In the waning years of the twentieth century and the dawning of the twenty-first, scholars of human behaviour have been rethinking concepts of violence. InViolence, Identity, and Self-Determination, for example, Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber state that the question of violence has imposed itself with renewed urgency “with the collapse of the bipolar system of global rivalry.” They remark that violence, which had formerly been simplistically construed as a manifestation of binary opposition – the intrusion of an external other/adversary upon the self/same – now needs to be studied more subtly as the attempt to delineate the borders that separate...

Not all violence is sexual, but it is difficult to imagine any analysis or discussion of violence without a concomitant study of gender. Indeed, definitions of violence, gender, and culture need to underpin any such discussions, especially as one moves from investigations of “real” violence to more philosophical meditations, and finally to its artistic – and here specifically literary – representations.

While there is disagreement within scholarly communities about which theoretical perspectives best explain “real” violence and violent behaviour, there is general agreement on the importance of looking at multiple causal influences (biological, psychological, and socio-cultural/environmental/structural) at multiple levels (individual, community, and...

In a typically clever and topical tone, a 2002 cartoon inThe New Yorkerdepicts a man and a woman at a table in a restaurant. “You seem different, yet somehow familiar,” says the man. “Are you perhaps Canadian?” In one image and a few words, the cartoonist captures the general attitude of Americans toward Canadians, English Canadians, at least. Cultural, national, ethnic, racial, and gendered stereotypes abound throughout the world, of course, but in the case of Canada – especially English-speaking Canada – and the United States, essentialist images flare up in the preconceived ideas of the “average” citizen, in the...

“Re-vision,” says Adrienne Rich in a 1971 essay,¹ has revolutionary potential. Re-vision can be revolutionary when understood as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction … an act of survival.” Enriching the term even more, Rich calls it a “drive to self-knowledge … more than a search for identity … part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society … how we can begin to see and name – and therefore live – afresh” (“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” 35). Linda Williams, borrowing a decade later...

Although it is common to refer to the killing of any child – newborn or older – by either parent as infanticide (as I shall do in this study), current legal definitions of infanticide and filicide are precisely defined and are quite country-specific. According toBlack’s Law Dictionaryas used in the United States legal system, infanticide is: “I. The act of killing a newborn child, esp. by the parents or with their consent. In archaic usage, the word referred also to the killing of an unborn child. – also termedchild destruction; neonaticide. 2. The practice of killing newborn children. 3. One...

When Northrop Frye wrote his concluding essay for the 1965Literary History of Canada, he pointed out that Canadians, historically, have had significant respect for law and order in the face of mammoth, threatening, and somewhat monstrous wilderness. Although Frye uses European existentialism and the Russian Revolution as examples of differing social structures and philosophies, the underlying comparison he draws throughout the essay is between Canada and the United States. Assuming Canada’s overriding mythology to be pastoral, Frye found it an easy step to emphasize that Canada, unlike the United States with its history of revolution and technological productivity, is...

InSexing the Self,Elsbeth Probyn tells us that “in the name of … connecting (or at least acknowledging) the crevices within and between the previous chapters,” she would try to proceed “‘en guise d’une conclusion’ (which roughly translates as ‘in the manner of a conclusion,’ although [she likes] the idea of being ‘disguised as a conclusion’ better)” (165). Given the complexity, breadth, and timeliness of my topic, such a stance seems most appropriate: to present here “in the manner of a conclusion,” some disguised concluding remarks. Let me state at the outset that I see the questions that I...