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What comes to mind when we hear that a friend or colleague is studying unpublished documents in a celebrated author’s archive?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.
Contributor Notes
Marlene Kadar is an associate professor in humanities and women’s studies at York University, and the former director of the graduate programme in interdisciplinary studies.
| Helen M. Buss is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. Her book on Canadian women's life writing, Mapping Our Selves, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize. As Margaret Clarke, she has published novels, short stories and poetry. Three of her most recent books published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press are Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, edited with D.L. Macdonald and Anne McWhir, and Working in Women’s Archives edited with Marlene Kadar.
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.
— Laurie McNeill, Canadian Literature, 172, 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.
— Janice Dickin, Biography, 25.3, Summer 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.
— Clara Thomas, York University, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 39, #2, Fall 2001
