2009)
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Canadian Literature's Winter 2009 issue (CL#203), "Home, Memory, Self", celebrates the home with papers about migrant identities, ghettoization, comics history, Alzheimer's disease, settlement narratives, and exile writing.
Since this is the first issue for which I have been the designated editorial writer since our 200th issue, and as part of my resolve to learn more about the history of the journal, I decided to see how [George] Woodcock marked important anniversaries.
—Margery Fee, "Home, Memory, Self"
Visit our archive for more information.
Laurie Ricou's “Top Ten Sports-in-Can-Lit Moments”
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
To celebrate the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver, Canadian Literature presents Laurie Ricou’s "Top Ten Sports-in-Can-Lit Moments" (from his editorial, "Thinking Tremolo and Backflip," in Canadian Literature #202).
Please submit your own list of ten (or less) moments and we'll (maybe) publish them!
Editing The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller, co-editors of The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, reflect on their experience of editing the volume.
As, for example, Bruce Greenfield's chapter on explorers' narratives and Marta Dvorák's discussion of writing related to migrations and multiple allegiances from Frances Brooke to Thomas Chandler Haliburton make clear, global mobilities have always affected Canadian literature to some extent. We found particularly interesting the case of the Black United Empire Loyalists, because of the bestselling success of Lawrence Hill's novel The Book of Negroes and because of George Elliott Clarke's role as educator in keeping the public memory of this particular migration alive. Mobility, as imperialist quest or as enforced exile, is a key theme in Canadian writing that deserves to be studied further.
—Eva-Marie Kröller
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