Books published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

A study of modern Muslim ethics, focussed upon the lives and writings of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Mawlana Mawdudi, this volume sheds light upon the modern ethical problems of contemporary Islam.

In 1932, Isay Rottenberg, a Jewish paper merchant, bought a cigar factory in Germany: Deutsche Zigarren-Werke. When his competitors, supported by Nazi authorities, tried to shut it down, the headstrong entrepreneur refused to give up the fight.

Explores the different literary, historical and cultural legacies of Canada's sesquicentennial celebrations. The book asks vital questions about the ways that histories and stories have been suppressed and invites consideration about what happens once a commemorative moment has passed.

Twenty literary critics engage a variety of genres - essay, life writing, testament, polemic, poetry - to explore the ways Canadian cultural production has been shaped by social and historical relations and can be given new and various forms to decolonize the institutions associated with the creation of this country's vision of Canadian literature.

Gathers nine conversations with Indigenous writers about the relationship between Indigenous literatures and learning, and how their writing relates to communities. Relevant, reflexive, and critical, these conversations explore the pressing topic of Indigenous writings and its importance to the well-being of Indigenous peoples.

Franz Werfel was born in Prague in 1890 and died in Beverly Hills in 1945, a popular and artistic success in Europe and America. Despite his Jewish birth and upbringing, he was attracted to Christianity at any early age, and although he never formally converted, he celebrated his own vision of it in his entire life's work. The origina sof that peculiar faith and the response it engendered in Werfel's work as he lived thorough the horrific end of Jewish life in Europe are treated here. Werfel was not a systematic thinker, and, while his writing contains much that is philosophical and theological, his eclecticism and idiosyncracy render any attempt to trace the specific origins of his thought or its relation to the work of contemporary philosophers and theologians highly problematic. Thus, this work is neither biography nor intellectual history in the strict sense it goes beyond, melding the concerns of both genres into a thoughtful, comprehensive portrait of faith at work. Of interest to historians of the twentieth century as well as to students of that intriguing zone that lies between faith and art but is neither or both.

Explores how dance intersects with the shifting concerns of pluralism in a variety of racial and ethnic communities across Canada. Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contributors examine a broad range of dance styles used to promote diversity and intercultural collaborations.

Cheri DiNovo went from living on the streets as a teenager to performing the first legal same-sex marriage registered in Canada in 2001 as a United Church minister. This is the story of one queer kid who will hopefully inspire other young people (queer and not) to resist the system and change it.

Explores open conversation to examine the relationship between language, identity and human connection. Driven by the desire to have an honest discussion about Indigenous identity/mixed identity, artist Nadia Myre invites viewers on an intimate journey to probe the meaning of cultural distinctiveness.

Through the making and documentation of jingle dresses, Marshall explores the deeply personal stories that have shaped her perception of the complexities of her family history in the context of Canadian history.

Examines the memoirs of famous Canadian women, such as L.M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, the Dionne Quintuplets, Margaret Trudeau, and Shania Twain, to trace the rise of celebrity autobiography in Canada and the role gender has played in the rise to fame and in writing about that experience.

Presents a collection of poems by Robert Kroetsch selected by his former student David Eso. The book features Kroetsch's iconic collection, Completed Field Notes, alongside rare work gathered from different stages of Kroetsch's career. The book contains an afterword by Aritha van Herk.

Deeply informed by archival research and current scholarship, but written as a reflective and intimate memoir, What the Oceans Remember addresses current issues in migration, identity, belonging, and history through an interrogation of race, ethnicity, gender, archives and memory.

Explores the cultural and literary contexts of narrative texts produced in English Canada over the last forty years. The book takes as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses on the cultural identity of the country.

Social Poesis introduces readers to the work of one of Canada's most exciting and challenging poets. Through selections from across Rachel Zolf's poetic oeuvre, this book foregrounds the philosophical, ethical, and political questions that inform Zolf's poetry. Selections range from early poems in which Zolf explores transhistorical trauma and queer subjectivity to more recent writings that examine militarism, settler colonialism, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence. Zolf's poetry enacts what she calls a "e;social poesis"e;; she is attuned to questions of ethical responsibility and the role, and limitations, of poetry as a tool for ethical thinking, political engagement, accountability, and bearing witness. Heather Milne's introduction examines Zolf's compositional strategies, tracing the evolution of Zolf's writing from an autobiographical poetics, in which Zolf as subject/speaker is locatable, toward a poetics that moves beyond the self to address political and ethical relations among subjects of geopolitics and settler colonialism. In her afterword, Zolf focuses on her most recent work, in which poems are composed almost entirely from archival sources and enact a kind of collective assemblage of enunciation.

Quebec author An Antane Kapesh's two books, Je suis une maudite sauvagesse and Qu'as-tu fait de mon pays?, are among the foregrounding works by Indigenous women in Canada. This English translation of these works, each page presented facing the revised Innu text, makes them available for the first time to a broader readership.

Grounds itself in the critical trajectory related to what Sara Ahmed calls affective economies to offer fresh insights about the process of archiving and approaching literary materials. These economies form the crucial affective contexts for the legitimization of archival caches in the present moment and for future use.

Early-twentieth-century authors Nellie L. McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche published their novels serially to keep readers and publishers in a state of anticipation. This book argues that they were heavily invested in the cultural phenomenon of the continuing story.

