This book gives students an answer to the question, “What does my professor want from this essay?” In lively, direct language, it explains the process of creating “a clearly-written argument, based on evidence, about the meaning, power, or structure of a literary work.” Using a single poem by William Carlos Williams as the basis for the process of writing a paper about a piece of literature, it walks students through the processes of reading, brainstorming, researching secondary sources, gathering evidence, and composing and editing the paper. Writing Essays About Literature is designed to strengthen argumentation skills and deepen understanding of the relationships between the reader, the author, the text, and critical interpretations. Its lessons about clarity, precision, and the importance of providing evidence will have wide relevance for student writers.

Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland—one of Canada’s most beloved writers and one of Canada’s most significant publishers—enjoyed an unusual rapport. In this collection of annotated letters, readers gain rare insight into the private side of these literary icons. Their correspondence reveals a professional relationship that evolved into deep friendship over a period of enormous cultural change. Both were committed to the idea of Canadian writing; in a very real sense, their mutual and separate work helped bring “Canadian Literature” into being. With its insider’s view of the book business from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s, Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland, Letters presents a valuable piece of Canadian literary history curated and annotated by Davis and Morra. This is essential reading for all those interested in Canada’s literary culture.

Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada is the first book to examine how Laurence addresses decolonization and nation building in 1950s Somalia and Ghana, and 1960s and 1970s English Canada. Focusing on Laurence’s published works as well as her unpublished letters not yet discussed by critics, the book articulates how Laurence and her characters are poised between African colonies of occupation during decolonization and the settler-colony of English Canada during the implementation of Canadian multiculturalism. Laurence’s Canadian characters are often divided subjects who are not quite members of their ancestral “imperial” cultures, yet also not truly “native” to their nation. Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada shows how Laurence and her characters negotiate complex tensions between “self” and “nation,” and argues that Laurence’s African and Canadian writing demonstrates a divided Canadian subject who holds significant implications for both the individual and the country of Canada. Bringing together Laurence’s writing about Africa and Canada, Davis offers a unique contribution to the study of Canadian literature. The book is an original interpretation of Laurence’s work and reveals how she displaces the simple notion that Canada is a sum total of different cultures and conceives Canada as a mosaic that is in flux and constituted through continually changing social relations.