Margaret Laurence

Laurence, Margaret - (Jean Margaret Laurence), 1926–87, Canadian novelist, b. Manitoba. She lived in Somaliland, Ghana, and England and many of her early works had an African setting. Laurence was particularly concerned with character, and her writings usually focused on women struggling to overcome the limitations of small town life. Among her novels are This Side Jordan (1960), The Stone Read More...

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Margaret Laurence

1.

New Perspectives on Margaret Laurence: Poetic Narrative, Multiculturalism, and Feminism
by Greta M. Coger. 238 pgs.

Book

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Nearly all of Laurence's works from Africa and Canada are critiqued in this volume. The essays highlight Laurence's innovative narrative styles, showing how her combinations of oral literary forms and unique shifts in tense and point of view help her achieve vivid character portrayals. In addition, viewing Laurence's prose as closely textured poetry, her use of language, theme, and image are carefully critiqued. The importance of Laurence's portrayal of women's experiences, most notably that of aging women, is viewed in a feminist framework. These new American perspectives on Laurence will be of interest to both scholars and students.

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Title Page

Copyright Acknowledgments

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part I Language, Theme, and Image in Laurence

Chapter 1 Margaret Laurence: Novelist-As-Poet

Works Cited

Chapter 2: The Angel and the Living Water: Metaphorical Networks and Structural Opposition in the Stone Angel

Chapter 3 Stacey Cameron Macaindra: the Fire This Time

Works Cited

Chapter 4 a World Divided, a World Divined: Two North American Fictions

Works Cited

Part II Narrative Structure in Laurence

Chapter 5: Hagar Shipley's Rage for Life: Narrative Technique in the Stone Ange l

Chapter 6 "Sisters Under Their Skins": a Jest of God and the Fire-Dwellers

Works Cited

Chapter 7 Coherence in a Bird in the House Bruce Stovel

Works Cited

Chapter 8 Dividing the Diviners

Works Cited

Part III Multiculturalism in Laurence

Chapter 9: War in the Manawaka Novels as Macrocosm, Fictionalized Biography, an d Imaginative History

Chapter 10 Margaret Laurence of Hargeisa: a Discussion of a Tree for Poverty

Chapter 11: Margaret Laurence and the Ancestral Tradition

Chapter 12: "It Was like the Book Says, but It Wasn't": Oral Folk History in La urence's the Diviners

Part IV Feminist Perspectives in Laurence

Chapter 13: Self-Alienation of the Elderly in Margaret Laurence's Fiction

Chapter 14: Coming to Terms with the Image of the Mother in the Stone Angel Cy nthia Taylor

Chapter 15: The Subversive Voice in the Fire-Dwellers

Chapter 16: Morag Gunn in Fictional Context: The Career Woman Theme in the Div iners

Chapter 17: Wordsmith and Woman: Morag Gunn's Triumph Through Language

Chapter 18: Writing a Woman's Life: Celebration, Sorrow, and Pathos in Margaret Laurence's Memoir Dance on the Earth Alexandra Pett

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Editor and Contributors
2.

The Dominion of Women: The Personal and the Political in Canadian Women's Literature (Chap. 4 "'A Canadian Theme . . . Just as Much a Personal Theme': Margaret Laurence, Canada and the 1960s")
by Wayne Fraser. 194 pgs.

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This examination of the works of 18 women writers in English Canada's history demonstrates how Canadian women's literature provides rich insight into the social and political development of the country. Arranged chronologically from colonial times through the 1980s, the study provides in-depth analyses of works of such notables as Frances Brooke, Ethel Wilson, and Margaret Atwood. Fraser's contention is that the literature, as a forum where women voiced their personal concerns, reflects Canada's political identity as a country with a continuing commitment to the essentially feminine values of compromise, cooperation, and international peace.

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Title Page

Recent Titles in Contributions in Women's Studies

Copyright Acknowledgments

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

NOTES

1: A Husbandman as Far as Theory Goes": The Distaff View of Colonization"

NOTES

2: The Home Has Expanded Until It Has Become the Whole State": Imperialism to Emancipation"

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3: Nothing and No One Could Complicate Life Here": Isolationism in the Novels of Ethel Wilson"

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4: A Canadian Theme . . . Just as Much a Personal Theme": Margaret Laurence, Canada and the 1960s"

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5: To Refuse to Be a Victim": Anti- Americanism in the Early Novels of Margaret Atwood"

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6: Still Fighting the Same Bloody Battles as Always": The Diviners and Lady Oracle"

NOTES

Bibliography

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
3.

From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature (Discussion of Margaret Laurence begins on p. 157)
by Barbara Frey Waxman. 212 pgs.

