Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage

by Ronda Arab

Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage addresses the neglected topic of how the masculinity of working men is represented in London plays of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Arguing that labouring men are not always merely a source of laughter, Ronda Arab examines representations of manual workers who emerge as key figures that excite, please, and sometimes frighten the audience, working men whose manliness matters. From Simon Eyre to Jack Cade to Nick Bottom, the working men examined here are physical characters whose acclaimed masculine qualities are associated with their manual-labouring bodies. Manly Mechanicals illuminates a range of work-oriented masculinities that positioned manliness in terms particular to work or the working man’s experience, masculinities that challenged the hegemony of aristocratic models of manhood or aristocratic men as the greatest exemplars of manliness. The early modern theatre was uniquely suited to foreground this subject: since it was in the business of displaying bodies, it could really drive home its constructions of a bodily-centric masculinity.

Ronda Arab is Assistant Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

The Only Poetry That Matters

by Clint Burnham

In The Only Poetry That Matters, novelist and poet Clint Burnham offers the first book-length examination of the Kootenay School of Writing, the notorious group of poets who came to international attention in Vancouver during the 1980s. Founded in 1984 after the closure of David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, the KSW offered writing and publishing courses and hosted colloquia, critical talks, and a reading series featuring local, Canadian, and international writers (which continue to this day). Just as significantly, the KSW came to be associated with a number of "language poets who worked defiantly outside the confines of traditional Canadian poetry.

Clint Burnham is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

The Wheel of Language

by David Coley

In The Wheel of Language, David Coley explores representations of speech in English poetry of the later Middle Ages, proposing that the spoken word, both within Ricardian and Lancastrian poetry and within late medieval English culture, was understood as an efficacious, powerful medium. Representing speech in the poetic text was always a political act, one that enabled authors to criticize and comment upon the social, economic, religious, and institutional changes occurring in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Coley examines the work of Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and the anonymous author of Saint Erkenwald to show how writers manipulated cultural understandings of speech to engage with the crises that defined the later Middle Ages. Ultimately, The Wheel of Language uses the spoken word within the written text to map the complicated and shifting relationships among language, literature, politics, and power.

David Coley is Assistant Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

On the Material

by Stephen Collis

Structured in three parts, On the Material is a meditation on language, geography, socio-economics and the body, moving from the glut of fossil-fuelled consumer excess to the materiality of a single book.

Stephen Collis is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

 Controversy as News Discourse

by Peter Cramer

This book presents a constitutive approach to controversy based on a discourse analysis of news texts, focusing on the role of journalists as participants who shape public controversy for readers. Drawing data from the Reuters Corpus, the project identifies formulas that journalists use in reporting controversy and draws conclusions about how these serve professional and textual functions and how they shape public controversy as a natural, historical, and pragmatic event. While the traditions of dialectic and rhetoric have focused on the prescriptive aim of training participants to resolve controversies in philosophical dialogue or public debate settings, this orientation has tended to preempt questions about where controversy is located and how it is shaped. This project contributes to descriptive, ethnographic research about controversy, using discourse analysis to address a problem in argumentation.

Peter Cramer is Assistant Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place, and Politics

by Peter Dickinson

World Stages, Local Audiences examines the relationship between audience and event, placed-based spectatorship and global politics. Dickinson argues that the forms of intimacy and identification that come from being part of a local performance public (however temporarily or tenuously) provide a potential model for rethinking our roles as world citizens. Using his own experience of recent theatrical practice in Vancouver, Canada as a starting point, Dickinson maps the spaces of connection and contestation, the flows of sentiment and social responsibility, produced by different communities in response to global sports spectacles like the Olympics and World Cup; national, religious, and civic debates on same-sex marriage, the war on terror, and the protocols of mourning; even the extreme weather resulting from climate change. He also analyses how such topics are taken up in the work of playwrights like Moisés Kaufman, Tony Kushner, Terrence McNally, Charles Mee, and Paula Vogel; conceptual, installation, and performance artists like Ai Weiwei, Rebecca Belmore, Paul Chan, and Annie Sprinkle; and dance-theatre artists like Margie Gillis, Crystal Pite, battery opera, DV8 Physical Theatre, and Stan Won’t Dance. In so doing, Dickinson makes an original contribution to the emerging discourse on live art and livability by examining not only the geographical and historical affiliations between different sites of performance, but also the at times radical new social bonds created by audiences witness to those performances. Suggesting that performance offers a way to read the world, and an opportunity to remake it, Dickinson’s study will be especially useful as a teaching text for artists, researchers, and urban planners interested in linking their site-specific practice to some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Peter Dickinson is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

