I am preparing an edition of the unknown/uncollected works of Eurasian author Sui Sin Far. Sui Sin Far’s reputation as the first North American Asian author was established by the 1995 publication of Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, which brought together fiction that Sui Sin Far had collected in her own 1912 book as well as a small amount of located journalism and periodical literature. In particular, it emphasized Sui Sin Far’s interest in North American Chinatowns and commitment to investigating the place of the mixed-race Eurasian. Since the publication of Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, however, many additional works by Sui Sin Far have been located. These texts include journalism written in Montreal, Northern Ontario, Jamaica and Seattle; essays protesting Canada’s Head Tax for Chinese immigrants and celebrating the Chinese Reform movement; stunt-girl journalism and interviews; middlebrow magazine fiction; syndicated sensation fiction; syndicated children’s fiction; translations of Chinese folktales; fiction depicting racialized subjects beyond Chinatown, including Japanese and Native Americans; and much much more. These new-found works dramatically shift our understanding of this complex writer and redefine how she fits into North American Progressive-Era literary history. Born in England, raised in Montreal, employed in Jamaica, Thunder Bay and the western United States, Eaton submitted stories from geographically distant peripheries to diverse journals in the print cultural, political and financial metropoles. Prolific and experimental, she wrote under a variety of pseudonyms in addition to the one by which she is best known, in many genres beyond “Chinatown chronicles”, and from a range of perspectives in order to corner the market that would permit her to support herself as a single New Woman.
So far, I have located texts that quadruple Sui Sin Far’s oeuvre to include 58 sketches and works of adult fiction; 79 works of journalism; 57 stories for children; and 6 autobiographical sketches, published in over 45 popular magazines and newspapers, in both Canada and the U.S.. But more significant than the mere expansion of her bibliography, these texts reposition Sui Sin Far’s work within the gendered landscape of turn-of-the-century transnational mass print culture. By attending to the substantial number of texts not yet acknowledged as part of her oeuvre, I will dramatically shift the context in which Sui Sin Far and her work have been previously understood. Sui Sin Far serves as a case study of the turn-of-the-century Canadian woman writer as mobile literary labourer in an era of global capitalism.
Editor | Reilly Yeo
Supervisor | Mary Chapman
Partner | University of British Columbia
I propose to do a digital edition of works by Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton that will push the edges of this opportunity by integrating innovative approaches and tools from both inside and outside the academy. My digital edition of works by Sui Sin Far will have three primary goals:
1. Bridge academic and public conversations about Canadian modernism and multicultural contributions to Canadian literature by experimenting with a “duplex” website, with one half targeted to academics and one half targeted to the interested public, connected through multiple opportunities for dialogue and exchange. This can allow scholarly conversation and investigation to continue at the same time as academic work is made relevant and accessible. A strong multi‐platform approach, including good integration with social media, would be an essential element in establishing distinct yet interconnected portals.
2. Explore ways to innovate on the interface design for digital editions in order to allow the reader/user to have more authority in designing his or her reading experience. This is a natural extension of the last decades’ efforts to de‐centre the author in literary criticism, and Edith Eaton is a perfect candidate for a digital edition that furthers these efforts. As an author with multiple identities who has primarily been read through one limited lens (i.e. race) Eaton and her work are burgeoning with potential re‐figurations. Mary Chapman has already been working diligently to move beyond the narrow construction of Eaton as a bi‐racial writer. Eaton’s known body of work, now quadrupled thanks to Chapman’s efforts, includes poems, children’s stories, love stories, humor pieces, stridently anti‐racist editorials, “native informant”‐style magazine features, stunt‐girl journalism, travelogues written while cross‐dressing, sensationalized reportage of a murder case in small‐town Ontario, and more. Eaton emerges from this body of work as an incredibly complex figure whose “real” perspective on the events of her time is obscured by the many different authorial identities she chose to assume. Inevitably, any set of editorial choices will involve telling a certain story about Eaton, but digital editions allow the reader/user to reconfigure that story in unexpected ways.
3. Bring the digital edition into the 21st century by making it a rich multimedia experience. I imagine experimenting not just with TILE and IMT but with other innovative media tools (Mozilla’s Popcorn tool would be one example) to create a dynamic digital edition that incorporates the best of what the web has to offer in new media forms. I would consider hiring a web filmmaker to experiment with the role of film in the digital edition, given that this is the direction the web is moving in. In general, I would like to help EMiC be at the forefront of the movement to change readers’ relationships to texts through their digitization, to make reading Canadian literature an interactive, immersive experience that can rival other, more pop‐ cultural online experiences that dominate the bulk of what Canadians now do online.
