Stephanie Kirkwood Walker is an artist and writer and
teaches in the Department of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid
Laurier University. She is a founding member of WindSight, a
creative arts group, and directed An Attentive Life: Conversations
with Edna Staebler.
William Closson James was professor at Queen's University in
Kingston in the Department of Religious Studies.
"Stephanie Kirkwood Walker's thoughtful and meticulously researched
analysis of the writings about Emily Carr (Carr's own writings
included) serves to relocate a discussion of Carr, thereby
challenging the closure of the autobiographical text and shattering
the boundaries of the absolutist empiricism which has threatened to
turn Carr and her words to stone....Walker is not an art historian
and does not attempt to make critical analyses of Carr's paintings;
rather she approaches Carr from the discipline of religious studies
and because of this offers the art historical reader an important
perspective on the production and consumption of Carr's art....
[A]rt historians will be well-served by her sometimes tentative but
always lucid examination of the spiritual, particularly her
placement of Carr into a tradition of writing about female mystics
which draws upon literature with which few art historians will be
familiar. Most important, Walker signals directions: her listing of
`loci of late-twentieth-century concern,' specifically `[w]oman,
nature power, space, health, cities' (p. 138), highlights issues
that will, one hopes, be taken further." -- The Journal of Canadian
Art History
"Walker's book...offers apt observations, particularly about the
spiritual dimensions of Carr's image...." -- Susan Crean, Vancouver
Sun
Regarding the subject of biography, Stephanie Walker perceptively
observes that: "Biography is a deceptive genre. Positioned between
fact and fiction and elusive in its purposes, biography displays an
individual life, an existence patterned by conventions that have
also shaped the reader's experience. " In This Woman In Particular,
Stephanie Walker explores versions of Emily Carr's life that have
appeared over the last half-century. Walker contends that the
biographical image of Emily Carr that emerges from an accumulation
of biographies, films, plays and poetry as well as her own
autobiographical writing establishes an elaborated cultural
artifact -- an "image" that is bound by its very nature to remain
forever incomplete and always elusive. She demonstrates how changes
in Carr's biographical image parallel the maturing of Canadian
biographical writing, reflecting attitudes toward women artists and
the shifting balance between religion, secular attitudes and
contemporary spirituality. And Walker concludes that biography
plays a crucial role in all our lives in initiating and sustaining
debate on vital personal and collective concerns. This Woman In
Particular is a superlative and painstaking contribution to the
literary and biographical canon regarding the work and life of
Emily Carr. It is also a unique and valuable addition to any
serious discussion of the nature of biography, biographical
research, and biographical literature. -- Midwest Book Review
``[An] excellent and important book.... Walker's contextualization
is impressive. In very effective and learned ways, she elaborates
cultural, social, and art history, biographical and feminist
theory, bringing each to bear on the construction of Carr's
biographical image.... Walker is especially effective in tracing
the ways Carr's avowed religiosity -- especially seen in her
readings and wonderings over Theosophy under the influence of
Lawren Harris -- becomes a malleable spirituality in the hands of
Carr's biographers....Walker is at her very best, for she traces
carefully and very adeptly contextualizes the construction of Emily
Carr's image from its beginnings in the early decades of the
century through the appropriation controversies of the
mid-1990's....she has made a significant contribution to Canadian
cultural studies with This Women in Particular, a book that needs
to be read, and referred to often, by anyone interested in Emily
Carr or the writing artist's numerous -- and still numinous --
cultural moments.'' -- Robert Thacker -- Canadian Literature
``[This Women in Particular]...is a superlative and painstaking
contribution to the literary and biographical canon regarding the
work and life of Emily Carr. It is also a unique and valuable
addition to any serious discussion of the nature of biography,
biographical research, and biographical literature.'' -- The
Midwest Book Review
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