How does an "outsider" feminist read a contemporary Canadian literature that is profoundly inscribed with the contradictions of late 20th-century capitalism, nationalism and globalism, and with vigorous class, race and gender struggles for access to power and representation? What does "literature" become when its own strategies variously place history, genre, legitimacy and literariness into question?

Through readings of such diverse Canadian writers as Dionne Brand, Alice Munro, Jacqueline Dumas, Frank Davey, Claire Harris, Michael Ondaatje, Elly Danica, Robert Kroetsch, Nourbese Philip, bpNichol, Beatrice Culleton, Margaret Atwood, Rose Dorion, George Bowering, Lola Lemire Tostevin and Daphne Marlatt, Outsider Notes offers tough-minded reappraisals of canonictiy, modernism, postmodernism, marginality, and postcoloniality and opens a challenge to write and read "past the ideology of the nation state."