Featured November reading

Available on November 20, Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture is the first book to gather together essays by Barbara Godard, one of the leading and most prolific figures in the field of Canadian studies. Godard has long been recognized as a leading scholar in the areas of literary criticism, women's studies, French-Canadian literature, and the role of Native woman writers, having travelled across Canada and to the United States, Europe, and India to spread her vast knowledge of Canadian culture as a whole. Click here for more information on this groundbreaking scholarly title.

On December 5-6, a symposium will be held in Barbara Godard's honour at the Pia Bouman School (6 Noble Street) in Toronto. Poets, artists, and academics will convene for a day and a half of  readings, screenings, and roundtables to discuss Barbara Godard's extensive influence on generations of writers, artists, and scholars in Canada. Click here for schedule information.

For the media and educators To order a desk copy or review copy, please contact Tiffany Regaudie at marketing@newestpress.com or (780) 432-9427.

About the book Much of the force of Godard’s work comes from her meticulous and relentless attention to the networks that produce both the texts and events we study and the methods through which we read them. Whether she writes about feminist theory, orality and Native women writers, or the exigencies of the cultural field, she has been instrumental in interrogating the normative ways in which we think about Canadian culture. From the function of literature to the materiality of institutions and periodicals, from the theory and practice of translation to the interrelations between English- and French-Canadian literatures, her critical interventions have drastically reconceptualized our inherited understandings of Canadian culture as it relates to the world at large.

Edited by Smaro Kamboureli, and with an interview published here for the first time that offers a detailed look at the trajectories of Barbara Godard’s writing and teaching career, Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture is a groundbreaking collection of essays, spanning the period 1987–2003, that will continue to be necessary reading for years to come.

About the author Barbara Godard, Historica Chair of Canadian Literature and Professor of English, French, Social and Political Thought, and Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto, has published widely on Canadian and Quebec cultures and on feminist and literary theory. Through her writings on translation theory and translations of Quebec women writers, most recently Nicole Brossard’s Intimate Journal (2004), she has contributed to the “cultural turn” in Translation Studies. Her most recent edited volumes include Re:Generations: Canadian Women Poets in Conversation (2005) and Wider Boundaries of daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry (2008, both with Di Brandt).

Godard is the recipient of the Gabrielle Roy Prize of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (1988), the Award of Merit of the Association of Canadian Studies (1995), the Vinay-Darbelnet Prize of the Canadian Association of Translation Studies (2000), and the Teaching Award of the Northeast Association of Graduate Schools (2002). For more information, visit her website at www.yorku.ca/bgodard.

About the editor Smaro Kamboureli is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature at the University of Guelph, where she founded and directs TransCanada Institute. Her most recent publication is Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, a volume of essays she has co-edited with Roy Miki.