Situating the intellectual inheritance of Canadian Vorticists in a multidisciplinary assemblage of authors and artists.

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.

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.

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.

Fourteen essays map Canadian literary and cultural products via advances in digital humanities research methodologies.

Wyndham Lewis was both a serious proponent and forthright critic of modernism. His assault upon his contemporaries foreshadowed the twenty-first century scholarly interest in the networks, professions, and coteries – rather than the myths and heroics – of modernism. Lewis, after a long period of neglect, now sits increasingly at the heart of a revised field of modernist studies. This book explores Lewis’s cultural criticism as a valuable body of writing which posed questions that have yet to be answered about subsidy and the function of the artist, about professionalism and ethics, about who should pay for the arts, and what the artist’s obligations should be in return. It is the first book-length study of this body of critical writing, through which Lewis articulated the central and most lasting of his critical preoccupations: the question of how the work of the artist is to be valued, and the artist to be paid, in a professionalised society. This book makes an important contribution to the long overdue reassessment of a complex, contrarian figure, spanning the disciplines of literature and the visual arts, who asked pressing questions about the role and status of the artist, and ultimately about the value (economic, civic, political) of the work of art.

Dani Spinosa takes up anarchism’s power as a cultural and artistic ideology, rather than as a political philosophy, with a persistent emphasis on the common. She demonstrates how postanarchism offers a useful theoretical context for poetry that is not explicitly political—specifically for the contemporary experimental poem with its characteristic challenges to subjectivity, representation, authorial power, and conventional constructions of the reader-text relationship. Her case studies of sixteen texts make a bold move toward politicizing readers and imbuing literary theory with an activist praxis—a sharp hope. This is a provocative volume for those interested in contemporary poetics, experimental literatures, and the digital humanities. Case Studies Jim Andrews Christian Bök Mez Breeze John Cage Andy Campbell Robert Duncan Kenneth Goldsmith Susan Howe Jackson Mac Low Erín Moure [Erin Mouré] Harryette Mullen bpNichol Vanessa Place Juliana Spahr Brian Kim Stefans W. Mark Sutherland Darren Wershler

Poetic Community examines the relationship between poetry and community formation in the decades after the Second World War. In four detailed case studies (of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the Caribbean Artists Movement in London, the Women’s Liberation Movement at sites throughout the US, and the Toronto Research Group in Canada) the book documents and compares a diverse group of social models, small press networks, and cultural coalitions informing literary practice during the Cold War era. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished archival materials, Stephen Voyce offers new and insightful comparative analysis of poets such as John Cage, Charles Olson, Adrienne Rich, Kamau Brathwaite, and bpNichol. In contrast with prevailing critical tendencies that read mid-century poetry in terms of expressive modes of individualism, Poetic Community demonstrates that the most important literary innovations of the post-war period were the results of intensive collaboration and social action opposing the Cold War’s ideological enclosures.

Demonstrates how McLuhan extended insights derived from advances in physics and artistic experimentation into a theory of acoustic space which he then used to challenge the assumptions of visual space that had been produced through print culture.

A new look at the man who gave us ideas "the medium is the message" and "global village".