Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War

by Emily Robins Sharpe

Overview

Mosaic Fictions is the first book-length critical analysis of Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. Exploring published and archival writings, the book focuses on the extensive contributions of Jewish Canadian authors as they articulate the stakes of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) in the language of a nascent North American multiculturalism. Placing Jewish Canadian writers within overlapping North American networks of Jewish, Black, immigrant, female, and queer writers challenges the national distinctions that dominate current critical approaches to Anglophone Spanish Civil War literature.

Reframing the narrative of Spain's noble but tragic struggle against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, the book demonstrates how marginalized North American supporters of the Spanish Republic crafted narratives of inclusive citizenship amidst a national crisis not entirely their own. Mosaic Fictions examines texts composed between the war's outbreak and the present to illuminate the integral connections between Canada's developing national identity and global leftist action.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487501426
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	03/26/2020
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.26(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Emily Robins Sharpe is an associate professor in the Department of English at Keene State College, where she is also an affiliate faculty member of the Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction
A Better Earth: Looking at Spain, Envisioning Canada

1. Love: Impossible War Romances
2. Sympathy: Cosmopolitan Combat and Postcolonial Spain
3. Community: Documenting Female Friendship in Spain
4. Inclusion: Elegizing Lorca

Conclusion
Remembrance: Envisioning Spain and Canada Now

Notes
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

Norman Ravvin

"A notable, original, and worthwhile contribution, Mosaic Fictions offers a range of research on the Spanish Civil war in relation to Canadian literature."

Josh Lambert

"Among many admirable interventions, Mosaic Fictions does an excellent job — one of the best I can remember encountering — of situating the work of Mordecai Richler, a major Canadian Jewish writer, in a broader context, and its treatments of Leonard Cohen, Martha Gellhorn, and many other important but understudied writers are similarly valuable. Mosaic Fictions makes a fascinating case for ways in which Jewishness and other identities were in dialogue in a crucial, formative historical moment, and does so in such a way as to make a relatively narrow area of literary production much more widely relevant."

Editorial Reviews

"Among many admirable interventions, Mosaic Fictions does an excellent job – one of the best I can remember encountering – of situating the work of Mordecai Richler, a major Canadian Jewish writer, in a broader context, and its treatments of Leonard Cohen, Martha Gellhorn, and many other important but understudied writers are similarly valuable. Mosaic Fictions makes a fascinating case for ways in which Jewishness and other identities were in dialogue in a crucial, formative historical moment, and does so in such a way as to make a relatively narrow area of literary production much more widely relevant."—Josh Lambert, Sophia Moses Robison Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English, Wellesley College
"A notable, original, and worthwhile contribution, Mosaic Fictions offers a range of research on the Spanish Civil war in relation to Canadian literature."—Norman Ravvin, Professor, Department of Religions and Cultures, Past Chair of Canadian Jewish Studies, Concordia University

From the Publisher