The Worlds of Carol Shields

by David Staines (Editor)

Overview

"Carol was a very fine writer and a remarkable human being, a wonderful person whose work I closely followed for more than 20 years. I interviewed her frequently over those years, with virtually every work she produced —novel, radio drama, play, book of stories. So I had a good sense of the span of her work and also her evolution as a stylist. But the key reason I wanted to make a book focusing on her life and work is that we were friends."
—Eleanor Wachtel

This book strikes the right balance between intimate accounts and literary analysis. It opens with reminiscences by close friend Eleanor Wachtel, which are followed by a study of Shields’ poetry by her daughter and grandson, then by various aspects of her fiction, including a detailed examination of her plays. It closes with reminiscences by four close friends: Jane Urquhart, Joan Clark, Wayson Choy and Martin Levin.

The 23 contributors offer new insights, new theories, and new perspectives about Shields’ illuminating career. Only one piece—her obituary written by Margaret Atwood—has been previously published.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780776621852
Publisher:	University of Ottawa Press
Publication date:	12/02/2014
Series:	Reappraisals: Canadian Writers
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	906 KB

About the Author

Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, David Staines specializes in medieval literature and culture and Canadian literature and culture. In the former, he has published Tennyson’s Camelot: The Idylls of the King and Its Medieval Sources, and translated The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes; in the latter, he published The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, The Forty-Ninth and Other Parallels: Contemporary Canadian Perspectives, and The Letters of Stephen Leacock. He has also edited volumes on Morley Callaghan, Stephen Leacock and Margaret Laurence, and co-edited volumes of the writings of Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. A long-time friend of Carol Shields, he wrote Carol Shields: Cultural Context, a part of Library and Archives Canada’s Web exhibition Canadian Writers.

Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, David Staines specializes in medieval literature and culture and Canadian literature and culture. In the former, he has published Tennyson’s Camelot: The Idylls of the King and Its Medieval Sources, and translated The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes; in the latter, he published The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, The Forty-Ninth and Other Parallels: Contemporary Canadian Perspectives, and The Letters of Stephen Leacock. He has also edited volumes on Morley Callaghan, Stephen Leacock and Margaret Laurence, and co-edited volumes of the writings of Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. A long-time friend of Carol Shields, he wrote Carol Shields: Cultural Context, a part of Library and Archives Canada’s Web exhibition Canadian Writers.

Table of Contents

Introduction
     David Staines
To The Lighthouse
     Margaret Atwood
Art is Making: Carol Shields in Conversation and Correspondence
     Eleanor Wachtel
The Square Root of a Ticking Clock: Time and Timing in Carol Shields’s Poetry and Prose
     Anne Giardini and Joseph Giardini
All that “below the surface” Stuff: Carol Shields’s Conversational Modes
     Coral Ann Howells
Guilt, Guile, and Ginger in Small Ceremonies
     ElizabethWaterston
Revisiting the Sequel: Carol Shields’s Companion Novels
     Wendy Roy
Sarah Binks, Pat Lowther, and the Satirical Gothic Turn in Carol Shields’s Swann: A Mystery
     Cynthia Sugars
Assembling Identity: Late Life Agency in The Stone Angel and The Stone Diaries
     Patricia Life
Male Pattern Bewilderment in Larry’s Party
     John Van Rys
Departures, Arrivals: Canada/U.S. Migration and the Trope of Travel in the Fiction of Carol Shields
     Alex Ramon
“To Be Faithfull to the Idea of Being Good”: The Expansion to Goodness in Carol Shields’s Unless
     Margaret Steffler
Narrative Pragmatism: Goodness in Carol Shields’s Unless
     Tim Heath
Shields's Guerrilla Gardeners: Sowing Seeds of Defiance in a Middle-Class World
     Shelley Boyd
Cool Empathy in the Short Fiction of Carol Shields
     Marilyn Rose
The “Perfect Gift” and the “True Gift”: Empathetic Dialogue in Carol Shields’s “A Scarf” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Scarf”
     ElizabethReimer
Prepositional Domesticity
     Aritha van Herk
Grand Slam: Birthing Women and Bridging Generations in Carol Shields’s Play Thirteen Hands
     Nora Foster Stovel
Archives as Traces of Life Process and Engagement: the Late Years of the Carol Shields Fonds
     CatherineHobbs
The Voices of Carol Shields
     Joan Clark
The Clarity of Her Anger
     Jane Urquhart
My Seen-Sang, Carol Shields: A Memoir of a Master Teacher
     Wayson Choy
Carol Shields
     Martin Levin