Hugh Garner once commented that he hoped his short stories would not only “live longer than my novels” but also “give me a little bit of immortality.” Yet despite his extraordinary output of short stories—at least one hundred between the late 1930s and his death in 1979—as well as the stories’ wide and enthusiastic reception, his four short story collections have been overshadowed by his novels. Of the collections, Hugh Garner’s Best Stories (1963), Garner’s self-professed favourite, contains what are perhaps his most famous shorter works. The book won the 1963 Governor General’s Award for English language fiction, but since the early 1980s has fallen out of print.
Our scholarly edition of Hugh Garner’s Best Stories aims to restore Garner’s short fiction—as well as Garner himself—to its rightful place in Canadian literature, as well as in modern literature more broadly. Hugh Garner was an integral and influential Canadian author, noted for what Paul Stuewe describes as his “ability to write at what might be described as the highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow levels.” The twenty-four stories in the volume are drawn from nearly three decades of his literary career, and include some of his most widely reprinted works, such as “One-Two-Three Little Indians,” “The Yellow Sweater,” and “A Trip for Mrs. Taylor.” The stories contained in this collection have been published in magazines and journals, broadcast over the radio on the CBC and BBC, performed as plays, and reprinted and translated in anthologies around the world.
The scholarly edition of Hugh Garner’s Best Stories we propose will complement the growing Canadian Literature Collection/Collection de littérature canadienne at the University of Ottawa Press in featuring both print and online material. Inspired by McGann’s notion of an archive, rather than an edition, our print version will include a critical introduction providing an overview of Garner’s biography and contemporaneous Canadian history, as well as discussions of the stories’ textual history and critical reception. The print edition will also contain extensive annotations noting each story’s divergent versions. The online apparatus will provide additional information about Garner’s biography, a bibliography of his works complete with supplementary works of fiction and non-fiction, additional versions of the stories (published, among other outlets, in Chatelaine, The Northern Review, The Canadian Forum, Canadian Home Journal, National Home Monthly, Saturday Night, The Star Weekly, and New Liberty Magazine), a selection of reviews of Best Stories and The Yellow Sweater and Other Stories, and a reader’s guide to each of the stories.
In the final volume of the Collected Works of A.M. Klein, Elizabeth Popham completes the process of restoring the public voice of one of Canada’s most respected authors. A.M. Klein: The Letters is the first compilation of a significant body of Klein’s correspondence. Using his communications to construct a compelling narrative, Popham traces Klein’s career from his apprenticeship to great critical success and his tragically premature silence.
The content of Klein’s letters gives new resonance to his works, most notably to his critically acclaimed novel The Second Scroll (1951) and his Governor General Award-winning The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (1948). In his exchanges with publishers and scholars, Klein glosses his own writing and argues for the integrity of his poetic vision. Samplings of his correspondence with Seagram’s Distilleries clarify Klein’s controversial role as ghost-writer and PR consultant for Sam Bronfman. A valuable resource for understanding Canadian literary modernism, diasporic Judaism, and the culture of Montreal, A.M. Klein: The Letters is a remarkable portrait of an important Canadian literary figure of the twentieth century.
Lewis spent the entirety of the period 1939-45 in North America, living mostly in Toronto and Windsor. He published one book in Canada—Anglosaxony: A League That Works (Ryerson Press, 1941)—and planned another, which he published on his return to England, America and Cosmic Man (1948). Both books demonstrate an important shift in Lewis’s political thought, from the strongly-advocated nationalism of the early to mid thirties towards an equally adamant espousal of internationalism. Neither of these works has received the attention it deserves.
Lewis produced a revised edition of Anglosaxony in 1941, in which he attempted to reflect the rapidly-changing political situation. Because of the poor sales of the first edition, however, it was never printed (the manuscript is available in PDF format, however, on the website of the Wyndham Lewis Society.)
My proposed edition will allow the reader of a digital Anglosaxony to view the text in its original 1941 edition, to see it as it would have appeared in a revised second edition, or to see a version that registers the differences between the two editions.
