The Double Hook
First edition
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| Author | Sheila Watson |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Frank Newfeld |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Series | New Canadian Library |
| Genre | modernist |
| Publisher | McClelland & Stewart |
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Publication date
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1959 |
| Media type | Hardcover & paperback |
| Pages | 127 |
| C813.54 | |
| LC Class | PR9199.3 W37 D68 |
The Double Hook is a novel written by Sheila Watson, which is considered "a seminal work in the development of contemporary Canadian literature." Published in 1959, The Double Hook is written in a style more like prose poetry than fiction. It is often considered to be Canada's first modernist novel due to how it "departs from traditional plot, character development, form and style to tell a poetic tale of human suffering and redemption that is at once fabular, allegorical and ."The Canadian Encyclopedia declares that: "Publication of Watson's novel The Double Hook (1959) marks the start of contemporary writing in Canada."
Watson said that her novel is "about how people are driven, how if they have no art, how if they have no tradition, how if they have no ritual, they are driven in one of two ways, either towards violence or towards insensibility – if they have no mediating rituals which manifest themselves in what I suppose we call art forms." She has explained that the "double hook" of her title refers to the idea "that when you fish for the glory you catch the darkness too. That if you hook twice the glory you hook twice the fear."
Watson wrote The Double Hook between 1952 and 1954 in Calgary, Alberta and revised it during a year spent in Paris. Throughout the 1950s she was unable to find a publisher. "T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, C. Day-Lewis at Chatto & Windus, and Rupert Hart-Davis all turned it down."
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Wikipedia