This essay examines gendered nature and female agency in Canadian children's author L. M. Montgomery's Emily trilogy. Focusing on the spruce and maple grove known as "Lofty John's bush," this essay argues that the trilogy frames nature as a site of feminine power under heteropatriarchal control. In Emily of New Moon (1923), the heroine leverages social authorities to defend the bush from male dominance. In Emily Climbs (1925), she associates the bush with her childhood sweetheart while an older suitor begins leading her towards other, more oppressive, spaces. Finally, in Emily's Quest (1927), she comes to believe that environmental preservation necessitates participation in the capitalist institutions that threaten nature. By entwining Emily's bodily autonomy with her defence of feminized landscapes, the trilogy reimagines nature not merely as background but as the foundation of female agency. Ultimately, Emily's struggles with men and social expectations reveal how agency, belonging, and environmental stewardship are intertwined with-and ultimately constrained by-gendered authority.
This interview by Margery Fee focuses on Sherrill Grace's academic career in Canadian literary studies. The introduction outlines her many awards and gives an overview of the major figures about whom she has written. In the interview, Sherrill Grace discusses stages in her career from her early years in Quebec, her education, and her career at the University of British Columbia from 1977 to her post-retirement research and writing. Her identification as a Canadian inspired her research trajectory, as she moved from her work on Malcolm Lowry to Canadians, including Margaret Atwood; dramatist Sharon Pollock; Mina Hubbard, an explorer; Timothy Findley, an actor and author; and Tom Thomson, a painter. She also discusses how she learned as she taught and conducted research, from her colleagues and graduate students in particular, but also from her international conference participation as a speaker.
This essay is an autotheoretical reflection on the experience of teaching life writing in programs outside of English and creative writing. Structured as a series of notes or fragments, it explores competing accounts of subjectivity by braiding personal narrative together with theoretical excursions on the body, place, and language. Arguing for decomposition as a term analogous to decolonization and deconstruction, the essay challenges assertions of selfsovereignty-ego, individuality, and success-that too often underpin creativity within an academic context. Using research from fields as disparate as ethology and psychoanalysis, it reimagines the writing classroom as a heterotopic space that is its most generative when it destabilizes students' fixed notions of themselves as fully present and autonomous. In its commitment to both dissolution and failure, it offers new modes of collaboration-inter-and intrapersonal, human and more-than-human-as an ethics of care and solidarity.
This article discusses how the protagonist of Marian Engel's first novel, No Clouds of Glory (1968) revises her roles in her past relationships to reimagine her future possibilities. The conversation in Engel's novel, retitled Sarah Bastard's Notebook when it was republished in 1974, reflects the author's own anxiety about being a woman but also lends itself, almost sixty years after its first publication, to ongoing conversations about female bodies, gender identities, and sexuality. Scholarship about the novel has generally touched on nationality, gender and identity, and writing and feminism. More recent scholarship discusses the female professor trope in Canadian fiction written by women and imposter syndrome. Building on these conversations, this essay shifts attention to how romance in the novel attaches to what Engel's protagonist experiences as "the ugly." Engel, through her mode of critique and the novel's irritated aesthetic, decentres beauty and patriarchal femininity as a woman's sole measure of value. Moreover, Sarah's abortions function as a ritual cleansing of the female-coded self, removing the sterile and potentially dangerous material of romance's reproductive mythology from the body.
