Books
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Alice Munro and the Art of Time
By Laura K. Davis Published by the University of Alberta Press, 2025 In Alice Munro and the Art of Time, Laura K. Davis demonstrates how one of the world’s greatest writers of short stories challenged and reconfigured traditional assumptions about time. In chapters that analyze selected stories and collections from across Munro’s career, Davis examines the formal and conceptual function of temporality in Munro’s oeuvre, considering the relationship between the past and the present, material experiences of being, story structure, memory, and memoir. While place has been considered extensively by scholars of the Nobel-Prize-winning author’s work, time has not been given equal attention, until now. Clear and compelling interpretations of Munro’s stories offer insights into her writing process, her representations of character and setting, and the complexities of her narrative techniques—which often evade linearity and chronology, emphasizing, instead, revision, repetition, and the body. By highlighting the connections between time and various tropes in Munro’s work, including identity, ephemerality, and environmental change, this study provides new, exciting avenues for engaging with Munro’s work. As Davis reveals, Munro’s intricate narrative structures resist dominant conceptions of time and instead epitomize a complex, diverse understanding of life, often centering women’s knowledge while simultaneously foregrounding the possibilities and necessity of performativity, inclusion, and change. For more information and to order the book, click here. |
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Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland, Letters
Edited by Laura K. Davis and Linda M. Morra Published by the University of Alberta Press, 2018 Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland--one of Canada's most beloved writers and one of Canada's most significant publishers--enjoyed an unusual rapport. In this collection of annotated letters, readers gain rare insight into the private side of these literary icons. Their correspondence reveals a professional relationship that evolved into deep friendship over a period of enormous cultural change. Both were committed to the idea of Canadian writing: in a very real sense, their mutual and separate work helped bring "Canadian Literature" into being. With its insider's view of the book business from the later 1950s to the mid-1980s, Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland, Letters presents a valuable piece of Canadian literary history curated and annotated by Davis and Morra. This is essential reading for all those interested in Canada's literary culture. For more information and to order the book, click here. |
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Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada
By Laura K. Davis Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017 Many of the Canadian characters in Margaret Laurence's writing are divided subjects who are not quite members of their ancestral "imperial" cultures and at the same time not quite "native" to Canada. Laura K. Davis shows how Laurence and her characters negotiate complex tensions between "self" and "nation," and she argues that Laurence's African and Canadian writing demonstrates a divided Canadian subject who holds significant implications both for the individual and for Canada. Margaret Laurence Writes Africa and Canada is the first book to examine how Laurence addresses decolonization and nation building in 1950s Somalia and Ghana and in the 1960s and 1970s English Canada. Focusing on Laurence's published works as well as unpublished letters not yet discussed by critics, the book articulates how Laurence and her characters are poisded between African colonies of occupation during decolonization and the settler-colony of English Canada during the implementation of Canadian multiculturalism. For more information and to order the book, click here. |
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Essay Writing for Canadian Students, with Readings
By Roger Davis and Laura K. Davis Published by Pearson (10th edition, 2025, 9th edition, 2020, 8th edition, 2016, 7th edition, 2013) Essay Writing for Canadian Students, a popular writing guide for thirty years, presents the writing process as a systematic set of procedures for planning, drafting, and revising deductively organized academic essays. The textbook is a rhetoric, a reader, and a handbook--all in one. The rhetoric section takes students through the process of writing and revising a wide range of essays and writing assignments: summaries and essays in various disciplines; essays analysing literature, comparing, evaluating, and persuading; and research papers. The reader includes selected essays published in a wide range of sources both to illustrate the types of writing discussed in the rhetoric section and to provide timely subjects for students to write about. The handbook section gives students the tools they need to recognize and correct problems in sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, and format. For more information and to order the book, click here. |
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