While books are often cast as axiomatically good, Professor Jody Mason’s new book Books for Development: Canada In the Late Twentieth-Century World, argues that this idea can be troubled by revisiting the history of development. 

, published this month by McGill-Queen’s University Press, considers how state and non-state actors used books within the late twentieth-century development paradigm between 1945 and the end of the 1970s or so. Doing so allows her to track the ways the book, which came to function as a key representative of settler exceptionalism, was used within the context of the development paradigm to express solidarity with newly decolonized nations; to argue for the importance of Canadian leadership in the new international order; and to consolidate settler liberal rule at home. 

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In the Fall of 2024 Professor Adam Barrows taught a graduate seminar on the topic of madness and time in 20^th-century literature. This will be the topic of a book-length project that Professor Barrows is beginning to write, with the seminar creating an opportunity for a small group of MA and PhD students to workshop the primary texts, arguments, and theoretical approaches that will be central to the book.

The seminar examined characters from a range of 20^th-century novels whose deviation from accepted norms of behaviour, speech, and thought places them in a unique and radical relationship with time. Texts such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power dove into topics of madness in a deeply personal context, while Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and others opened up discussions on what it means to write from the mad perspective and how authors have used this perspective to critique what is considered ‘sane’ in our society.

Professor Barrows’s intention was to create a knowledge community that would help him shape and refine his approach to the material, with the concluding project being an opportunity for every student to promote a contemporary work of mad literature that they felt belonged in the course selection. Professor Barrows reports that he has learned a lot from the seminar discussions and final projects, and when the book is published all eight students will be formally thanked for their contributions.

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Gorgeous books and royal annotations

What did Katherine Parr and Henry VIII write in their books? Step into the private libraries of one of history’s most infamous royal couples and discover how ink, margins, and manuscript flourishes reveal more than meets the eye.

In this illuminating lecture, renowned scholar Professor Micheline White delves into the marginalia left by King Henry VIII and his last wife, Katherine Parr, in their personal books. These deluxe volumes, often adorned with handwritten notes, decorative trefoils, and curious little pointing hands called manicules, tell a compelling story of public image-making and personal survival in the Tudor court.

Were these annotations simply personal reflections, or were they calculated messages written for a watchful audience of courtiers? Professor White will guide us through a close reading of these royal markings to reveal how Henry and Katherine used their books not just for learning or devotion, but as tools of self-fashion in crafting images of piety, wisdom, and authority. For Katherine in particular, this wasn’t merely academic: her very survival may have depended on how successfully she performed the role of the ideal Tudor queen.

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Doctoral candidate Sarah Dorward has just published “Embracing ‘Elsewhereness’: May Agnes Fleming and Late Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Authorship” in the . Arguing that authorship in Canada during the nineteenth century was fundamentally transatlantic, Sarah shows that authors who resided in British North America, and later Canada, needed to navigate the system of trans-border publishing if they wished to see much in the way of financial compensation or wide readerships. While the material and legal conditions of trans-border publishing were a hindrance to many authors residing in Canada, some were able to negotiate these conditions to their advantage.

Focusing on the career of May Agnes Fleming, a New Brunswick-born writer whose literary career was made possible through her pursuit of trans-border —and eventually transatlantic —publishing, Sarah explores how Fleming’s accrual of mass-market, transatlantic readers and subsequent significant financial success was enabled by this period’s international copyright agreements.

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Congratulations to Dr. John Coleman for the publication of his new article, which has recently been published in Modern Fiction Studies. Coleman argues that Kunzru’s novel Transmission allegorizes the experiences of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) authors, implicitly querying Penguin’s self-branding as an antidote to racialized disparities in literary production. Transmission self-reflexively critiques the influence of publishing agents helping author postcolonial and similarly constructed niche genres of literature. Through this critique, the novel figures the distance a work’s nominal author has from controlling reception over their oeuvre and persona. Transmission is also canny about casting Penguin’s diversity initiatives as injecting sought-after authorial brands into the market, something Coleman‘s article also works to critique. As an open-access essay, Coleman’s essay is ready to read and enjoy.

