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Australia, New Zealand, & Canada

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2020 Edition

                    World Literature: Australia, New Zealand, & Canada 

                                  Australia

                                  History

     The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, Robert Hughes

     Before the Invasion: Aboriginal Life to 1788, Mudrooroo, Colin Bourke, and Isobel White

     Australian Dreaming: 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History, Jennifer Isaacs (Editor), Wandjuk Marika (Foreword)

     The World of the First Australians: Aboriginal Traditional Life Past and Present, The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia, Ronald M. Berndt, Catherine H. Berndt

     Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art, Pamela McClusky, Wally Caruana, Lisa Graziose Corrin, Stephen Gilchrist

                            Literature

     Dr Wooready’s Prescription for Enduring the End of the World, Master of the Ghost Dreaming, The Undying, Underground, The Promised Land, Aboriginal Mythology: An A-Z Spanning the History of the Australian Aboriginal Peoples from the Earliest Legends to the Present Day, Mudrooroo Nyoongah

     The Female Eunuch, The Whole Woman, Sex and destiny, Slip-Shod Sibyls, Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood, Lysistrata – The Sex Strike, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, Shakespeare’s Wife, Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th-Century Women’s Verse, The Madwoman’s Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, Daddy We Hardly Knew You, Germaine Greer

     The Twyborn Affair, Voss, The Aunt’s Story, Tree of Man, Riders in the Chariot, Eye of the Storm, The Cockatoos, Patrick White

The Eye In The Mandala: Patrick White, A Vision Of Man And God, Peter Beatson

     Illywacker, Oscar & Lucinda, Jack Maggs, True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life As A Fake, His Illegal Self, Parrot and Olivier in America, On The Chemistry of Tears, Amnesia, A Long Way From Home, Peter Carey

     Remembering Babylon, An Imaginative Life, The Great World, The Conversations at Curlow Creek, On Dream Stuff: Stories, Every Move You Make,    Earth Hour, On A First Place, David Malouf

     The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, Drylands, Thea Astley

     Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas   

                   New Zealand

                   History

     Turning Points: Events That Changed the Course of New Zealand History, Encounters: The Creation of New Zealand: A History, Paul Moon

     Tikanga Whakaaro: key concepts in Maori culture, Cleve Barlow

     Mau Moko: the world of Maori Tattoo, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku

                     Literature

     Te Kaihau: the Windeater, The Bone People, Stonefish, Keri Hulme

     Once Were Warriors, Alan Duff

     The Piano, Jane Campion

     Selected Stories, Katherine Mansfield

                    Canada

                    History

     Canada: An Illustrated History, Derek Hayes

     National Dreams: Myth, Memory, and Canadian History, Imagining Ourselves: Classics of Canadian Non-Fiction, Imagining British Columbia: Land, Memory, and Place, Daniel Francis

     A Story as Sharp as a Knife: the classical Haida storytellers and their world, Robert Bringhurst

     Haida Art, George F. MacDonald

     Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker

                    Literature

     The Next Sure Thing, Dreams, Him Standing, Starlight, Indian Horse, Ragged Company, Medicine Walk, Dream Wheels, One Story One Song, For Joshua, One Native Life, Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations, One Drum: Stories and Ceremonies for a Planet, Richard Wagamese

     Monkey Beach, Son of a Trickster, Trickster Drift, Eden Robinson

     The Deptford Trilogy : Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders, The Cornish Trilogy: The Rebel Angels, Whats Bred In The Bone, & The Lyre of Orpheus, Robertson Davies

     The Smaller Infinity, Patricia Monk

     Not Wanted on the Voyage, Pilgrim, Timothy Findley

     Selected Poems, Anne Hebert

     Celia’s Song, Lee Maracle

      Autobiography of Red, Eros the Bittersweet, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, Glass Irony and God, Antigonick, An Oresteia, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Men in the Off Hours, Decreation, Float, Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae (contributor), Anne Carson

Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, Joshua Marie Wilkinson editor

     Warlight, The Cat’s Table, Divisadero, Anil’s Ghost, The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion, The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems, Handwriting, Coming Through Slaughter, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,   Michael Ondaatje

     The Edible Woman, Life Before Man, Interlunar, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, Sharon Rose Wilson

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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