Lexington Books
Pages: 156
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-7936-4747-4 • Hardback • April 2024 • $100.00 • (£77.00)
978-1-7936-4748-1 • eBook • April 2024 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Rita Dirks is associate professor of English at St. Mary’s University, Calgary.
Chapter 1: A Memoir of a ‘weak and effeminate’ Man. Swing Low: A Life of Dignity
Chapter 2: Plautdietsch and Silence in A Complicated Kindness
Chapter 3: Irma Voth: Art, Shunning (Again), and Domestic Violence
Chapter 4: All My Puny Sorrows: A Defense of Art and the Right to Die
Chapter 5: A Hayloft of Their Own: From Rape to Rage in Women Talking
Chapter 6: Fight Night: Healing and Writing for Generations to Come
In this first book-length study of Miriam Toews’ “Mennonite” novels, Rita Dirks offers patient, deeply grounded, and insightful readings of a body of work that has broken open often-silenced areas of Mennonite women’s experience. One result, as Dirks shows, is open expression of rage—but she also details the great resources of wisdom, resilience, humor, and solidarity in these novels.
— Jeff Gundy, Bluffton University
In Silence and Rage in Miriam Toews's Mennonite Novels, Rita Dirks creates both a personal meditation on violence towards women and a fine academic study of Miriam Toews’s six Mennonite novels. Working from a deep knowledge of Mennonite history and religious practice, Dirks examines how Toews uses autofiction to resist “the burden of silence” imposed on women within fundamentalist Mennonite communities. Dirks shows how Toews, through her Mennonite novels, combats the personal and communal harm caused by enforced self-silencing. As Dirks explains, Toews exposes the power of anger by portraying how her characters move from silence, to rage, to self-expression through art.
— Sabrina Reed, Mount Royal University