Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada

by Dean Irvine (Editor), Smaro Kamboureli (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771121118
Publisher:	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date:	05/20/2016
Series:	TransCanada
Pages:	335
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Dean Irvine is an associate professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie Universityand director of Editing Modernism in Canada. He is the author of Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1914–1956, (2008) editor of The Canadian Modernists Meet, (2005) and co-editor (with Bart Vautour and Vanessa Lent) of Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and Digital Media (forthcoming).

Smaro Kamboureli is a professor and the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature in the English Department at the University of Toronto. She is the founder of the TransCanada series of books, published by WLU Press, originating from interdisciplinary conferences that initiated collaborative research on the methodologies and institutional structures and contexts that inform and shape the production, dissemination, teaching, and study of Canadian literature. Her most recent publications include Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (WLU Press 2012), co-edited with Robert Zacharias and Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (WLU Press, 2013), co-edited with Kit Dobson.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction Dean Irvine Smaro Kamboureli 1

Literary and Editorial Theory and Editing Marian Engel Christl Verduyn 17

"We think differently. We have a different understanding": Editing Indigenous Texts as an Indigenous Editor Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm 29

Toward Establishing an-or the-"Archive" of African Canadian Literature George Elliott Clarke 41

Project Editing in Canada: Challenges and Compromises Carole Gerson 57

Editing in Canada: The Case of L.M. Montgomery Irene Gammel Benjamin Lefebvre 75

The Material and Cultural Transformation of Scholarly Editing in Canada Zailig Pollock 93

Editing Without Author(ity): Martha Ostenso, Periodical Studies, and the Digital Turn Hannah McGregor 105

Editing the Letters of Wilfred and Sheila Watson, 1956-1961: Scholarly Edition as Digital Practice Paul Hjartarson Harvey Quamen EMiC UA 121

The Politics of Recovery and the Recovery of Politics: Editing Canadian Writing on the Spanish Civil War Bart Vautour 139

Keeping the Code: Narrative and Nation in Donna Bennett and Russell Brown's An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English Robert Lecker 149

Performing Editors; Juggling Pedagogies in the Production of Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts Laura Moss Cynthia Sugars 169

Labours of Love and Cutting Remarks: The Affective Economies of Editing Kate Eichhorn Heather Milne 189

bpNichol, Editor Frank Davey 199

Air, Water, Land, Light, and Language: Reflections on the Commons and Its Contents Robert Bringhurst 211

The Ethically Incomplete Editor Darren Wershler 225

Notes 239

Works Cited 249

About the Contributors 273

Index 279