Sharpe, Emily R./Vautour, Bart (Hrsg.) Canada and the Spanish Civil War

An Anthology

The Spanish Civil War sparked a flood of reactions among Canadian cultural figures. Nevertheless, the war and its influence on Canadian literature have received little attention in the history of Canadian cultural production. This anthology attempts to fill this gap and stimulate future research on Canadian literature about the Spanish Civil War. The anthology brings together a selection of diverse literary materialsfiction, poetry, drama, reportage, journalism, pamphlets, memoirs, and other biographiesthat represent only a fraction of the Canadian cultural production inspired by the Spanish Civil War. Many of these texts have never been published and are scattered across archives around the world. This selected anthology joins Ted Allan's This Time a Better Earth, Hugh Garner's Best Stories, and Charles Yale Harrison's Meet Me on the Barricades in the Spanish Civil War sub-series of the University of Ottawa Press's Canadian Literature Collection. Together, these edited texts are now being republished under a common banner to establish what we consider to be the first stage of rediscovering Anglophone Canadian literature on the Spanish Civil War. To better contextualize the literary texts included here, the editors have added a scholarly introduction and a complete apparatus of author biographies, textual notes, and explanations. The introduction provides a historical and cultural overview of the 1930s to contextualize Canada's involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the cultural impact of the war. After presenting the historical and cultural context, they explain the reasons for selecting the texts. The notes explain specific historical and cultural terms and trace the publication history and editorial development of each text.