Brébeuf's Ghost

Brébeuf's Ghost
Author: Daniel David Moses
Publisher: Exile Editions, Ltd.
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2000
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781550965292

In the year 1649, the Iroquois are on the warpath, killing traitors and Christians at the mission of Sainte Marie. The shaman is worried about windigos and the Black Robe about the fires of hell. Worlds collide in a renowned First Nations playwright's epic, dark, funny, and healing vision of early Canada.

The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature

The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature
Author: James H. Cox
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 769
Release: 2014-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199914044

Over the course of the last twenty years, Native American and Indigenous American literary studies has experienced a dramatic shift from a critical focus on identity and authenticity to the intellectual, cultural, political, historical, and tribal nation contexts from which these Indigenous literatures emerge. The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature reflects on these changes and provides a complete overview of the current state of the field. The Handbook's forty-three essays, organized into four sections, cover oral traditions, poetry, drama, non-fiction, fiction, and other forms of Indigenous American writing from the seventeenth through the twenty-first century. Part I attends to literary histories across a range of communities, providing, for example, analyses of Inuit, Chicana/o, Anishinaabe, and Métis literary practices. Part II draws on earlier disciplinary and historical contexts to focus on specific genres, as authors discuss Indigenous non-fiction, emergent trans-Indigenous autobiography, Mexicanoh and Spanish poetry, Native drama in the U.S. and Canada, and even a new Indigenous children's literature canon. The third section delves into contemporary modes of critical inquiry to expound on politics of place, comparative Indigenism, trans-Indigenism, Native rhetoric, and the power of Indigenous writing to communities of readers. A final section thoroughly explores the geographical breadth and expanded definition of Indigenous American through detailed accounts of literature from Indian Territory, the Red Atlantic, the far North, Yucatán, Amerika Samoa, and Francophone Quebec. Together, the volume is the most comprehensive and expansive critical handbook of Indigenous American literatures published to date. It is the first to fully take into account the last twenty years of recovery and scholarship, and the first to most significantly address the diverse range of texts, secondary archives, writing traditions, literary histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field.

Canadian Gothic

Canadian Gothic
Author: Cynthia Sugars
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2014-01-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1783160772

This book explores the Gothic tradition in Canadian literature by tracing a distinctive reworking of the British Gothic in Canada. It traces the ways the Gothic genre was reinvented for a specifically Canadian context. On the one hand, Canadian writers expressed anxiety about the applicability of the British Gothic tradition to the colonies; on the other, they turned to the Gothic for its vitalising rather than unsettling potential. After charting this history of Gothic infusion, Canadian Gothic turns its attention to the body of Aboriginal and diasporic writings that respond to this discourse of national self-invention from a post-colonial perspective. These counter-narratives unsettle the naturalising force of this invented history, rendering the sense of Gothic comfort newly strange. The Canadian Gothic tradition has thus been a conflicted one, which reimagines the Gothic as a form of cultural sustenance. This volume offers an important reconsideration of the Gothic legacy in Canada.

Ghost Brothers

Ghost Brothers
Author: Rony Blum
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2005-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0773572465

Devastating losses caused by diseases such as smallpox led to an epidemic of bereavement among the Natives. This loss resonated with the French, who had dealt with smaller epidemics in France and were also mourning their absent communities through a nostalgia for home. Blum traces how ghosts provided transgenerational and transcultural links that guided understanding rather than encouraging violence. Ghost Brothers insightfully examines the process of this colonial interdependent alliance between Native and European worlds.

Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures

Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures
Author: Stefan Helgesson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 589
Release: 2020-09-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110583186

The Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures is the first globally comprehensive attempt to chart the rich field of world literatures in English. Part I navigates different usages of the term ‘world literature’ from an historical point of view. Part II discusses a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to world literature. This is also where the handbook’s conceptualisation of ‘Anglophone world literatures’ – in the plural – is developed and interrogated in juxtaposition with proximate fields of inquiry such as postcolonialism, translation studies, memory studies and environmental humanities. Part III charts sociological approaches to Anglophone world literatures, considering their commodification, distribution, translation and canonisation on the international book market. Part IV, finally, is dedicated to the geographies of Anglophone world literatures and provides sample interpretations of literary texts written in English.

Eaters of the Dead

Eaters of the Dead
Author: Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-09-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789144450

Spanning myth, history, and contemporary culture, a terrifying and illuminating excavation of the meaning of cannibalism. Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to medieval Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tales of being consumed are both universal and universally terrifying. In this book, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explores the full range of monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, wendigos, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, Wetmore considers everything from ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, to actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies. By examining these seemingly inhuman acts, Eaters of the Dead reveals that those who consume corpses can teach us a great deal about human nature—and our deepest human fears.

Crosses in the Sky

Crosses in the Sky
Author: Mark Bourrie
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 604
Release: 2024-05-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1771966181

From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr's death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit's "martyrdom" became one of the founding myths of Canada. In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary's fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf's accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.

Storied Communities

Storied Communities
Author: Hester Lessard
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0774818824

Political communities are defined, and often contested, through stories. Scholars have long recognized that two foundational sets of stories � narratives of contact and narratives of arrival � helped to define settler societies. Storied Communities disrupts the assumption that Indigenous and immigrant identities fall into two separate streams of analysis. The authors juxtapose narratives of contact and narratives of arrival as they explore key themes such as narrative form, the nature of storytelling in the political realm, and the institutional and theoretical implications of foundation narratives. By doing so, they open up new ways to imagine, sustain, and transform political communities.

Shakespeare in Quebec

Shakespeare in Quebec
Author: Jennifer Drouin
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2014-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442647973

In Shakespeare in Québec, Jennifer Drouin analyses representations of nation and gender in Shakespearean adaptations written in Québec since the Quiet Revolution. Using postcolonial and gender theory, Drouin traces the evolution of discourses of nation and gender in Québec from the Conquest of New France to the present, and she elaborates a theory of adaptation specific to Shakespeare studies. Drouin's book explains why Québécois playwrights seem so obsessed with rewriting “le grand Will,” what changes they make to the Shakespearean text, and how the differences between Shakespeare and the adaptations engage the nationalist, feminist, and queer concerns of Québec society. Close readings from ten plays investigate the radical changes to content that allowed Québécois playwrights to advocate for political change and contribute to the hot debates of the Quiet Revolution, the 1970 October Crisis, the 1980 and 1995 referenda, the rise of feminism, and the emergence of AIDS. Drouin reveals not only how Shakespeare has been adapted in Québec but also how Québécois adaptations have evolved in response to changes in the political climate. As a critical analysis in English of rich but largely ignored French plays, Shakespeare in Québec bridges Canada's “two solitudes.”