 The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing

by Michael Everton

When Lord Byron toasted Napoleon for executing a bookseller, and when American satirist Fitz-Greene Halleck picketed his New York publisher for trying to starve him, both writers were taking part in a time-honored tradition--calling out publishers as unregenerate capitalists. However apocryphal, both stories speak to what writer Gail Hamilton called "the conflict of the ages," the feud between and writers and publishers over the way the business of print ought to be conducted. The Grand Chorus of Complaint is a study of the terms of that feud in early America. Ranging from the Revolution to the Civil War, Michael Everton explores moral propriety in American literary culture, arguing that debates over the business of authorship and publishing in the first century of the United States were simultaneously debates over the ethics and character of capitalism.

Michael Everton is Assistant Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. 
 

 The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700

edited by James Dougal Fleming

The early modern period used to be known as the Age of Discovery. More recently, it has been troped as an age of invention. But was the invention/discovery binary itself invented, or discovered? This volume investigates the possibility that it was invented, through a range of early modern knowledge practices, centered on the emergence of modern natural science. From Bacon to Galileo, from stagecraft to math, from martyrology to romance, contributors to this interdisciplinary collection examine the period's generation of discovery as an absolute and ostensibly neutral standard of knowledge-production. They further investigate the hermeneutic implications for the epistemological authority that tends, in modernity, still to be based on that standard. The Invention of Discovery, 1500–1700 is a set of attempts to think back behind discovery, considered as a decisive trope for modern knowledge.

James Fleming is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

Canadian Women in Print, 1750—1918

by Carole Gerson

Canadian Women in Print, 1750—1918 is the first historical examination of women’s engagement with multiple aspects of print over some two hundred years, from the settlers who wrote diaries and letters to the New Women who argued for ballots and equal rights. Considering women’s published writing as an intervention in the public sphere of national and material print culture, this book uses approaches from book history to address the working and living conditions of women who wrote in many genres and for many reasons. It received the 2010 Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian literary criticism, awarded annually by ACQL/ALCQ (Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures).

Carole Gerson is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. 

Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada

Christine Kim, Sophie McCall and Melina Baum Singer, editors

Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada considers how the terms of critical debate in literary and cultural studies in Canada have shifted with respect to race, nation, and difference. In asking how Indigenous and diasporic interventions have remapped these debates, the contributors argue that a new “cultural grammar” is at work and attempt to sketch out some of the ways it operates. The essays reference pivotal moments in Canadian literary and cultural history and speak to ongoing debates about Canadian nationalism, postcolonalism, migrancy, and transnationalism. Topics covered include the Asian race riots in Vancouver in 1907, the cultural memory of internment and dispersal of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s, the politics of migrant labour and the “domestic labour scheme” in the 1960s, and the trial of Robert Pickton in Vancouver in 2007. The contributors are particularly interested in how diaspora and indigeneity continue to contribute to this critical reconfiguration and in how conversations about diaspora and indigeneity in the Canadian context have themselves been transformed. is an attempt to address both the interconnections and the schisms between these multiply fractured critical terms as well as the larger conceptual shifts that have occurred in response to national and postnational arguments. 

Christine Kim is an Assistant Professor, and Sophie McCall an Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

Melina Baum Singer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario.

