ReCalling Early Canada: Reading the Political in Literary and Cultural Production

by Jennifer Blair, Daniel Coleman, Kate Higginson

ReCalling Early Canada is the first substantial collection of essays to focus on the production of Canadian literary and cultural works prior to WWI. Reflecting an emerging critical interest in the literary past, the authors seek to retrieve the early repertoire available to Canadian readers—fiction and poetry certainly, but family letters, photographs, journalism, and captivity narratives are also investigated. Filling a significant gap in Canadian criticism, the authors demonstrate that to recall the past is not only to shape it, but also to reshape the present. This fresh interest in the cultural past, informed by new approaches to historical inquiry, has resulted in a unique and diverse investigation of more than two centuries of a little known “early Canada.”

440 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2005

About the author

A specialist in Canadian literature, Jennifer Blair teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on early Canadian literature, with a special interest in architecture and the circulation of information in colonial Canada. She has published essays in Studies in Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, and Feminist Media Studies.