Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 165-66.
Abstract
I first read Margaret Laurence in secondary school in Gibbons, Alberta, a place similar in many ways to Margaret Laurence's hometown of Neepawa, Manitoba, the place she called Manawaka in her fiction and about which she wrote so much. I continued to read and to study Laurence as an undergraduate at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Later, I dragged along my dog-eared copies of A Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, and {my favorite} The Diviners as my life's journey took me to Ottawa, Ontario; Boulder, Colorado; Vancouver, British Columbia; and most recently, Lincoln, Nebraska.
The idea for this special issue of the Quarterly came out of a conference entitled "Margaret Laurence and Her Times" hosted by the University of Manitoba, St. John's College, and the University of Winnipeg in 1997. The conference was organized by Barbara Kelcey, Barbara Huber, and Jack Bumsted. Many of the participants in that conference assisted us in the preparation of this special issue as authors, book reviewers, and manuscript readers. Thank you, one and all.
Wes Mantooth, in "The 'Album' Songs of Margaret Laurence's The Diviners," breaks new ground by arguing that the music included in The Diviners is an important part of the novel as well as an important part of Laurence's artistic vision. Debra Dudek, in "Poetic Redress: Her Body, Her House in The Fire-Dwellers," also sheds new light on Laurence's prairie fiction, examining Laurence's female characters as a reflection of the larger Canadian struggle for identity within colonial cultures and structures.
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln