2023
Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon
(Columbia University Press)
Alexander Manshel
Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. Midcentury writers tended to set their works in their own moment, but for the last several decades critical acclaim and attention have fixated on historical fiction. This shift is particularly dramatic for writers of color. Even as the literary canon has become more diverse, cultural institutions have celebrated Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous novelists almost exclusively for their historical fiction.
Writing Backwards explores what the dominance of historical fiction in the contemporary canon reveals about American literary culture. Alexander Manshel investigates the most celebrated historical genres—contemporary narratives of slavery, the World War II novel, the multigenerational family saga, immigrant fiction, and the novel of recent history—alongside the literary and academic institutions that have elevated them. He examines novels by writers including Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Colson Whitehead, Julia Alvarez, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Chabon, Julie Otsuka, Yaa Gyasi, Ben Lerner, and Tommy Orange in the context of MFA programs, literary prizes, university syllabi, book clubs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Manshel studies how historical fiction has evolved over the last half century, documenting the formation of the newly inclusive literary canon as well as who and what it still excludes. Offering new insight into how institutions shape literature and the limits of historical memory, Writing Backwards also considers recent challenges to the historical turn in American fiction.
Writing Backwards offers us a surprising new history of the contemporary novel that no future critic will be able to ignore. Alexander Manshel’s book reads like a detective story, but the stakes of the mystery are very high. He explains how, when the literary canon has itself receded for many into a more remote past, history has come flooding back into serious fiction, especially fiction by minoritized writers. In a series of intricate readings, Manshel demonstrates that history is not done with the novel. — John Guillory, author of Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study
Alexander Manshel's Writing Backwards is essential reading for students and scholars of contemporary American literary studies. His insights into how institutions and market appetites establish "literary" value are provocative and profound. This book has changed how I think about the relationship between history and the critical acclaim accorded American novels. — Stephanie Li, author of Pan-African American Literature: Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century
Do You Want to Be Happy and Write?: Critical Essays on Michael Ondaatje
(McGill-Queen's University Press)
Robert Lecker
Taking its title from a question in his poem “Tin Roof,” Do You Want to Be Happy and Write? reassesses Ondaatje’s writing and the role of the poet, from his troubled explorations of the self-reflexive artist to his most recent novels. Comprehensive in both approach and coverage, this new collection offers groundbreaking analysis informed by an understanding of Ondaatje’s entire oeuvre, placing early poetry collections like The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do alongside the full range of his novels and his extensive work as a literary editor. The book highlights the transnational, postcolonial, and diasporic issues that have become increasingly apparent in Ondaatje’s work. Contributors explore key interests that have reappeared and been rethought across his fiction and poetry: the construction of identity; the nature of memory and its relation to family origins and history; the human body as a site of contestation and struggle; the contrast between Eastern and Western values and the Southeast Asian diaspora; the writer’s responsibility in depictions of war, psychic trauma, and genocide; and an ongoing fascination with the visual and the media of photography and film.
An eclectic celebration of an iconic author, Do You Want to Be Happy and Write? offers an authoritative reference point for scholars and students of literature and reveals new facets of a major author to his readers around the world.
Canadian Literary Fare
(McGill-Queen's University Press)
Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd
with Alexia Moyer
When writers place food in front of their characters - who after all do not need sustenance - they are asking readers to be alert to the meaning and implication of food choices. As readers begin to listen closely to these cues, they become attuned to increasingly layered stories about why it matters what foods are selected, prepared, served, or shared, and with whom, where, and when.
In Canadian Literary Fare Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd explore food voices in a wide range of Canadian fiction, drama, and poetry, drawing from their formational blog series with Alexia Moyer. Thirteen short vignettes delve into metaphorical taste sensations, telling of how single ingredients such as garlic or ginger, or food items such as butter tarts or bannock, can pack a hefty symbolic punch in literary contexts. A chapter on Canada’s public markets finds literary food voices sounding a largely positive note, just as Canadian journalists trumpet Canada’s bountiful and diverse foodways. But in chapters on literary representations of bison and Kraft Dinner, Cooke and Boyd bear witness to narratives of hunger, food scarcity, and social inequality with poignancy and insistence.
Canadian Literary Fare pays heed to food voices in the works of Tomson Highway, Rabindranath Maharaj, Alice Munro, M. NourbeSe Philip, Eden Robinson, Fred Wah, and more, inviting readers to listen for stories of foodways in the literatures of Canada and beyond.
