With an entrenched mythology related to peacefulness and cooperation, a popular global reputation for model livability (alongside being boring), and historical crime rates amongst the lowest in the world, Canada cannot be said to seethe with a sense of murderousness. Its genres of storytelling, however, conjure an alternate reality.
From multi-genre works of fiction—ranging from Michael Winter’s The Death of Donna Whalen, Lynn Crosbie’s Dorothy L’Amour, and R.M. Vaughan’s Spells to Eden Robinson’s Blood Sports, George Elliott Clarke’s George & Rue, and Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam—to poetry, graphic series/novels, drama, popular history, and media (including, but not limited to, film and television), there is a preponderance of meditations on and depictions of murderous acts—homicide, suicide, genocide—in Canadian litero-creative enterprise.
Amongst the questions raised by the abundance of forms representing and/or reflecting on murder is “What does murder signify?” If, after Alan Sinfield, these assorted works embody forms of cultural reproduction (re: “Societies have to reproduce themselves culturally as well as materially, and this is done in great part by putting into circulation stories of how the world goes”), what murder-themed accounts of ‘how Canada goes’ are being put into circulation and to what result?

The editors of The Matter of Murder have an agreement for publication with Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Topics/approaches that might be taken into consideration:

· Representation of social and economic class
· Sexuality and gender
· Geo-politics, governmental structure, ideology, knowledge
· Community, ethnicity, race, territory, region, urban/rural
· Spirituality, religion, mythology, history
· Technology
· Consumerism, media, popular culture
· Cross-genre comparison

Please send a brief query and/or a 300-word (maximum) proposal to
representingcdnmurder@gmail.com by February 1, 2014 and include a bio-bibliographical note. Accepted essays will be due September 1, 2014 and should be between 4000 and 6000 words.

Brett Josef Grubisic and Gisèle M. Baxter, eds. The Matter of Murder

Department of English,
University of British Columbia
397-1873 East Mall, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1