Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and 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 2018. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight Grant for her program of research on Carol Shields.

• Foreword – Anne Giardini.- Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction: Crossing Borders.- Prologue: (Es)saying It Her Way: Carol Shields as Essayist – Christl Verduyn.- Part I: Essays on Carol Shields’s Short Stories.- The Short of It: Carol Shields’s Stories – Neil Besner.- Space for Strangeness: Carol Shields’s Short Stories – Coral Ann Howells.- “Be a Little Crazy: Astonish Me”: Carol Shields’s Improvisational Flair in Dressing Up for the Carnival – Nora Foster Stovel.- “Controlled Chaos” and Carol Shields’s “A View from the Edge of the Edge” – Marta Dvořák.- Part II: Essays on Carol Shields’s Novels.- “The Alchemy of Re-Imagined Reality”: Biographical Gothicism in Carol Shields’s Swann: A Mystery – Cynthia Sugars.- Transforming Love: Critical and Religious Discourses in Carol Shields’s The Republic of Love – Brenda Beckman-Long.- Shields’s Theory of Fiction Writing: Grief and Memorial in The Stone Diaries – ChristianRiegel.- Larry’s Party: Man in the Maze and “Where Curiosity Leads” – Warren Cariou.- Advice to Writers in Carol Shields’s Unless – Wendy Roy.- In/visibility, Race-Baiting, and the Author Function in Carol Shields’s Unless – Smaro Kamboureli.- Afterword: “Little Shocks of Recognition”: Carol Shields’s Book Reviews – Alex Ramon.-  Epilogue: “Etching on Glass”: Carol Shields’s Re-Vision – Aritha van Herk.