The novella by Malcolm Lowry that appeared in Paris Review in 1963 under the title “Lunar Caustic,” and was published in book form in 1968 does not match the claims made for it by his widow Margerie Lowry as the final, definitive version of the work. This text is neither the version which Lowry wrote in New York City in 1936 (“The Last Address”), nor the partially revised version he drafted in Vancouver in 1939 (still called “The Last Address”), nor the radically transformed version that he undertook in Dollarton between 1942 and 1944 (“Swinging the Maelstrom”). In a long letter of January 1952 to the influential New York editor and publisher Robert Giroux, Lowry stated clearly that “Swinging the Maelstrom” should be considered as the final, completed version of the novella (which meanwhile had acquired its new title “Lunar Caustic”) and that “The Last Address” should be “looked on as simply the material from which I worked up “Swinging the Maelstrom.” Our research reveals, in a long overdue scholarly edition, the exact status of all the “Lunar Caustic” manuscripts, including the posthumous mix of two versions in published form. The book will include both “Swinging the Maelstrom” and “The Last Address” in a scholarly edition of Lunar Caustic, thus offering the reader unique insight into the developing creative process. The edition will be accompanied by a web-based apparatus featuring digital facsimiles of archival material, including manuscripts of the novella, Lowry’s own comments on the various versions of the text, images, and links to other sources. Together, the print edition and its web-based companion will allow scholars to engage in a genetic study of Lowry’s novella and reconstruct, step by step, the creative process that developed from a rather pessimistic and misanthropic vision of the world as a madhouse (the 1936 version of “The Last Address”), via the apocalyptic metaphors of a world on the brink of Armageddon at the beginning of World War II (the 1939 revisions of the “The Last Address”), to a world that – in spite of all its troubles – leaves room for self-irony and humanistic concern (the radical transformation of the novella into “Swinging the Maelstrom” in 1942-44).
Editors | Paul Tiessen and Miguel Mota
Annotator | Christopher Ackerley
Series | Canadian Literature Collection/Collection de littérature canadienne
Publisher | University of Ottawa Press
Research assistants | TBA
Partners | Wilfrid Laurier University, University of British Columbia, University of Miami, University of Otago, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Publication date | expected 2014 or 2015
Malcolm Lowry’s The 1940 Under the Volcano has been regarded too often as little more than Lowry’s blueprint for his 1947 masterwork, Under the Volcano. It has never been fully critically edited in the context of the work that preceded it, or marketed for an audience on its own terms. Completed in Canada in June 1940, it was shown by Lowry’s literary agent to thirteen publishers in New York before being withdrawn from circulation in September 1941. Further, already by March 1941 Lowry was ready to abandon it. By that time, he was already working on what would become the altogether different kind of novel for which he would become internationally renowned: the 1947 Under the Volcano.
The 1940 Under the Volcano is a work of the 1930s. The text invites comparison to Ultramarine (1933) and early phases of Lunar Caustic. But the as yet unpublished novel In Ballast to the White Sea (written largely during Lowry’s New York years, 1934-36, and to which he returned in Canada during the early 1940s) is perhaps the closest in spirit and temper to The 1940 Under the Volcano. In fact, and what has been overlooked, The 1940 Under the Volcano functions as a bridge between the 1930s fiction and the 1947 Under the Volcano, and connects fruitfully and compellingly Lowry’s writing of the 1930s to the different kind of experimental innovation that he would produce with the 1947 Under the Volcano.
We propose to create a critical edition of The 1940 Under the Volcano that interprets it in terms of its own claims, its own status, as a novel that Lowry believed in fully when he sent it to his agent in New York. Further, our critical edition will situate it within the overall textual history of Lowry’s composition of Under the Volcano, from the original 1936/37 notes written in Mexico to the drafts leading to the well-known 1947 version, and including the 1947 version itself. Our emphasis will be on what persists, from note to note, draft to draft, with The 1940 Under the Volcano (rather than the 1947 Under the Volcano) as our template. Further, we will position The 1940 Under the Volcano in relation to other of Lowry’s prose fiction, particularly texts (published and so far unpublished) that precede it.
We will provide a full context for this work by means first of a critical introduction that will include the biocritical context for the volume; a publication and reception history; a textual history; and a statement of editorial principles. Second, we will provide extensive explanatory notes on the text and on its composition as well as textual notes (keyed line by line to the text). Finally, we will simultaneously produce a web-based apparatus to accompany the project.
