Novels
Van Herk’s writing career began with the publication of her M.A. thesis in 1978. Judith a novel that explores a feisty female protagonist’s experiences in both rural and urban Canadian spaces, was the first winner of the Seal First Novel Award (C$50,000) from McClelland and Stewart, which granted the book international distribution throughout North America and Europe. With her second novel, The Tent Peg (1981), van Herk continued to focus on issues of both female experience and the Canadian wilderness in a narrative where the female protagonist disguises herself as a man in order to get a job as a cook in a northern geological bush-camp. Van Herk established herself as a postmodern novelist by challenging classic myths and mythology, upending notions of both gender and genre, and experimenting with humour and magic realism. Van Herk would continue to subvert literary conventions with her third novel, No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey (1986), a parody of the picaresque genre in which underwear saleswoman Arachne Manteia traverses the Canadian prairies in her vintage Mercedes. The novel, nominated for the Governor General’s Award, won the Howard O'Hagan Award for Best Alberta Novel. Like No Fixed Address, van Herk’s fourth novel Restlessness (1998) questions and subverts narrative form, and features another female character on the fly. In this reversed Sheherazade tale, Dorcas, a nomadic protagonist in a self-reflexive narrative about how to avoid both story and travel, paradoxically divulges her own life story to the man whom she has contracted to kill her.
Read more about this topic: Aritha Van Herk
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“I have just opened Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning” for the first time, which I read with great delight. It is more like what Scott’s novels were than anything.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)