‘It’s the liveliest, most cogently argued, most provocative and most infuriatingly self-satisfied work of literary criticism to be published in this country in at least the last decade.’
When Words Deny the World is a compelling report from the front lines of Canadian writing. Engagingly written but highly controversial, Words joyfully slaughters the reputations of Timothy Findley, Barbara Gowdy, Anne Michaels, Carol Shields, Michael Ondaatje, the Giller Prize, and the Globe and Mail bestseller list.
In a series of maverick essays, fiction writer and literary journalist Stephen Henighan takes on the decade of the 1990s, when Canadian writing became, before all else, a commercial enterprise. Where most commentators have disregarded the impact of globalization on the way Canadians write and publish, Henighan makes this his central concern.
Examining both Canadian fiction and Canada’s changing literary institutions, Henighan explores subjects ranging from best-seller lists to the Giller Prize, from ‘voice appropriation’ to Toronto-centrism, from Americanization to the literary languages of the Americas. He examines the disintegration of the traditional Canadian linked short-story collection and probes whether Canadian writers abroad can be considered ‘post-colonial’. Analysing novels such as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces and Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries as expressions of a free trade culture, he reaches conclusions that are original, irreverent and devastating.