Editor | Patrick A. McCarthy
Annotator | Christopher Ackerley
Series | Canadian Literature Collection/Collection de littérature canadienne
Publisher | University of Ottawa Press
Research assistant | TBA
Partners | Wilfrid Laurier University, University of British Columbia, University of Miami, University of Otago, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Publication date | expected 2014
MacLennan’s high-modernist novel A Man Should Rejoice was finished in 1937 and has never been published. One of the few Canadian novels of the period written in the first-person voice, this work is an autobiographical Künstlerroman about David Culver, the son of a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman who studies at Princeton, rejects his privileged social upbringing largely because of his artistic temperament, and travels to Europe to become a painter. Reflecting MacLennan’s 1930s interest in leftist politics, Culver falls under the influence of socialist friends before returning to America and becoming an employee in one of his father’s factories. He grows to detest the capitalism his father represents, becomes a communist, and returns to Europe to take part in an armed socialist revolution. This novel experiments with unreliable narration and stream-of-consciousness writing. My critical introduction will narrate the circumstances that surround the composition of this novel, as detailed in MacLennan’s unpublished letters and other documents, explore a second wave of MacLennan’s modernist experiment, consider his problematic employment of first-person narrative, and situate his work in relation to socialist realism in Canada and beyond.
This edition, which has been invited for submission to the University of Ottawa Press as part of the Canadian Literature Collection, will follow the same general format and editorial methodology as my 2007 edition of Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage. The finished edition will comprise a fully edited text culled from McGill University archives, a critical introduction, short biography, a bibliography, a textual history, explanatory notes, list of emendations, and an online archive of supporting documents.
Editor | Colin Hill
Series | Canadian Literature Collection/Collection de littérature canadienne
Publisher | University of Ottawa Press
Research assistants | TBA
Partner | University of Toronto
Publication date | expected 2013
The career of Eli Mandel (1922–92) was one of the most prolific and distinguished in all of Canadian literature, yet in recent years his work has gone unsung compared with that of such peers as Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Robert Kroetsch, Irving Layton, and P.K. Page. Though he was a critic, anthologist, and editor of national prominence, Mandel’s legacy resides most securely in his poetry, which earned many accolades.
From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel presents thirty-five of Mandel’s best poems written over four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. The selection covers the most prominent themes in Mandel’s work, including his Russian-Jewish heritage, his Saskatchewan upbringing, his interest in classical and biblical archetypes, and his concern for the political and social issues of his time. The book also highlights the way in which Mandel’s work bridged the formal attributes of modernist poetry with contemporary, sometimes experimental, poetics.
Complete with a scholarly introduction by Peter Webb and a literary afterword by Andrew Stubbs, From Room to Room makes a worthy addition to the Laurier Poetry Series, which presents affordable editions of contemporary Canadian poetry for use in the classroom and the enjoyment of anyone wishing to read some of the finest poetry Canada has to offer.
One of a series of pilot projects for the EMiC Digital Commons.
The objectives of the project are twofold: (1) to produce the Collected Works of P.K. Page in the form of a digital edition, The Digital Page, accompanied by a series of ten printed volumes published by the Porcupine’s Quill; (2) to establish a model for image-based digital editions and to produce in collaboration with our partners a suite of tools, guidelines and procedures for other EMiC digital editions.
Poems, ed. Zailig Pollock (2011-14)
Brazilian Journal, ed. Suzanne Bailey (2011-14)
Mexican Journal, Margaret Steffler (2011-14)
Visual Art, eds. Michèle Rackham and Zailig Pollock (2011-14)
Children’s Literature, eds. Mavis Reimer and Deborah Schnitzer (2015-18)
Non-Fiction, ed. Emily Ballantyne (2015-18)
Fiction, ed. Elizabeth Popham (2015-18)
Letters, eds. Dean Irvine and Sandra Djwa (2015-18)
Editor | Zailig Pollock
Series | Collected Works of P.K. Page
Publisher | The Porcupine’s Quill
Research assistant | Emily Ballantyne
Partner | Trent University
Kaleidoscope is the first in a series of ten volumes to be published over the next ten years as a complement to The Digital Page. Selected and edited by Zailig Pollock, the poetry in Kaleidoscope is elegant, technically exquisite and full of marvels, and the chronological presentation reveals Page’s growth as a poet over her long lifetime. This collection is more than a mere re-publishing of previous work; Kaleidoscope includes poetry hitherto unpublished, and Page involved herself with the process of editing certain pieces until her death in January 2010. It offers a comprehensive look at one of Canada’s most beloved and brilliant poets.
