Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman

Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman PDF Author: John Lennox
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442655739
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Over a period of forty years, from 1947 to 1986, Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman wrote to each other constantly. The topics they wrote about were as wide-ranging as their interests and experiences, and their correspondence encompassed many of the varied events of their lives. Laurence's letters - of which far more are extant than Wisman's - reveal much about the impact of her years in Africa, motherhood, her anxieties and insecurities, and her developement as a writer. Wiseman, whose literary success came early in her career, provided a sympathetic ear and constant encouragement to Laurence. The editors' selection has been directed by an interest in these women as friends and writers. Their experiences in the publishing world offer an engaging perspective on literary apprenticeship, rejection, and success. The letters reveal the important roles both women played in the buoyant cultural nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s. This valuable collection of previously unpublished primary material will be essential to scholars working on Canadian literature and of great interest to the general reading. The introduction contextualizes the correspondence and the annotations to the letters help to clarify the text. The Laurence-Wiseman letters offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives and friendship of two remarkable women whose personal correspondence was written with verve, compassion, and wit.

Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman

Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman PDF Author: John Lennox
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442655739
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Over a period of forty years, from 1947 to 1986, Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman wrote to each other constantly. The topics they wrote about were as wide-ranging as their interests and experiences, and their correspondence encompassed many of the varied events of their lives. Laurence's letters - of which far more are extant than Wisman's - reveal much about the impact of her years in Africa, motherhood, her anxieties and insecurities, and her developement as a writer. Wiseman, whose literary success came early in her career, provided a sympathetic ear and constant encouragement to Laurence. The editors' selection has been directed by an interest in these women as friends and writers. Their experiences in the publishing world offer an engaging perspective on literary apprenticeship, rejection, and success. The letters reveal the important roles both women played in the buoyant cultural nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s. This valuable collection of previously unpublished primary material will be essential to scholars working on Canadian literature and of great interest to the general reading. The introduction contextualizes the correspondence and the annotations to the letters help to clarify the text. The Laurence-Wiseman letters offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives and friendship of two remarkable women whose personal correspondence was written with verve, compassion, and wit.

Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman

Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman PDF Author: Margaret Laurence
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802080905
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
The correspondence between Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman covers a period of 40 years, from 1947-1986, and encompasses the professional and personal developments, accomplishments, disappointments, and satisfactions of that period.

The Force of Vocation

The Force of Vocation PDF Author: Ruth Panofsky
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887553737
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Adele Wiseman was a seminal figure in Canadian letters. Always independent and wilful, she charted her own literary career, based on her unfailing belief in her artistic vision. In The Force of Vocation, the first book on Wiseman's writing life, Ruth Panofsky presents Wiseman as a writer who doggedly and ambitiously perfected her craft, sought a wide audience for her work, and refused to compromise her work for marketability.Based on previously unpublished archival material and personal interviews with publishers, editors, and writers, The Force of Vocation charts Wiseman's career from her internationally acclaimed first novel, The Sacrifice, through her near career-ending decisions to move into drama and non-fiction, to her many years as a dedicated mentor to other writers. In the process, Panofsky presents a remarkable and compelling story of the intricate negotiations and complex relationships that exist among authors, editors, and publishers.

Margaret Laurence

Margaret Laurence PDF Author: Donez Xiques
Publisher: Dundurn
ISBN: 1459714695
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Margaret Laurence: The Making of a Writer is an engaging narrative that contains new and important findings about Laurence's life and career. This biography reveals the challenges, successes, and failures of the long apprenticeship that preceded the publication of the The Stone Angel, Laurence's first commercially successful novel. Donez Xiques demonstrates the importance of Margaret Laurence's early work as a journalist in her development as a writer and covers her return to Canada from Africa in the late 1950s. She details the significance of Laurence's "Vancouver years" as well as the challenges of her year in London prior to settling at Elm Cottage in Buckinghamshire, when Laurence stood on the verge of success. The Margaret Laurence known to most people is a public figure of the 1960s and 1970s; matriarchal, matronly, and accomplished. The story of her early years in the harsh setting of the Canadian Prairies during the 1930s - years of drought and the Great Depression - and of her African years has never before been chronicled with the thoroughness and vividness that Xiques provides for the reader. Appended to this powerful new biography is a short story by Margaret Laurence that has never before been published and two other stories that have not been widely available. They indicate the range of her concerns and show a marked departure from her fiction in The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories and A Bird in the House. Readers will benefit from the extensive research in this full and vibrant portrait of one of the most revered writers of twentieth-century Canadian literature.

Intimate Strangers

Intimate Strangers PDF Author: Margaret Laurence
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887553303
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
The books of Margaret Laurence and Gabrielle Roy are among the most beloved in Canadian literature. In 1976, when both were at the height of their careers, they began a seven-year written correspondence. Laurence had just published her widely acclaimed The Diviners, for which she won her second Governor-General’s Award, and Roy had returned to the centre of the literary stage with a series of books that many critics now consider her richest and most mature works. Although both women had been born and raised in Manitoba—Laurence in Neepawa and Roy in St. Boniface—they met only once, in 1978 at a conference in Calgary. As these letters reveal, their prairie background created a common understanding of place and culture that bridged the differences of age and language. Here Laurence and Roy discuss everything from their own and each other’s writing, to Canadian politics, housekeeping, publishing, and their love of nature. With a thoughtful introduction by Paul G. Socken, these lovely and intimate letters record the moving, affectionate friendship between two remarkable women.