2022
Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble
(Bloomsbury Publishing)
Fiona Ritchie
Siblings Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) and John Philip Kemble (1757–1823) were the most famous British actors of the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Through their powerful acting and meticulous conceptualisation of Shakespeare's characters and their worlds, they created iconic interpretations of Shakespeare's major roles that live on in our theatrical and cultural memory. This book examines the actors' long careers on the London stage, from Siddons's debut in 1782 to Kemble's retirement in 1817, encompassing Kemble's time as theatre manager, when he sought to foreground their strengths as Shakespearean performers in his productions.
Over the course of more than thirty years, Siddons and Kemble appeared opposite one another in many Shakespeare plays, including King John, Henry VIII, Coriolanus and Macbeth. The actors had to negotiate two major Shakespeare scandals: the staging of Vortigern – a fake Shakespearean play – in 1796 and the Old Price Riots of 1809, during which the audience challenged Siddons's and Kemble's perceived attempts to control Shakespeare.
Fiona Ritchie examines the siblings' careers, focusing on their collaborations, as well as placing Siddons's and Kemble's Shakespeare performances in the context of contemporary 18th- and 19th-century drama. The volume not only offers a detailed consideration of London theatre, but also explores the importance of provincial performance to the actors, notably in the case of Hamlet – a role in which both appeared across Britain and in Ireland.
Victorian Metafiction
(University of Virginia Press)
Tabitha Sparks
Critics agree in the abstract that "metafiction" refers to any novel that draws attention to its own fictional construction, but metafiction has been largely associated with the postmodern era. In this innovative new book Tabitha Sparks identifies a sustained pattern of metafiction in the Victorian novel that illuminates the art and intentions of its female practitioners.
From the mid-nineteenth century through the fin de siècle, novels by Victorian women such as Charlotte Brontë, Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Riddell, Eliza Lynn Linton, and several New Women authors share a common but underexamined trope: the fictional characterization of the woman novelist or autobiographer. Victorian Metafiction reveals how these novels systemically dispute the assumptions that women wrote primarily about their emotions or were restricted to trivial, sentimental plots.
Countering an established tradition that has read novels by women writers as heavily autobiographical and confessional, Sparks identifies the literary technique of metafiction in numerous novels by women writers and argues that women used metafictional self-consciousness to draw the reader’s attention to the book and not the novelist. By dislodging the narrative from these cultural prescriptions, Victorian Metafiction effectively argues how these women novelists presented the business and art of writing as the subject of the novel and wrote metafiction in order to establish their artistic integrity and professional authority.
2021
Milton’s Poetical Thought
(Oxford University Press)
Maggie Kilgour
A defence of the importance of poetry that studies one of the greatest poets of the English tradition: John Milton.
The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading.
Why would anyone read John Milton today? To many, poetry in general is an irrelevant and even irresponsible luxury that we cannot afford in a time of environmental and social crisis. The work of a seventeenth-century 'Puritan' might seem especially obscure and out of touch with our needs. But this book argues that Milton offers us one of the most powerful arguments for the importance of poetry today, both representing in his poetry and demonstrating through his own life, the transformative and sustaining force of the human imagination even in times of greatest upheaval. Writing out of his own experience of loss and disappointment, he insists that poetry is a form of knowledge, a way of seeing and understanding the world around us, others, and indeed ourselves. He uses the resources of poetry—its language, imagery, and forms—to challenge and shake us up, making us think in unfamiliar ways and expanding our imagination and our sense of the possibilities in our lives. Milton insists that poetry gives us knowledge of truths we otherwise would never apprehend; it enriches the experience of both writers and readers and makes us creative and fully realized human beings.
2020
The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua
Yael Halevi-Wise
Diplomacy and the Modern Novel: France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature
Allan Hepburn and Isabelle Daunais, eds.
Who Was Doris Hedges? The Search for Canada's First Literary Agent
Robert Lecker
Little Resilience: The Ryerson Poetry Chap-Books
Eli MacLaren
Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction
Richard Jean So
At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War
Monica Popescu
The Cultural Cold War and the Global South: Sites of Contest and Communitas
Kerry Bystrom, Monica Popescu and Katherine Zien, eds.
Richard Rolle: On Lamentations. A Critical Edition with Translation and Commentary
Michael Van Dussen
A Companion to the Hussites
Michael Van Dussen and Pavel Soukup, eds.
2019
Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony
Sandeep Banerjee
The Classics in Modernist Translation
Lynn Kozak and Miranda Hickman, eds.
2018
A Grain of Faith: Religion in Mid-Century British Literature
Allan Hepburn
The Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney
Peter Sabor
2017
Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism
Kenneth Borris
Samuel Richardson in Context
Peter Sabor and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds.
A City Girl: A Realistic Story (1887)
Tabitha Sparks, ed.
