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From Translation to the Writing: On the Quebec Feminists, Anglo-Canadian Women Translators and the Translation ContinuumThe article presents the unique relationship between French- and English- -speaking translators in Canada, which has resulted in a great number of interesting translation phenomena. The author makes reference to the distinction between feminist translation and translation in the feminine, derived from literature in the feminine, both widely practiced in Quebec. One of the representatives of this trend was Suzanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood, mostly French-English translator, known for her translations of Nicole Brossard’s works. Her activity, as well as that of other translators, contributed to the spread of the idea of translation in the feminine among Canadian writers and theoreticians. What is more, their cooperation has resulted in the creation of the magazine Tessera and in the emergence of a range of phenomena on the borderline between translation and literature. This relationship is also a rare example of the impact of “minor literature”, which is the literature of Quebec, on the English-language Canadian literature.

Hopkins Moorhouse and Peter Donovan (or P.O’D.) were once familiar names in Canadian literature. In the first decades of the twentieth century both authors wrote a variety of sketches and stories for Canadian magazines and newspapers, and went on to produce well-received, popular, Toronto-set novels. The intervening years have seen both writers and their novels all but forgotten. This article revisits Moorhouse’s Every Man for Himself (1920) and Donovan’s Late Spring (1930) in light of an increasing interest in the depiction of cities in Canadian literature. Both novels can be seen as self-aware modern urban Canadian fictions, addressing the complexity of the cityscape alongside the overarching challenges of modernity to literary representation.

Despite L.M. Montgomery's voluminous presence in the North American periodical marketplace throughout her literary career, critical studies of Montgomery largely remain focused on her novels and journals. This article examines Montgomery's short fiction and feature submissions to the Canadian mass-market magazines Chatelaine and the Canadian Home Journal. It analyses the editorial commentary, page layout, and illustrations which appeared alongside the text of the stories themselves, in order to examine the way in which Montgomery's work was framed and presented on the pages of periodicals. Through a close analysis of a few of Montgomery's non-fiction contributions to Chatelaine, it also explores the ways in which she shaped and controlled her public status as a 'celebrity' author late in her career. This article thus aims to build towards a wider understanding of Montgomery's literary outputs and her successful navigation of the Canadian literary marketplace. Could not determine copyright holder, assume LUP but left blank - AC

It was [the Contact Poetry Reading Series] more than the magazines that had, I believe, the greatest impact on Canadian poets of the 1960s ... [I]t brought the world to us. When the fledgling Canada Council gave us money for the Series, we were able to bring some of the best poets in the world to Toronto ... these Black Mountain and City Lights people were avenues to the wider world of human intrigues. Toronto and Canada felt restrictive and parochial by contrast. When they started to come, our own poets started to change. It was like flowers germinating. (Souster 2002, 200)Poetry readings are a distinct and important part of the processes of publication, distribution, and reception of poetry in Canada. They are public utterances that occur in the presence of a reading public reconstituted as a listening public. Poetry readings, by their ephemeral nature, shift the terms of what can and should be studied as a literary "text," rendering it difficult but necessary to interrogate the roles such events play. The physical and symbolic conditions of public performance invest readings with particular significance in the development of Canadian literature in the middle decades of the twentieth century, yet such events remain widely understudied. The Contact Poetry Reading Series, organized and run primarily by poetpublisher Raymond Souster and poet Kenneth McRobbie from 1957 to 1962, was a landmark in Canada, establishing a successful model for future poetry reading series while engaging Canada's poets in new dialogues with international writing and publishing communities.1 Among the 44 poets hosted during the series' five-year run were many of the leading Canadian poets of the day; A.J.M. Smith, Margaret Avison, Leonard Cohen, Jay Macpherson, and Al Purdy all made at least one appearance. The series also featured writers from the vanguard of mid-century American poetics such as Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Frank O'Hara (see Appendix A for a full list of poets). Importantly, the Contact Poetry Reading Series was the first institution of its kind to receive funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, establishing a precedent that would shape the development of Canadian poetry in the twentieth century and the structures that supported, promoted, and distributed it. The Contact Poetry Reading Series marks the emergence of a fundamental form of modern literary expression in Canada. Studying the series broadens the history of literary publication and dissemination in this country, and restores an indispensable-yet-overlooked component of Raymond Souster's editorial legacy.The Contact readings, like much of Souster's editorial work, occurred at a nexus in Canadian poetry between the origins of Canadian literary modernism in the 1920s and the first appearances of influential poets and theorists of the coming postmodern turn in the 1970s. The series is a fundamental part of Souster's contribution to Canadian poetry at mid-century, and its implicit relationship to his more commonly studied editorial projects is made clear by his use of "Contact" for each of them. Contact Press (1952-67), Contact magazine (1952-54), and the Contact Poetry Reading Series (1957-62) collectively emphasize his concern with building and maintaining the community of Canada's poets. None the less, little has been written about the series. The few discussions that do exist tend to subordinate the Contact Poetry Reading Series within broader treatments of Souster's life and work.2 Existing criticism of Souster includes textual analysis (see Frank Davey's Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster [1980] and Stephen Cain's "Mapping Raymond Souster's Toronto" [2005]), bibliographic and archival research (see the bookseller catalogues of Nicky Drumbolis's Letters Bookshop [Drumbolis 1984], Bruce Whiteman's Collected Poems of Raymond Souster: Bibliography [1984], and Michael Gnarowski's Contact Press 19521967 [1971] and Contact 1952-1954 [1966]), as well as studies that document and analyze his work as an editor (see Ken Norris's The Little Magazine in Canada, 1925-1980 [1984] and Davey's Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster [1980]). …

Kristine Moruzi is a Grant Notley Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her book, Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915, is forthcoming from Ashgate and is based on the doctoral work she completed at the University of Melbourne. In her current research, she is examining representations of girlhood in Canadian children’s literature between 1840 and 1940. This work is also part of a collaborative project funded by the Australian Research Council with Dr. Michelle J. Smith (Melbourne) and Prof. Clare Bradford (Deakin) on colonial femininity between 1840 and 1940.