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Professor Jody Mason has just published . The essay argues that the history of the Margaret Wrong Memorial Fund (MWMF) and its literary prize (1950–62) renders visible the influence of late colonial development policy on the emergent field of African literature in English. While the positioning of language in the field was bound up in the metropolitan conferral of literary legitimacy on European languages (and, conversely, in African struggles to confer the same legitimacy on African vernaculars), the positioning of language in the surrounding field of power formed the site of a different kind of struggle regarding late colonial development in British Africa. Those members of the MWMF administrative committee who advocated after 1949 and through the 1950s for the inclusion of African vernaculars were appealing to the early twentieth-century ideology of Phelps-Stokeism, a theory of differentiated education for Africans that was based on a Social Darwinist assumption of racial inferiority.

More generally, the essay argues that the influence of late colonial development on the emergence of the postcolonial field of cultural production matters: the history of this field must be tracked via the metropolitan (British) welfare state and the emergent postwar development paradigm, both of which shaped debates about language, for instance, that have long been attributed to the influence of metropolitan publishers and the African nationalisms of figures such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, among other forces.

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Prof. Philip Kaisary (cross-appointed to Law and Legal Studies / ICSLAC / and English) has a new book, ! It was published a few weeks ago by SUNY Press. The book aspires to promote an understanding of historical and contemporary racial injustice, arguing that Cuban cinema challenges the ways in which slavery has been fundamentally misremembered and misunderstood in North America and Europe, and asking how the medium of film might contribute to a renewal of emancipatory politics today.

Prof. Kaisary wrote a short blog piece about the book for the Press’s website which you can read . He also recently recorded a podcast about the book with Jenn Jordan of “Turn the Page” which is available , and on all major podcast platforms. The book is currently available in hardback and as an e-book. A paperback will be out in January 2025 and a Spanish-language edition is forthcoming with Ediciones ICAIC. For those of you in Ottawa,  has some copies in stock.

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ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ News Room recently highlighted , which she argues is one among a handful of social media platforms changing the conditions that writers and other publishing industry workers face today. You can find out more about this work at , where Prof. Brouillette and Susanna Sacks track the shaping force that social media platform algorithms are having on reading practices and emerging aesthetics.

In “Reading with Algorithms,” Prof. Brouillette and her co-author argue that AI and machine learning, data collection and control, are now inescapable facets of how people read: watched over by corporations, interrupted by advertisements, distracted by multiplying devices and open tabs, joined by others engaging with the same content, our practices all observed and reflected in new textual forms. They notice that algorithmic effects are distributed and experienced unevenly, reflecting varying levels of access to social media reading experiences, as well as varying forms of exposure to surveillance and control. They ask: What does it mean to read with and through algorithmic structures?

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In honour of the approaching conference season, this month’s spotlight features a paper presented last fall by Dana Mitchell, a PhD student in the Department of English. Mitchell’s paper, “Autobiography and Audience in Anne Thicknesse’s School for Fashion,” was featured in the program of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) conference. The conference, “Matters and Materials of Life, 1660-1820,” was held in October 2023 in Montreal. Mitchell’s paper focused on Anne Thicknesse—an eighteenth-century musician, writer, and socialite—and her semi-autobiographical novel, The School for Fashion. Published by subscription in 1800, the novel follows Euterpe, a young heroine who overcomes societal pressure and gendered expectations to perform her music publicly. Examining the intersections between fact, fiction, and extraliterary labour, Mitchell argues that the book’s subscription list illuminates the autobiographical elements of the text and helps renegotiate Thicknesse’s controversial reputation in fashionable society. The paper was developed from Mitchell’s interest in women’s writing and research, and from work she completed for Dr. Hugh Reid’s graduate course on Eighteenth-Century Book Subscription Lists.

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Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande, a PhD candidate in the Department of English, has an article forthcoming in a 2024 issue of American Quarterly. “‘Death before Reenlistment’: Vandalism and Sabotage onboard the USNS General John Pope” traces an alternative history of the USNS General John Pope, which had ferried troops across the Pacific throughout WWII and the Korean War and was reactivated in August 1965 as a civilian-manned ship of the Military Sea Transport Service (MSTS). While official histories of The Pope evoke a sense of pride, discipline, and martial prowess, 400 vandalized canvas bunk beds taken from the ship and preserved by Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Graffiti Project tell an altogether different narrative of the years from 1965-1970. In this essay, Tibbits-Lamirande argues that GI tagging and vandalism onboard The Pope not only functions as a subterranean archive of soldiers’ war experience, but also falls in line with a larger pattern of soldiers’ resistance, which mobilized quotidian practices to sabotage military infrastructure and produce bonds of solidarity in the concomitant traditions of racial and working-class struggle. Ultimately, this work claims vandalism both as a form of revolt and a critically understudied resource for historical scholarship.

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