Lorraine York

Daniel Coleman

Jennifer Blair

Kate Higginson

ReCalling Early Canada is the first book-length collection of essays to focus on Canadian literary and cultural production prior to WWI. While Canadian literature is often thought to have emerged in the mid-twentieth-century, the essays in this volume reflect a recent critical interest in earlier generations of cultural production. The authors do not limit their analyses to fiction and poetry_instead they welcome photographs, captivity narratives, family letters, and journalism as part of the repertoire of early Canadian readers. This book fills a significant gap in Canadian criticism, and it appeals both to seasoned scholars and to undergraduate students who may be new to Canadian historical research. Taking seriously the project of "recall," the essays here not only seek to deliver certain historical documents to the light of present-day critique, they also ask important theoretical and political questions about the various methodologies involved in doing so and the assumptions that accompany them. In effect, these essays combine a fresh interest in this burgeoning field of study with new approaches to historical inquiry. The result is a unique and diverse investigation of more than two centuries of a relatively unknown "early Canada."

Reading the Political in Literary and Cultural Production

ReCalling Early Canada

Thomas Allen

Material Cultures in Canada presents the vibrant and diverse field of material culture studies in Canadian literary, artistic, and political contexts today. The first of its kind, this collection features sixteen essays by leading scholars in Canada, each of whom examines a different object of study, including the beaver, geraniums, comics, water, a musical playlist, and the human body. The book’s three sections focus, in turn, on objects that are persistently material, on things whose materiality blends into the immaterial, and on the materials of spaces. Contributors highlight some of the most exciting new developments in the field, such as the emergence of “new materialism,” affect theory, globalization studies, and environmental criticism. Although the book has a Canadian centre, the majority of its contributors consider objects that cross borders or otherwise resist national affiliation. This collection will be valuable to readers within and outside of Canada who are interested in material culture studies and, in addition, will appeal to anyone interested in the central debates taking place in Canadian political and cultural life today, such as climate change, citizenship, shifts in urban and small-town life, and the persistence of imperialism.

Jennifer Blair

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