Böcker av Isabella Valancy Crawford

This volume established Isabella Valancy Crawford as one of Canada's principal poets. Coupled with an introductory collage of viewpoints and reactions to her work by James Reaney its provides a vivid glimpse into the literary past of this country.Although her poetry reflects the patterns of her time, Isabella Valancy Crawford was able to accept the raw and vigorous Canadian landscape on its own terms. She was the first of our poets for whom it became the setting for struggle, passion, love, and death. She celebrated the young land with an imagery enriched by allusions to North American Indian lore reflected in such lines as these:From his far wigwam sprang the strong North Wind  And rushed with war-cry down the steep ravine, And wrestled with the giants of the woods; And with his ice-club beat the swelling crests Of the deep water courses into death.'These verses bear the stamp of genius and show a true poetic instinct,' said a critic in The Canadian Magazine in 1895. The poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford forms a vital part of the body of Canadian writing. 

The prize-winning entry in a national competition for distinctively Canadian fiction, Winona was serialized in a Montreal story paper in 1873. The novel focuses on the lives of two foster-sisters raised in the northern Ontario wilderness: Androsia Howard, daughter of a retired military officer, and Winona, the daughter of a Huron chief. As the story begins, both have come under the sway of the mysterious and powerful Andrew Farmer, who has proposed to Androsia while secretly pursuing Winona. With the arrival of Archie Frazer, the son of an old military friend, there is a violent crisis, and the scene shifts southward as Archie takes the foster-sisters via Toronto to his family's estate in the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River. Farmer follows, and the narrative moves towards a sensational climax. The critical introduction and appendices to this edition place Winona in the contexts of Crawford's career, the contemporary market for serialized fiction, the sensation novel of the 1860s, nineteenth-century representations of women and North American indigenous peoples, and the emergence of Canadian literary nationalism in the era following Confederation.