A History of Canadian Culture by
Winner of the Lela Common Award for Canadian HistoryFinalist for the Pierre Berton Award, 2009From Dorset sculpture to traveling circuses to the Barenaked Ladies, award-winning historian Jonathan Vance reveals a storyteller's ear for narrative. In a country of unparalleled diversity, "culture" has many different shades of importance and meaning. A stranded Innu woman found by eighteenth-century explorers in the wind-swept Arctic took the time to decorate her clothing with rich designs. The explorers were taken aback; but Vance informs usthat the Inuit word meaning "to make poetry" is the same as the word for "breathe"; and both derive from the word for "the soul." Unsurprisingly, Aboriginal culture began to change with the arrival of more Europeans (who brought their own ideas about culture) in one of the many complicated andintertwined tales that Vance weaves together to explore Canada's cultural history. Vance considers other key issues. Where, for example, is the divide between "culture" and mass entertainment? He describes plays created by sailors trapped in an ice-bound ship through the Arctic winter; "occasionally lewd" tavern music; an early version of Macbeth with a Monty Pythonesquetwist--in Canada, so-called high and low culture have coexisted uneasily, and intermingled creatively. Vance reveals that the hot-button cultural issues we all know and love--government funding for the arts, the cultural brain drain, the drive to preserve distinctly Canadian forms of expression, concerns over copyright protection, the economic impact of cultural industries--can be traced back toprevious centuries. Taking into account both the past and modern developments, such as the thriving culture of Quebec and the evolution of the CBC, Vance addresses one of the quintessential anxieties of Canadians--where, and what, is our culture'stronga href="http://www.oupcanada.com/History_of_Canadian_Culture/" Click here to visit emA History of Canadian Culture/em's mini-site/a/strong
Souvenir of Canada by
Full of surprises and insights, Souvenir of Canada presents us as we have never seen ourselves before in an irresistible flow of text and image. Douglas Coupland offers new ways of seeing and experiencing Canada -- looking at how it feels to be a Canadian right now and speculating what it might feel like to be a Canadian in the future. From our collective memories, he locates objects like stubbie beer bottles and ookpiks, Kraft dinner and maple walnut ice cream. And with the same unique sensibility, he considers the FLQ crisis, our relationship with the United States, medicare and the landscape itself. In the section humbly titled "Cheese," he writes: "When you assemble them together, foods that feel intuitively Canadian look more like camping trip provisions than actual groceries...Canada is a cold and northern country...from a biological standpoint, it is imperative that Canadians stockpile concentrated forms of sugars, carbohydrates, fats and salt." The 50 personal categories of the 30,000-word text are arranged alphabetically and matched with 100 illustrations (50 in colour) -- new luscious photos taken by Coupland himself, images of Canadian ephemera and icons, historical photos and pictures from other quite startling sources.
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