Refuse
CanLit in Ruins
CanLit--the commonly used short form for English Canadian Literature as a cultural formation and industry--has been at the heart of several recent public controversies. Why? Because CanLit is breaking open to reveal the accepted injustices at its heart. It is imperative that these public controversies and the issues that sparked them be subject to careful and thorough discussion and critique.
provides a critical and historical context to help readers understand conversations happening about CanLit presently. One of its goals is to foreground the perspectives of those who have been changing the conversation about what CanLit is and what it could be. Topics such as literary celebrity, white power, appropriation, class, rape culture, and the ongoing impact of settler colonialism are addressed by a diverse gathering of writers from across Canada. This volume works to avoid a single metanarrative response to these issues, but rather brings together a cacophonous and ruinous multitude of voices.
ERIN WUNKERÂ is Chair of the Board of the national non-profit organization Canadian Women in the Literary Arts and co-founder, writer, and managing editor of the feminist academic blog Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe. She teaches courses in Canadian literature and cultural production with a special focus on cultural production by women. She lives in Halifax with her partner, their daughter, and Marley the dog.
JULIE RAK is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She holds an Eccles Fellowship at the British Library for 2017-2018 and is also a Killam Professor at the University of Alberta for 2017-18. Julie was born on traditional Haudenosaunee territory in New York State, and grew up in Delmar, NY, the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehaken (Mohawk). She currently lives and works on Treaty 6 and Metis territory in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
HANNAH MCGREGOR is an Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, a feminist podcaster, and a CanLit killjoy. She co-hosts the popular Harry Potter podcast Witch, Please, and hosts the slightly-less-popular podcast Secret Feminist Agenda, a weekly discussion of the insidious, nefarious, insurgent, and mundane ways we enact our feminism in our daily lives. When she isn't podcasting, Hannah writes about Canadian literature and publishing for mostly academic venues, including the edited collections Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2016) and Reading Modernism With Machines (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). She lives in Vancouver on the territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh, and has two cats; one is named after a poet, and the other is named after a breakfast.
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