Eli MacLaren – författare

The Ryerson Poetry Chap-Books were a landmark achievement in Canadian poetry. Edited by Lorne Pierce, the series lasted for thirty-seven years (1925-62) and comprised two hundred titles by writers from Newfoundland to British Columbia, over half of whom were women. By examining this editorial feat, Little Resilience offers a new history of Canadian poetry in the twentieth century. Eli MacLaren analyzes the formation of the series in the wake of the First World War, at a time when small presses had proliferated across the United States. Pierce's emulation of them produced a series that contributed to the historic shift in the meaning of the term "chapbook" from an antique of folk culture to a brief collection of original poetry. By retreating to the smallest of forms, Pierce managed to work against the dominant industry pattern of the day - agency publishing, or the distribution of foreign editions. Original case studies of canonical and forgotten writers push through the period's defining polarity (modernism versus romanticism) to create complex portraits of the author during the Depression, the Second World War, and the 1950s. The stories of five Ryerson poets - Nathaniel A. Benson, Anne Marriott, M. Eugenie Perry, Dorothy Livesay, and Al Purdy - reveal poetry in Canada to have been a widespread vocation and a poor one, as fragile as it was irrepressible. The Ryerson Poetry Chap-Books were an unprecedented initiative to publish Canadian poetry. Little Resilience evaluates the opportunities that the series opened for Canadian poets and the sacrifices that it demanded of them.

Margaret Laurence blazed a trail as a Canadian woman author, yet she credited her mother-in-law, Elsie Fry Laurence (1893–1982), more than writers like Virginia Woolf, for establishing a model of authorship that she could emulate – one grounded in western Canada and equally committed to writing books, raising children, and attending to the realities of everyday life.This is the first book-length study devoted to the life and work of Elsie Fry Laurence, a poet and accomplished novelist who played a formative role in defining literary life in Canada between the World Wars and into the postwar period. A complete reading of Fry Laurence’s oeuvre sets the foundational premise for the book, along with interviews with her daughter, correspondence with her grandchildren, a comparison to Margaret Laurence’s fiction, archival research, and a contextualization of her works among those of other Canadian and Indigenous poets and filmmakers. The second half of the volume brings together all of the poetry Fry Laurence published in book form, a substantial selection of poems from newspapers and magazines, and her complete short fiction, excluding only her two novels. The works explore themes such as women’s roles in creating homes and sustaining communities while confronting grief, loneliness, war, and the anxieties of the nuclear age. Fry Laurence’s writing is shaped by a regional history marked by early twentieth-century settlement, the displacement and persistence of Dakelh and Nehiyawak peoples, and the complex cultural entanglements that continue to define the region today.In recovering Fry Laurence’s work, Eli MacLaren restores attention to the place-based forces that shaped western Canadian women’s writing, thus reanimating contemporary approaches to Canadian literary study.

The 1867 Canadian confederation brought with it expectations of a national literature, which a rising class of local printers hoped to supply. Reforming copyright law in the imperial context proved impossible, and Canada became a prime market for foreign publishers instead. The subsequent development of the agency system of exclusive publisher-importers became a defining feature of Canadian trade publishing for most of the twentieth century.In Dominion and Agency, Eli MacLaren analyses the struggle for copyright reform and the creation of a national literature using previously ignored archival sources such as the Board of Trade Papers at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. A groundbreaking study, Dominion and Agency is an important exploration of the legal and economic structures that were instrumental in the formation of today's Canadian literary culture.

The 1867 Canadian confederation brought with it expectations of a national literature, which a rising class of local printers hoped to supply. Reforming copyright law in the imperial context proved impossible, and Canada became a prime market for foreign publishers instead. The subsequent development of the agency system of exclusive publisher-importers became a defining feature of Canadian trade publishing for most of the twentieth century.In Dominion and Agency, Eli MacLaren analyses the struggle for copyright reform and the creation of a national literature using previously ignored archival sources such as the Board of Trade Papers at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. A groundbreaking study, Dominion and Agency is an important exploration of the legal and economic structures that were instrumental in the formation of today's Canadian literary culture.