Trans.Can.Lit

The study of Canadian literature—CanLit—has undergone dramatic changes since it became an area of specialization in the 1960s and ’70s. As new global forces in the 1990s undermined its nation-based critical assumptions, its theoretical focus and research methods lost their immediacy. The contributors to Trans.Can.Lit address cultural policy, citizenship, white civility, and the celebrated status of diasporic writers, unabashedly recognizing the imperative to transfigure the disciplinary and institutional frameworks within which Canadian literature is produced, disseminated, studied, taught, and imagined.

Smaro Kamboureli is a professor and the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature in the English Department at the University of Toronto. She is the founder of the TransCanada series of books, published by WLU Press, originating from interdisciplinary conferences that initiated collaborative research on the methodologies and institutional structures and contexts that inform and shape the production, dissemination, teaching, and study of Canadian literature. Her most recent publications include Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (WLU Press 2012), co-edited with Robert Zacharias and Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (WLU Press, 2013), co-edited with Kit Dobson.

Roy Miki teaches contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University. He has published widely on Asian- Canadian literature as well as writers such as bpNichol, George Bowering, and Roy Kiyooka. He is the author of Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing and received the Governor General’s Award for his poetry book Surrender.

Tamara Palmer Seiler:
``The articles...make this a formidable and important collection, one that will give the serious reader, one interested not only in Canadian literature, but also in contemporary thinking about the intersections among the nation state, difference, globalization and cultural representation, more than enough to ponder.''

Debra Dudek:
``While Trans.Can.Lit does not engage overtly with how postcolonial studies and its dissenters and offshoots--including Indigenous, diasporic, and critical race studies--inform the study of CanLit, a quick look at the contents pages reveals an impressive list of some of the foremost Canadian critics working in these fields.... One of the strengths of organizing this collection around the intersecton of literature, institutions, and citizenship is that the essays become a multivoiced call for revolution to critics and teachers working in a field under attack... Trans.Can.Lit reminded me, as an academic who teaches and researches CanLit in Australia, not only of the specificities of debates occurring within Canada but also of how many of the concerns in Canada transfer with frightening ease to an Australian context. The `trans' in CanLit moves beyond the porous borders of Canada, reminding academics working in literary studies about the power of what we do and of the responsibility attached to this power.''

``The outcome of a great idea that manages well to be accessible and relevant to both scholars and general readers of Canadian literature.''