Darias-Beautell, Eva ed. Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of
  English Canada. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012.  ISBN13: 978-1-55458-3638
  
  Book Description:

This collection of essays studies the cultural and literary contexts of narrative texts produced in 
English Canada over the last forty years. It takes as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, 
when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses on the cultural 
identity of the country. That type of metaphor provided the nation with the distinctive elements it was looking for and 
contributed to the creation of a sense of tradition that has survived to the present.

In the decades following the 1970s, however, critics, artists, and writers have repeatedly questioned such a model of 
national identity, still fragile and in need of articulation, by reading the nation from alternative perspectives such 
as multiculturalism, environmentalism, (neo)regionalism, feminism, or postcolonialism. These contributors suggest that 
the artistic and cultural flowering Canada is experiencing at the beginning of the twenty-first century is, to a great 
extent, based on the dismantlement of the images constructed to represent the nation only forty years ago. Through their 
readings of representative primary texts, their contextual analysis, and their selected methodological tools, the authors 
offer a tapestry of alternative approaches to that process of dismantlement. Together, they read as an unruly Penelopiad, 
their unravelling views self-consciously interrogating Canada's (lack of) ghosts.

  
  Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Penelopes? How Unruly? Which Ghosts? Narratives of
  English Canada |

Eva Darias-Beautell

ONE: Rewriting Tradition: Literature, History, and Changing Narratives in
  English Canada since the 1970s | Coral Ann Howells

TWO: (Reading Closely) Calling for the Formation of Asian Canadian Studies
  | Smaro Kamboureli

THREE: When Race Does Not Matter, "except to everyone else": Mixed Race
  Subjectivity and the Fantasy of a Post-Racial Canada in Lawrence Hill and
  Kim Barry Brunhuber | Ana María Fraile

FOUR: Of Aliens, Monsters, and Vampires: Speculative Fantasy's Strategies
  of Dissent (Transnational Feminist Fiction) | Belén Martín-Lucas

FIVE: The Production of Vancouver: Termination Views in the City of Glass |
  Eva Darias-Beautell

SIX: Jane Rule and the Memory of Canada | Richard Cavell

SEVEN: Confession as Antidote to Historical Truth in River Thieves | María
  Jesús Hernáez Lerena

EIGHT: Indigenous Criticism and Indigenous Literature in the 1990s:
  Critical Intimacy | Michèle Lacombe

Contributors
  Index
  Orders and more information:

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