This essay proposes a new critical approach to modern prairie fiction through a reading of Edward McCourt's self-contradictory criticism and novels. The author re-evaluates McCourt's literary significance and locates his book, The Canadian West in Fiction, at the beginning of a formative and enduring prairie-realist "school" of criticism with geographical, thematic, and regionalist emphases. This essay suggests that these same theses, ironically, are partly responsible for the neglect of McCourt's own significant fiction, which resists them. These established and influential theses have disconnected prairie writing from larger modern movements and its rarely acknowledged international, psychological, and experimental aspects. Le present article propose une nouvelle facon critique d'examiner la fiction moderne des prairies en lisant les romans et ouvrages critiques contradictoires de Edward McCourt. L'auteur re-evalue l'importance litteraire de McCourt et situe son livre - The Canadian West in Fiction - au tout debut d'une « ecole » critique formative et persistante de realisme des prairies en mettant l'accent sur ses aspects geographique, thematique et regionaliste. Cet article suggere que ces memes hypotheses sont, ironiquement, en partie responsables de la negligence de l'importante fiction de McCourt lui-meme, laquelle leur resiste. Ces theses acceptees, voire influentes, ont debranche la fiction des prairies, avec ses aspects internationaux, psychologiques et experimentaux rarement reconnus, de plus vastes mouvements modernes. Although Edward McCourt is almost unknown today, he was among the most prolific Canadian writers of the middle of the twentieth century, and his most significant work of literary criticism, The Canadian West in Fiction, belongs among the most influential books about Canadian literature. The Canadian West in Fiction - first published in 1949 and reissued in revised form in 1970 - established foundational and enduring conceptions of western Canadian writing, and its characterizations of early twentieth-century prairie fiction have been especially influential. It offers the first significant literary-historical survey of Canadian writing from west of Ontario and features in-depth treatment of major writers of the West (most of whom have since become canonical figures). It asks why western Canadian literary production and quality, in McCourt's estimation, have been substandard. Most significantly and influentially, McCourt roots his analyses and evaluative principles in three main suppositions that have been loudly echoed and proven remarkably persistent: writing from western Canada should be seen primarily through the lens of regionalism; it is firmly grounded in a particular and deterministic geographical space or place; and, accordingly, it is realistic, mimetic, and technically conventional. As McCourt writes on the first page of his preface, "It is the purpose of this book to examine some of the prose fiction written about the Canadian West by native Westerners and others, and to attempt an estimate of the extent to which it is an artistic re-creation of the prairie way of life" (1970, 5). Both editions of McCourt's book were greeted with laudatory reviews, and nearly all of the major critics to approach prairie writing implicitly or explicitly consider The Canadian West in Fiction a point of departure. The thematic bases for evaluation that McCourt employs in his book proved particularly useful to critics writing as Canadian cultural nationalism was peaking in the 1970s. Even today, the criticism and pedagogy that surround prairie fiction continue to be guided by thematic theses that can be easily traced back to McCourt's book. McCourt's influence is perhaps most tangible at the beginning of Laurence Ricou's Vertical Man / Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction (1973), probably the most read book on prairie writing: "Anyone who writes on the fiction of the Canadian West would do well to start with a tribute to the author of the only book-length study of the subject yet attempted" (1). …

Reader at Work: An Appreciation of Barbara Godard Barbara Godard, Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture, edited by Smaro Kamboureli (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2008), 412pp. Paper. $36.95. ISBN 978-1-897126-36-3. What narrative to relate? This is the fundamental question to be addressed by the literary critic faced with a vast body of material, a pluralistic critical scene, a border/line position both inside and outside the critical institution in question, and the limitations of form imposed by the present venue. Godard 2008 [1990]: 83 IN THEIR ORIGINAL CONTEXT these words stage the problematic of composing a critique that at once introduces, surveys and interrogates the discourse about Quebec literature. They also seem appropriate to the job before me here. Which narrative of Barbara Godard should I write, given the range and quantity of her scholarly work and achievements? How should I tell a story that celebrates a career as well as reviewing a new book that re-presents a selection of her essays? What narrative mode should I adopt for this tale of an intellectual whom I think of as a teacher, although I have never formally been her student? To borrow from Godard again, think of what follows as a reader at work, reading again, and reading with the critic who is also 'reading reading' (2008 [1992]: 200). Consider this as an invitation to read on, and beyond, the narratives that I have selected here. Such is the evolving nature of my subject that, even as I speak, [she] slips away from me. Godard 2008 [1987]: 53 Barbara Godard's contribution to Canadian literature and culture has been extensive and multi-faceted. As a prize-winning translator, theorist, editor, collaborator, award-winning teacher (at York University), researcher and recipient of the Award of Merit from the Association for Canadian Studies, Godard has taken up multiple positions within the field of scholarship that we have come to delimit as 'Can. Lit.'. She is a significant intellectual figure whose feminist politics have informed her professional advocacy work, social activism, teaching and scholarship. Creating the tools - bibliographical and theoretical - as well as many primary and secondary texts that have helped to shape the paradigms of feminist Canadian criticism has been a key achievement of Godard's long and distinguished scholarly career. Her accomplishments range from dazzling contributions to feminist translation theory to her practice of 'writing with the text', a style of criticism elaborated among the Tessera collective as 'fiction-theory' (Godard 1994). She has been one of a small handful of scholars responsible for the introduction of several substantial bodies of theory and knowledge to Canadian academic criticism, from semiotics to approaches derived from comparative literature. As well as publishing prolifically across her wide range of interests, Godard has been involved in the production of several innovative Canadian periodicals, labour that, when it is well done, is of course often almost invisible to its readers. Without such labour, however, it is very difficult to sustain intellectual conversations across time and space, and Godard's substantial volume of work on periodicals has been characterised by a strong commitment to introducing to the pages of Canadian journals not only new ideas and experimental writing, but also work by new generations of academic and creative writers. A founding member of Tessera, the feminist journal which brought together work by feminist writers and thinkers from across Canada and in both official languages, Godard has also worked for many years as a contributing editor to Open Letter, and, from 1998 to 2008, as the book reviews editor for Topia, the journal of Canadian cultural studies. Additionally, she was the French editor of Fireweed (1978-80) and has served on the editorial boards of a range of other periodicals. Barbara Godard is a name known to many feminist scholars around the world, especially perhaps to students of translation and followers of Canadian and Quebec women's writing. …

This essay traces the genealogy of the stereotype of the French Canadian found in two popular postwar Canadian history textbooks. French Canadians were portrayed as gregarious, easy-going, colourful, and fond of song and dance, but also unlettered, ignorant of the world outside Quebec, and content with their lot. These stereotypes are traced back to the work of earlier scholars on New France, notably Francis Parkman, and to primary sources. From the character traits mentioned in these sources, textbook writers selected those that allowed them to construct the French Canadian in the negative image of the contemporary English Canadian, thus detaching French Canadians from the main narrative of Canadian history.

