This groundbreaking volume of critical essays revolving around the concept of resurgence maps the modes of conservation, transformation, and invention of the literary, visual, and cultural expressions which Jane Urquhart’s singular voice has brought about on the Canadian but also international scene.
Taking resurgence as the informing principle of investigation, the volume as a whole focuses on the rewriting and reconstruction of the past, on the modalities of its resurfacing or of its erasure. It raises questions about the explicit or implicit ideological repercussions of such concealment and disclosure, such rupture and resilience. Through the prism of this concept, through surveys, close textual scrutiny and comparative analyses, the book explores Urquhart’s discursive practices, the way they hinge on intertextuality or citation, at the same time as upon intratextuality or self-citation. It brings to the fore the extratextual and metatextual quality of her writing together with the transmediality, the transcoding or intersemioticity which characterize the interaction between literature and the visual arts in her fictional and poetic works.
The volume engages with Urquhart’s entire literary œuvre, opening with a thoughtprovoking, previously unpublished address by Urquhart herself and concluding with a discussion with the author. Special emphasis has been given to A Map of Glass, with the third chapter entirely dedicated to its specific or comparative examination, but her collections of poetry and the other five novels have also garnered single or comparative critical attention from the present contributors.
From The Whirlpool to A Map of Glass, the uncanny array of Urquhart’s resurgent colours makes us see «through the power of the written word» that there is a genuine mystery in art and a real place for wonder. It is the resurgence of such innermost forces, in the creative and critical landscapes of contemporaneity, that the present collection aims at bringing forth.