Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction

This book charts the significant changes in contemporary Canada's literary profile since the mid-1990s, within a context of the new national rhetoric of multiculturalism. By looking closely at a representative range of fictions in English by women from a variety of ethnocultural backgrounds, Howells examines the complexities embedded within Canadian identity. What does 'Refiguring Identities' mean for these writers, given their individual agendas and the multiple affiliation of any woman's identity construction? All these writers are engaged in rewriting history across generation, and Howells argues that woman's fiction negotiates new possibilities for cultural change, introducing more heterogeneous narratives of identity in multi-cultural Canada.

CORAL ANN HOWELLS is Professor of English and Canadian Literature at the University of Reading, England. Born and educated in Australia, she obtained her PhD in London. She has been Visiting Professor at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and has lectured extensively on Canadian women's fiction and women's writing in other postcolonial literatures in English in the United States, Europe, India and Australia. Her previous books include Love, Mystery and Misery, Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970's and 80s, Jean Rhys, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Munro, together with numerous essays published in international journals.