New ebooks From Canadian Indies
Description
What comes to mind when we hear that a friend or colleague is studying unpublished documents in a celebrated author’s archive? We might assume that they are reading factual documents or, at the very least, straightforward accounts of the truth about someone or some event. But are they?
Working in Women’s Archives is a collection of essays that poses this question and offers a variety of answers. Any assumption readers may have about the archive as a neutral library space or about the archival document as a simple and pure text is challenged.
In essays discussing celebrated Canadian authors such as Marian Engel and L.M. Montgomery, as well as lesser-known writers such as Constance Kerr Sissons and Marie Rose Smith, Working in Women’s Archives persuades us that our research methods must be revised and refined in order to create a scholarly place for a greater variety of archival subjects and to accurately represent them in current feminist and poststructuralist theories.
Editorial Reviews
''The book is unique not only in theorizing female archival subjectivity but also in its focus on Canadian archives and resources.... This collection emphasizes those concerns unique to studying women's life-texts, and includes an interrogation of archives as socially constructed sites.''
— Canadian Literature, 172, Spring 2002
''This collection of seven articles marks the beginning of a record of women's archival research on Canadian women. All the papers are important and informative, giving heartening encouragement to the many others who will follow them. All of them are noteworthy in their practical detail.''
— Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 39, #2, Fall 2001
''Following a nicely focussed introduction by Buss, who sketches the principal themes in the essays, the contributors in Working in Women's Archives identify and probe potentially problematic dimensions of working in women's archives.''
— English Studies in Canada, 28, 2002
''Did you know that Nellie McClung wrote in children's scribblers at the kitchen table? That Lucy Maud Montgomery used her journals to vent her anger and discouragement: That 'shopping lists and recipes sit alongside elegant prose passages and character sketches' in Marian Engel's notebooks?... In addition to providing fascinating tidbits of Canadiana, this collection reveals the unique difficulties faced by scholars studying Canadian women authors, particularly those who lived and wrote before 1940.''
— Herizons, Spring 2002
''You could teach a course from Working in Women's Archives preferrably an interdisciplinary one combining graduate students in history and literature. The exploration of their different takes on how to work in archives would do them--and their work--a world of good.''
— Biography, 25.3, Summer 2002
