With passion and conviction, Johnson maintains that our response to our environment shapes our culture, determines our lifestyle, defines our identity, and sets the tone for our relationships and economies. With photos, she documents the landscape and contrasts the ecological relationships with land of First Nations peoples to those of non-indigenous scientists. The result is an absorbing study…
In 1906, Nello Vernon-Wood (1882–1978) reinvented himself as Tex Wood, Banff hunting guide and writer of “yarns of the wilderness by a competent outdoorsman.” His homespun stories of a vanishing era, in such periodicals as The Sportsman, Hunting and Fishing, and the Canadian Alpine Journal, have much to tell us about the west as envisioned by those who wanted to leave the industrialized w…
This book explores a relatively small but interesting and unusual region of Alberta between the North Saskatchewan and the Battle Rivers. The Beaver Hills arose where mountain glaciers from the west met continental ice-sheets from the east to create a complex and diverse landscape. MacDonald relates how climate, water levels, wildlife, vegetation, and fire have shaped the possibilities and prov…
In the mid-1960s as a young high school student John Brumley visited Lookout Cave for the first time and knew immediately that the site was exceptional. The cave, located in north central Montana, was initially discovered in 1920 but it wasn’t until 1969 that a field crew from the University of Montana excavated a large portion of the remote site. The materials recovered in that excavation re…
This book explores a relatively small but interesting and unusual region of Alberta between the North Saskatchewan and the Battle Rivers. The Beaver Hills arose where mountain glaciers from the west met continental ice-sheets from the east to create a complex and diverse landscape. MacDonald relates how climate, water levels, wildlife, vegetation, and fire have shaped the possibilities and prov…
Long a topic of intricate political and social debate, Canadian identity has come to be understood as fragmented, amorphous, and unstable, a multifaceted and contested space only tenuously linked to traditional concepts of the nation. As Canadians, we are endlessly defining ourselves, seeking to locate our sense of self in relation to some Other. By examining how writers and performers have con…
As the first collection of literary criticism focusing on Alberta writers, Wild Words establishes a basis for identifying Alberta fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction as valid subjects of study in their own right. By critically situating and assessing specific Alberta authors according to genre, this volume continues the work begun with Melnyk’s Literary History of Alberta.
This volume builds on Grant’s earlier analysis of Van Gogh’s correspondence, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study (AU Press, 2014), a study in which he approached the letters from a literary critical standpoint, delving into key patterns of metaphors and concepts. In the present volume, he provides instead a literary theoretical analysis of the letters, one that draws them more…
When he died at the age of thirty-seven, Vincent van Gogh left a legacy of over two thousand artworks, for which he is now justly famous. But van Gogh was also a prodigious writer of letters—more than eight hundred of them, addressed to his parents, to friends such as Paul Gauguin, and, above all, to his brother Theo. His letters have long been admired for their exceptional literary quality, …
Known for his exploration of the relationship between Buddhism and violent ethnic conflict in modern Sri Lanka, as well as his contribution to the study of Northern Ireland and the complex relationships among religion, literature, and ethnicity, Grant provides the reader with an analysis of the widespread rise of religious extremism across the globe. Referencing Plato, Van Gogh, Jesus, and the …