Home Ground and Foreign Territory is an original collection of essays on early Canadian literature in English. Aiming to be both provocative and scholarly, it encompasses a variety of (sometimes opposing) perspectives, subjects, and methods, with the aim of reassessing the field, unearthing neglected texts, and proposing new approaches to canonical authors. Renowned experts in early Canadian literary studies, including D.M.R. Bentley, Mary Jane Edwards, and Carole Gerson, join emerging scholars in a collection distinguished by its clarity of argument and breadth of reference. Together, the essays offer bold and informative contributions to the study of this dynamic literature.

Home Ground and Foreign Territory reaches out far beyond the scope of early Canadian literature. Its multi-disciplinary approach innovates literal studies and appeals to literature specialists and general readership alike.

Aktuell - kritisch - facettenreich.

Die neue Ausgabe mit Interviews, Porträts, Hintergrundgeschichten und vielen Rezensionen zu ausgewählten Neuerscheinungen.

Diesmal am Cover: Judith W. Taschler. Die Autorin erzählt in ihrem neuen Roman bleiben meisterhaft von einer Begegnung im Nachtzug, von Verrat und Liebe.

Außerdem: Die Frankfurter Buchmesse rückt Flandern und die Niederlande in den Fokus. Hans-Dieter Grünefeld hat den Ehrengastunter die Lupe genommen und in aktuellen Romanen ein starkes Geschichtsbewusstsein vorgefunden. Die koreanische Autorin Han Kang schreibt von einer surrealen Verwandlung, der Lyriker Jan Kuhlbrodt brilliert auch in der Gattung Roman und zu Roald Dahls 100. Geburtstag erinnern wir an den Kinderbuchautor, Spion und Schokoladen-Fan.

Long a topic of intricate political and social debate, Canadian identity has come to be understood as fragmented, amorphous, and unstable, a multifaceted and contested space only tenuously linked to traditional concepts of the nation. As Canadians, we are endlessly defining ourselves, seeking to locate our sense of self in relation to some Other. By examining how writers and performers have conceptualized and negotiated issues of personal identity in their work, the essays collected in Selves and Subjectivities investigate emerging representations of self and other in contemporary Canadian arts and culture. Included are essays on iconic poet and musician Leonard Cohen, Governor General award–winning playwright Colleen Wagner, feminist poet and novelist Daphne Marlatt, film director David Cronenberg, poet and writer Hédi Bouraoui, author and media scholar Marusya Bociurkiw, puppeteer Ronnie Burkett, and the Aboriginal rap group War Party.

As critic Diana Brydon has argued, contemporary Canadian writers are "not transcending nation but resituating it." Drawing together themes of gender and sexuality, trauma and displacement, performati­vity, and linguistic diversity, Selves and Subjectivities offers an exciting new contribution to the multivocal dialogue surrounding the Canadian sense of identity.

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While Canadian poetic practices have steadily pluralised since the early 1960s, the poetry review has remained stubbornly constant. You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence is a critical, and at times hilarious survey of reviews of innovative Canadian poetry in English since 1961. What is at stake in the reviewing of poetry? What fantasies are inherent to the practice? How is poetry itself produced in the reviewing of poetry? Why has the reviewing of poetry remained largely invisible to self-reflexive critique? These are some of the many questions You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence dares to ask in its query to determine if poetry reviewers can claim to have the authority they imagine they have over their chosen subject. As a retort to the retrograde trend that is poetry reviewing in Canada, You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence is the first book to detail the production and structure of an "aesthetic conscience" and demonstrate how this functions as the dynamic administrative apparatus of any aesthetic ideology. In short, this book opens for the first time a new and desperately needed channel in Canadian criticism.

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This lively, engagingly written, and theoretically sophisticated study takes a provocatively pointed look at postmodern Canadian poetry through the revealing lenses of its reviews: their ideological and moral blindspots, their lamented critical belatedness, and the "ongoing positions war" of their canonization practices. Mancini's theorizing of the "aesthetic conscience" and his astute analysis of the discourse of the "craft" of poetry are major additions to the critical work on reviewing. This is a "must" for anyone interested in Canadian poetry - and reviewing.

– Linda Hutcheon, author of The Canadian Postmodern; A Poetics of Postmoderism: History, Theory, Fiction; The Politics of Postmodernism.

In You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence, Donato Mancini exposes and delimits the ideology behind a practice of poetry reviewing that functions more like diamond appraisal than intellectual engagement. If you read or write poetry whose clarity, carat, colour or cut is deemed flawed in such a critical political economy, you will find in Mancini’s work a challenge to aesthetic exclusivity that is incisive, expansive and potentially liberatory.

– Wayde Compton

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Tours et détours examine l’inscription du mythe de Babel dans la littérature contemporaine de langue française. Le mythe s’avère une source d’inspiration pour les auteurs examinés qui évoquent justement des phénomènes sociaux actuels, tels que le multiculturalisme, l’immigration, l’exil, la pluralité des langues, la traduction et l’identité. Les ouvrages étudiés, tous écrits en français mais issus de différents contextes linguistiques et culturels, mettent en lumière de nouvelles interprétations du mythe de Babel. Pendant longtemps le mythe de Babel et la pluralité linguistique et culturelle qui s’ensuivent ont été considérés une malédiction pour l’humanité, mais les romans à l’étude remettent en question cette vision négative. Sans exalter les bienfaits de la multiplicité, ils considèrent comment la pluralité linguistique et culturelle enrichit et façonne la production littéraire ainsi que le monde contemporain.

