At Odds in the World: Essays on Jewish Canadian Women Writers

by Ruth Panofskyitor (Editor)

Overview

This volume brings together a series of scholarly essays that reflects the author's career-long interest in writing by Jewish Canadian women, in particular work that is situated at the margins of literary and Jewish studies. Collectively the essays show a consistent engagement with issues of cultural identity, specifically how female Jewish identity is constructed in Canadian prose works that span the years 1956 to 2004. As the first book to focus exclusively on writing by Jewish Canadian women, this collection aims to deepen and broaden the scholarly canvas, to situate key representative works within a North American critical paradigm of Jewish literary studies. These essays, which include critiques of two widely known Jewish writers Miriam Waddington and Adele Wiseman, are also intended to introduce readers to lesser known writers: Helen Weinzweig, Fredelle Bruser Maynard and her daughter Joyce Maynard, Nora Gold, and Lilian Nattel. Each writer seeks to investigate the intersecting complexities of her identity as a Canadian, a Jew, and a woman and to critique prevailing notions, for example, of Canada as a country that embraces people of all faiths, of Judaism as open to female participation, and of Jewish women as submissive within marriage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780980882247
Publisher:	Inanna Publications
Publication date:	01/28/2009
Series:	Inanna Poetry & Fiction
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Ruth Panofsky has published widely in the field of book history and print culture in Canada. Her first volume of poems, Lifeline, appeared in 2001. Her second volume of poetry, Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices, was published by Inanna in 2007. She is also the author of several scholarly books, most recently The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman (2006). In addition to scholarly works, her articles, book reviews, and poems have appeared in scholarly periodicals, literary journals, and major Canadian newspapers. She is Poetry Editor of the literary journal Parchment, and has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council Social and the Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Currently, she lives in Toronto where she teaches in the Department of English at Ryerson University.