Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Callaghan, Morley - Gary Boire (essay date 1999)

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Gary Boire (essay date 1999)

SOURCE: Boire, Gary. “The Language of the Law: The Cases of Morley Callaghan.” In Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story, edited by Gerald Lynch and Angela Arnold Robbeson, pp. 75-86. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Boire examines Callaghan's use of the language of the law in his short stories between 1925 and 1928.]

This discussion has two discrete, yet intersecting, points of departure. I want to consider, first, Morley Callaghan as an experimental short story writer—more specifically, a postcolonial writer intensely aware of his own resistant activity within a well-established colonialist genre. I want to consider, in other words, Callaghan's radical experimentations with both the language and genre of the short story form. Second, I want to consider how this experimentation intersects with what proved to be Callaghan's lifelong boredom and...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Margaret Avison (essay date summer 1992)
   2. John W. Burbidge (essay date fall 1992)
   3. Russell Brown (essay date winter-spring 1993-94)
   4. Marianne Perz (essay date 1997)
   5. Justin D. Edwards (essay date 1998)
   6. Barbara Pell (essay date 1998)
   7. Gary Boire (essay date 1999)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright