Unarrested archives: case studies in twentieth-century Canadian women's authorship

摘要

Linda Morra poses many significant questions about the relationships between archives, material records and the creative work of women in literary fields. There are five chapters in Unarrested Archives, and each focuses on the work, experiences and literary records of one Canadian woman writer. This approach is taken 'to showcase how women writers were regulated and contained, and how at times they existed in or negotiated both personal and professional antagonist relationships' in the context of historically specific ideologies of class, race and sexual identity (p. 7). As Morra states, her work 'invites rethinking of seemingly clear designations, of what the archive means, of what power structures are undergirded by papers under house arrest, and by whom and for whom archives are established' (p. 11). Conceptually, 'arrested' and 'unarrested' are used in the framing and analysis of the authors' papers and their respective placements in and out of formal archives. Through this the numerous and often multiple paths that personal and literary papers, in various forms, can take is considered. These include when papers are arrested (detained and/or captured by institutions) and when they are not (unwanted by institutions, withheld by creators and/or discarded by institutions) (pp. 8-9).