By examining three recent theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare by three Canadian authors (Ann-Marie MacDonald, Margaret Clarke and Djanet Sears), this article discusses the ways in which the plays re-write and re-appropriate Shakespeare for contemporary postcolonial North America, in defiance of the conservative Bard constructed by Ontario's Stratford Festival. This article demonstrates how, despite their superficial differences in focus, all three plays share a concern with interrogating the complexities of class, sexuality and politics, and explore themes – victimhood and survival – that are often portrayed as central to much Canadian literature.

"Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word 'archive.'" So declared Jacques Derrida in his well-known address to the 1994 international conference on Memory: The Question of Archives. Fittingly, the conference took place in Sigmund Freud's last house in London, England, now the international centre of Freud studies and the repository-arkheion, the Greek word for domicile, address, and residence-of his archives. Derrida's lecture, "The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression," appeared the following year under the title Mal d'archive: Une impression freudienne (1995). Its English language translation, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996), has provided tremendous impetus to renewed, if not feverish, interest in archives, archival research, and archival theory, no less in Canada than throughout the world of scholarship. This collection of essays aims to contribute to the debates and discussions. Central to Derrida's discussion is the term archive itself, from the Greek arkhe-"the commencement and the commandment... there where things commence ... there where men and gods command" (Derrida 1996, 1). It is the place of inter section between commencement and commandment in archives that this collection proposes to explore. Notwithstanding Carolyn Steedman's contention that "nothing starts in the Archive, nothing ever at all" (2002, 45), archives mark the point where, among other commencements, scholars begin what can prove to be a lengthy, sometimes lifelong, attachment to the unpublished legacy of their research subject. The act of commandment is, at least in its earliest stage, the work of the archons, the archival professionals, the "guardians" under whose "house arrest" the archives "speak the law" (Derrida 1996,2). Our purpose here is to examine this "uncommon place, where law and singularity intersect in privilege" (3) from the points of view of its two most visible and most powerful inhabitants, the scholar and the archivist, and in particular, their shared enterprise as it relates to Canadian literature. There is a distinctly Canadian tradition of scholarly interest in the nature of communication, an area in which the archival record plays an essential part. Its most prominent trajectories have been traced by the work of Harold Innis, George Grant, and Marshall McLuhan. Innis, a historian and pioneering communications theorist, saw in Canada the representation of a balance between civilization and power. Grant, in contrast, found "a lack of morality and vision in this technological dynamo, which also incorporated technocratic bureaucracies," while McLuhan concerned himself with "the impact of technological media, which include the media of record, on the user" (Taylor 2003, 174).' Arthur Kroker, a more recent contributor to the discourse on communication technology, has described Canada's unique situation "midway between the future of the New World and the past of European culture" (1984, 7). He sees Canada "by virtue of historical circumstance and geographical accident to be forever marginal to the 'present mindedness' of American culture (a society which ... does not enjoy the recriminations of historical remembrance)" and as "incapable of being more than ambivalent on the cultural legacy of our European past" (8). We will be considering the archive here in the context both of cultural communication and of what Ursula Franklin has called "technology as practice" (1999, 2), involving "organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset" (3). This volume will also demonstrate that the ready availability of the more material elements of technology, particularly the Internet, has both illuminated and complicated the archival space for scholars and archivists alike. In a special issue of English Studies in Canada (ESC), "The Event of the Archive," (March 2004), co-editors Michael O'Driscoll and Edward Bishop commence with the necessary question: just what do we mean by the term "archive"? …

This paper argues for “regionality” as a new term to address the intersection of geographical regions and writing from those regions. The limited applicability of traditionally conceived regionalism to the poetry of the Canadian West Coast demonstrates the need for this new term. The suffix “-ity” stands not for a faith in region or region as totality, but “an instance” or “a degree of” region. These “instances” accrue a processual and multiple version of region. Building on the idea of landscape as repository, this article briefly outlines the importance of institutions (the University of British Columbia’s English Department and Poetry Conference in the early 1960s in particular) and literary archives for this methodology. In order to trace a more fugitive regionality, especially one with transnational aesthetic affiliations, one must be able to locate a writer/work among a constellation of documented influences and documented perspectives. This article then argues that Daphne Marlatt’s work from the 1970s to 2013 offers a particularly compelling example of how theorizing regionality can open up perception of regions and the writing that emerges from them.

Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions. Arnold E. Davidson, Priscilla L. Walton, and Jennifer Andrews. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Thomas King is perhaps the most well-known Native writer in Canada today. Not only are his works widely taught in university literature and Native studies courses-particularly his novels Medicine River (1990) and Green Grass, Running Water (1993)-but he has also achieved immense public acclaim for his parodie, and at times irreverent, CBC Radio program The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour (1995-2000). In 1999, the scholarly journal Canadian Literature devoted an entire issue to King's writing (Kroller 1999); however, the issue was dedicated primarily to his innovative novel Green Grass, Running Water. Border Crossings is the first full-length study of King's enormously influential body of creative fiction and multimedia work, and it is certainly long overdue. Its breadth of focus makes this text particularly valuable to scholars and teachers interested in King's work. It is a little-known fact, for example, that King is also an accomplished photographer who has staged exhibitions throughout the United States and Canada. Nor are many of his readers aware of the fact that he wrote his PhD thesis in 1986 at the University of Utah on images of Aboriginals in English literature, a few years before Terry Goldie's more well-known and oft-cited study Fear and Temptation. King's acting and screen-writing work, as well as his children's stories, are also rarely discussed. These are all topics that enter into this exhaustive, interdisciplinary study of King's oeuvre. Ranging from his creative fiction, to his critical essays and anthologies, to his film-scripts, to his photographic work, this study provides an invaluable overview of King's comic spirit and creative output. It will undoubtedly become a key reference point for any future scholarship on King. Despite King's own critique of postcolonial criticism in his article "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial," Border Crossings takes a postcolonial approach to King's engagement with the legacies of imperialism for North American Native peoples. And rightly so. The fact remains, notwithstanding King's rejection of postcolonialism's focus on the period beginning with "the advent of Europeans in North America" (King 1997, 242-43), that King's creative work tends to focus on the implications of colonial contact and its problematic legacy for Native peoples. John Willinsky's Learning to Divide the World explores how the legacy of imperialism has had a pervasive influence on the ways we experience our world-namely, the ways we are educated to structure reality according to rigid, and generally falsifying, borders and boundaries. The future legacy of many contemporary Aboriginal writers in North America may prove to be the undoing of these boundaries and the debilitating divisions they instill. This is the focus of Border Crossings. As the authors of this study put it, King's work ensures "a multiplicity of perspectives that create dialogue across borders rather than merely reasserting the solidity of the borders that typically divide Native and non-Native communities" (7). The focus of this study is two-fold. First, it explores various stylistic and thematic "border crossings" and boundary subversions as these occur in King's life and work. Second, it is concerned with King's "comic inversions"-that is, the ways in which his texts sustain a counterdiscursive perspective by mingling the comic with the political. This contributes to what the authors identify as the "trickster effect" of King's work. On the one hand, his work inverts inherited values, particularly those "measures of 'difference' that have oppressed Native peoples" (54). On the other hand, his fictions are sly, performing as "tricksters which lure [readers] into believing one thing at their own expense" (55). …

