Academic Monographs by Cheryl Cowdy
Canadian Suburban: Reimagining Space and Place in Postwar English Canadian Fiction, 2022
Canadian Suburban considers the cultures of suburbia
as they are articulated in English Canadian ... more Canadian Suburban considers the cultures of suburbia
as they are articulated in English Canadian fiction
published from the 1960s to the present. Cheryl
Cowdy begins her excursion through novels set
between 1945 and 1970, the heyday of modern
suburban development, with works by canonical
authors such as Margaret Laurence, Richard B.
Wright, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Gowdy.
Her investigation then turns to the meaning of the
suburbs within fiction set after the 1970s, when a
more corporate model of suburbanization prevailed,
and ends with an investigation of how writers from
immigrant and racialized communities are radically
transforming the suburban imaginary. Cowdy argues
there is no one authentic suburban imaginary but
multiple, at times contradictory, representations
that disrupt prevalent assumptions about suburban
homogeneity.
Canadian Suburban provides a foundation for
understanding the literary history of suburbia and a
refreshing reassessment of the role of space and place
in Canadian culture and identity.
Journal Articles by Cheryl Cowdy
Bookbird, 2018
This paper analyzes the possibilities of empathic experience created by Jessica
Anthony and Rodri... more This paper analyzes the possibilities of empathic experience created by Jessica
Anthony and Rodrigo Corral’s book and iPad app Chopsticks (2012), using
as a theoretical framework Marshall McLuhan’s theories concerning “hot” and
“cool” media in Understanding Media and the significance of changing “sense
ratios” created by the extension of new technologies “into the social world,” as
he first posited in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Exploring the tension between my
own textual analysis and the affective responses reported by youth interpreters
and by Goodreads reviewers, I explore how Chopsticks invites readers to enter
“the multimodal subjunctive” (Mackey, 2008, 2011), compelling consideration of
our senses and emotions in interactive meaning-making processes. Inspired by
Jenkin’s theories concerning transmedia storytelling, I propose the term “transsensory
storytelling” as a means for theorizing the meaning-making possibilities of
changing sense ratios when an app’s engagement with touch and sound extends
the visuality of a book. I argue that investigation into this process might help
counter moral panics based on implicit assumptions about a projected future
dystopia in which the disappearance of childhood, the book, and the human
capacity for empathy are all falsely connected.
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2016
Inanimate Alice is a digital, online novel that employs strategies of transmedia and game-based s... more Inanimate Alice is a digital, online novel that employs strategies of transmedia and game-based storytelling in order to appeal to the “born-digital” generation. Using a simple episodic narrative structure, IA moves readers around the globe as Alice travels to various locations and homes in different national contexts. Thematically, the narrative both allays and raises anxieties about children’s experiences of mobility and migration. Incorporating literary and cultural analysis with multimethod qualitative research, this article investigates the ways in which children’s understandings of their practices of mobility are shaped by transmediation and their reading experiences of IA. It also considers how adults and young people might work together in their encounters with such texts to create “animated learning” scenarios that privilege what I call alternative pedagogies of mobility, in which adult-child hierarchies are disrupted and physical and virtual movements are considered essential to experiential, reflective learning.
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2013
Global Studies of Childhood, 2011
This article explores the ideological work of play as it is represented in three
contemporary gr... more This article explores the ideological work of play as it is represented in three
contemporary graphic narratives – Kean Soo’s Jellaby and Jellaby: monster in the city, and Mariko & Jillian
Tamaki’s Skim, analyzing the relationship these texts create between urban spaces and the ‘innovative’
spaces of the panel and page. The author is interested in the various ways the graphic novel can be read
as a ‘leisure genre’ (to borrow a term coined by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner) that creates a
dynamic, interactive ecology, encouraging protagonists and readers to participate in a ludic, pediarchic
poetics of play. The content and the formal properties of these texts posit ‘play’ dynamically in
relationship to ‘flow’ as a subject of the texts’ critique, but also as an activity occurring in the liminal
spaces in and between panels. The novels address readers as clever, sophisticated accomplices in the
meaning-making process. Play is represented as subversive of adult authoritarianism and narrative
domination, thwarting the co-optation and commodification of play in the cultures of young people.
Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature, 2012
n spite of its history as an unintelligible activity in Western society, self-mutilation entered ... more n spite of its history as an unintelligible activity in Western society, self-mutilation entered the discourse of childhood as a significant motif of feminine experience the moment children appropriated the fairy tale. Since then, it has functioned as a complex motif in literature, offering scholars an opportunity to identify the different ways troubling or disturbing subjects are treated based on the target audiences of texts. Taking "Cinderella" and "The Little Mermaid" as representative, this paper argues that self-mutilation functions as an act of self-mutilation functions as an act of self-sacrifice to romantic hetero-normative narratives. Meanwhile, cutting in the Canadian young adult novels As She Grows by Lesley Ann Cowan () and Cheryl Rainfield's Scars () is represented ambivalently, exposing both the potential for violence and for agency in self-mutilative acts. In their refusal of pathologization, representations of self-mutilation in YA fiction offer readers a ritualistic occasion for their own empathic resistance to the hegemonic incorporation of symbolic demands, encouraging the development of creative strategies for self-expression within dysfunctional societies.
Studies in Canadian Literature, 2011
Margaret Atwood examines the meaning of time and space for the female Canadian artist coming of a... more Margaret Atwood examines the meaning of time and space for the female Canadian artist coming of age in postwar suburbia in her Künstlerromane, Lady Oracle (1977) and Cat’s Eye (1989). Set in Toronto, both texts foreground the epistemological instability of the wilderness/urban binary through the trope of the ravine. They posit ravines as dark, hidden, repressed spaces associated with the unconscious and with the liminal space of childhood and adolescence. In their representation of young female artist characters, the novels contest the denigration of the autobiographical as they suggest the creative potential of a space most often associated, socially and culturally, with sterility. Both texts articulate a political vision in which young women refuse to be confined to spaces of domesticity, reflecting the “outsider-within stance” described by Gillian Rose in her understanding of feminist politics as paradoxical space.
Book Chapters by Cheryl Cowdy
Journal Issues by Cheryl Cowdy
IRCL (International Research in Children's Literature 11.2, 2018
Online Resources by Cheryl Cowdy
Scholarly Resource: Children’s Literature Collection at York University Libraries, 2017
“Introduction to the Collection,” “Wilderness and Civilized Domesticity: Adventurous Boys and Res... more “Introduction to the Collection,” “Wilderness and Civilized Domesticity: Adventurous Boys and Resourceful Girls,” and “The Figure of the Indigene in Settler Canadian Children’s Literature.” Critical Commentary for Scholarly Resource: Children’s Literature Collection at York University Libraries. Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York U.
Papers by Cheryl Cowdy
Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 2016
The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien
Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 2016
Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature, 2018
International Research in Children's Literature
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2016
Uploads
Academic Monographs by Cheryl Cowdy
as they are articulated in English Canadian fiction
published from the 1960s to the present. Cheryl
Cowdy begins her excursion through novels set
between 1945 and 1970, the heyday of modern
suburban development, with works by canonical
authors such as Margaret Laurence, Richard B.
Wright, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Gowdy.
Her investigation then turns to the meaning of the
suburbs within fiction set after the 1970s, when a
more corporate model of suburbanization prevailed,
and ends with an investigation of how writers from
immigrant and racialized communities are radically
transforming the suburban imaginary. Cowdy argues
there is no one authentic suburban imaginary but
multiple, at times contradictory, representations
that disrupt prevalent assumptions about suburban
homogeneity.
Canadian Suburban provides a foundation for
understanding the literary history of suburbia and a
refreshing reassessment of the role of space and place
in Canadian culture and identity.
