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Literary Criticism Canadian

A Candle to Light the Sun (eBook)

by (author) Patricia Blondal

introduction by Patricia Demers

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Initial publish date
Oct 2013
Category
Canadian
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780199013685
    Publish Date
    Oct 2013
    List Price
    $9.99

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Description

Three years before Margaret Laurence's first Manawaka novel, Patricia Blondal introduced the Prairie town of Mouse Bluffs, set in the Depression of the 1930s. Like the book's title suggests, this is a novelistic world of sharply drawn contrasts, where diminutive life force on a human scale trembles before a wide open, unprotecting Prairie, planet, universe. But where Laurence's novels are angry, fuelled by class-based and ethnic tensions, there is a kindness and warmth beneath Blondal's cold surfaces, an admiration for resilience and survival against the apocalyptic silence of empty space:

"Nothing so silent, not moon or cold space or mountaintop so silent as the streets of Mouse Bluffs at night, nothing so small as the sound of feet on the cinder paths. Whatever man had built was lost against a horizon so vast no house or pathetic valley could hold the eyes. Eyes and heart, like the two lives lines of steel that braced all together, must follow the sweet west, forever travelling over immensity, proportionately nothing."

Human existence in Blondal's novel is frail, but clings with determination to the Prairie's surface. This at times epic landscape is described with the "strength of purpose" (in Hugh Garner's words) of an author who was dying of breast cancer and would leave behind two young children. There is little to comfort the novel's characters, who inhabit an inadequate and sordid world. But there are glimmering moments of connection, reasons to struggle, and the motivation to look to the next generation.

About the authors

Patricia Blondal's profile page

A professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Patricia Demers is the author or editor of eleven books and over fifty articles. Her research interests range widelyâ??from early modern womenâ??s writing, Shakespearean and Jacobean drama, feminist hermeneutics, and childrenâ??s literature to contemporary Canadian womenâ??s writing. She is the recipient of a Rutherford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and a McCalla Research Professorship. In September 2005 she was awarded the University Cup, the University of Albertaâ??s highest recognition for outstanding teaching and research. In 2006, she was appointed University Professor.

Patricia Demers' profile page

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