The first collection of critical essays devoted to the study of English-Canadian literary anthologies brings together the work of thirteen prominent critics to investigate anthology formation in Canada and answer these key questions: Why are there so many literary anthologies in Canada, and how can we trace their history? What role have anthologies played in the formation of Canadian literary taste? How have anthologies influenced the training of students from generation to generation? What literary values do the editors of various anthologies tend to support, and how do these values affect canon formation in Canada? How have different genres fared in the creation of literary anthologies? How do Canadian anthologies transmit ideas about gender, region, ideology, and nation? Specific essays focus on anthologies as national metaphors, the controversies surrounding early literary collections, representations of First Nations peoples in anthologies, and the ways in which various editors have understood exploration narratives. In addition, the collection examines the representation of women in Canadian anthologies, the use of anthologies as teaching tools, and the creation of some very odd Canadian anthologies along the way.

The first collection of critical essays devoted to the study of English-Canadian literary anthologies brings together the work of thirteen prominent critics to investigate anthology formation in Canada and answer these key questions: Why are there so many literary anthologies in Canada, and how can we trace their history? What role have anthologies played in the formation of Canadian literary taste? How have anthologies influenced the training of students from generation to generation? What literary values do the editors of various anthologies tend to support, and how do these values affect canon formation in Canada? How have different genres fared in the creation of literary anthologies? How do Canadian anthologies transmit ideas about gender, region, ideology, and nation? Specific essays focus on anthologies as national metaphors, the controversies surrounding early literary collections, representations of First Nations peoples in anthologies, and the ways in which various editors have understood exploration narratives. In addition, the collection examines the representation of women in Canadian anthologies, the use of anthologies as teaching tools, and the creation of some very odd Canadian anthologies along the way.

Canadian Women in Print, 1750—1918 is the first historical examination of women’s engagement with multiple aspects of print over some two hundred years, from the settlers who wrote diaries and letters to the New Women who argued for ballots and equal rights. Considering women’s published writing as an intervention in the public sphere of national and material print culture, this book uses approaches from book history to address the working and living conditions of women who wrote in many genres and for many reasons. This study situates English Canadian authors within an extensive framework that includes francophone writers as well as women’s work as compositors, bookbinders, and interveners in public access to print. Literary authorship is shown to be one point on a spectrum that ranges from missionary writing, temperance advocacy, and educational texts to journalism and travel accounts by New Woman adventurers. Familiar figures such as Susanna Moodie, L.M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, Pauline Johnson, and Sara Jeannette Duncan are contextualized by writers whose names are less well known (such as Madge Macbeth and Agnes Laut) and by many others whose writings and biographies have vanished into the recesses of history. Readers will learn of the surprising range of writing and publishing performed by early Canadian women under various ideological, biographical, and cultural motivations and circumstances. Some expressed reluctance while others eagerly sought literary careers. Together they did much more to shape Canada’s cultural history than has heretofore been recognized.

The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English takes the pulse of the last decade of Canadian poetry with ninety superb poems that have excelled--twice--at the test of "the best." With poems chosen from the first nine volumes of this landmark series, this special tenth-anniversary edition highlights a vibrant variety of subjects from romance and family to ecology and the economy--not to mention blizzards and bears. Ranging from iconic poets Michael Ondaatje, Anne Carson, George Elliott Clarke, and P.K. Page to notable upstarts, the anthology includes an index for readers, notes from the poets, an illuminating analysis of Canadian poetics by series editor Molly Peacock, and provocative excerpts from past introductions by guest editors Stephanie Bolster, A.F. Moritz, Lorna Crozier, Priscila Uppal, Carmine Starnino, Sue Goyette, Sonnet L'Abbé, Jacob McArthur Mooney, and Helen Humphreys.

The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology recovers a new regional archive of “black prairie” literature, and includes writing that ranges from work by nineteenth-century black fur traders and pioneers, all of it published here for the first time, to contemporary writing of the twenty-first century. This anthology establishes a new black prairie literary tradition and transforms inherited understandings of what prairie literature looks and sounds like. It collects varied and unique work by writers who were both conscious and unconscious of themselves as black writers or as “prairie” people. Their letters, recipes, oral literature, autobiographies, rap, and poetry- provide vivid glimpses into the reality of their lived experiences and give meaning to them. The book includes introductory notes for each writer in non-specialist language, and notes to assist readers in their engagement with the literature. This archive and its supporting text offer new scholarly and pedagogical possibilities by expanding the nation’s and the region’s archives. They enrich our understanding of black Canada by bringing to light the prairies' black histories, cultures, and presences.

Household anthologies of seventeenth-century Isfahan collected everyday texts and objects, from portraits, letters, and poems to marriage contracts and talismans. With these family collections, Kathryn Babayan tells a new history of the city at the transformative moment it became a cosmopolitan center of imperial rule. Bringing into view people's lives from a city with no extant state or civic archives, Babayan reimagines the archive of anthologies to recover how residents shaped their communities and crafted their urban, religious, and sexual selves. Babayan highlights eight residents—from king to widow, painter to religious scholar, poet to bureaucrat—who anthologized their city, writing their engagements with friends and family, divulging the many dimensions of the social, cultural, and religious spheres of life in Isfahan. Through them, we see the gestures, manners, and sensibilities of a shared culture that configured their relations and negotiated the lines between friendship and eroticism. These entangled acts of seeing and reading, desiring and writing converge to fashion the refined urban self through the sensual and the sexual—and give us a new and enticing view of the city of Isfahan.

Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. It continues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genre and the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism and theory has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This collection redresses that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of a range of thirty well-known and often-anthologized Canadian short stories from the genre's beginnings through the twentieth century. A historical survey of the genre introduces the volume and a timeline comparing the genre's development in Canada, the US, and Great Britain via representative examples completes it. The collection is geared both to specialists in and to students of Canadian literature. For the latter it is of particular benefit that the volume provides not only a collection of interpretations, but a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Canadian short story. Reingard M. Nischik is professor and chair of American Literature at the University of Constance, Germany.