EN:

Douglas Le Pan can be considered an imagist poet in the sense that he bases his poetry on carefully observed particulars which he then expands and explores as a means of conveying thought. This movement of thought around a single image or from one image to another can be seen clearly in his earlier and shorter poems as well as in the longer war poems. Occasionally, in keeping with imagist theory, Le Pan's poetry expresses confidence in the justice of language and the adequacy of the image; that is, the poetry shows faith in the ability of art to interpret reality. Yet, more often, Le Pan complicates the theory of the imagists by challenging the power of poetic language and suggests that the image is sometimes not adequate to the task demanded of it. Moreover, he also challenges the pictorial power of his imagery by portraying a failure of perception.

EN:

Ethel Wilson's fictional world is one of peaks and valleys governed largely by chance and peopled by characters yearning for independence, at times even solitude, while simultaneously seeking to establish a firm link with the larger human community. Such a link remains elusive, though, because Wilson's universe is essentially unpredictable and disjointed, with no apparent moral or ethical foundation. The motivation behind her writing derives from the need to discover such a foundation amid the chaos about her. Her progress toward that discovery is mapped out in her characters, who range from the indifferent and immoral to the sensitive and forgiving. Thus, one can trace the emergence of a moral dimension in Wilson's fictional world as it is reflected in the development of her characters.

EN:

In her latest work in verse -- Two-Headed Poems and True Stories -- Margaret Atwood, concerning her various poetic personae, has been accepting some constraint while still pressing with all her faculties at the edges of it. We know that it is impossible to find the real Atwood by casting our eyes over the pages of her poetry, yet we still feel with conviction that the space between woman and speaker of the poems is next to snug, is compressed and saturated with energy. However, when people at their most vulgar ask what Atwood is "really like," they are unwittingly asking for a comparison, and they are requesting that one put aside her being as a poet. She is, of course, real, and perhaps different from the persona that speaks the art, but her skill in finding and fashioning the persona is her reality.

EN:

Past critics have seen little need to pursue the artist-theme of Malcolm Lowry's novels much beyond its autobiographical basis. Certainly that basis exists, for one can clearly see that Lowry's protagonists are modeled on his own life. Nevertheless, it is one thing to say that Lowry's protagonists are thinly disguised versions of himself; it is quite another to say they are only that. If Lowry had trouble creating believable fictional personae who were not writers, he had no trouble fictionalizing the one persona that he did have at his disposal. In other words, Lowry used the vocation of writer to his own artistic advantage, and as a metaphor for the human condition. Lowry's first novel, Ultramarine, serves as the best focus for discussion in this case, since it is here that his first artist theme originates.

EN:

Novels that challenge the social-political order also challenge conventional wisdom about literary structures and heroes who make choices that - however indirectly - legitimize the status quo. The act of literary criticism involving analysis of class and class implications is by its nature, therefore, revolutionary in capitalist society. The novels that strongly invite such criticism because of their class consciousness are rare in English Canadian fiction. However, Irene Baird's Waste Heritage is one novel that does belong in that category. Baird's novel is instructive because it can provide a basis for rejecting the general sense that there is no class interest in Canadian literature, and it can show why Canadian critics are timid about using an analysis of class as a way of making Canadian literature more accessible and comprehensible to readers.

EN:

In her book Winter Sun, Margaret Avison fears the mathematical certainty of the new science, which from the seventeenth century on has appeared to remove the ground of faith from the believing Christian and has clamped the world in other vices. This kind of false human clarity can affect all human relationships; she fears the over-familiarity of "all the eyes I do not own" and she also fears the vortex of love, the suction toward a compulsion that will leave all those "eyes I do not own" orbiting round the edges. She fears depersoned existence. She prefers destiny to gravitation, yet both are predetermined. A Calvinist she is not, nor a modern-day behaviourist. Yet, as the narrator of these poems heals herself of her misapprehension of love, so the poet heals herself of a misapprehension of science -- at least in part. Along with the physicists who have the courage to occupy the same air with poets, she works out an understanding of her Christ's domus on the new map of the universe, resting assured that no amount of intelligence can altogether predetermine the post-Newtonian world.

EN:

The starting point for any Kroetsch novel is the recognition of the importance of the "old dualities" -- chaos/order, life/death, freedom (movement)/stasis, beginnings/endings, youth/age. Gone Indian abounds in binary distinctions; indeed, these paired opposites are also played off against each other. Moreover, one dual polarity (the difference between the real and the imagined Professor R. Mark Madham, the similarity between Jeremy Sadness and his very different professor) is so playfully presented that it may not be present at all -- which is simply another dichotomy.

EN:

As a guide to editors and future critics, and as an aid to teachers and students, Struthers lists the works on Alice Munro. The checklist, which draws upon the format established by Robert Lecker and Jack David in ECW Press's The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors, includes items under the three categories of "Articles and Sections of Books," "Theses and Dissertations," and "Interviews and Profiles." The article excludes bibliographies, bio-bibliographical sketches, newspaper articles, and book reviews.