 Epistles on Women and Other Works

by Lucy Aikin, edited by Anne K. Mellor and Michelle Levy

The most important long poem by a woman from the British Romantic era, Aikin's Epistles on Women (1810) is the first text in English to rewrite the entire history of western culture, from the creation story of Genesis through the eighteenth century, from a feminist perspective. Responding to Alexander Pope's misogynistic "Epistle to a Lady," Aikin argues that men's degradation of women has hindered the growth of civilization, and provides historical and literary evidence for her claim that "man cannot degrade woman without degrading himself."

In addition to Epistles on Women, this Broadview Edition also includes a wide selection of poetry, historical writing, fiction, memoir, and literary criticism by Aikin, as well as letters, contemporary reviews, and other feminist historiographies.

Anne K. Mellor is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Michelle Levy is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship

by Sophie McCall

Discussing a wide range of told-to narratives, including ethnography, recorded (auto)biography, testimonial life narrative, documentary, myth, legend, and song, Sophie McCall explores the multifaceted implications of the choices that editors, translators, narrators, and filmmakers make as they channel these narratives into new forms. Focused on the 1990s, when debates over voice and representation were particularly explosive, this comprehensive study examines collaboratively produced texts in conjunction with key political events that have shaped the struggle for Aboriginal rights in Canada. Emphasizing the scope rather than the limits of the told-to narrative, McCall considers how Aboriginal voices have been represented in a range of forums such as public inquiries, commissioners’ reports, and land claims court cases.

A captivating inquiry, First Person Plural offers a vital, interdisciplinary discussion of how told-to narratives contribute to larger debates about Indigenous voice and literary and political sovereignty.

Sophie McCall is Assistant Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations

Deanna Reder and Linda M. Morra, Editors

“The term ‘trickster’ has done much to illustrate the distinct nature of Indigenous literatures and narrative traditions. This volume examines the historical use of this term but also points out its limitations through the lens of Indigenous thought and philosophy. I will have all of my students read and study this important book.”

— Neal McLeod, Trent University, Indigenous Studies

Deanna Reder is Assistant Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. Linda Morra is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Bishop's University.

 E.A. Dupont and His Contribution to British Film

by Paul Matthew St. Pierre

This book discusses the life and career of German Jewish filmmaker Ewald Andre Dupont (1891-1956), as a journalist, screen writer, and director in Berlin, 1913-25, 1931-33, a director at British International Pictures, 1926-31, and a B-movie director in Hollywood, 1925-26, 1933-56.

This book will appeal to film buffs interested in movies and movie stars generally and British and German films and actors of the 1920s and 30s in particular, and to specialized audiences of filmmakers and film historians, academics, and scholars interested in the techniques of film production, such as camera angles and movement, shot composition and lighting, and other aspects of cinematography.

Paul Matthew St. Pierre is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography: Canadian Literary Humorists, Twentieth Century

Paul Matthew St. Pierre, Editor

This award-winning multi-volume series is dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers, while satisfying the standards of librarians, teachers and scholars. Dictionary of Literary Biography provides reliable information in an easily comprehensible format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history.

Dictionary of Literary Biography systematically presents career biographies and criticism of writers from all eras and all genres through volumes dedicated to specific types of literature and time periods.

Paul Matthew St. Pierre is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

The Fabulous Dark Cloister
Romance in England After the Reformation

by Tiffany Jo Werth

Romances were among the most popular books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among both Protestant and Catholic readers. Modeled after Catholic narratives, particularly the lives of saints, these works emphasized the supernatural and the marvelous, themes commonly associated with Catholicism. In this book, Tiffany Jo Werth investigates how post-Reformation English authors sought to discipline romance, appropriating its popularity while distilling its alleged Catholic taint.

Tiffany Jo Werth is Assistant Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

Wit's End: Women's Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy

by Sean Zwagerman

In Wit’s End, Sean Zwagerman offers an original perspective on women’s use of humor as a performative strategy as seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. He argues that women whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men.

Zwagerman seeks to broaden the scope of performativity theory beyond the logical pragmatism of deconstruction and looks to the use of humor in literature as a deliberate stylization of experiences found in real-world social structures, and as a tool for change.

Sean Zwagerman is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.