Description: The Worlds of Carol Shields is the first book to examine Shields' extraordinary career and life through the lens both of close friends and of literary critics.
Brief description: Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, David Staines specializes in medieval literature and culture and Canadian literature and culture. In the former, he has published Tennyson’s Camelot: The Idylls of the King and Its Medieval Sources, and translated The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes; in the latter, he published The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, The Forty-Ninth and Other Parallels: Contemporary Canadian Perspectives, and The Letters of Stephen Leacock. He has also edited volumes on Morley Callaghan, Stephen Leacock and Margaret Laurence, and co-edited volumes of the writings of Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. A long-time friend of Carol Shields, he wrote Carol Shields: Cultural Context, a part of Library and Archives Canada’s Web exhibition Canadian Writers.
Review Quotes: Most of the 23 pieces in this collection were presented at a conference celebrating the work of Shields at the University of Ottawa in 2012. (...) These pieces wrap the collection in a quilt of affectionate memory of Carol Shields as a person, teacher and a friend that will be a necessary comfort for the non-academic reader of the book (...). Scholars will be grateful for the essays in this collection. Readers are advised to treat the book as a companion to a rereading of Shields oeuvre (...)-- "PUO-UOP"