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Literary Criticism Canadian

RE: Reading the Postmodern

Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism

edited by Robert David Stacey

Publisher
University of Ottawa Press
Initial publish date
Jan 2011
Category
Canadian, Semiotics & Theory
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780776619231
    Publish Date
    Jan 2011
    List Price
    $19.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780776607399
    Publish Date
    Oct 2010
    List Price
    $39.95

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Where to buy it

Description

It would be difficult to exaggerate the worldwide impact of postmodernism on the fields of cultural production and the social sciences over the last quarter century—even if the concept has been understood in various, even contradictory, ways. An interest in postmodernism and postmodernity has been especially strong in Canada, in part thanks to the country’s non-monolithic approach to history and its multicultural understanding of nationalism, which seems to align with the decentralized, plural, and open-ended pursuit of truth as a multiple possibility as outlined by Jean-François Lyotard. In fact, long before Lyotard published his influential work The Postmodern Condition in 1979, Canadian writers and critics were employing the term to describe a new kind of writing.

 

RE: Reading the Postmodern marks a first cautious step toward a history of Canadian postmodernism, exploring the development of the idea of the postmodern and debates about its meaning and its applicability to various genres of Canadian writing, and charting its decline in recent years as a favoured critical trope.

About the author

Contributor Notes

Robert David Stacey is assistant professor of Canadian Literature in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa.

Editorial Reviews

"It is difficult for me to overstate the value of this book...[it] is a must-read for anyone attempting to understand Canadian literature since the 1960s...RE: Reading the Postmodern is an excellent resource for commprehending where Canadian literature has been in the past half-century, where CanLit is now, and where CanLit is going."
- Canadian Literature