Emily Robins Sharpe – författare

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) inspired an outpouring of responses among Canadian cultural producers. Yet, the war and its influence on Canada literature have received little attention in histories of Canadian cultural production. This anthology attempts to remedy this gap and inspire future research into Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. The anthology brings together a selection of diverse literary materials—fiction, poetry, drama, reportage, journalism, pamphlets, memoirs, and other life writing—representing just a fraction of the Canadian cultural production inspired by the Spanish conflict. Many of these texts have never been published before, having been largely dispersed in archives across the world._x000D__x000D_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 subseries of the University of Ottawa Press’s Canadian Literature Collection. Together, these edited texts are now re-circulating under a common banner to establish what we consider to be the first stage in the recovery of anglophone Canadian literature about the Spanish Civil War. To further situate the literary texts included here, we include a scholarly introduction, and a full apparatus of author biographies, textual notes, and explanatory notes. The introduction provides an historical-cultural overview of the 1930s to contextualize Canadian involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the cultural production the war generated. After establishing a historical and cultural context, we explain the rationale we’ve applied to the selection of texts for inclusion. The notes explain specific historical-cultural terms and trace the publication histories and editorial evolutions of each text._x000D__x000D_Includes works by Ted Allan, Norman Bethune, Jean Watts, Neil Bissoondath, Dyson Carter (Jack Parr), Hugh Garner, George Gordo, A.M. Mowat, Kathryn Peck, Alfonso Rojo, Milton Acorn, Patrick Anderson, George Elliott Clarke, Stephen Collis, Margaret Day, Brian Dedora, Louis Dudek, Dorothy Livesay, Leo Kennedy, Eldon Grier, Ron Hawkins, Jesús López-Pacheco, L.A. Mackay, Seymour Mayne, Lionel Reid, F.R. Scott, Miriam Waddington, Patrick Waddington, J.A. Wainwright, J.S. Wallace, and many others.

Mosaic Fictions is the first book-length critical analysis of Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. Exploring published and archival writings, the book focuses on the extensive contributions of Jewish Canadian authors as they articulate the stakes of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) in the language of a nascent North American multiculturalism. Placing Jewish Canadian writers within overlapping North American networks of Jewish, Black, immigrant, female, and queer writers challenges the national distinctions that dominate current critical approaches to Anglophone Spanish Civil War literature.Reframing the narrative of Spain’s noble but tragic struggle against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, the book demonstrates how marginalized North American supporters of the Spanish Republic crafted narratives of inclusive citizenship amidst a national crisis not entirely their own. Mosaic Fictions examines texts composed between the war’s outbreak and the present to illuminate the integral connections between Canada’s developing national identity and global leftist action.