Description
The Daughter’s Way investigates negotiations of female subjectivity in twentieth-century Canadian women’s elegies with a special emphasis on the father’s death as a literary and political watershed. The book examines the work of Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, Jay Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, Kristjana Gunnars, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Anne Carson, and Erin Mouré as elegiac daughteronomies—literary artifacts of mourning that grow from the poets’ investigation into the function and limitations of elegiac convention. Some poets treat the father as a metaphor for socio-political power, while others explore more personal iterations of loss, but all the poets in The Daughter’s Way seek to redefine daughterly duty in a contemporary context by challenging elegiac tradition through questions of genre and gender.
Beginning with psychoanalytical theories of filiation, inheritance, and mourning as they are complicated by feminist challenges to theories of kinship and citizenship, The Daughter’s Way debates the efficacy of the literary “work of mourning” in twentieth-century Canadian poetry. By investigating the way a daughter’s filial piety performs and sometimes reconfigures such work, and situating melancholia as a creative force in women’s elegies, the book considers how elegies inquire into the rhetoric of mourning as it is complicated by father-daughter kinship.
Awards
- Short-listed, ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism 2012
Reviews
Tanis MacDonald’s The Daughter’s Way represents a new way of understanding Canadian women’s poetic elegies. Ranging widely across twentieth- and twenty-first century Canadian women’s texts, the study provides a compelling and precisely focused engagement with gender, genre, and nation. MacDonald (herself a poet) brings a rich understanding of the importance of poetic form. She produces insightful analyses in prose that is crystal clear and a pleasure to read, making readers engage with the evocative power of the ‘literary’ all over again.
- Gabrielle Roy Prize jurors
“‘How women are to be—as bodies, as artists, and as elegists—is predicated on their ability to memorialize and inherit,’ writes Tanis MacDonald in the introduction to The Daughter’s Way. In the carefully theorized and beautifully written chapters that follow, she traces an arc of female paternal elegies with sensitivity and a keen critical and feminist intelligence. Erudite, insightful, nuanced, and continuously engaging, The Daughter’s Way is a lucid crystallization of years of study, thought, and felt experience in and around elegies that casts a brilliant light on the texts and on their literary, personal, and social contexts. It is a significant contribution to Canadian literary and feminist studies and, indeed, to studies of the elegiac mode itself.
- D.M.R. Bentley, Department of English, University of Western Ontario, editor of Canadian Poetry