Book

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This literary critical book deals exclusively with contemporary fiction by women on the subject of aging. It discusses the emergence of a new fictional genre--the novel of ripening or Reifungsroman. The book contains an extensive bibliography of 20th-century popular periodical articles on aging (Canadian, American, and British), literary critical articles on aging in the fiction of Doris Lessing, Alice Adams, Paule Marshall, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, May Sarton, and Margaret Laurence, as well a general literary critical works on these authors, and some general (nonliterary) studies of aging, such as Simone de Beavoir's The Coming Age.

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Title Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A New Fictional Genre--The Reifungsroman, or Fiction of Ripening

1: Popular Journalism's Treatment of Old Age and the Aging Experience

2: Beginning the Journey to Selfhood in Middle Age

3: New Passions and Commitments in Young Old Age

4

Conclusion: The Aging Woman in Society, the Reifungsroman, and Literary Criticism's Role

Bibliography

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
4.

African Interests: White Liberalism and Resistance in Margaret Laurence's "Pure Diamond Man," in International Fiction Review
by John C. Eustace. 7 pgs.

Journal Article
5.

Reading Together and Apart: Feminism and/versus Ethnicity in Margaret Laurence and Margaret Atwood: A Conversation, in American Review of Canadian Studies
by Lynn Z. Bloom. 15 pgs.

Journal Article
6.

Temples and Tabernacles: Alternative Religions in the Fictional Microcosms of Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, and Alice Munro, in International Fiction Review
by Nora Foster Stovel. Multiple pgs.

Journal Article
7.

Faith of a (Woman) Writer (Chap. 6 "Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Their Nineteenth-Century Forerunners")
by Alice Kessler-Harris, William McBrien. 358 pgs.

Book

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Reflecting the salient undercurrents of contemporary researh on women writers, this volume is an appraisal of the work of the writer as woman and presents critics' perceptions about how women writers have dealt with the complexity of changing female visions in the 20th century. Each of the 34 essays, contributed by some of today's most distinguished writers, speaks to the work of a particular 20th-century woman writer, and each constitutes a contribution to the scholarly debate.

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Title Page

Recent Titles in Contributions in Women's Studies

Copyright Acknowledgments

Contents

1: Introduction

2: The (Woman) Writer

NOTES

3: Joyce Carol Oates's the Dead and Feminist Criticism

NOTES

4: Acts of Self-Creation: Female Identity in the Novels of Margaret Drabble

NOTES

5: Grave Endearing Traditions": Edith Wharton and the Domestic Novel"

NOTES

6: Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Their Nineteenth-Century Forerunners

NOTES

7: The Poetic World of Snezhina Slavova

NOTES

8: Kay Boyle: In a Woman's Voice

NOTES

9: Two Women: The Transformations

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10: Effects of Urbanization in the Novels of Christiane Rochefort

NOTES

11: Irmgard Keun: A German Deviation

NOTES

12: Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and Jean Rhys: What Rhys's Letters Show About That Relationship

NOTES

13: Literary Criticism

14: Miles Franklin: Chronicler of the Australian Bush and Early Feminist

NOTES

15: Edna St. Vincent Millay--Saint of the Modern Sonnet

NOTES

16: Domestic Comedy, Black Comedy, and Real Life: Shirley Jackson, a Woman Writer

17: Records of Survival: The Autobiographical Writings of Marieluise Fleisser and Marie Luise Kaschnitz

NOTES

18: Jhabvala's Fiction: The Passage from India

NOTES

19: Luise Rinser's Autobiographical Prose: Political Engagement and Feminist Awareness

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20: Women and Choice--A New Look at Simone De Beauvoir and the Second Sex

NOTES

21: Virginia, Virginius, Virginity

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22: Sexual Politics and Female Heroism in the Novels of Christina Stead

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23: Agnes Smedley's Cell Mates": A Writer's Discovery of Voice, Form, and Subject in Prison"

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24: The Transformation of Privilege in the Work of Elena Poniatowska

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25: Marguerite Yourcenar's Sexual Politics in Fiction, 1939

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26: A Way of Ordering Experience: A Study of Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye and Sula

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27: A Voice of Authority

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28: Charlotte Delbo, a Woman/Book

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29: The Case of the Dangling Signifier: Phallic Imagery in Eudora Welty's Moon Lake""

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30: An End to Torment: H.D.'s Metonymic Course

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31: Leslie Stephen Revisited: A New Fragment of Virginia Woolf's A Sketch of the Past""

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32: Defeating the False God: Janie's Self- Determination in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

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33: The Woman Warrior: Claiming Narrative Power, Recreating Female Selfhood

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34: In Search of Ordinary Human Happiness": Rebellion and Affirmation in Mary Gordon's Novels"

NOTES

Index

About the Editors and Contributors

Hofstra University's Cultural and Intercultural Studies

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