Beyond the Provinces takes stock of Canada’s literary scene at the end of the twentieth century, revealing the astonishing developments that have occurred in the country’s literary culture in the past decades and affirming the maturity of literary Canada.

In the opening chapter David Staines examines the colonial mentality that pervaded turn-of-the-century literature, was later challenged, and has all but disappeared at century’s end. In the second chapter he explores the unique Canadian presence in American fiction in order to examine the way in which Canada found its literary independence from the United States. And in the final chapter he proposes that Canadian literary selfhood has been complemented by a still tentative but distinctive critical voice.

(F.E.L. Priestley Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas)

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.

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