Racial, Ethnic, Gender and Class Representations in Margaret Laurence’s Writings

Racial, Ethnic, Gender and Class Representations in Margaret Laurence’s Writings PDF Author: Andreea Topor-Constantin
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443850969
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Racial, Ethnic, Gender and Class Representations in Margaret Laurence’s Writings is a study on Canada, Canadian literature and Margaret Laurence’s works in particular, thus addressing various kinds of readership. This book avoids the danger of limiting the approach to solely focusing attention on Canada by presenting a thorough analysis of various literary genres, allowing the book to be of interest to all literature lovers. Furthermore, the book explores the parallelism between life and fiction, emphasising Laurence’s biographic and realist elements and their influence on the writer’s fictional writing, revealing real and imaginary worlds which would appeal to anybody’s literary needs. This major contribution to the already existent criticism of Margaret Laurence’s works lies in the analysis of her work as an entity, balancing both terms of the common binary oppositions: fiction versus non-fiction, Africa versus Canada, white versus Black or Metis. In spite of critical comments which might be raised, Andreea Topor-Constantin comments on how the voice of the marginal makes itself heard throughout the author’s books, underlying Laurence’s emphasis on characterisation and her genuine concern for people. This book covers all aspects of Laurence’s life and fiction: from the African to the writer’s Canadian background, from adults’ to children’s literature, from novels to short stories, from essays to letters, in order to challenge readers’ perceptions of race, ethnicity, gender and class.

Alien Heart

Alien Heart PDF Author: Lyall Powers
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887553117
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
Today, almost two decades after her death, Margaret Laurence remains one of Canada's best-known and most beloved writers. Twice winner of the Governor General's Award for fiction, she was, as the late William French wrote, "more profoundly admired than any other Canadian novelist of her generation." Lyall Powers is both a respected scholar of literature and a lifelong friend of Laurence's, having met her when they were students together at Winnipeg's United College in the 1940s. Alien Heart is the first full-length biography of Margaret that combines personal knowledge and insights about Laurence with a study of her work, which often paralleled the events and concerns in her own life. Drawing on letters, personal correspondence, journals, and interviews, Lyall Powers discusses the struggles and triumphs Laurence experienced in her efforts to understand herself in the roles of writer, wife, mother, and public figure. He portrays a deeply compassionate and courageous woman, who yet felt troubled by conflicting demands. While Laurence's work is not directly autobiographical, Powers illustrates how her writing expressed many of the same dilemmas, and how the resolution her characters achieved in the novels and stories had an impact on Laurence's own life. Powers provides an in-depth analysis of all Laurence's work, including the early African essays, fiction, and translations, and her books for children, as well as the beloved Manawaka fiction. The study clearly shows the progression and expression of Laurence as a writer of great humanity and conscience.

Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace

Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace PDF Author: Linda M. Morra
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1554584302
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women’s archives in Canada. The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present. From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae—missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication—that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.

Dangerous Writing

Dangerous Writing PDF Author: Carmen Luz Fuentes-Vásquez
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401209170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This book examines the literary construction of personal identity through autobiographical narratives by three significant writers analysed together for the first time: the Scottish Willa Muir (1890-1970), the Canadian Margaret Laurence (1926-1987), and the New Zealander Janet Frame (1924-2004). These apparently dissimilar authors suffered not only geographical, but also political marginality: they were women from the working-class or struggling middle-class, striving to be considered as professional writers, and emerging from countries that might be felt to be under the shadows of economic and political world powers such as England and the United States. During their lifetimes, they exerted themselves to overcome prejudices about class, gender and ethnicity. They experienced war and the post-war era, and lived through most of the twentieth century, being accurate witnesses and critics of their times. As it discusses major writers who are iconic for the development of the literatures of their respective countries, this book also attracts readers who are interested in learning more about the lives of these remarkable women, the way their socio-historical and geographical circumstances affected their writing and how they expressed such concerns in their autobiographies and other fictional and non-fictional works, besides considering them in relation to contemporary women writers —and autobiographers— who underwent similar experiences.

Heart of a Stranger

Heart of a Stranger PDF Author: Margaret Laurence
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 9780888644077
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Travel was closely connected to Margaret Laurence’s creativity. Laurence realized that her travels, especially to Africa, provided her with new perspectives on Canada. Heart of a Stranger, originally published in 1976, is a fascinating travelogue chronicling Laurence's geographical journeys to many lands and historic places. She notes "I saw, somewhat to my surprise, that they are all, in one way or another, travel articles. And by travel, I mean both those voyages which are outer and those voyages which are inner." Laurence writes about her travels to Egypt in "Good Morning to the Grandson of Ramesses the Second," to Scotland in "Road from the Isles," and to Greece in "Sayonara, Agamemnon." In "The Very Best Intentions" Laurence sees herself as a "stranger in a strange land" in Ghana. She reflects on the many places she lived in "Put Out One or Two More Flags," "Down East," "The Shack" and "Where the World Began." Professor Nora Foster Stovel’s new introduction "Heart of a Traveller" explores how Laurence’s experiences in other lands influenced and shaped her writing. She contends that "Heart of a Stranger constitutes a concealed autobiography, for, in chronicling her literal life journey, Laurence also reveals her spiritual odyssey."