A Township at War takes the reader from rural Canadian field and farm to the slopes of Vimy Ridge and the mud of Passchendaele, and shows how a tightly knit Ontario community was consumed and transformed by the trauma of war. In 1914, the southern Ontario township of East Flamborough was like a thousand other rural townships in Canada, broadly representative in its wartime experience. Author Jonathan Vance draws from rich narrative sources to reveal what rural people were like a century agohow they saw the world, what they valued, and how they lived their lives. We see them coming to terms with global events that took their loved ones to distant battlefields, and dealing with the prosaic challenges of everyday life. Fall fairs, recruiting meetings, church services, school concertsall are reimagined to understand how rural Canadians coped with war, modernism, and a world that was changing more quickly than they were. This is a story of resilience and idealism, of violence and small-mindedness, of a world that has long disappeared and one that remains with us to this day.

Presents an interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's early moral philosophy that relates it to the philosopher's own war experience and applies Wittgenstein's ethics of silence to analyse the ethical dimension of literary and artistic representations of the Great War.

Examines how Women's and Gender Studies programs can continue to prioritize the foundational critiques of inequality, power, privilege, and identity in the face of a post-secondary push toward praxis as resume building, skills acquisition, and the bridging of town-and-gown differences.

Deportment is a selection of poems surreal, cerebral, and defiant by Alice Burdick. Burdick examines the dangers of dogma, women's rights, and environmental degradation in biting satires, moving elegies, and anti-sentimental lyrics filled with mischievous wordplay. The selection includes some of Burdick's most iconic poems as well as rare work from the beginning of her career in 1990s Toronto and previously unpublished material. Burdick's later poetry, more expansive in form and subject matter, addresses motherhood, the rural landscape, and sex and desire at middle age. Deportment makes the case for Alice Burdick as one of Canada's best poets, alongside figures such as Lisa Robertson, Karen Solie, and Sina Queyras. Alessandro Porco's introduction situates Burdick's early work within the Toronto small press scene, focusing on her fugitive chapbooks, broadsides, and literary ephemera while highlighting her formative relationships with Victor Coleman and Stuart Ross. He traces her move from Toronto to Nova Scotia in the early 2000s and the impact of publishing from the social and spatial margins of Canadian literature. In her afterword, Burdick reflects on everyday life as a poet and citizen, daughter and mother in both the zombieland of downtown Toronto and the alien geography of Eastern Canada. She explores how the comparative speed, sound, and density of urban and rural spaces have shaped her literary imagination.

An original look at hoaxes in Canadian culture, this book shows how the work of some contemporary artists and writers disrupts the curatorial and authorial practices of Canada's most respected cultural institutions - art galleries, museums, and publishers - in order to celebrate discomfort, imagination, empathy, and change.

The year 1930 can be seen as the dawn of a period of darkness, the beginning of a decade that Auden would style "e;low, dishonest."e; That year was one of the most reflective moments in modernity. After the optimism of the nineteenth century, the West had stumbled into war in 1914. It managed to survive a conflagration, but it failed in the aftermath to create something valued. In 1930, Europe was questioning itself and its own viability. Where are we heading? a number of public intellectuals asked. Who are we and how do we build moral social and political structures? Can we continue to believe in the insights and healing quality of our culture? Major thinkersMann, Woolf, Ortega, Freud, Brecht, Nardal, and Huxley as well as a number of artists, including Picasso and Magritte, and musicians, such as Weill, sought to grapple with issues that remain central to our lives today: the viability of a secular Europe with Enlightenment values coming to terms with a darker view of human nature mass culture and its dangers; the rise of the politics of irrationality identity and the "e;other"e; in Western civilization new ways to represent the postwar world the epistemological dilemma in a world of uncertainty; and the new Fascismwas it a new norm or an aberration? Arthur Haberman sees 1930 as a watershed year in the intellectual life of Europe and with this book, the first to see the contributions of the public intellectuals of 1930 as a single entity, he forces a reconsideration and reinterpretation of the period.

One of the first transnational, feminist studies of Canada's black beauty culture and the role that media, retail, and consumers have played in its development, Beauty in a Box widens our understanding of the politics of black hair. The book analyzes advertisements and articles from medianewspapers, advertisements, television, and other sourcesthat focus on black communities in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and Calgary. The author explains the role local black community media has played in the promotion of African Americanowned beauty products; how the segmentation of beauty culture (i.e., the sale of black beauty products on store shelves labelled "e;ethnic hair care"e;) occurred in Canada; and how black beauty culture, which was generally seen as a small niche market before the 1970s, entered Canada's mainstream by way of department stores, drugstores, and big-box retailers. Beauty in a Box uses an interdisciplinary framework, engaging with African American history, critical race and cultural theory, consumer culture theory, media studies, diasporic art history, black feminism, visual culture, film studies, and political economy to explore the history of black beauty culture in both Canada and the United States.

More than a quarter of a century has passed since Canada promised to recognize and respect the rights of children under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Ratification of the Convention cannot, however, guarantee that everyone will abandon proprietary notions about children, or that all children will be free to enjoy the substance of their rights in every social and institutional context in which they find themselves, includingand perhaps especiallywithin families. This disconnect remains one of the most important challenges to the recognition of children's rights in Canada. The authors argue that social toxins are as harmful to children's independent welfare and developmental interests as environmental toxins, and that both must be eradicated if Canada is to fulfill its commitments under the Convention. They also argue that if Canada wishes to ensure the substance of the rights outlined in the Convention are socially guaranteed, an attitudinal or cultural shift is required concerning the moral and legal status of children. This revised, expanded, and updated edition of the bestselling Challenge of Children's Rights for Canada will be of interest to academics, policymakers, parents, teachers, social workers, and human service professionalsindeed to anyone who cares about and for children.