The Blythes Are Quoted has been included in the Canadian fiction section of Quill & Quire’s Fall Preview, compiled by Steven W. Beattie and included in the July-August 2009 issue, available now:
Benjamin Lefebvre edits The Blythes Are Quoted (Penguin Canada, $25 cl., Oct.), a posthumous novel from L.M. Montgomery that features the author’s usual themes: adultery, misogyny, revenge, and murder.
The following books will be rereleased in paperback over the next nine months:
Puffin Classics will reissue Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island on 6 August 2009 on the U.K. (available in Canada on 24 November 2009), joining their reissue last year of Anne of Green Gables with an introduction by Lauren Child. As you can see from the covers above, the authors of the introductions to the second and third books are to be confirmed, although Amazon suggests that Budge Wilson has written the introduction to Anne of Avonlea. I’ll let you know once I hear anything more.
2010 Canadian Literature Symposium, University of Ottawa
Keynote speakers: D.M.R. Bentley, Professor of English, University of Western Ontario; Carole Gerson, Professor of English, Simon Fraser University
http://www.canlit-symposium.ca/
Students and teachers of Canadian literature in English are invited to a symposium at the University of Ottawa to share their scholarship on early Canadian writers, especially to explore new approaches, uncover neglected texts and genres, and assess writers’ and critics’ diverse achievements.
2010 marks the twentieth anniversary of Lorraine McMullen’s Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers, a volume of essays that emerged from an earlier University of Ottawa symposium. McMullen’s anthology implicitly assumed that male authors of fiction and poetry were already receiving the attention they deserved, and that female writers would soon join them in the spotlight—two assumptions that, despite some remarkable scholarly achievements, remain open to question. This symposium seeks to address why and how we study early Canadian literature, and to energize scholars of this rich and challenging area of research.
Proposals are welcomed on any aspect of early Canadian literature to 1918, including but not limited to the following:
Please send, by e-mail attachment, your 300-400 word proposal, with a 100-word abstract and a 50-word bio-blurb, to Janice Fiamengo, Symposium Chair, Department of English, at fiamengo@uottawa.ca. The deadline for proposals is September 25, 2009.
World-renowned filmmaker Allan King, whose extensive filmography includes thirteen episodes of Road to Avonlea (1990-1996), died yesterday in Toronto at the age of 79. More details can be found on his obituary at the Globe and Mail. See also Lee Ferguson’s article “King of Compassion” on CBC.ca.
We were experiencing technical difficulties this weekend while we moved the website from one location to another, but everything seems to be back to normal now. Plus we’re running with version 2.8 of WordPress, so we hope to add some new bells and whistles in the near future.
The first international conference on L.M. Montgomery outside Canada
Uppsala, Sweden, will be the venue for an international conference entitled L.M. Montgomery—Writer of the World, 20-23 August 2009. The conference commemorates the first translation of Anne of Green Gables, the Swedish Anne på Grönkulla which appeared in 1909. Conference organisers are Gabriella Åhmansson, University of Gävle and Åsa Warnqvist, Uppsala University.
The main theme for the conference is reading response and it has attracted 28 speakers from 10 different countries, including major Montgomery scholars such as Elizabeth Waterston, Mary H. Rubio, Elizabeth Rollins Epperly and Irene Gammel. The last day of the conference, Sunday August 23, is open to the general public, a tribute to one hundred years of devoted Montgomery readers in Sweden.
For a detailed programme and information on how to register, please visit the conference website http://ahmansson.com/montgomery2009.html or contact the conference coordinators at asa.warnqvist@littvet.uu.se.
The conference is hosted by University of Uppsala, one of Europe’s oldest universities, established in 1477. More information on the beautiful medieval city of Uppsala and its surroundings can be found on the Uppsala Tourism official website http://www.uppsala.to/en.
Several reviews of the Toronto production of Anne of Green Gables: The Musical have appeared online of late. The CBC News story “Toronto reviewers unkind to P.E.I.’s favourite redhead” (15 May 2009) gives a good overview of the response; Kelly Nestruck’s story “We still love you, Anne, but smarten up, will you?” was published in the Globe and Mail a day later, on 16 May.
Here is the cover art for the New Canadian Library reissues of Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest, scheduled for publication on 4 August 2009.
Announcing the publication of 100 Years of Anne with an “e”: The Centennial Study of “Anne of Green Gables,” a collection of essays edited by Holly Blackford and published by University of Calgary Press. The book contains an introduction by Holly Blackford and chapters by Joy Alexander, Hilary Emmett, Irene Gammel, Monika Hilder, Melissa Mullins, Eleanor Hersey Nickel, Sharyn Pearce, E. Holly Pike, Cornelia Rémi, Laura M. Robinson, Christiana R. Salah, and Theodore Sheckels.