Journal Articles by Cheryl Cowdy
Anthony and Rodrigo Corral’s book and iPad app Chopsticks (2012), using
as a theoretical framework Marshall McLuhan’s theories concerning “hot” and
“cool” media in Understanding Media and the significance of changing “sense
ratios” created by the extension of new technologies “into the social world,” as
he first posited in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Exploring the tension between my
own textual analysis and the affective responses reported by youth interpreters
and by Goodreads reviewers, I explore how Chopsticks invites readers to enter
“the multimodal subjunctive” (Mackey, 2008, 2011), compelling consideration of
our senses and emotions in interactive meaning-making processes. Inspired by
Jenkin’s theories concerning transmedia storytelling, I propose the term “transsensory
storytelling” as a means for theorizing the meaning-making possibilities of
changing sense ratios when an app’s engagement with touch and sound extends
the visuality of a book. I argue that investigation into this process might help
counter moral panics based on implicit assumptions about a projected future
dystopia in which the disappearance of childhood, the book, and the human
capacity for empathy are all falsely connected.
contemporary graphic narratives – Kean Soo’s Jellaby and Jellaby: monster in the city, and Mariko & Jillian
Tamaki’s Skim, analyzing the relationship these texts create between urban spaces and the ‘innovative’
spaces of the panel and page. The author is interested in the various ways the graphic novel can be read
as a ‘leisure genre’ (to borrow a term coined by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner) that creates a
dynamic, interactive ecology, encouraging protagonists and readers to participate in a ludic, pediarchic
poetics of play. The content and the formal properties of these texts posit ‘play’ dynamically in
relationship to ‘flow’ as a subject of the texts’ critique, but also as an activity occurring in the liminal
spaces in and between panels. The novels address readers as clever, sophisticated accomplices in the
meaning-making process. Play is represented as subversive of adult authoritarianism and narrative
domination, thwarting the co-optation and commodification of play in the cultures of young people.
Book Chapters by Cheryl Cowdy
Journal Issues by Cheryl Cowdy
Online Resources by Cheryl Cowdy
Papers by Cheryl Cowdy
as they are articulated in English Canadian fiction
published from the 1960s to the present. Cheryl
Cowdy begins her excursion through novels set
between 1945 and 1970, the heyday of modern
suburban development, with works by canonical
authors such as Margaret Laurence, Richard B.
Wright, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Gowdy.
Her investigation then turns to the meaning of the
suburbs within fiction set after the 1970s, when a
more corporate model of suburbanization prevailed,
and ends with an investigation of how writers from
immigrant and racialized communities are radically
transforming the suburban imaginary. Cowdy argues
there is no one authentic suburban imaginary but
multiple, at times contradictory, representations
that disrupt prevalent assumptions about suburban
homogeneity.
Canadian Suburban provides a foundation for
understanding the literary history of suburbia and a
refreshing reassessment of the role of space and place
in Canadian culture and identity.
Anthony and Rodrigo Corral’s book and iPad app Chopsticks (2012), using
as a theoretical framework Marshall McLuhan’s theories concerning “hot” and
“cool” media in Understanding Media and the significance of changing “sense
ratios” created by the extension of new technologies “into the social world,” as
he first posited in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Exploring the tension between my
own textual analysis and the affective responses reported by youth interpreters
and by Goodreads reviewers, I explore how Chopsticks invites readers to enter
“the multimodal subjunctive” (Mackey, 2008, 2011), compelling consideration of
our senses and emotions in interactive meaning-making processes. Inspired by
Jenkin’s theories concerning transmedia storytelling, I propose the term “transsensory
storytelling” as a means for theorizing the meaning-making possibilities of
changing sense ratios when an app’s engagement with touch and sound extends
the visuality of a book. I argue that investigation into this process might help
counter moral panics based on implicit assumptions about a projected future
dystopia in which the disappearance of childhood, the book, and the human
capacity for empathy are all falsely connected.
contemporary graphic narratives – Kean Soo’s Jellaby and Jellaby: monster in the city, and Mariko & Jillian
Tamaki’s Skim, analyzing the relationship these texts create between urban spaces and the ‘innovative’
spaces of the panel and page. The author is interested in the various ways the graphic novel can be read
as a ‘leisure genre’ (to borrow a term coined by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner) that creates a
dynamic, interactive ecology, encouraging protagonists and readers to participate in a ludic, pediarchic
poetics of play. The content and the formal properties of these texts posit ‘play’ dynamically in
relationship to ‘flow’ as a subject of the texts’ critique, but also as an activity occurring in the liminal
spaces in and between panels. The novels address readers as clever, sophisticated accomplices in the
meaning-making process. Play is represented as subversive of adult authoritarianism and narrative
domination, thwarting the co-optation and commodification of play in the cultures of young people.