II. Textual History

Man Should RejoiceIn conforming to the nationalist agenda of his time, MacLennan … realized his ambition to become a famous writer, earned a considerable amount of money … and assured his place in the Canadian canon.But he was successful at the expense of his own creative instincts-perhaps at the expense of his full authenticity as a writer.… What would Hugh MacLennan have written had he written what he wanted to write?We can only make an educated guess.It seems to me that certain aspects of the authentic writer behind the nationalist guise can be found in his treatment of politics, in the feminine side of his sensibility and in the sort of novels he wrote before he stumbled upon the nationalist success of Barometer Rising.(33, 29) Of course, it is impossible to know the trajectory that MacLennan's career might have followed had Man Should Rejoice been published in 1937.It is hard to imagine the novel meeting the same laudatory reception, at least in Canada, that Barometer Rising did.But its publication might have affirmed for MacLennan that the international route was the surest way to success for an aspiring Canadian author of his period.He might then have adhered to his early modernist affinities-rather than casting them aside in favour of traditional realism-and produced more successful novels in the same mode.And how might English-Canadian literature have developed differently had its leading mid-century novelist not been a traditional realist?Might Canadian fiction have transitioned more quickly into contemporary forms, or is it precisely the conservative nature of the writing MacLennan endorses that invigorates some of Canada's antithetical postmodernist and postcolonial fiction?A reading of Man Should Rejoice provokes these and many other questions about the cultural moment that produced it, about its author and his legacy, and about the Canadian literature that MacLennan helped to shape. ii. textual historyThere is a considerable amount of source material-most of it unpublished and located in three archival collections-that permits the reconstruction of much of the story behind the writing of Man Should Rejoice and MacLennan's nearly successful attempts to publish it in the late 1930s.The largest trove of relevant material is found in the Hugh MacLennan Papers in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division, McGill University Libraries.There is another sizable assemblage of relevant documents in the Hugh MacLennan Fonds, held in the Archives and Special

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.