This project consists of two interlinked hypertext editions, The Complete Poems of E.J. Pratt and The Complete Letters of E.J. Pratt. It is being prepared under the auspices of the E.J. Pratt Publication Project in co-operation with the Victoria University Library (Toronto, Ontario) and the University of Toronto Press, with funding provided by SSHRC.
One of a series of pilot projects for the EMiC Digital Commons.
One of a series of pilot projects for the EMiC Digital Commons.
The HyperRoy project consists of the design and maintenance of a site which gathers biographical and bibliographical information on the works of Gabrielle Roy (1909-83), a novelist of Franco-Manitoban origin. The site also includes academic editions of Roy’s manuscripts, a space for academic publications, an analytical critical bibliography, an index of the novelist’s correspondence and a space for discussion which brings together researchers and readers outside the university circle. One of the project’s objectives is to make use of a digital platform for publication and academic editing, thus providing researchers and the reading public access to all of the author’s manuscripts and archives. In this way, we hope to contribute to the renewal and deepening of knowledge and inspiration surrounding this major work, to the development of certain areas of literary research, and to achieving a better understanding of the history and workings of Quebec and Canadian literatures. The biggest part of our work involves the electronic editing of the manuscripts and genetic files of published and unpublished works. Most of these files are currently held at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa (Gabrielle Roy Fonds).
Originally published in 1896, In the Village of Viger was Duncan Campbell Scott´s inaugural collection of short stories. Focusing on the daily lives and vicissitudes of the people in a small Quebec town at the turn of the century, In the Village of Viger has been hailed as a sensitive and realistic evocation of Canadian rural life. By deftly creating a system of themes, motifs, characters, and symbols that recur throughout the closely interlinked short stories, In the Village of Viger anticipates other Canadian short-story cycles such as Stephen Leacock´s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.
Accompanying Scott’s In the Village of Viger is a wealth of documentary and critical material that will contextualize the work for students and readers of early Canadian literature. Early reviews of both the first edition (1896) and the Canadian edition (1945) provide readers with a glimpse into the book´s critical reception at the time of its publication. Correspondence both to and from Scott, most of which is published here for the first time, enables readers to see how both editions evolved and developed from conception to finished product. Essays by J.D. Logan and Donald G. French, Glenn Clever, Stan Dragland, Carole Gerson, W.H. New, Gerald Lynch, and Tracy Ware demonstrate to readers how the work has been treated critically throughout the twentieth century.
Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott’s poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott’s artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as his emphasis on nature and landscapes, remain remarkably relevant. Scott weighed in on many issues important to Canadians today, using different terms, perhaps, but with no less urgency than we feel now: biopolitics, neoliberalism, environmental concerns, genetic modification, freedom of speech, civil rights, human rights, and immigration. Scott is best remembered for “The Canadian Authors Meet,” “W.L.M.K,” and “Laurentian Shield,” but his poetic oeuvre includes significant occasional poems, elegies, found poems, and pointed satires. This selection of poems showcases the politics, the humour, and the beauty of this central modernist figure.
The introduction by Laura Moss and the afterword by George Elliott Clarke provide two distinct approaches to reading Scott’s work: in the contexts of Canadian modernism and of contemporary literary history, respectively.
Editors | Dean Irvine and Robert G. May
Series | Modern Canadian Poetry: Texts and Contexts
Publisher | Canadian Poetry Press
Research Assistants | Bart Vautour, Vanessa Lent
Partners | Dalhousie University, Queen’s University, McGill University, University of Western Ontario
Publication date | expected 2013
Edited by Robert G. May and Dean Irvine, this critical edition of Scott’s complete poems and translations started as a two-year postdoctoral project that evolved into a decade-long collaboration among researchers at Dalhousie, Queen’s, and McGill. The edition is divided into two volumes: volume 1: poems, 1918-56; volume 2, poems, 1957-84, and poetry translations. These two volumes will nearly double the size of Scott’s already substantial oeuvre, which will now include all of his previously published and unpublished poems and translations. The edition scheduled to appear in the Canadian Modern Poets: Texts and Contexts series, published by Canadian Poetry Press at the University of Western Ontario.
