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Liminal Spaces: The Double Art of Carol Shields Unabridged Edition
Author(s): Alex Ramon (Author)
- Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Publication Date: 1 Nov. 2008
- Edition: Unabridged
- Language: English
- Print length: 205 pages
- ISBN-10: 1443800120
- ISBN-13: 9781443800129
Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of the work of Carol Shields. Arguing against enduring conceptions of Shields’s fiction as celebratory domestic miniaturism, the study presents her work as more expansive and equivocal than has sometimes been recognised, reading her texts as “liminal spaces” situated on a series of formal and thematic borders. Close attention is paid to Shields’s stylistic experimentation, to her subversions of auto/biography and historiography, and to the significance of her critical writing, while works which have previously received very little analysis, such as her early poetry collections, are also examined. Intertextual links between Shields’s work and that of a range of other writers including Phillip Larkin, Iris Murdoch, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood are identified and explored, and the study also draws extensively on manuscript materials which give an insight into Shields’s working methods and extend debate about her experiments with narrative perspective and genre-mixing.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This is the first critical study on Carol Shields to be published in Britain. It is a scholarly and celebratory book which honours the wide range of this very popular writer’s work. The great value of this book is that it encourages us to take a second (or maybe even a third) look at novels we thought we knew well, for Ramon’s Shields is an altogether odder and more experimental writer than we may have thought, with her excursions into the wilder areas of fantasy and imagination, postmodernism and paradox. Ramon offers new subversive critical insights into this most discreetly subversive woman writer’s works.” – Coral Ann Howells, Professor Emerita at the University of Reading; co-editor of the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature”This elegantly written, persuasively argued book is the most comprehensive study of Shields’s work yet carried out. It explores her poetry and critical writing alongside her much-admired fiction and offers many fresh insights based on extensive research in the Shields archive. Ramon attends to some of the darker and more eccentric elements of Shields’s writing, and his revelation of the play of light and shade in her work challenges the usual readings of her as a sunny, optimistic writer.”- Dr. Faye Hammill, senior lecturer in English, University of Strathclyde
About the Author
Alex Ramon lectures in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Reading, UK. His research interests include contemporary Canadian and British fiction, post-colonial fiction and theory, and novel-to-film adaptation.
