Marta DVORAK and Manina JONES [dir.], Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary, Montréal-Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, 288 p.
ISBN 0773532897
SUMMARY
Claiming the "ordinary" and "extra-ordinary" as critical categories, contributors to this volume explore the philosophical and literary import of Carol Shields's writing, its complex play with genre and narrative technique, its re-valuing of domesticity and gendered perspective, and the social critique implicit in its gentle satirical impulses.
Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary begins with a previously unpublished article by Shields. In the essays that follow, international scholars employ a variety of theories and methodologies in their analyses of her work, including narrative theory, cultural criticism, feminist analysis, psychoanalytic approaches, tropological explication, theories of authorship, and ficto-criticism to demonstrate how Shields's writing represents a genuine revision of literary realism in which the ordinary is subject to contemplation and not just celebration.
Contributors include Carol Shields, Marta Dvorák (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Catherine Hobbs (Library and Archives Canada), Coral Ann Howells (Reading), Lorna Irvine (George Mason), Manina Jones (Western Ontario), Ellen Levy (Toulouse-Le Mirail), Christine Lorre (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Patricia-Léa Paillot (IUFM d'Aquitaine), Taïna Tuhkunen (Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), Aritha van Herk (Calgary), Héliane Ventura (Orléans), Christl Verduyn (Mount Allison), and Lorraine York (McMaster).
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Contributors ix
Out of the Ordinary: Introduction 3
MARTA DVORÁK AND MANINA JONES
1 A View from the Edge of the Edge 17
CAROL SHIELDS
PART ONE ESSAYING/ASSAYING GENRE: BIOGRAPHY, ARCHIVE, SHORT STORY, NOVEL
2 Voice and Re-vision: The Carol Shields Archival Fonds 33
CATHERINE HOBBS
3 (ES)SAYING IT HER WAY: CAROL SHIELDS AS ESSAYIST 59
CHRISTL VERDUYN
4 “Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls”: Into the (Extra)ordinary World of Girls and Women 80
CHRISTINE LORRE
5 Carol Shields’s The Republic of Love, or How to Ravish a Genre 97
TAÏNA TUHKUNEN
6 Larry’s A/Mazing Spaces 115
CORAL ANN HOWELLS
PART TWO MARGINS OF OTHERNESS: REFLECTION, SUBJECTIVITY, EMBODIMENT
7 A Knowable Country: Embodied Omniscience in Carol Shields’s The Republic of Love and Larry’s Party 139
LORNA IRVINE
8 Pioneering Interlaced Spaces: Shifting Perspectives and Self-Representation in Larry’s Party 157
PATRICIA-LÉA PAILLOT
9 Scenes from a (Boston) Marriage: The Prosaics of Collaboration and Correspondence in A Celibate Season 172
MANINA JONES
10 “Artefact Out of Absence”: Reflection and Convergence in the Fiction of Carol Shields 191
ELLEN LEVY
11 Eros in the Eye of the Mirror: The Rewriting of Myths in Carol Shields’s “Mirrors” 205
HÉLIANE VENTURA
PART THREE EXTRA-ORDINARY PERFORMANCES: PRODUCTION AND RECEPTION
12 Disappearance and “the Vision Multiplied”: Writing as Performance 223
MARTA DVORÁK
13 Large Ceremonies: The Literary Celebrity of Carol Shields 238
LORRAINE YORK
14 Mischiefs, Misfits, and Miracles 256
ARITHA VAN HERK
Index 271
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Marta Dvorák is professor, Canadian and Commonwealth literatures, Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Manina Jones is associate professor, English, University of Western Ontario.