Bodies in Time: Suspense, Affect, Cinema
Alanna Thain
Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone
Katherine Zien
2016
Transpacific Community America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network
Richard Jean So
Europe After Wyclif
Michael van Dussen and J. Patrick Hornbeck II, eds.
2015
Forms of Association
Making Publics in Early Modern Europe
Paul Yachnin & Marlene Eberhart, eds.
Anthologizing Canadian Literature:
Theoretical and Cultural Perspectives
Robert Lecker, ed.
The Cambridge Companion to ‘Emma'
Peter Sabor, ed.
The Johnson Family Treasury:
A Collection of Household Recipes & Remedies, 1741-1848
Nathalie Cooke & Kathryn Harvey, eds.
The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches
Michael Johnston & Michael Van Dussen, eds.
Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture
Louise Penner and Tabitha Sparks, eds.
2014
Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century
Fiona Ritchie
Shakespeare’s World of Words
Paul Edward Yachnin, ed.
2013
The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy
Sean Carney
Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of the Nation
Robert Lecker
Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut
Volume 5 - Environment Part I
Minnie Grey, Peter Mittenthal, Marianne Stenbaek eds.
Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut
Volume 6 - Environment Part II
Minnie Grey, Peter Mittenthal, Marianne Stenbaek eds.
2012
Jane Austen's Manuscript Works
Linda Bree, Peter Sabor & Janet Todd, eds.
Four Generations/Kinguaariit Sisamat/Fire Generationer
Marianne Stenbaek & Peter Fr. Rosing, eds.
Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut, Volume 3: Health
Marianne Stenbaek & Minnie Grey, eds.
A series of anthologies of writings by Nunavik Inuit. In English.
Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination
Yael Halevi-Wise
Rereading the New Criticism
Miranda B. Hickman & John D. McIntyre, eds.
Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture
Robert Wisnovsky, Faith Wallis, Jamie Fumo & Carlos Fraenkel, eds.
From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages
Michael Van Dussen
Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid
Maggie Kilgour
Contemporary Literary & Cultural Theory: The Johns Hopkins Guide
Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth & Imre Szeman, eds.
Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century
Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, eds.
2011
Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut, Volume 2: Way of Life
Marianne A. Stenbaek & Minnie Grey, eds.
A series of anthologies of writings by Nunavik Inuit. In English.
One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Stanley Nott
Miranda Hickman
National Performance
Erin Hurley
The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney
Peter Sabor, ed.
Dominion and Agency: Copyright and the Structuring of the Canadian Book Trade, 1867-1918
Eli MacLaren
Richard II (Oxford World's Classics Edition)
Paul Yachnin & Anthony Dawson, eds.
2010
The Veins of the Heart to the Pinnacle of the Mind
Aqqaluk Lynge; Ken Norris and Marianne Stenbaek, trans.
The poetry of Aqqaluk Lynge, the International Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. In English and Greenlandic.
Local Knowledge: Living Resources and Natural Assets in Greenland
H.C. Petersen; Marianne Stenbaek, ed.
Traditional knowledge on the environment, animals and culture collected by the Greenlander HC Petersen over 60 years. In English and Greenlandic.
Voices and Images of Nunavimmiut, Volume 1: Stories and Tales
Marianne Stenbaek; Minnie Grey, eds.
A series of anthologies of writings by Nunavik Inuit. In English.
Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Fiction
Allan Hepburn
Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen
Allan Hepburn
Urban Underworlds
Thomas Heise
Canadian Literature 207: Mordecai Richler
Nathalie Cooke, ed.
Canadian Poetry from 1920 to 1960
Brian Trehearne, ed.
Theatre and Feeling
Erin Hurley
South African Literature Beyond the Cold War
Monica Popescu
The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority & Chaucerian Poetics
Jamie Fumo
2009
Vikings of To-day
Wilfred Grenfell; Marianne Stenbaek, intro.
The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices
Tabitha Sparks
Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema 
Derek Nystrom
Shakespeare and Character
Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights, eds.
Romanticism and Celebrity Culture
Tom Mole
What's to Eat?:
Nathalie Cooke
Making Publics in Early Modern Europe
Paul Yachnin and Bronwen Wilson, eds.
Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem
Monique Morgan
2008
Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature
Ned Schantz
Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance
Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir, eds.
Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century
Peter Sabor and Paul Yachnin, eds.
Spenser Studies XXIV
Ken Borris, ed.
2007
The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe
Ken Borris
The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney
Peter Sabor, ed.
Byron's Romantic Celebrity
Tom Mole
2006
The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen - Juvenilia
Peter Sabor, ed.