ENGL 262: Women's Literature

Helen Hoy's absorbing and provocative work raises and addresses questions around 'difference' and the locations of cultural insider and outsider in relation to texts by contemporary Native women prose writers in Canada. Drawing on post-colonial, feminist, post-structuralist and First Nations theory, it explores the problems involved in reading and teaching a variety of works by Native women writers from the perspective of a cultural outsider.

Recollecting is a rich collection of essays that illuminate the lives of late eighteenth-century to mid-twentieth-century Aboriginal women who have been overlooked in sweeping narratives of the history of the West. Some essays focus on individual women while others examine cohorts of women. The authors look beyond the documentary record and standard representations of women, drawing also on records generated by the women themselves, including their beadwork, other material culture, and oral histories.

A great starting point for students seeking an introduction to Atwood and the critical discussions surrounding her work.
Essays include a brief biography, a discussion of the critical reception of Atwood's work, her use of myth, and the themes of Gothicism, spirituality, and trauma that recur throughout her work.

Finalist for the 2018 Toronto Book Award My Conversations With Canadians is the book that "Canada 150" needs. On her first book tour at the age of 26, Lee Maracle was asked a question from the audience, one she couldn?t possibly answer at that moment. But she has been thinking about it ever since.

Recognised as one of the finest living short story writers, Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. She has won the admiration of writers and readers around the world.
For readers who are studying Munro for the first time, a biographical sketch relates the details of her life and four essays survey the critical reception of Munro's work, explore its cultural and historical contexts. Other essays explore Munro's Canadian identity; her aesthetics and narrative devices; the psychology of her characters; and recurrent themes in her work, like secrets, acting, and memory.

From award-winning author Cherie Dimaline comes a tale of struggle hope and the kind of magic that can only happen when you mix the Mississippi and the Georgian Bay.Rudy Bloom has a lot going on; her mother is eating herself to death, a soul crushing museum job, and her flamboyant best friend who humiliates and saves her in equal doses. And then there's a galaxy of odd planets that spin around her head. When Ruby's sent to New Orleans for work, she finds an astronomer in an attic that just might be the way out of her chaotic solar system.