Man Should Rejoice, by Hugh MacLennan: A Critical Edition(Canadian Literature Collection)

Man Should Rejoice is one of two hitherto unpublished novels by acclaimed novelist Hugh MacLennan. Completed in 1937 and left unpublished due to economic conditions during the Great Depression, it lay in the McGill archives until now. This critical edition of Man Should Rejoice , which is also the first-ever publication of the work, is comprised of a critical introduction, a bibliography of published and unpublished sources, a fully-edited text based on a typescript of the novel, a list of textual emendations, and explanatory notes. The introduction draws upon extensive research undertaken in three Canadian archival collections located in Montreal and Calgary. It provides relevant historical, cultural, and biographical context for the novel. From hundreds of archival documents, Colin Hill reconstructs a textual history of the novel's production that acknowledges the crucial contribution of Dorothy Duncan, who heavily revised the text and assisted MacLennan behind the scenes. Hill also explores the critical reception of MacLennan's fiction from the 1930s to the present. Published in English.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction I. Hugh MacLennan and Man Should Rejoice II. Textual History III. Critical Reception Bibliography Man Should Rejoice Preface Shadows Action  Transfusion  Form  Explanatory notes Textual notes

About the Author :
Colin Hill is Associate Professor at the Department of English, University of Toronto. His research focuses on modernist Canadian fiction. He is particularly interested in modernist archives, aesthetics, literary histories, and editorial practices, and is working on a book about modernism and Canadian cities. He is also editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly.

Review :
Man Should Rejoice certainly deserves to be published at last, even though -- as its editor Colin Hill admits -- it "is not MacLennan's lost masterpiece".  It is nevertheless, a remarkable, compelling novel.  Hugh MacLennan’s early novel Man Should Rejoice (c. 1937) has finally found a publisher in the Canadian Literature Collection, a series edited by Dean Irvine for the University of Ottawa Press. It is eighty years late in appearing, but it makes an important addition to MacLennan’s oeuvre, offering insightful new perspectives on the beginnings of his writing career. Carefully edited by Colin Hill, it will force interested readers to rethink past assessments of a writer seen by many as the quintessential, somewhat predictable, Canadian realist.