Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara Godard, one of the most original and wide-ranging literary critics, theorists, teachers, translators, and public intellectuals Canada has ever produced. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars, extend Godard’s work through engagements with her published texts in the spirit of creative interchange and intergenerational relay of ideas. Their essays resonate with Godard’s innovative scholarship situated at the intersection of such fields as literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, feminist theory, arts criticism, social activism, institutional analysis, and public memory. In pursuit of unexpected linkages and connections, the essays venture beyond generic and disciplinary borders, zeroing in on Godard’s transdisciplinary practice that has been extremely influential in the way that it framed questions and modeled interventions for the study of Canadian, Québécois, and Acadian literatures and cultures. The authors work with the archives ranging from Canadian government policies and documents, to publications concerning white supremacist organizations in Southern Ontario, online materials from a Toronto-based transgender arts festival, a photographic mural installation commemorating the Montreal Massacre, and the works of such writers and artists as Marie Clements, Nicole Brossard, France Daigle, Nancy Huston, Yvette Nolan, Gail Scott, Denise Desautels, Louise Warren, Rebecca Belmore, Vera Frenkel, Robert Lepage, and Janet Cardiff.

This book sets out a new framework for a feminist history of translators, drawing on the legacy of Canadian scholar Barbara Godard and her work in establishing the Canadian literary landscape as a means of exploring agency in feminist translation studies and its implications for cross-disciplinary debates. The volume is organised in three sections, establishing feminist translator studies as its own approach, examining these dynamics at work in a comprehensive portrait of Barbara Godard’s scholarly and literary history, and looking ahead to future directions. In situating the discussion on Godard and Canadian literary history, Elena Castellano calls attention to a geographic context in which translation and its practice has been at the heart of debates around national identity and intersected with the rise of feminism and feminist literary scholarship. The book demonstrates how an in-depth exploration of the agency of an individual stakeholder, whose activities spanned diverse communities and oft conflicting interests, can engage in key questions at the intersection of nation-making, translation, and feminism, paving the way for future research and the further development of feminist translator studies as methodological framework. This book will be of interest to scholars in translation studies, feminist literature, cultural history, and Canadian literature.

As new comparative perspectives on race and ethnicity open up, scholars are identifying and exploring fresh topics and questions in an effort to reconceptualize ethnic studies and draw attention to nation–based approaches that may have previously been ignored. This volume, by recognizing the complexity of cultural production in both its diasporic and national contexts, seeks a nuanced critical approach in order to look ahead to the future of transnational literary studies. The majority of the chapters, written by literary and ethnic studies scholars, analyze ethnic literatures of the United States which, given the nation’s history of slavery and immigration, form an integral part of mainstream American literature today. While the primary focus is literary, the chapters analyze their specific topics from perspectives drawn from several disciplines, including cultural studies and history. This book is an exciting and insightful resource for scholars with interests in transnationalism, American literature and ethnic studies.

The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature provides a broad-ranging introduction to some of the key critical fields, genres, and periods in Canadian literary studies. The essays in this volume, written by prominent theorists in the field, reflect the plurality of critical perspectives, regional and historical specializations, and theoretical positions that constitute the field of Canadian literary criticism across a range of genres and historical periods. The volume provides a dynamic introduction to current areas of critical interest, including (1) attention to the links between the literary and the public sphere, encompassing such topics as neoliberalism, trauma and memory, citizenship, material culture, literary prizes, disability studies, literature and history, digital cultures, globalization studies, and environmentalism or ecocriticism; (2) interest in Indigenous literatures and settler-Indigenous relations; (3) attention to multiple diasporic and postcolonial contexts within Canada; (4) interest in the institutionalization of Canadian literature as a discipline; (5) a turn towards book history and literary history, with a renewed interest in early Canadian literature; (6) a growing interest in articulating the affective character of the literary - including an interest in affect theory, mourning, melancholy, haunting, memory, and autobiography. The book represents a diverse array of interests -- from the revival of early Canadian writing, to the continued interest in Indigenous, regional, and diasporic traditions, to more recent discussions of globalization, market forces, and neoliberalism. It includes a distinct section dedicated to Indigenous literatures and traditions, as well as a section that reflects on the discipline of Canadian literature as a whole.

Designed as a contribution to the field of transnational comparative American studies, this book focuses on gender in life writing that exceeds the boundaries of traditional genres. The contributors engage with authors who bend genres to speak gender as it manifests in multiple shapes in different geographic locations across the Americas, and especially as it intersects with race and migration, war and colonialism, illness and ageing. In addition to supplying new insights into the established sites of auto/biographical production such as memoir, archive, and oral history, the book explores experimental mixed forms such as selfies, auto-theory, auto/bio comics, and autobiogeography. By combining this multi-genre and multi-media perspective with a multi-generational approach to life writing, the book showcases a spectrum of established and emerging critical voices, many of whom have been influenced by the work of Marlene Kadar, the Canadian life writing scholar whose interventions have expanded the feminist and interdisciplinary methods of life writing studies. Tracing the intergenerational relay of ideas, this collection fosters dialogue across the western hemisphere, and will be useful to those studying life writing exchanges between North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. This book was originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

This volume explores the different mechanisms and forms of expression used by women to come to terms with the past, focusing on the variety and complexity of women’s narratives of displacement within the context of Central and Eastern Europe. The first part addresses the quest for personal (post)memory from the perspective of the second and third generations. The touching collaboration established in reconstructing individual and family (post)memories offers invaluable insights into the effects of displacement, coping mechanisms, and resilience. Adopting the idea that the text itself becomes a site of (post)memory, the second part of the volume brings into discussion different sites and develops further this topic in relation to the creative process and visual text. The last part questions the past in relation to trauma and identity displacement in the countries where abusive regimes destroyed social bonds and had a lasting impact on the people lives.

This collection of essays focuses on the varied and complex roles that editors have played in the production of literary and scholarly texts in Canada. With contributions from a wide range of participants who have played seminal roles as editors of Canadian literatures—from nineteenth-century works to the contemporary avant-garde, from canonized texts to anthologies of so-called minority writers and the oral literatures of the First Nations—this collection is the first of its kind. Contributors offer incisive analyses of the cultural and publishing politics of editorial practices that question inherited paradigms of literary and scholarly values. They examine specific cases of editorial production as well as theoretical considerations of editing that interrogate such key issues as authorial intentionality, textual authority, historical contingencies of textual production, circumstances of publication and reception, the pedagogical uses of edited anthologies, the instrumentality of editorial projects in relation to canon formation and minoritized literatures, and the role of editors as interpreters, enablers, facilitators, and creators. Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada situates editing in the context of the growing number of collaborative projects in which Canadian scholars are engaged, which brings into relief not only those aspects of editorial work that entail collaborating, as it were, with existing texts and documents but also collaboration as a scholarly practice that perforce involves co-editing.