The first book-length commentary on twentieth-century Pacific Northwest writing, The Arbutus / Madrone Files explores the dynamics of the Pacific Northwest. Laurie Ricou’s meditations are dropped into thirteen files—such as, the "Island File," the "Salmon File," and inevitably, the "Rain File." Resonant quotations, poetry, song lyrics, and art from the region enhance Ricou’s own readings, which move from an academic perspective on the narratives of bio-region toward more personal reflections on home and the local.

This lively and perceptive look at the literature of the U.S. and Canadian Pacific Northwest explores the dynamics of the cross-border region using resonant quotations, poetry, song lyrics, and art to demonstrate and enhance Laurie Ricou's critical readings and ideas.

On Sacred Ground explores the literature of the Northwest, the area that extends from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, and from the forty-ninth parallel to the Siskiyou Mountains. The Northwest exhibits astonishing geographical diversity and yet the entire bioregion shares a similarity of climate, flora, and fauna. For Nicholas O’Connell, the effects of nature on everyday Northwest life carry over to the region's literature. Although Northwest writers address a number of subjects, the relationship between people and place proves the dominant one, and that has been true since the first tribes settled the region and began telling stories about it, thousands of years ago. Indeed, it is the common thread linking Chief Seattle to Theodore Roethke, Narscissa Whitman to Ursula K. Le Guin, Joaquin Miller to Ivan Doig, Marilynne Robinson to Jack London, Betty MacDonald to Gary Snyder. Tracing the history of Pacific Northwest literary works--from Native American myths to the accounts of explorers and settlers, the effusions of the romantics, the sharply etched stories of the realists, the mystic visions of Northwest poets, and the contemporary explosion of Northwest poetry and prose--O’Connell shows how the most important contribution of Northwest writers to American literature is their articulation of a more spiritual human relationship with landscape. Pacific Northwest writers and storytellers see the Northwest not just as a source of material wealth but as a spiritual homeland, a place to lead a rich and fulfilling life within the whole context of creation. And just as the relationship between people and place serves as the unifying feature of Northwest literature, so also does literature itself possess a perhaps unique ability to transform a landscape into a sacred place.

A realistic but nostalgic look at the land that is as much a state of mind as it is an actual place examines what it means to be a westerner today and how present actions are shaping the landscapes, institutions, culture, and potential of the American West for future generations. Original.

A quartet of the British novelist’s finest works of fiction, including “Lowry’s masterpiece,” Under the Volcano (Los Angeles Times). Malcolm Lowry was an author who poured his soul into his prose, including his struggle with his own demons. Of his most famous work, Under the Volcano, Dawn Powell wrote: “You love the author for the pain of his overwhelming understanding.” In the New YorkHerald Tribune, Mark Schorer commented that few novels “convey so feelingly the agony of alienation, the infernal suffering of disintegration.” D. T. Max wrote in the New Yorker: “[Lowry’s] portrait of an unravelling drunk was unnervingly intimate.” Honored by the Modern Library as one of the one hundred best English language novels of the twentieth century, Under the Volcano is widely acknowledged as “Lowry’s masterpiece” (Los Angeles Times). In this novel and the other works of fiction gathered here, the reader follows Lowry as he confronts the abyss, but also shares in his eternal hope for transcendence. Ultramarine: Lowry’s debut novel, and the only book, other than Under the Volcano, published in his lifetime, is the coming-of-age story of Dana Hilliot, who escapes the bourgeois provincialism of his upper-class British upbringing by joining a crew of weathered, world-weary sailors on a freighter bound for South Asia. Part Moby-Dick, part A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ultramarin draws on Lowry’s own early experience on the sea. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place: Published posthumously, these seven stories and novellas include “Through the Panama,” in which a burned-out, alcoholic writer on a voyage from Vancouver to Europe tries to make sense of the literature that has kept him afloat, while the pulse of his life grows harder to distinguish, and “The Forest Path to Spring,” about a couple that has been through hell finding new life in the beauty and seclusion of a vast forest. “[These] stories and novellas afford glimpses of the whole toward which Lowry was striving.” —The New York Times Under the Volcano: Former British consul Geoffrey Firmin lives alone with his demons in the shadow of two active volcanoes in South Central Mexico. Drowning in alcoholism, Geoffrey makes one last effort to salvage his crumbling life when his estranged wife, Yvonne, arrives in town on the Day of the Dead, 1938. “One of the towering novels of [the twentieth] century.” —The New York Times October Ferry to Gabriola: Edited by Lowry’s widow and frequent collaborator, and released more than a decade after his untimely death, October Ferry to Gabriola is the story of a married couple striving for renewal, sanity, and transcendence in the deep seclusion of the British Columbian forest. “What awaits [the reader] is worth the effort: a species of ecstatic, lyrical prose that has all but gone out of existence.” —The New York Times

