Linda Hutcheon

Linda Hutcheon

Linda Hutcheon, literary and art critic, educator (born at Toronto, Ont 24 Aug 1947). Educated at the University of Toronto and Cornell University, she is currently professor of English and comparative literature at U of T. She is a leading authority on contemporary art and literature, and several of her books concern the history, theory and practise of postmodernism. In A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), Hutcheon analyses both mass media and high art forms and asserts that our visual images and verbal stories construct rather than reflect our experience of the world. She explores the function of parody and irony in postmodernism in A Theory of Parody (1985) and Irony's Edge (1995). Splitting Images (1991) argues that Canadian culture offers particularly fertile ground for the cultivating of doubleness, and examines the numerous forms of irony observable in Canadian literature and visual arts. These issues are similarly foregrounded in her study of contemporary Canadian fiction, The Canadian Postmodern (1988).

She has also edited or co-edited numerous anthologies, including Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions (1990), and Double-Talking (1992), a series of essays on ironies in Canadian art and literature. Her most recent work is Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (1996), co-authored with Michael Hutcheon.