The Canadian Prairie has long been represented as a timeless and unchanging location, defined by settlement and landscape. Now, a new generation of writers and historians challenge that perception and argue, instead, that it is a region with an evolving culture and history. In a collection of ten essays, History, Literature and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies explores a more contemporary prairie identity, and reconfigures “the prairie” as a construct that is non-linear and diverse, responding to the impact of geographical, historical, and political currents.

These writers explore the connections between document and imagination, between history and culture, and between geography and time.The subjects of the essays range widely: the non-linear structure of Carol Shield’s The Stone Diaries; the impact of Aberhart’s Social Credit, Marshall McLuhan, and Mesopotamian myth on Robert Kroetsch’s prairie postmodernism; the role of document in long prairie poems; the connection between cultural tourism and heritage; the theme of regeneration in Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka writing; the influence of imagination on geography in Thomas Wharton’s Icefields; and the effects on an alpine climber of pre-WWII ideological concepts of time and individualism.

Alison Calder’s first poetry collection, Wolf Tree, won two Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for both the Gerald Lampert Award and the Pat Lowther Award for Canadian poetry. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, most notably Breathing Fire:Canada’s New Poets and Exposed, and has twice circulated on Winnipeg city buses.She is the editor of Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007) and a critical edition of Frederick Philip Grove’s 1924 novel Settlers of the Marsh (Borealis, 2006), and the co-editor of History, Literature, and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies (University of Manitoba Press, 2005).Born in England, Alison Calder grew up in Saskatoon and now lives in Winnipeg, where she teaches Canadian Literature and creative writing at the University of Manitoba.

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Robert Wardhaugh is an associate professor in the Department of History at University of Western Ontario and is the author of Mackenzie King and the Prairie West.

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“An original and vital contribution to the understanding of prairie culture, history, and life.”

Christian Riegel, University of Regina