Mapping with Words re-conceptualizes early Canadian settler writing as literary cartography. Examining the multitude of ways in which writers expanded the work of mapmakers, it offers fresh readings of both familiar and obscure texts from the nineteenth century.

The American West is a complex region that has inspired generations of writers and artists. Often portrayed as a quintessential landscape that symbolizes promise and progress for a developing nation, the American West is also a diverse space that has experienced conflicting and competing hopes and expectations. While it is frequently imagined as a place enabling dreams of new beginnings for settler communities, it is likewise home to long-standing indigenous populations as well as many other ethnic and racial groups who have often produced different visions of the land. This History encompasses the intricacy of Western American literature by exploring myriad genres and cultural movements, from ecocriticism, settler colonial studies and transnational theory, to race, ethnic, gender and sexuality studies. Written by a host of leading historians and literary critics, this book offers readers insight into the West as a site that sustains canonical and emerging authors alike, and as a region that exceeds national boundaries in addressing long-standing global concerns and developments.

The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature introduces the fiction, poetry and drama of Canada in its historical, political and cultural contexts. In this clear and structured volume, Richard Lane outlines: the history of Canadian literature from colonial times to the present key texts for Canadian First Peoples and the literature of Quebec the impact of English translation, and the Canadian immigrant experience critical themes such as landscape, ethnicity, orality, textuality, war and nationhood contemporary debate on the canon, feminism, postcoloniality, queer theory, and cultural and ethnic diversity the work of canonical and lesser-known writers from Catherine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie to Robert Service, Maria Campbell and Douglas Coupland. Written in an engaging and accessible style and offering a glossary, maps and further reading sections, this guidebook is a crucial resource for students working in the field of Canadian Literature.

Writing in Dust is the first sustained study of prairie Canadian literature from an ecocritical perspective. Drawing on recent scholarship in environmental theory and criticism, Jenny Kerber considers the ways in which prairie writers have negotiated processes of ecological and cultural change in the region from the early twentieth century to the present. The book begins by proposing that current environmental problems in the prairie region can be understood by examining the longstanding tendency to describe its diverse terrain in dualistic terms—either as an idyllic natural space or as an irredeemable wasteland. It inquires into the sources of stories that naturalize ecological prosperity and hardship and investigates how such narratives have been deployed from the period of colonial settlement to the present. It then considers the ways in which works by both canonical and more recent writers ranging from Robert Stead, W.O. Mitchell, and Margaret Laurence to Tim Lilburn, Louise Halfe, and Thomas King consistently challenge these dualistic landscape myths, proposing alternatives for the development of more ecologically just and sustainable relationships among people and between humans and their physical environments. Writing in Dust asserts that “reading environmentally” can help us to better understand a host of issues facing prairie inhabitants today, including the environmental impacts of industrial agriculture, resource extraction, climate change, shifting urban–rural demographics, the significance of Indigenous understandings of human–nature relationships, and the complex, often contradictory meanings of eco-cultural metaphors of alien/invasiveness, hybridity, and wildness.

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.