Les auteurs et œuvres étudiés sont

•    Monique Bosco, Babel-Opéra

•    Hédi Bouraoui,  Ainsi parle la tour CN

•    Francine Noël,  Babel, prise deux ou Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique

•    Ernest Pépin, Tambour-Babel

•    Jorge Semprun, L’Algarabie

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Dans son analyse, Catherine Khordoc a decelé différentes interprétations du mythe de Babel prouvant également la richesse de ce récit. Les interprétations positives, qui voient dans le multiculturalisme et le plurilinguisme une bénédiction, prévalent. Le message principal contemporain de Babel est la diversité et la pluralité contrairement aux époques révolues focalisées avec nostalgie sur la recherche de la langue commune perdue et de l'unité.

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« La précision des analyses textuelles et l’approche théorique (au croisement de la littérature, de la psychanalyse et de la sociocritique) rendent justice aux diverses questions liées au multiculturalisme, à l’identité individuelle et collective et à la cohabitation des langues. C’est toutefois lorsqu’elle lie ses interprétations sur le mythe de Babel à un questionnement métaphysique sur l’identité et le monde que l’auteure nous offre quelques-unes de ses plus belles pages, et elles sont nombreuses. Si l’approche reste littéraire, Khordoc propose aussi un contenu culturel et philosophique habilement mené. »

– Adina Balint-Babos, Revue Analyses, vol. 8, no 1, hiver 2013

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“Khordoc’s study left this reviewer with a way to explore facets of the Babel myth in other texts besides those in the study. It is recommended as both a historical review of the myth itself and as a companion for those interested in the novels under scrutiny.

– Mary L. Poteau-Tralie, Rider University (NJ), French Review

Alexander Pechmann erzählt die Geschichte einer exzentrischen Passion in zwanzig vergnüglichen Kapiteln.

Im wunderbaren »Haus des Bücherdiebs« sind sie versammelt: all die kuriosen, spannenden, berührenden und skurrilen Geschichten, die sich um berühmte Bibliophile, passionierte Sammler und trickreiche Diebe ranken. Dabei erweist sich der Autor seinem Gegenstand als ebenbürtig, denn er beherrscht die Kunst des kurzweiligen und zugleich ernsthaften Erzählens. Seine Geschichten sind essayistische Punktlandungen, durchdrungen von einer großen heiteren Bücherleidenschaft! Ein Kopfkissenbuch, das man von Anfang bis Ende lesen kann oder auch irgendwo aufschlägt und sich unweigerlich festliest

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Fluchen macht Laune

»Mit Verlaub, Herr Präsident, Sie sind ein Arschloch. « – »Deine Mutter klaut bei KiK!« – »Du Opfer!« Die Welt des Fluchens steckt voller Überraschungen und spannender Geschichten. Unterhaltsam erzählt Rolf-Bernhard Essig, womit Materazzi einst Zidane zur Weißglut trieb; weshalb man in anderen Ländern immer die Mütter auf dem Kieker hat; was das Fluchen magisch und den Tabubruch zum Vergnügen macht; wie sich Mann und Frau gegenseitig und Autofahrer untereinander zum Teufel jagen; was die prominentesten Entgleisungen waren; welche Beleidigungen mit dem Rausreißen der Zunge geahndet wurden und warum die »Blöde Kuh!« heute immerhin noch 700,– € kosten kann. Ein Buch, das Lust auf schöne Schimpfkanonaden macht.

Dieser unterhaltsame Fluchbegleiter erklärt, warum man selbst mit Nichtskönnern, blöden Kühen, Honks oder Vollpfosten viel Freude haben kann und wie man so richtig Dampf ablässt. Ein höchst amüsantes Plädoyer für schöneres Schimpfen.

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Robert D. Denham pursues his quest to uncover the links between Northrop Frye and writers and others who directly influenced his thinking but about whom he did not write an extensive commentary. 

The first chapter is about Frye’s reading of Patanjali, the founder of the philosophy of Hindu yoga, while the second, discusses cultural mythographer Giambattista Vico, literary history and poetic language. 

The focus of Frye’s criticism was the verbal arts, but he also had an abiding interest in both the visual arts and music; hence Frye’s admiration of J.S. Bach. The essay on Tolkien examines the tendency in literary history to return from irony to myth, as well as the role that Tolkien played in Frye’s fiction-writing fantasies. 

