A literary exploration of Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes.

Winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction Canada Reads Selection (CBC), 2013 A landmark of nationalist fiction, Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes is the story of two peoples within one nation, each with its own legend and ideas of what a nation should be. In his vivid portrayals of human drama in First World War–era Quebec, MacLennan focuses on two individuals whose love increases the prejudices that surround them until they discover that “love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch and greet each other.” The novel centres around Paul Tallard and his struggles in reconciling the differences between the English identity of his love Heather Methuen and her family, and the French identity of his father. Against this backdrop the country is forming, the chasm between French and English communities growing deeper. Published in 1945, the novel popularized the use of “two solitudes” as referring to a perceived lack of communication between English- and French-speaking Canadians. Content note: This book contains racial slurs that readers may find offensive or upsetting.

In 2030, an old man who has survived the holocaustic destruction of civilization in the 1980's illuminates the events of the past by portraying the lives of his cousin, a journalist during the 1970 war measures act, and his stepfather, a German caught up in the madness of the Hitler era.

The works of a seminal Canadian writer, available again.

Since the publication of Two Solitudes in 1945, Hugh MacLennan has been generally accepted as one of Canada's premier novelists. However, recent studies suggest the need for a reappraisal of MacLennan's status. This need is confirmed by a close examination of his writing in recent years, which has raised questions about the depth of the quality of his works, his scope and inclusiveness, his modernism, as well as other issues. In this volume, leading scholars offer fresh perceptions of MacLennan's personality, character, and artistry. Among other issues, they examine the quality of his writing, the influences on his work, and its importance for Canadian literature. Moreover, conclusions are offered about his international, national, regional, and civic intent; his love-hate relationship with the nationalist literary agenda; his attitude toward women; his own "feminine side"; the authenticity of the father-son conflict central to his fiction; his attitude toward his own and other writers' works, the role of critics, the future of literature. An annotated bibliographic update is also included.

The Encyclopedia of the Novel is the first reference book that focuses on the development of the novel throughout the world. Entries on individual writers assess the place of that writer within the development of the novel form, explaining why and in exactly what ways that writer is importnant. Similarly, an entry on an individual novel discusses the importance of that novel not only form, analyzing the particular innovations that novel has introduced and the ways in which it has influenced the subsequent course of the genre. A wide range of topic entries explore the history, criticism, theory, production, dissemination and reception of the novel. A very important component of the Encyclopedia of the Novel is its long surveys of development of the novel in various regions of the world.

The Precipice is the sweeping story of Lucy Cameron, a young woman who seems destined to live and die in small-town Ontario. Into this place of monotony and petty incidents, of spiteful gossip and rigid moralism, appears Stephen Lassiter. Stephen is a Princeton-educated engineer from a wealthy New York family and Lucy's antithesis. Despite the chasm of their differences, they fall in love, marry, and begin life together in New York during the distressing years of the Second World War. It is a life that will nearly break Lucy in heart and spirit, however, as her husband faces disillusionment in his job and boredom in the serenity of his home life. While Stephen looks for excitement and approval elsewhere, Lucy must fight to retain her poise and dignity in order to survive. With its sustained contrast between the crushing deadness of small-town life and the glittering artificiality of New York City, MacLennan's third novel revealed a new level of maturity when it first appeared in 1948. A classic now back in print, with an introduction by renowned scholar and MacLennan biographer Elspeth Cameron, this timeless story portrays characters with a realism and fascination that is as rare as it is effective.

Is it possible to write an artistically respectable and theoretically convincing religious novel in a non-religious age? Up to now, there has been no substantial application of theological criticism to the works of Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan, the two most important Canadian novelists before 1960. Yet both were religious writers during the period when Canada entered the modern, non-religious era, and both greatly influenced the development of our literature. MacLennan’s journey from Calvinism to Christian existentialism is documented in his essays and seven novels, most fully in The Watch that Ends the Night. Callaghan’s fourteen novels are marked by tensions in his theology of Catholic humanism, with his later novels defining his theological themes in increasingly secular terms. This tension between narrative and metanarrative has produced both the artistic strengths and the moral ambiguities that characterize his work. Faith and Fiction: A Theological Critique of the Narrative Strategies of Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan is a significant contribution to the relatively new field studying the relation between religion and literature in Canada.