Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction

“This essay collection, written by a stellar group of Canadian literature specialists, is a love letter to the late Canadian writer Carol Shields, who died about twenty years ago. The essays revisit Shields’s prolific career—short story writer, novelist, book reviewer, teacher and biographer—through the lens of her posthumous collection, Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing (2016), edited by her daughter Anne Giardini and grandson Nicholas Giardini. The chapters are eclectic, both intimate and academic in tone, as they reflect different relationships with this beloved writer within our Can Lit circle—and beyond.” —Laurie Kruk, Professor in English Studies, Nipissing University, Canada

This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields's experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her novels and short stories. Shields’s essays clarify her iconoclastic approach to rules of narrative and illuminate her revisionist policies, elucidating the development of her fiction, both novels and short stories, as her writing gradually becomes more explicitly feminist, as well as more daringly postmodernist. The dozen essays by the eminent Canadianists included in this edition throw fresh light on Shields’s writing, inviting us to read it with new eyes, by revealing how her essays reflect and refract the brilliance of her fiction, both novels and stories, helping readers to comprehend her art. These essays read Shields’s fiction through the lens of her essays, including those contained in the recent Giardini edition, wherein the author explains the creative methodologies involved in her fiction and also offers specific advice to writers of fiction.
Nora Foster Stovel is a Professor Emerita of the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has published books and essays on Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Margaret Drabble, Carol Shields, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Laurence, including Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete Writings. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight Grant for her program of research on Carol Shields.