Canadian and American scholars note the extent to which Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948) drew from Dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s (1874-1927) bohemian life history to write his own German and Canadian life writings, but the materials from which these scholars have made these assertions remain inaccessible due to factors geographical, linguistic, and technological. In proposing a collaborative, digital scholarly edition focused on comparing Freytag-Loringhoven’s autobiographical papers with the writings of her long-time lover once known as Felix Paul Greve, I am proposing an editorial model that mitigates these problems by encouraging multi-lingual, cross-repository, electronic collaborations.
I am preparing a critical print edition (with digital apparatus) of the collected poems of Miriam Waddington. The first such edition of Waddington’s poetry, it will facilitate the teaching of her work to undergraduate and graduate students alike and bring renewed scholarly attention to a neglected modernist Canadian poet whose work, as critic Candida Rifkind asserts in a recent article, “mediate[s] in different ways on the cultural consequences of modernity.” Upon completion, the edition will be submitted for publication in the University of Ottawa Press’s Canadian Literature Collection.
My edition will study Waddington’s writing practice, account for authorial intention, consider the variant states of her poems, reproduce as reliable as possible a copy text for each poem, and include scholarly apparatus (annotations and a selection of contemporary reviews, scholarly articles, and author interviews). The edition will be based on extensive primary research in the Miriam Waddington fonds, housed at Library and Archives Canada, which includes poems in manuscript, in tandem with an examination of her published poetry, theoretical material relevant to the editorial project, and secondary material relevant to Waddington’s poetic oeuvre. By bringing the rigorous analysis of textual scholarship to bear on Waddington’s poetry — she published fourteen volumes of verse during her lifetime — and by situating her work in the context of Canadian modernist poetics, my critical edition of her complete poems will underscore the poet’s sophisticated craft, nuanced voice, and wide-ranging interests and thereby heighten scholarly interest in her work.
Sheila Watson’s novel The Double Hook is an integral part of Canadian literature. A critical edition does not yet exist, and it is my intention to produce for my MA thesis an edition of the novel under the supervision of Elizabeth Popham, senior editor of the high-modernist Canadian novel The Second Scroll and Leonard Conolly, series editor of the widely acclaimed Broadview Editions. My edition of The Double Hook will be modeled on the Broadview Press editions and considered for publication as part of that series, provided that I am able to obtain the rights from the Watson estate.
The Double Hook underwent a myriad of revisions prior to publication. My edition will track these revisions in the textual apparatus, as well as provide contextual materials such as correspondence between Watson and her editors/publishers, interviews with Watson regarding The Double Hook and reviews of the text in order to establish the social context in which the text was received. I will focus particularly on the attempts by creative writers and critics such as Robert Kroetsch to redefine The Double Hook (or hijack it) as a postmodernist rather than modernist text.
I intend to produce a clear-reading text with footnoted annotations. Appendices will track the transmission of the text by indicating the various changes made to both the manuscripts and published versions. My decision to create a clear text edition in no way implies that I believe this to be the final or “best” version of the text. Rather, Watson’s work exists in multiple forms and possibilities, and I will address this issue in the introduction of my edition. Although my edition will be mainly guided by authorial intention, I recognize that this is only one editorial possibility and a specific narrative that I have chosen to create for my audience.
Through partnerships with the University of Alberta Libraries, the John M. Kelly Library at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, and the University of Alberta Press, EMiC UA is preparing print and digital editions of papers in the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson archives.
Our lead project in this initiative is an edition of Wilfred Watson’s first play, Cockcrow and the Gulls, produced by the University of Alberta’s Studio Theatre in March 1962. Gordon Peacock directed the play; Norman Yates served as set designer. Watson began work on Cockcrow as early as 1949 and was awarded a Canadian Government Overseas Fellowship with which he funded a year-long trip to Paris in 1955-56 to work on Cockcrow within an environment steeped in avant-garde and absurdist theatrical production and theorization.
Our pilot project with the John M. Kelly Library at St. Michael’s is an edition of the letters Sheila and Wilfred wrote one another between 1956 and 1961; at that time, she was a graduate student in Toronto studying for her doctorate under the supervision of Marshall McLuhan while Wilfred, a recently appointed professor of English at the University of Alberta, was in Edmonton seeking to build on his reputation as an internationally recognized poet and to establish himself as a playwright.
Whalley published two books of poetry during his life: a Ryerson chapbook entitled Poems, 1939-44 and No Man an Island with Clarke and Irwin in 1948. George Johnston published The Collected Poems of George Whalley with Quarry press in 1986. All of these books are out of print. Elizabeth Whalley, George’s widow, has given me access to George’s private papers (the public papers are in the Queen’s University Archives) including all the manuscripts of the poems through the stages of composition, a diary of writing, etc. She has given me permission to publish a scholarly edition of his poetry with a biographical and critical introduction, textual notes, and a chronology of composition and revision drawn from George’s diaries and letters.
