Born in Winnipeg to Icelandic immigrants in 1890, Laura Goodman Salverson embarked on a life marked by contradiction and cultural exchange. Her 1939 memoir braids the strands of her parents’ intellectual life in Iceland with a hardscrabble existence on the Prairies at the turn of the century, all against a backdrop of European settlement in post-Riel Manitoba and in colourful, self-assured prose. Leaving behind economic hardship, a difficult climate, and the threat of volcanoes, Lars Gudman was in search of stability for his family, but he was also ensnared by wanderlust. Travelling onward to Minnesota, the Dakotas, Selkirk, Duluth, and the Mississippi Valley, Salverson and her parents returned time and again to the Icelandic enclave in Winnipeg, a community struggling to adjust to life in Canada. In Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter Salverson makes real the political and cultural history of the twentieth-century North American west, even as she draws the reader into the inner life of a young girl growing up “hopelessly Icelandic” and finding refuge from discrimination and ostracism in the world of books. With a new introduction by Carl Watts situating the memoir and its prolific author in the literary canon, and reproducing Salverson’s original preface for the first time, Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter remains both a Canadian classic and an important social history of the experiences of women and immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century.

In this special two-book bundle you’ll meet remarkable women in science, sport, preaching and teaching, politics, war and peace, arts and entertainment, etc. The book is full of amazing facts and fascinating trivia about intriguing figures. Discover some of the many heroines Canada can be proud of. Find out how we’re remembering them. Or not! ??Augmented by great quotes and photos, this inspiring collection profiles remarkable women — heroines in science, sport, preaching and teaching, politics, war and peace, arts and entertainment, and more. Profiles include mountaineer Phyllis Munday, activist Hide Shimizu, unionist Lea Roback, movie mogul Mary Pickford, the original Degrassi kids, Captain Kool, hockey star Hilda Ranscombe, and the woman dubbed "the atomic mosquito." Includes 100 Canadian Heroines 100 More Canadian Heroines

This inspiring collection profiles remarkable women — heroines in science, sport, preaching and teaching, politics, war and peace, arts and entertainment, and more. In 100 Canadian Heroines you’ll meet remarkable women in science, sport, preaching and teaching, politics, war and peace, arts and entertainment, etc. The book is full of amazing facts and fascinating trivia about intriguing figures. Discover some of the many heroines Canada can be proud of. Find out how we’re remembering them. Or not! Augmented by great quotes and photos, this inspiring collection profiles remarkable women — heroines in science, sport, preaching and teaching, politics, war and peace, arts and entertainment, and more. Profiles include mountaineer Phyllis Munday, activist Hide Shimizu, unionist Lea Roback, and movie mogul Mary Pickford.

As Told by Herself offers the first systematic study of women's autobiographical writing about childhood. More than 175 works—primarily from English-speaking countries and France, as well as other European countries—are presented here in historical sequence, allowing Lorna Martens to discern and reveal patterns as they emerge and change over time. What do the authors divulge, conceal, and emphasize? How do they understand the experience of growing up as girls? How do they understand themselves as parts of family or social groups, and what role do other individuals play in their recollections? To what extent do they concern themselves with issues of memory, truth, and fictionalization? Stopping just before second-wave feminism brought an explosion in women's childhood autobiographical writing, As Told by Herself explores the genre's roots and development from the mid-nineteenth century, and recovers many works that have been neglected or forgotten. The result illustrates how previous generations of women—in a variety of places and circumstances—understood themselves and their upbringing, and how they thought to present themselves to contemporary and future readers.

Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction is a critical overview of the appearances and consequences of racism in English-Canadian fiction published between 1905 and 1980. Based on an analysis of traditional expressions in literature of group solidarity and resentment, the study screens English-Canadian novels for fictional representations of such feelings. Beginning with the English-Canadian reaction to the mass influx of immigrants into Western Canada after World War One, it examines the fiction of novelists such as Ralph Connor and Nellie McClung. The author then suggests that the cumulative effect of a number of individual voices, such as Grove and Salverson, constituted a counter-reaction which has been made more positive by Laurence, Lysenko, Richler and Clarke. The “debate” between these two sides, carried on in fictional and non-fictional writing, is seen to be in part resolved in synthesis after World War Two, as attitudes are forced by wartime alliances and intellectual pressures into a qualified liberalism. The author shows how single novels by Graham, Bodsworth, and Callaghan demonstrated a new concern for the exposure and eradication of racial discrimination, an attitude taken further by the works of Wiebe and Klein. The book concentrates on single texts that best portray deliberately or not, racist ideology or anti-racist arguments, and attempts to explain the arousal in Canada of such ideas.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, the best-selling fiction of Ralph Connor, Robert Stead, Nellie McClung, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Arthur Stringer was internationally recognized. In this intriguing cultural history of the conception, production, and reception of popular fiction, Clarence Karr challenges the common assumption that best sellers are a conservative cultural influence, reflecting and promoting traditional values. By focusing on a society and its cultural leaders at a period when they were coming to grips with modernity, Karr provides a new perspective on popular culture and the interaction between readers and popular authors.

In Grasslands Grown Molly P. Rozum explores the two related concepts of regional identity and sense of place by examining a single North American ecological region: the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairie Provinces. All or parts of modern-day Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Manitoba form the center of this transnational region. As children, the first postconquest generation of northern grasslands residents worked, played, and traveled with domestic and wild animals, which introduced them to ecology and shaped sense-of-place rhythms. As adults, members of this generation of settler society worked to adapt to the northern grasslands by practicing both agricultural diversification and environmental conservation. Rozum argues that environmental awareness, including its ecological and cultural aspects, is key to forming a sense of place and a regional identity. The two concepts overlap and reinforce each other: place is more local, ecological, and emotional-sensual, and region is more ideational, national, and geographic in tone. This captivating study examines the growth of place and regional identities as they took shape within generations and over the life cycle.

Alberta's contradictory landscape has fired the imaginative energies of writers for centuries. The sweep of the plains, the thrust of the Rockies, and the long roll of the woodlands have left vivid impressions on all of Alberta's writers--both those who passed through Alberta in search of other horizons and those who made it their home. The Literary History of Alberta surveys writing in and about Alberta from prehistory to the middle of the twentieth century. It includes profiles of dozens of writers (from the earnestly intended to the truly gifted) and their texts (from the commercial to the arcane). It reminds us of long-forgotten names and faces, figures who quietly--or not so quietly--wrote the books that underpin Alberta's thriving literary culture today. Melnyk also discusses the institutions that have shaped Alberta's literary culture. The Literary History of Alberta is an essential text for any reader interested in the cultural history of western Canada, and a landmark achievement in Alberta's continuing literary history.

This fully revised second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature offers a comprehensive introduction to major writers, genres and topics. For this edition several chapters have been completely rewritten to reflect major developments in Canadian literature since 2004. Surveys of fiction, drama and poetry are complemented by chapters on Aboriginal writing, autobiography, literary criticism, writing by women and the emergence of urban writing. Areas of research that have expanded since the first edition include environmental concerns and questions of sexuality which are freshly explored across several different chapters. A substantial chapter on francophone writing is included. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, noted for her experiments in multiple literary genres, are given full consideration, as is the work of authors who have achieved major recognition, such as Alice Munro, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature.

"The writings collected here all testify to the complexity of Gunnars's literary vision as much as they testify to the sheer pleasures of reading her work. In her interview, Gunnars speaks both as a reader and a writer, describing the form and modes of address of her work, as well as the philosophical and literary traditions she draws from. The nine essays and two poems that follow, organized chronologically according to the publication dates of the primary texts they treat, represent a broad range of approaches to Kristjana Gunnars's work. The contributers are M. Travis Lane, Judith Owens, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Scobie, Anne Malena, Siobhan O'Flynn, K.I. Press, and Christl Verduyn. It is my hope that readers will find in this 'critical community' some productive points of entry into Gunnars's corpus that will stimulate their own thinking about her words and ideas" - from the Introduction by Monique Tschofen.