In making their selections from the published poetry of P.K. Page, literary anthologists have produced a canon of sorts, a remarkably consistent body of work that is clearly intended to be seen as representative of her voice and vision. Such anthological selections, however, too often appear to owe as much to habit and genealogy as to critical alertness to shifts in her evolving poetic practice. An examination of the way Page's work has been anthologized over the past century suggests that a broader representation of her work, which more generously responds to the Protean nature of her output over the past half-century, is needed in our time - and indeed that such a shift has begun to occur in the early years of the twenty-first century. En effectuant leur choix parmi les poesies publiees de P.K. Page, les createurs d'anthologies litteraires ont produit une forme de canon, recueils d'uvres remarquables par leur qualite soutenue et dont l'intention est clairement de representer sa voix et sa vision. Toutefois, les morceaux recueillis ont trop souvent l'air d'etre tributaires tout autant de l'habitude et de la genealogie que de la vigilance critique a l'egard de l'evolution dynamique de sa creation poetique. En examinant la maniere dont les uvres de Page ont ete selectionnees pour des anthologies depuis cent ans, on conclut qu'une plus large representation de ses poemes, qui repondrait plus genereusement a l'oeuvre proteiforme qu'elle a creee depuis un demi-siecle, est necessaire de nos jours - et qu'effectivement ce virage s'affirme deja a l'aube du vingt-etunieme siecle. The literary anthology is a time-capsule of sorts, composed of snippets of work issembled by editors whose task is to select the "best" and "most representaive" of the material available to them at a particular moment. Questions of value and notions of representation, however, are culturally specific and change over time. Presumably, then, the works chosen to represent a particular writer will shift over time, as new anthologies appear, themselves products of new contingencies of value - particularly in the case of a living writer whose body of published work increases substantially over the years. If there is little change in anthological selection with respect to such a writer over decades of anthology-making, one must ask why - and perhaps ask for revision in the face of conservative tendencies that may therefore be said to inhere in "anthological acts," which are themselves powerful instruments of canon-formation in the field of literary studies. My essay addresses the anthologizing of the work of RK. Page from the 1940s to the present, through an analysis of the poems by Page that have been selected for inclusion in literary anthologies. Such a line of inquiry reveals a great deal of overlap in the poems selected by various editors over the years, and suggests that Page has been "packaged" with remarkable consistency and in very specific ways within the evolving canon of Canadian literature over the past five decades. Indeed, this essay argues that, by continuing to include a specific cadre of core poems as representative of her work, literary anthologists have contributed to a perception of Page's work as much more static than it actually is, given the degree to which she has evolved and changed over the many years of her long life as a working poet. In fact, Page is a protean poet, one whose half-century of published work reflects great variety, deliberate change and considerable technical experiment. While she is certainly the poet of "voluptuous eye" and "lush image" that her anthologized oeuvre suggests, I would argue that much that is otherwise in her work has been obscured by the blunt instrument that is the literary anthology, the main means by which poetry is imported into the public sphere in this country. None amongst us would deny, I'm sure, that anthologies - collections of work by various authors intended to represent a period, genre or theme as selected by the representative figures who are their editors - are political instruments, whether wielded from the centre, in the service of the interests of a dominant culture (and hence as instruments in canon formation), or from the margins, as countercultural devices designed to correct the trajectory of established hegemonic collections. …

Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) composed Dance on the Earth: A Memoir (1989) as a tribute to her mothers and a celebration of "the female principle in the Holy Spirit." Laurence's copious holograph notes and drafts show that she used "Dance on the Earth" as the title of a novel she attempted to write before giving it to her memoir. While the draft novel parallels the memoir in more ways than its title, it resembles The Diviners even more closely. Why was Laurence so determined to compose "Dance on the Earth" as a novel, and why was she unable to complete it? An answer to both questions may lie in the censorship controversies of 1976 and 1985, when her Manawaka novels, especially The Diviners, were attacked as pornographic. When she was unable to complete her last novel, Laurence turned to the memoir form to convey her legacy to her inheritors. Margaret Laurence (1926-87) a compose son autobiographie, Dance on the Earth A Memoir (1989), comme un hommage a sa mere et une celebra tion "du principe feminin dans l'esprit saint." Les copieuses notes et les ebauches olographes de Laurence demontre qu'elle a essaye a plusieurs reprises d'ecrire > en tant que roman avant de le composer comme un memoire. Mais l'ebauche de son roman > rejoint encore plus The Diviners, ce qui est peu surprenant, puisque que la fiction Dance on the Earth a ete clairement destine pour faire partie du cercle de Manawaka. Pourquoi Laurence etait-elle si determine a ecrire > en tant que roman, et pourquoi a-t-elle ete incapable de le terminer? Je propose une reponse aux deux questions, qui tourne autour de la polemique de censure qui a fait rage autour de Laurence dans son propre comte de Peterborough en 1976 et en 1985 lorsque ses romans de Manawaka, particulierement The Diviners, qui a d'ailleurs ete introduit dans le programme d'etudes de la treizieme annee, ont ete juges "pornographiques". Lorsqu'elle a compris qu'elle ne pouvait pas terminer son dernier roman, elle s'est tournee vers la forme du memoire pour transporter son legs a ses heritiers. Margaret, are you grieving...? Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall: to a young child To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die... a time to mourn and a time to dance.... Ecclesiastes 3: 1-4. Margaret Laurence (1926-1987), dubbed "Canada's most successful novelist" (434) in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, predicted that The Diviners, the final of her five Manawaka novels, would be her last. And it was, just as the novel that Morag Gunn is writing in The Diviners is predicted to be her last. But The Diviners was not the last novel Laurence tried to write; it was merely the last she succeeded in finishing. Actually, she tried repeatedly over several years to write another novel, as we know from James King's The Life of Margaret Laurence (1997) and from recent editions of Laurence's letters by John Lennox, Ruth Panofsky and J.A.Wainwright. What was the novel that she tried so hard to compose and why was she unable to complete it? These questions have haunted me ever since reading her Dance on the Earth: a Memoir, published posthumously in 1989. Not until a decade later was it possible to answer these questions because Laurence's holograph notes and drafts for this novel were not available until 1997 when they formed an accession of material in the Margaret Laurence Archives at McMaster University.(f.1) The title of her unfinished novel was to he "Dance on the Earth," which is also the title of her memoir. Textual evidence suggests that Laurence had first attempted to compose Dance on the Earth as a novel. Only after she failed to complete the work as a fiction did she compose Dance on the Earth as an autobiographical work of nonfiction.(f.2) But the fictional and non-fictional versions are parallel in several ways. …