I am pleased to announce the publication of www.georgewhalley.ca, an introduction to George Whalley (1915-1983). Whalley was a scholar, poet, teacher, naval officer and secret intelligence agent during World War II, CBC broadcaster, musician, biographer, and translator. As a man of many parts, Whalley has often been called a renaissance man and a polymath.
You may read samples of Whalley’s works, including the essay “Picking Up The Thread” and three poems. Recordings of Whalley reading his poems are published here for the first time. The photo gallery includes previously unpublished photographs from his childhood to the last years of his life. A link to the National Film Board website will allow you to see The Living Stone, an award-winning film he narrated. Three essays by John Ferns explore Whalley’s life, poetry, and Coleridge scholarship. A comprehensive bibliography records Whalley’s impressive range of works. A timeline summarizes some significant events in his life.
The website was produced by Robin Isard, Systems Librarian, and Rick Scott, the Library Technologies Specialist in the Wishart Library at Algoma University. Whalley’s essays, poems, photographs, and recordings are published with the permission of the estate.
The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson: A Digital Edition will be an “archive of editions” of Wilkinson’s poetry. Rather than attempting to supplant or replace the existing editions of Wilkinson’s work, my edition seeks to encompass them; in so doing, the digital Complete Poems will illuminate the composition, transmission, and reception history of Wilkinson’s poetry, an ongoing process of which the published editions are material manifestations. The digital edition will present Wilkinson’s complete published and unpublished poems in all of their variant forms as marked-up images. The editions to be contained within the digital edition include Wilkinson’s two published collections, Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) and The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955), A.J.M. Smith and Joan Coldwell’s respective collected editions (1968, 1990), and Dean Irvine’s Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924-1961 (2003). Variant texts are located in Wilkinson’s journals and copy-books (held at the Thomas Fisher Library at the University of Toronto), in numerous periodical publications, and in audio recordings and musical settings of her poems.
The digital edition allows for Wilkinson’s work to be cross-linked to the work of other Canadian modernists, which functions to situate her work within the larger context of Canadian literature, and to illuminate the relationship of her work to that of her collaborators and contemporaries. As well, recent work I have undertaken at the Fisher archive to sort through material donated by Wilkinson’s son in the mid-1990s (but never catalogued) has uncovered at least one unpublished poem; further searching may uncover more. Heresies is now an incomplete “complete poems.” The flexibility of the digital Complete Poems allows me to include this new poem and any others that may be discovered; it will also allow me to include any future editions or versions of Wilkinson’s work.
To enhance the reader’s understanding of Wilkinson’s work and its history, I will foreground the experience of it in the documents themselves by presenting them as digital facsimiles. I will present Wilkinson’s poems and demonstrate the process of textual alteration and revision by marking up high-resolution digital facsimiles using the Image Markup Tool. The IMT allows me to present transcriptions of textual variants and descriptions of bibliographic features as text embedded in the facsimile that pops up at the reader’s command. This format forces the reader’s engagement with both text and textual history, and will better represent the bibliographic codes of the source documents than transcriptions of the texts. The digital format of the Complete Poems will also allow readers to compare multiple versions of the same text so that they can examine the evolution of each work, in all of its variant forms, over time; readers will be able to select which versions of the text they choose to compare, providing them with control over their reading experience and selection of material for analysis.
The Complete Poems will be designed to resemble a bookshelf that displays the published Wilkinson editions from 1951 to 2003. As a reader selects and “opens” an edition, the table of contents will link to the marked-up image of the selected poem as it appeared in that edition. Readers will then have the option of expanding the view of that poem to see all of its variant versions: from before its original publication (in manuscript, typescript, periodical, and publisher’s proof forms), and from after (in the Smith, Coldwell, and Irvine editions, and in various anthologies and recordings). In this way, readers can read across editions, as well as within then. Poems will be coded using TEI to embed textual information that can then be subject to search and analysis, tools for which will be built into the edition. Alongside the variant and bibliographic markup, the poems will also include links to extensive explanatory notes. These notes will cross-link to other related poems, and as the collection expands, to Wilkinson’s letters, journals, juvenilia, and prose.