Smaro Kamboureli

Dean Irvine

This collection of essays focuses on the varied and complex roles that editors have played in the production of literary and scholarly texts in Canada. With contributions from a wide range of participants who have played seminal roles as editors of Canadian literatures—from nineteenth-century works to the contemporary avant-garde, from canonized texts to anthologies of so-called minority writers and the oral literatures of the First Nations—this collection is the first of its kind. Contributors offer incisive analyses of the cultural and publishing politics of editorial practices that question inherited paradigms of literary and scholarly values. They examine specific cases of editorial production as well as theoretical considerations of editing that interrogate such key issues as authorial intentionality, textual authority, historical contingencies of textual production, circumstances of publication and reception, the pedagogical uses of edited anthologies, the instrumentality of editorial projects in relation to canon formation and minoritized literatures, and the role of editors as interpreters, enablers, facilitators, and creators. Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada situates editing in the context of the growing number of collaborative projects in which Canadian scholars are engaged, which brings into relief not only those aspects of editorial work that entail collaborating, as it were, with existing texts and documents but also collaboration as a scholarly practice that perforce involves co-editing.

Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada

Based on extensive new archival and literary historical research, Editing Modernity examines these Canadian women writers and editors and their role in the production and dissemination of modernist and leftist little magazines.

Women and Little-magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916-1956

Editing Modernity

Vanessa Lent

Bart Vautour

An examination of the connections between modernist writers and editorial activities, Making Canada New draws links among new and old media, collaborative labour, emergent scholars and scholarships, and digital modernisms. In doing so, the collection reveals that renovating modernisms does not need to depend on the fabrication of completely new modes of scholarship. Rather, it is the repurposing of already existing practices and combining them with others - whether old or new, print or digital - that instigates a process of continuous renewal. Critical to this process of renewal is the intermingling of print and digital research methods and the coordination of more popular modes of literary scholarship with less frequented ones, such as bibliography, textual studies, and editing. Making Canada New tracks the editorial renovation of modernism as a digital phenomenon while speaking to the continued production of print editions.

Editing, Modernism, and New Media

Making Canada New

The period between 1916 and 1956 was a unique interval in the history of Canadian publishing. During this period not only were a significant number of non-commercial literary, arts, and cultural magazines established, but it also happened that an unprecedented number of those involved in the creation and subsequent editing of this new type of magazine - the little magazine - were women. Based on extensive new archival and literary historical research, Editing Modernity examines these Canadian women writers and editors and their role in the production and dissemination of modernist and leftist little magazines. At once a history of literary women and of the emergent formations and conditions of cultural modernity in Canada, Irvine's study relates women's editorial work and poetry to a series of crises and transitions in modernist and leftist magazine communities, to the public hearings and published findings of the Massey Commission of 1949-51, and to the later development of feminist literary magazines and editorial collectives during the 1970s and 1980s. Writers and editors examined in this study include Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Floris McLaren, P.K. Page, Miriam Waddington, Flora Macdonald Denison, Florence Custance, Catherine Harmon, Aileen Collins, and Margaret Fairley.

Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916-1956

Marta Dvořák

Emily Ballantyne

Translocated Modernisms is a collection of ten chapters partitioned into sections and framed by an introduction by the editors and a coda by Kit Dobson, which is interested in those who thronged to the vibrant streets, cafés, and salons of Montparnasse, those who stayed such as Brion Gysin and Mavis Gallant, those who returned “home” such as Morley Callaghan, John Glassco, David Silverberg, and Sheila Watson, and those who galvanized local cultural practices by appropriating and translating them from elsewhere. While for some Paris becomes a permanent home, for others, it is simply a temporary excursion which can last for months, or for many years. The collection opens up the Lost Generation to include multiple generations and broadens its ambit to encompass modernist writers placed under erasure by dominant narratives of Anglo-American modernism. Instead of limiting the category to a single group based on a collective identity, this volume considers lost generations as a particular type of modernist identity attributable to multiple and disparate collectivities. These lost generations include those excluded from canonical narrativizations of expatriate modernisms, among which we spy the glimmer of other modernists living in the shadows of luminaries long recognized in the Anglo-American tradition.

Dean Irvine

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