Lives Lived, Lives Imagined: Landscapes of Resilience in the Works of Miriam Toews - Softcover

Sabrina Reed (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1772840092 ISBN 13: 9781772840094

Publisher: University of Manitoba Press, 2022

Synopsis

Perceptive, controversial, topical, and achingly funny, Miriam Toews’s books have earned her a place at the forefront of Canadian literature. In this first monograph on Toews’s work, Sabrina Reed examines the interplay of trauma and resilience in the author’s fiction. Reed skillfully demonstrates how Toews situates resilience across key themes, including: the home as both a source of trauma and an inspiration for resilient action; the road trip as a search for resolution and redemption; and the reframing of the Mennonite diaspora as an escape from patriarchal oppression. The dual suicides of Toews’s father and sister stand out as the most shocking and tragic of the author’s biographical details, and Reed explores Toews’s use of autofiction as a reparative gesture in the face of this trauma.Written in an accessible style that will appeal to both scholars and devotees of Toews’s work, Lives Lived, Lives Imagined is a timely examination of Toews’s oeuvre and a celebration of fiction’s ability to simultaneously embody compassion and anger, joy and sadness, and to brave the personal and communal oppressions of politics, religion, family, society, and mental illness.

About this title

About the Author

Sabrina Reed is a professor in the Department of English, Languages and Cultures at Mount Royal University. She researches in the areas of Canadian Literature and Critical Disability Studies.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1772840092
• ISBN 13: 9781772840094
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277