This essay surveys the major achievements and world-wide acclaim that give substance to Northrop Frye's reputation as one of the most influential Canadians of the twentieth century. It points out, however, that Frye did not succeed in his project to establish criticism as a discipline with its own accepted axioms based on an acknowledgement of the unity of literature. Rather than concluding that the more theoretical works have been superseded, however, the essay argues that they may now be read as imaginative creations approaching poetry, embodying an insight nourished by literature but focussed on the human condition itself. Cet article examine les accomplissements principaux et la reconnaissance mondiale qui ont aide a solidifier la reputation de Northrop Frye en tant qu'un des Canadiens les plus influents du vingtieme siecle. II precise cependant que Frye n'a pas reussi son projet d'etablir la critique comme une discipline acceptee avec ses propres axiomes et bases sur une reconnaissance de l'unite du champ litteraire. Plutot que de conclure que les travaux theoriques ont ete remplaces, Particle suggere qu'ils peuvent maintenant etre lus en tant que creations imaginatives s'approchant de la poesie, incarnant une perspicacite nourrie par la litterature, mais concentree sur l'etat humain lui-meme. It is not necessary to refer to the recent spate of pre-millennium polls on important figures of the twentieth century to establish that Northrop Frye has been a towering presence in Canadian intellectual life. One thinks, for instance, of the undergraduate at Victoria College who went through a religious crisis. A fervent believer in her first year, she was in despair in her second when her studies convinced her that there was no God. But her equanimity returned in her third year: she discovered that Northrop Frye was God. Without going quite so far, one may nevertheless recognize that Frye's reputation and influence have been enormous. His work is inseparable from the growth of Canadian culture into maturity. Throughout his career he wrote on our literature and explored the national psyche; his last major speech (delivered to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) was on the cultural development of the country. The astounding recent flowering of Canadian literature - a phenomenon which Frye hailed as one of the most gratifying to occur in his lifetime - arguably owes something to his efforts as a reviewer and commentator. Between 1951 and 1961 he was responsible for the poetry section of the University of Toronto Quarterly's review of the year's literature, reading virtually every poem published in the country during the preceding year. He wrote his commentary on the year's work not to judge poems by an international standard but to elucidate them and to create the informed and interested reading public which is one of the conditions necessary for a mature literature. Frye had a gift for combining profound thought and quotable aphorism, as in his remark that "Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it." Phrases such as the "garrison mentality" or the question "Where is here?" have become part of the national consciousness. Scarcely a day goes by without some columnist or writer of a letter to the editor citing Frye to bolster a point. He has become a national icon, one of the defining voices of Canada. But of course Frye's reputation spreads far beyond Canada. He is often mentioned in the same breath with Marshall McLuhan - a pairing that rather annoyed both of them - as one of the few Canadian thinkers of world stature. His works have now been translated into 17 languages, including Serbo-Croatian, Korean and Portuguese. He is particularly revered in Italy: the University of Bologna gave him an honorary doctorate in 1979 and he was the subject of a three-day conference in Rome in 1987. But, perhaps surprisingly, he is proving to have much to offer to non-European countries. …

When we speak of literary influence, we are usually speaking of the impact of one established writer's words on another aspiring writer. Admiration, reverence and careful study of a style or voice that seems to us to be GOOD and successful. There is usually an element of distance in such apprenticeship, wherein we gladly receive the words of a writer via his published works. Personal contact with the writer himself is uncommon, or rare, and yet if we are speaking of Timothy Findley, we are immediately speaking of the exception to the rule. To many rules. I came to know Timothy Findley through his books, in high school. The library employed a system of marking Canadian Literature with red maple leaf stickers on the spines of the books. I chased this path of leaves with a fair amount of ignorance, picking randomly from the shelves, and so came upon Mr Findley. The librarian, who was more than familiar with my twin passions for Can Lit and skipping classes, saw that I held The Butterfly Plague in my hands, and asked if I would not like to begin with The Wars instead. NO, said I, I would begin with this one. The Butterfly Plague remains my favourite Findley book for two reasons. The author's foreward, in which he explains why he felt compelled to rewrite his novel, shook the foundations of what I believed about books. That each published work was perfect in the eyes of its maker. That once written and published, work could not be taken back, as it were. And yet there was this man, Findley, insisting that his first version of The Butterfly Plague was not what he had wanted. He drew a comparison to "stage fright" endured by beginning actors, and I was hooked. I was, after all, at that time, determined to become an actress. Writing, although I engaged in it, was not really in my plans. My second reason for favouring the novel of which I speak is that it retains the glow of a "first love," an occasion on which I met someone's fictioneering mind and fell for it instantly. It is also an incredible book, written with the eerie, humourous and stirring voice that is Findley. I should not like my high sentimentality to gloss over the technical merits of the book itself. The character of Dolly Damarosch is like no one else you will meet in Can Lit, just as NOBODY writes like Tiff Findley. Lesson number one: real writers admit failure, and enjoy what it means. Zip forward in time to 1990. The girl who skipped so many classes and gobbled so many books in high school stands behind the cash register in a bookstore. She is no longer sure that being an actress is what she wants. Mr Findley is finishing the arduous task of signing box after box of his memoirs. As he and Bill Whitehead are passing the register, I collect the spit required to call out to them. In my memory, I remain the babbling cashier asking if there is somewhere I can write to Findley. Throughout his visit to the bookstore I am terrified, too terrified to speak much, to convey my admiration. In my mind I came off as a sputtering, muttering twit, and yet both Tiff and Bill smiled graciously, and provided me with their card. Lesson number two: there is always time to be gracious, even, or especially when, the person addressing you is gripped with nervous terror. After about five drafts of a letter, I finally managed to write to Timothy Findley and mail the damned thing. I did not expect a reply beyond a polite thank-you, and I'm not even sure I expected that. I tried to thank Findley for writing The Butterfly Plague, and for Inside Memory. And possibly I explained what was, for me at the time, a terrible life crisis. Writing had become an unexpected passion for me and I was not sure how to reconcile that with my longtime dream of becoming Canada's Anne Bancroft. I held Tiff in such high regard that his human presence in the store frightened me and yet caused me to be brave, even for a few moments, and I knew that something important was happening. …