In subsequent chapters, Denham explores Frye’s preference for romance and his critique of realism, which run parallel to the views of Oscar Wilde, and their strong shared convictions about the centripetal thrust of art, and about criticism being as creative as literature. Frye’s appreciation for Whitehead’s concept of interpenetration in Science in the Modern World became a key feature of Frye’s speculations about the highest reaches of literature and religion. Frye is clearly indebted to Martin Buber, particularly his influential meditation I and Thou. Aristotle, an important influence upon Frye, was partially filtered through R.S. Crane and his The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Finally, the relationship between Frye and his Oxford tutor Edmund Blunden are explored, while the last is an essay on Frye and M.H. Abrams on how Frye’s critical project might be viewed developed in Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp.

This book is published in English.

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Robert D. Denham poursuit son examen d’écrivains et autres influences qui ont marqué l’éminent critique Northrop Frye, mais sur lesquels celui-ci n’avait pas consacré de réflexions très développées. 

Le premier chapitre porte sur la lecture que fait Frye de Patanjali, le fondateur de la philosophie du yoga hindou, et le deuxième, sur le mythographe culturel Giambattista Vico, l’histoire littéraire et le langage poétique. 

Frye s’intéressait aux arts visuels et à la musique et Denham approfondit l’influence de J.S. Bach sur Frye. Le chapitre sur Tolkien porte sur la tendance en histoire littéraire de passer de l’ironie au mythe, mais aussi sur l’ascendant de Tolkien sur la fiction fantaisiste de Frye. 

Dans les chapitres suivants, Denham explore la préférence de Frye pour le romantique et sa critique du réalisme, qui trouvent écho chez Oscar Wilde, de même que leur conviction, partagée, de l’importance de l’art, et de la critique comme étant aussi créative que la littérature. L’admiration de Frye pour le concept d’interpénétration présenté dans le Science in the Modern World de Whitehead est devenue un élément clé des réflexions de Frye sur la portée de la littérature et de la religion. 

Denham explore aussi le lien entre Frye et Martin Buber, dont la méditation I and Thou l’a beaucoup inspiré, et celui entre Frye et R.S. Crane, qui parle beaucoup d’Aristote dans son ouvrage The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Le chapitre 9 explore la relation entre Frye et son tuteur d’Oxford, Edmund Blunden, alors que le dernier chapitre porte sur Frye et M.H. Abrams, et notamment sur le projet critique de Frye compris à la lumière du cadre sur la théorie critique développé par Abrams dans The Mirror and the Lamp.

Ce livre est publié en anglais.

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Art historians, biographers, and other researchers have long drawn on Van Gogh’s voluminous correspondence—more than eight hundred letters—for insights into both his personal struggles and his art. But the letters, while often admired for their literary quality, have rarely been approached as literature. In this volume, Patrick Grant sets out to explore the question, “By what criteria do we judge Van Gogh's letters to be, specifically, literary?” Drawing, especially, on Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualization of self-awareness as an ongoing dialogue between “self” and “other,” Grant examines the ways in which Van Gogh’s letters raise, from within themselves, questions and issues to which they also respond. Their literary quality, he argues, derives in part from this “double-voiced discourse”—from the power of the letters to thematize, through their own internal dialogues, the very structure of self-fashioning itself. Far from merely reproducing the narrative of the artist’s personal progress, “the letters enable readers to recognize how necessary yet open-ended, constrained yet liberating, confined yet unpredictable, are the means by which people seek to shape a place for themselves in the world.”

This volume builds on Grant’s earlier analysis of Van Gogh’s correspondence, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study (AU Press, 2014), a study in which he approached the letters from a literary critical standpoint, delving into key patterns of metaphors and concepts. In the present volume, he provides instead a literary theoretical analysis of the letters, one that draws them more fully into the domain of modern literary studies. In his deft and keenly perceptive reading, Grant deconstructs the binaries that surface in both Van Gogh’s writing and painting, discusses the narrative dimensions of the letter-sketches and the recurring themes of fantasy, belief, and self-surrender, and draws attention to Van Gogh’s own understanding of the permeable boundary between words and visual art. Viewing the letters as an integrated body of discourse, “My Own Portrait in Writing” offers a theoretically informed interpretation of Van Gogh’s literary achievement that is, quite literally, without precedent.

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"A deep and creative inquiry suggesting meaningful structures for understanding the richness of the artist's life and work. Grant succeeds in bringing Van Gogh's letters into the domain of modern literary studies, and demonstrates that the effort opens exciting new ways of understanding the radical tensions, puzzling transformations, and internal frustrations expressed by the artist in writing, drawing, and painting."

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Mit seinem neuen Roman "Inferno" setzt Dan Brown eine Erfolgsgeschichte fort, die alle Rekorde bricht. Robert Langdon, der Symbolforscher aus Harvard, wird dabei mit einem der berühmtesten und dunkelsten Meisterwerke der Literatur konfrontiert: Dantes "Göttlicher Komödie".

Die in der "Göttlichen Komödie" enthaltene imposante Darstellung einer Reise durch die drei Reiche des Jenseits - beginnend in der Hölle (Inferno) - fasst Fritz R. Glunk in seinem Werk eindrucksvoll zusammen und ermöglicht somit einen spannenden Einblick in eines der bedeutendsten Werke der Weltliteratur.

Ergänzt wird diese Einführung durch den Originaltext von Dantes Meisterwerk.