Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic / / Brenda Beckman-Long.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Beckman-Long, Brenda,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2018]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (176 p.)

Throughout her literary and critical career, Canadian writer Carol Shields (1935-2003) resisted simple categorization. Her novels are elegant puzzles that confront the reader with the ambiguity of meaning and narrative, yet their position within Shields' critical feminist project has, until now, been obscured.In Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic, Brenda Beckman-Long illuminates that project through the study of Shields' extensive oeuvre, including her fiction and criticism. Beckman-Long brings depth to her analysis through close readings of six novels, including the award-winning The Stone Diaries. Elliptical, open-ended, and concerned with women writing about women, these novels reveal Shields' critique of dominant masculine discourses and her deep engagement with the long tradition of women's life writing. Beckman-Long's original archival research attests to Shields' preoccupation with the changing efforts of waves of feminist activism and writing.A much needed reappraisal of Shields's innovative work, Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic contributes to the scholarship on life writing and autobiography, literary criticism, and feminist and critical theory.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Permissions -- Introduction: Shields as Writer-Critic: Autobiography and the Politics of Self-Representation -- Chapter One: The Problem of the Genre: The Autobiographical Pact in Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden -- Chapter Two: The Problem of the Author: Absence and the Epitaph of Victim in Swann -- Chapter Three: The Problem of the Body: Romance as Metaphysical Ruin in The Republic of Love -- Chapter Four: The Problem of the Subject: The Stone Diaries as an Apocryphal Journal -- Chapter Five: The Problem of the Subject of Feminism: Unless as Meta-Autobiography -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index