Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada

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 literaturesâfrom 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 Nationsâthis 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.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents for Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada , edited by Dean Irvine and Smaro Kamboureli 1. Literary and Editorial Theory and Editing Marian Engel | Christl Verduyn 2. âWe think differently. We have a different understandingâ: Editing Indigenous Texts as an Indigenous Editor | Kateri Akiwenzie 3. Toward Establishing anâor theââArchiveâ of African-Canadian Literature | George Elliott Clarke 4. Project Editing in Canada: Challenges and Compromises | Carole Gerson 5. Editing in Canada: The Case of L.M. Montgomery | Irene Gammel and Benjamin Lefebvre 6. The Material and Cultural Transformation of Scholarly Editing in Canada | Zailig Pollock 7. Editing Without Author(ity): Martha Ostenso, Periodical Studies, and the Digital Turn | Hannah McGregor 8. Editing the Letters of Wilfred and Sheila Watson, 1956-1961: Scholarly Edition as Digital Practice | Paul Hjartarson, Harvey Quamen, and EMiC UA 9. The Politics of Recovery and the Recovery of Politics: Editing Canadian Writing on the Spanish Civil War | Bart Vautour 10. Keeping the Code: Narrative and Nation in Donna Bennett and Russell Brown's An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English | Robert Lecker 11. Performing Editors: Juggling Pedagogies in the Production of Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts | Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars 12. Labours of Love and Cutting Remarks: The Affective Economies of Editing | Heather Milne and Kate Eichhorn 13. bpNichol, editor | Frank Davey 14. Air, Water, Land, Light, and Language: Reflections on the Commons and Its Contents | Robert Bringhurst 15. The Ethically Incomplete Editor | Darren Wershler

About the Author :
Dean Irvine is an associate professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University. Author and editor of books on Canadian modernism, he is also the director of Editing Modernism in Canada, Agile Humanities Agency, and the University of Ottawa Press's Canadian Literature Collection. 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.