Carol Shields

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Standard Name: Shields, Carol
Birth Name: Carol Ann Warner
CS , an American-born Canadian novelist of the twentieth century, a low-key but passionate feminist, published a collection of poetry as her first book. Her earliest novel features as minor character a novelist whose stock-in-trade is to be Canadian but who is by birth (secretly) an American. Her novels probe the freight of meaning in the small change of ordinary lives, especially those of women, and the way that an ordinary person becomes an artist. They delight in self-reflexiveness, and combine self-conscious artistry with a disarming appearance of transcription from life. CS also wrote short fiction and plays.
Colour photo of Carolyn Shields taken outside at her home in Victoria, Canada, 1995. Shot from below, she looks off-camera, wears a red tartan scarf draped over her right shoulder, and is framed by tree branches overhead in a light blue, near-night sky.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Author summary Susanna Moodie
SM is best remembered for her first-person narrative of pioneer life in Canada, Roughing It in the Bush, 1852, considered a foundational work of Canadian literature. She was a prolific author who wrote...
Textual Features Susanna Moodie
Another personal narrative, but with less of the autobiographical in it than its predecessor, this book takes its structure from the succession of places passed through and people met on a recent trip to Niagara...
Textual Features Susanna Moodie
The eponymous leading personage is the unmitigated consummation of evil, but a couple of other bad characters have redeeming features.
Shields, Carol. Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision. Borealis Press, 1977.
17
Carol Shields renders with a diagram the elaborate pairing and contrasting of characters good...
Textual Features Susanna Moodie
Carol Shields noted that several details in this book are lifted from life, that psychological causes are often suggested for characters' personal aberrations, and that Moodie has become capable of more complex characterization.
Shields, Carol. Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision. Borealis Press, 1977.
23, 71
Textual Features Alice Munro
Most exotic and improbable of all is The Albanian Virgin (based on an actual experience, about 1900, of a librarian from Clinton, Ontario),
Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro. McClelland and Stewart, 2005.
445
which makes use of the ancient tradition, in a tribal society...
Textual Production Penelope Lively
PL has published introductions to works by other writers including Ivy Compton-Burnett , Edith Wharton , Willa Cather , and Carol Shields . In September 2015 she reviewed Alison Light 's Common People: In Pursuit...
Textual Production Claire Luckham
CL 's musical adaptation of Defoe 's novel Moll Flanders was staged in 1986. More recently she has performed a valuable service by providing the catalyst for the delivery to radio audiences of much women's...
Textual Production Deborah Levy
DL has also written dramatic adaptations for BBC radio of others' work: of Chance Acquaintances by Colette , of Unless by Carol Shields , and of Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca , the last...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Penelope Fitzgerald
It includes Fitzgerald's comments on works by Jane Austen , George Eliot , Margaret Oliphant , Barbara Pym , Carol Shields , and Amy Tan , as well as on a number of recent literary...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Shields, Carol. Thirteen Hands: a play in two acts. Blizzard Publishing, 1993.
Shields, Carol. Unless: a novel. Random House Canada, 2002.
Shields, Carol. Various Miracles. Stoddart, 1985.
Shields, Carol. “When I do count the clock”. The Guardian, pp. Review 4 - 6.