Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology, Writers/Readers and Publishing

by Lynette Hunter

How does an “outsider” feminist read a contemporary Canadian literature that is profoundly inscribed with the contradictions of late 20th-century capitalism, nationalism and globalism, and with vigorous class, race and gender struggles for access to power and representation? What does “literature” become when its own strategies variously place history, genre, legitimacy and literariness into question?

Through readings of such diverse Canadian writers as Dionne Brand, Alice Munro, Jacqueline Dumas, Frank Davey, Claire Harris, Michael Ondaatje, Elly Danica, Robert Kroetsch, Nourbese Philip, bpNichol, Beatrice Culleton, Margaret Atwood, Rose Dorion, George Bowering, Lola Lemire Tostevin and Daphne Marlatt, Outsider Notes offers tough-minded reappraisals of canonictiy, modernism, postmodernism, marginality, and postcoloniality and opens a challenge to write and read “past the ideology of the nation state.”

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Hunter is Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Rhetoric and Performance at the University of California, Davis, and Professor Emeritus in Rhetoric at Gresham College, City of London. She has written or co-written over 25 books in performance studies, feminist philosophy, the politics of decolonial and alterior aesthetics, and the history of rhetoric and performance, including Critiques of Knowing (Routledge, 1999).