This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields’s experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her fiction. 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 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. 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 2018. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight Grant for her program of research on Carol Shields.