These selected essays on Canadian, Australian and New Zealand literatures often, although not always, consider individual texts and literary authors within the post-colonial paradigm. They discuss some of the most prominent, mostly contemporary literary authors in these genres, including, for example, Margaret Atwood, C. K. Stead, Christopher Koch, David Malouf, Richard Flanagan, Andrew Riemer, Ouyang Yu, A. D. Hope, Teju Cole from the USA, and others. Several studies focus on significant issues in recent diasporic and transcultural writing in English, including the specific Slovenian literary production, while some of the essays examine the literary representations of a country in a particular national collective consciousness.

These selected essays on Canadian, Australian and New Zealand literatures often, although not always, consider individual texts and literary authors within the post-colonial paradigm. They discuss some of the most prominent, mostly contemporary literary authors in these genres, including, for example, Margaret Atwood, C. K. Stead, Christopher Koch, David Malouf, Richard Flanagan, Andrew Riemer, Ouyang Yu, A. D. Hope, Teju Cole from the USA, and others. Several studies focus on significant issues in recent diasporic and transcultural writing in English, including the specific Slovenian literary production, while some of the essays examine the literary representations of a country in a particular national collective consciousness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that an appreciation of its vast natural resources would become the foundation of American culture. His assertion that human thought and actions proceed from nature, was a radical departure from the traditional European emphasis on domesticating nature to suit human needs. His philosophy is rich in common natural scenes of daily life, and expresses the inherent harmony between man and nature. This collection brings together 15 of Emerson's most significant essays, including "Nature", "The American Scholar", "Self-reliance" and "The Transcendentalist", as well as his assessments of Montaigne, Napoleon and Thoreau.

Clark Blaise's Selected Essays brings together another aspect of his tremendous and courageous oeuvre: belle lettres, essays and occasional pieces which range over autobiography, his French-Canadan heritage, the craft of fiction, American fiction, Australian fiction, and the work of such individual writers and Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, and Bernard Malamud, his friend and mentor.

Spoken word is one of the most popular styles of poetry in North America. While its prevalence is often attributed to the form’s strong ties to oral culture, Recalling Recitation in the Americas reveals how poetry memorization and recitation curricula, shaped by British Imperial policy, influenced contemporary performance practices. During the early twentieth century, educators frequently used the recitation of canonical poems to instill "proper" speech and behaviour in classrooms in Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States. Janet Neigh critically analyses three celebrated performance poets - E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake (1861-1913), Langston Hughes (1902-1967), and Louise Bennett (1919-2006) - who refashioned recitation to cultivate linguistic diversity and to resist its disciplinary force. Through an examination of the dialogues among their poetic projects, Neigh illuminates how their complicated legacies as national icons obscure their similar approaches to resisting Anglicization. Recalling Recitation in the Americas focuses on the unexplored relationship between education history and literary form and establishes the far-reaching effects of poetry memorization and recitation on the development of modern performance poetry in North America.