When I was invited to be part of Tiff's celebration, I wanted to write something new that came directly from his work. I reread Not Wanted on the Voyage, one of the most delightful and darkest novels in Canadian literature, and wrote two poems as a result. There were dozen of images that resounded and wouldn't let me go, but being limited for time, I chose two: Mrs Noyes, waking from sleepwalking, finds she is stroking the forehead of a weeping bear; after the rains have stopped, Ham, his mother and Mottyl stand on the deck of the ark, the moon and stars visible for the first time in days.On the plane from Vancouver to Toronto, I reread The Piano Man's Daughter and tried to write a kind of ghazal that pulled actual phrases from the novel that I pieced together and sometimes expanded or used as springboards to something else (as in the ending three lines). And finally, at the conference banquet Bill told the wonderful story of losing Tiff on Salt Spring Island. He set out to find him and there he was in the middle of the road, stopping traffic. A slug was crossing. When I got home, I couldn't resist using that marvellous anecdote, that so sums up Tiff's generosity and care, in a poem.Woman with BearsNoah's wife steppedinto the pungent dark. Sleep-walking, when she wokeshe was strokingthe wide forehead of a bear.The bear was weeping, its muzzle wet,its mate a denser darknessbehind her in the cage.What to do but keep on strokingtill the animal lowered its headto her lap and closed its eyes.She, too, and when she woke again,a bear slept on either side.One could be death, the othertenderness. She thought of herfirstborn son, killed at her breastfor his hairy arms, his wet fur head;one could be pity, the other desire.She thought of her husband,smooth and hard in their bed;one could be terror, the othergrace. Could she rise withoutdisturbing such a sleep,wade into the world as it had been,bears in the woods pawing berries,tongues purple and plush,she on the porch with Mottyl in her lap,the boy curled in her womb's watery cage,his small mouth opening. One could beforgiveness; the other, memory.Nothing resembles what this one knows.(first appeared in Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry)On the Ark, The First Night of StarsHe stood with his motheron the deck, Mottyl in her arms.Everything gleamed from the coldscrubbing of the rain, its handsnot smallafter all, the moon finallyvisible, doubled in Mottyl'sblue-white eyes.He wondered if the catcould sense it there,wondered if it changed anythingshe couldn't see.Charlie's Poem (from The Piano Man's Daughter)Things pushing up to heaven,others bending down to hell.And in between the livingwalking sideways on the earth. Crablike,crowlike, the charred ankle-wingedglide of lovers: Ede and the Piano Man,Lily and Pan, Lily and Ned; in our own way,dare I say, my mother Lily and me.She said, I was struck like a match,I had no option but to burn.The cornet, flute, harp, sackbut,psaltery, dulcimer, all kinds of musicshall fall down. …

Experience is necessary for growth and survival. But experience is not simply what happened. A lot may happen to a piece of stone without making it any wiser. Experience is what we are able and prepared to do with what happens to us. Chinua Achebe In 1974, seven years after Margaret Laurence had published Long Drums and Cannons, her study of Nigerian writers, she and Chinua Achebe first met. Ten years later, in May of 1984 they met again, on two consecutive evenings. Those three occasions were the only ones when these two writers, whose ideals of the purposes and practices of fiction were so close, actually met. I was present on all three occasions, able to observe and enjoy their sibling-like rapport, an instant empathy that made them almost oblivious to those around them and that obviously renewed in them a mutually supportive creative energy. On the first occasion in May of 1974, as a past president of ACCUTE and member of the current programme committee I had arranged an evening session at the Royal Ontario Museum Theatre during the annual meetings of the "Learneds," that year held in Toronto. Douglas Killam, a former colleague at York and already an Achebe friend, both personal and scholarly, had added his influence to my invitation and was to chair an informal conversation between Achebe and Laurence (one of my most lasting regrets is that neither I nor anyone else thought to make a tape recording of the proceedings). Margaret had been back in Canada from England for increasing lengths of time since accepting a writer-in-residence post at the University of Toronto in 1969. That first year back, she bought her "shack" on the Otonabee, and that year she also began writing the novel that was to be published in the spring of 1974. When she and Achebe met at the museum that novel, The Diviners, had just been published by Knopf, Macmillan and McClelland and Stewart; at that time Achebe was serving as writer-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts, one of the first of several such posts that he was persuaded to accept. He had little choice -- as a prominent Igbo who had already published four novels and was the respected head of the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, when the Civil War following the secession of Biafra broke out in 1967-68, he and his family narrowly escaped the demolition (by bombing) of their home in Enugu, the Biafran capital, and suffered the massacre of friends and relatives. He was and would remain persona non grata in Nigeria, an exile until 1976. From the opening sentences of their dialogue, Laurence and Achebe spoke to each other from positions of trust and admiration in an exchange that lives on in my memory as the most memorable writerly exchange I have ever witnessed. Margaret wore one of the colourful long gowns that I loved to make for her, Achebe a brilliantly patterned and coloured African shirt. This choice of "costume" underscored the prevailing mood, one of dear friends who had just picked up a recently unfinished conversation. No one who watched and listened was unaffected by the passionate joining of ideals and practices in these two major writers of our time. Margaret had come back to Canada in the midst of the great nationalist surge of the late 1960s, and she speedily became appalled at the lack of teaching of Canadian literature in our schools and the neglect of our writers throughout the country. Starting with an article written in the course of a brief visit to Canada in 1966, in which she came down strongly against the taint of parochialism in Canadian literary criticism and for the treatment of Canadian as one of the many. Commonwealth literatures, she had by 1973 become one of our most vociferous literary nationalists. One of the founders of The Writers' Union of Canada, she carried into all her proselytizing activities the naming of all Canadian writers as a "tribe," her "tribe," the recipient of her deepest loyalty. Achebe's strong sense of social responsibility spoke to her never entirely dormant Social Gospel conscience, so very much a part of her Manitoba upbringing and her education at Winnipeg's United College, and she quoted often his most famous dictum against a colonial mentality: "What we need to do is to look back and try to find out where we went wrong, where the rain began to beat us. …

