The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) inspired an outpouring of responses among Canadian cultural producers. Yet, the war and its influence on Canada literature have received little attention in histories of Canadian cultural production. This anthology attempts to remedy this gap and inspire future research into Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. The anthology brings together a selection of diverse literary materials-fiction, poetry, drama, reportage, journalism, pamphlets, memoirs, and other life writing-representing just a fraction of the Canadian cultural production inspired by the Spanish conflict. Many of these texts have never been published before, having been largely dispersed in archives across the world.
This selected anthology joins Ted Allan's This Time a Better Earth, Hugh Garner's Best Stories, and Charles Yale Harrison's Meet Me on the Barricades in the Spanish Civil War subseries of the University of Ottawa Press's Canadian Literature Collection. Together, these edited texts are now re-circulating under a common banner to establish what we consider to be the first stage in the recovery of anglophone Canadian literature about the Spanish Civil War. To further situate the literary texts included here, we include a scholarly introduction, and a full apparatus of author biographies, textual notes, and explanatory notes. The introduction provides an historical-cultural overview of the 1930s to contextualize Canadian involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the cultural production the war generated. After establishing a historical and cultural context, we explain the rationale we've applied to the selection of texts for inclusion. The notes explain specific historical-cultural terms and trace the publication histories and editorial evolutions of each text.
Includes works by Ted Allan, Norman Bethune, Jean Watts, Neil Bissoondath, Dyson Carter (Jack Parr), Hugh Garner, George Gordo, A.M. Mowat, Kathryn Peck, Alfonso Rojo, Milton Acorn, Patrick Anderson, George Elliott Clarke, Stephen Collis, Margaret Day, Brian Dedora, Louis Dudek, Dorothy Livesay, Leo Kennedy, Eldon Grier, Ron Hawkins, Jesús López-Pacheco, L.A. Mackay, Seymour Mayne, Lionel Reid, F.R. Scott, Miriam Waddington, Patrick Waddington, J.A. Wainwright, J.S. Wallace, and many others.
Bart Vautour (Dalhousie) is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University in K'jipuktuk/Halifax, Canada. His research examines Canadian cultural production with a focus on transnationalism, modernism, politics, poetics, and editing. He is co-editor (with Erin Wunker, Travis V. Mason, and Christl Verduyn) of Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics and (with Vanessa Lent and Dean Irvine) Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media. He is also editor of a scholarly edition of Ted Allan's Spanish Civil War novel, This Time a Better Earth (1939) and co-editor of Charles Yale Harrison's Meet Me on the Barricades (1938), both from the University of Ottawa Press.
Emily Robins Sharpe (Keene State) is Professor of English and an affiliate faculty member of the departments of Women's and Gender Studies and Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. Her book Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War was published in 2020 by the University of Toronto Press. She is also the editor of a scholarly edition of Hugh Garner's Governor General's Award-winning Best Stories (1963), and co-editor with Bart Vautour of a scholarly edition of Charles Yale Harrison's Meet Me on the Barricades (1938), both from the University of Ottawa Press. This anthology is the first of its kind. It brings together a selection of diverse literary materials-fiction, poetry, drama, reportage, journalism, pamphlets, memoirs, and other life writing-representing just a fraction of the Canadian cultural production inspired by the Spanish conflict. Many of these texts hav
