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 considers how elegies inquire into the rhetoric of mourning as it is complicated by father daughter kinship.
Brief description:
Tanis MacDonald is an associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Rue the Day (Turnstone Press, 2008), and the editor of Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt (WLU Press, 2006). Her book The Daughter's Way: Canadian Women's Paternal Elegies was a finalist for the 2012 ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism.
Review Quotes: "'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