Margaret Laurence was above all else an explorer of the human condition, and I would like to use the compass as a metaphor to explain the directions in which her art takes us. But first I should sketch the nature of my relationship with Margaret and her contribution to Canadian life and letters. The Manawaka novels and short stories are Margaret's greatest literary achievement. The series of four novels published between 1964 and 1974 (The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire - Dwellers, and The Diviners) and the collection of eight short stories entitled A Bird in the House (1970), together explore the lives of several generations who came to build and settle the town of Manawaka, Manitoba, and the surrounding countryside. It is well known that the fictional town of Manawaka is very closely patterned after Margaret's hometown of Neepawa, Manitoba, a small agricultural centre situated approximately halfway between the metropolitan centre of Winnipeg to the east and the city of Brandon to the west. In Manawaka, we meet the Gunns and the Logans, Scottish settlers who came to settle the region during the opening decades of the nineteenth century; the Tonnerres, Metis descendants of the French fur traders and their Native trading partners who by then had also peopled the region; and the later immigrants from eastern Canada, the British Isles, and continental Europe, among them the Shipleys, the Camerons, and the MacLeods. Few artists have expressed the rhythms and mysteries of life in Canada as magnificently as Margaret did in her Manawaka books. Margaret was well into her creation of the Manawaka series when, in 1969, she became a friend of my family. That year she returned to Canada from Britain to become writer - in - residence at the University of Toronto for the academic year 1969 - 70. My mother, Clara Thomas, a Canadian literature specialist at York University, had first read Margaret's work in the mid 1960s, and the two had struck up an acquaintanceship that became a friendship with Margaret's arrival in Toronto. During the years to follow, until her death in 1987, she was a frequent house guest of my parents when she visited Toronto. Both of her children lived in Toronto for much of this period, she had many friends in the city, and her Canadian publisher, McClelland and Stewart, was located there, so she visited often. Frequently she and I would end up in Toronto together - particularly in the 1970s - me home from university for Christmas or the summer holidays, and she in the city to share the holiday seasons with friends and family. They were exciting times. The phone was always ringing, Margaret and my parents always seemed to be returning from some splendid event - a reading here, an honorary degree ceremony there - and always the conversation was stimulating, sometimes tension - filled when Margaret warmed emotionally to an issue, but more often laced with humour. Pathos was important to Margaret, but so also was comedy. The atmosphere was rarely salon - like, although I do remember the night that one of us wondered aloud how the panel choosing the Governor General's Award for 1969 had been so misguided as to ignore Margaret's Fire - Dwellers, only to have novelist Dave Godfrey, a dinner guest that evening, remind us that his novel, The New Ancestors, had been chosen that year. More often, when the topics of discussion were the craft of writing or the politics of publishing, the atmosphere was akin to a publisher's neighbourhood pub, or when the subjects were the life experiences of friends and family, an evening at the cottage. Margaret was an intellectual: she was obsessed with the question of the role of the writer in society, and she was passionately engaged in the life of the mind, but she was most decidedly not an academic, and she was uninterested in, even hostile to, many conventions of the academy. Thus the kinds of literary discussions that Woody Allen delights in capturing in his many movies were as alien to Margaret as men on the moon. …

As editor of Ryerson Press from 1920 to 1960, Lorne Pierce (1890-1961) was inspired by a nationalism rooted in his Methodist upbringing and education. As well as his many literary endeavours, Pierce had an enormously important role as the conceptualiser and publisher of nationalistic readers and history textbooks that dominated the English-language elementary and high school market circa 1930 to 1960, textbooks illustrated by the artist C.W. Jefferys (1869-1951) to great effect. Because Pierce and Jefferys shared a sense of nationalism and romantic history, Pierce was largely responsible for giving Jefferys the outlets for his work, culminating in the three-volume Picture Gallery of Canadian History between 1942 and 1950, made Jefferys the dominant visual myth-maker of Canada's past. Through the work of C.W. Jefferys and series like The Canada Books of Prose and Verse and The Canadian History Readers, generations of Canadian schoolchildren were influenced by Pierce's nationalistic publishing programme. Lorne Pierce was an early publisher of the pioneering economic history of Harold Innis (1894-1952). In their work on volumes of the landmark series on the Relations of Canada and the United States, underwritten by the Carnegie Endowment, Innis and Pierce displayed a gritty, pragmatic nationalism in their dealings with their collaborators in the United States, notably James Shotwell and Bartlet Brebner. Despite their common intellectual concerns about the effect of the social sciences on Canadian religious life in the 1940s, Pierce, like many of his contemporaries, was somewhat bemused by the obscurity and difficulty of Innis's later work on communications. As a result he read and commented on Innis's later manuscripts but declined to publish them. As editor of Ryerson Press from 1920 to 1960, Lorne Pierce (1890-1961) is best-known for his key role in Canadian literary publishing.(f.1) Yet Pierce's influence was by no means limited to literature. Two aspects of his involvement in Canadian history in the Ryerson publication lists in turn reveal his influence on the popular conception of Canadian history in Canada's schools and homes at mid-century, and his role in the production of the ambitious historical Canada-America Relations Series. To understand the nature and scope of Pierce's contributions to Canadian intellectual life, it is useful to examine two examples of how his nationalism functioned: in his textbook editing and subsequent promotion of the artist C.W. Jefferys (1869-1951) in the cause of an heroic and inspirational vision of Canadian history, and in his involvement with the editorial and historical projects of Harold Innis (1894-1952), dean of Canadian economic history. Pierce's work with both men underscores the complexity of his cultural nationalism, which left its mark on Canadian history and education as well as on Canadian literature. Pierce in fact played an important role as the conceptualiser and publisher of highly successful readers and history textbooks which dominated the English-language elementary and high school market from 1930 until the early 1960s, books he commissioned the artist C.W. Jefferys to illustrate to great effect. In the case of the school texts, Pierce used Jefferys's illustrations as a centrepiece for these books' romantic vision of nationhood. Pierce thus played a crucial role in the establishment of Jefferys's stature as Canada's most popular illustrator of our history. In Jefferys's work, he promoted an embodiment of his own concept of how Canadian history should be presented, particularly to the young. Jefferys's textbook illustrations--as well as the Ryerson volumes devoted exclusively to his historical depictions--offered tens of thousands of Canadian readers, particulary school children, a romantic, epic, and whiggish vision of Canadian history, the incarnation of a nationalist ideology shared by author and publisher. Pierce's significant role in the evolution of the new critical history in Canada through his involvement with historian Harold Innis also bears examination, in particular their collaboration on the editing and publication of the landmark Canada-America Relations Series between 1935 and 1945. …

Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising, George Woodcock wrote, concerns a Homeric "wanderer returning to a mysteriously changed homeland." (f.1) Anyone who wanders through the conflicting conceptions of Canada's North cannot help but feel a similar change. It has changed its latitude: from the country as a whole as North to the country having a distinct North. But has it changed its attitude? Think of the question in terms of holding a compass. All directions are somewhere beyond us. We are at the centre. If we call where we are "North," we put ourselves where we are not - we decentre ourselves. False knowledge results about both where we are and where we say we are, a fugue whose full effects are still to be seen.The country-as-North began at Confederation, with R.G. Haliburton's patriotic essay "On Northern Culture"; it continued steadily to John Sutherland's nationalist journal Northern Review and Donald Creighton's studies. In our time, John Diefenbaker heralded the full vision in his 1958 campaign: "a new Canada - a Canada of the North." While Edmund Wilson reminisced that Canada was "the 'North Woods' - of upstate New York," Malcolm Ross told us we were more than "northern Yankees," and W.L. Morton asserted that a "northern character" was one of the "four permanent factors" in Canadian history. Cole Harris argued that our "northern character and destiny" bound us, somewhat Prometheus-like, to the Precambrian Shield, while Mordecai Richler introduced his own mythology, calling Canada the "white, Protestant, heterosexual ghetto of the north." Northrop Frye discussed the "north as symbol" in Canadian writing, and Eli Mandel approved it. Frye also said that irony and tragedy dominate Canadian poetry, a view that corresponded nicely with the section in Anatomy of Criticism called "The Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire," even if Frye ignored Canadian literature. It corresponds entirely if we include W.L. Morton's belief that "northern life is moral or puritanical" and creates a "disposition for satire." Oddly, E.D. Blodgett agrees with Frye that "pastoralism predominates in Canadian literature," but he still entitles the relevant chapter "Cold Pastorals." How, then, do we take F.K. Hare's dissent, that "Canadians have not, as a nation, put the North anywhere near the centre of their mythology," or Rudy Wiebe's regret that "Canadians have so little comprehension of our own nordicity"? Part of our national mythology is the climatic and temperamental difference between Victoria, Montreal, and Tuktoyaktuk. Or are we just a series of similarly frozen blocks, as Philip Stratford teased when he said that "whereas the United States is a 'melting pot' Canada is 'a tray of ice cubes'"? (f.2)Our mythology is regionalism. Here we move into the second, conflicting sense of northernness: the North-of-country. We find disagreement - but, surprisingly, little commentary - over the location of Canada's North. Lack of consensus may result from its corollary topic of the North-as-frontier, which is itself a shifty concern. Even William Westfall, in his landmark essay on Canadian regionalism, lets the location slip like an ice cube from his grasp; his deconstruction of the "metaphor of a northern land" into regions - "Atlantic, Central, Prairie, and Pacific" - drops the North as region entirely. Has it fallen into the snow of Gilles Vigneault's pays - "l'hiver" - or the Canada that, as Robert Kroetsch chuffs, "is as timeless as winter"? George Woodcock skips over it in his Northern Spring: The Flowering of Canadian Literature, which is informed by Canadian nationalism and the "related phenomenon of regionalism." Has the North fallen down a shaft of The Northern Miner, a trade journal published in Don Mills, Ontario? Will light from Penumbra Press, "The Northern Publisher," as it likes to be known, of Moonbeam but mainly Waterloo, help us find it? Will we finally have to concede that the North is too slippery an entity, one that we can only hope to catch glimpses of in Northward Journal, a periodical which serves the northern arts from a Kapuskasing base but also receives mail in downtown Toronto? …

In September 1890, the New England Magazine of Boston featured an article entitled "Some Canadian Writers of To-Day." The author, Walter Blackburn Harte, had recently emerged on the American literary scene as a reporter and interpreter of Canadian subjects: his pieces on "The Canadian Legisla- ture" and "Social Life at Ottawa" were the lead articles in The Cosmopolitan of New York for April and August 1889; his series on Canadian politics and culture for the New England had begun in December 1889 with "Intellectual Life and Literature in Canada." The work of this previously unknown author was soon a topic of considerable interest in Canadian literary circles. Bliss Carman, who was on the staff of the New York magazine The Independent in 1890, wrote a brief but enthusiastic notice of Harte's article, as well as a personal letter of praise to Harte, and exchanged letters on Harte's view of Canadian literature with Archibald Lampman.1 In the Toronto Globe column of 1892-93, "At the Mermaid Inn," both Lampman and Wilfred Campbell paid tribute to Harte's recent achievements in magazine writing. "Mr. Harte," Campbell declared, "is rapidly making for himself a continental reputation as an able and strong writer of an aggressive character, and his truthful unveiling of humbug is making its influence felt in more than one quarter."2

The idea of a convenant between God and the White occupants of North American space runs through the literature of the continent. The literature of Anglophone Canada exhibits a pattern in which the exile from America of the United Empire Loyalists and their foundation of a new Kingdom in Canada confirm the existence of a sense of destiny and obligation. A secularized culture such as evolved in Canada still speaks in a rhetoric of rights and duties, an understanding of which is relevant to the understanding of our current cultural preoccupation with the fate of the natural environment.

Albert J. Devlin, ed. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. xx + 369 pp. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. xiv + 204 pp. Jackson R. Bryer, ed. Conversations with Lillian Hellman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. xxvi + 298 pp. Thomas Daniel Young, ed. Conversations with Malcolm Cowley. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. xxii + 224 pp. Interviews with writers have become a popular genre, at least in North America. They are a staple of the literary periodicals, and collections of them often appear in book form. Canadian literature has been well served by the writer interview; in the last two decades no fewer than five collections of interviews with Canadian creative writers have appeared in print, and the most recent of these, Andrew Garrod's Speaking for Myself,1 is an example of the genre at its best. Probably the best known collections of writer interviews are Viking's long-standing Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, currently and for some time past edited by George Plimpton. This series, now several volumes large, began publication in 1959 and signals the continuing interest in the genre.