About this ebook
Since the 1960s, metropolitan regions across the world have experienced radical transformation. For critical urban studies scholars, this phenomenon has been described as a ‘restructuring’. This study argues that in Canada this ‘restructuring’ has been accompanied by a literary rearrangement of its canon, consisting of a gradual shift of focus from the wild or rural to the urban.
Alluding to the changes within contemporary Canadian cities, the term ‘postmetropolis’ locates the contributors’ shared theoretical framework within a critical postmodern paradigm. Centered on a particular selection of poetic or fictional texts, each essay pushes the theoretical framework further, suggesting the need for new tools of interpretation and analysis. This book presents an urban literary portrait of Canada that is both thematically and conceptually coherent. Using a range of interdisciplinary methodologies, it adeptly navigates a range of urban issues such as surveillance, asylum, diaspora, mobility, the queer, and the post-political.
This book will be of interest to those studying or working on Canadian literature, both in Canada and internationally, as well as to those scholars engaged in investigations that intersect literature and urban studies.
About the author
Eva Darias-Beautell is Associate Professor of American and Canadian literature at the University of La Laguna (Spain). She has been Visiting Scholar at the Universities of Toronto, Ottawa and British Columbia, London, Berkeley, and Masaryk. Her books include Division Language and Doubleness in the Writings of Joy Kogawa (1998), Shifting Sands: Literary Theory and Contemporary Canadian Fiction (2000) and Graphies and Grafts: (Con)Texts and (Inter)Texts in the Fictions of Four Canadian Women Writers (2001). She has co-edited with María Jesús Hernáez Lerena Canon Disorders: Gendered Perspectives on Literature and Film in Canada and the United States (2007), and edited Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada (2012). Dr. Darias-Beautell has directed six fully-funded international research projects on Canadian and American literatures, with a focus on the issues of multiculturalism, literary theory, gender, and the canon, including “The City, Urban Cultures and Sustainable Literatures: Representations of the Anglo-Canadian Post-Metropolis.” She currently leads the international research network “TransCanadian Networks: Excellence and Transversality from Spain about Canada towards Europe” and is the co-principal investigator (with María José Guerra Palmero) of the research project “Justice, Citizenship, and Vulnerability. Narratives of Precarity and Intersectional Perspectives”.
