American and Canadian literature and culture : across a latitudinal line ; papers from the Saarbrücken Mediation Project

This volume presents selected papers given at three conferences. The first was presented by members of the CCAC and hosted by the Canadian Comparative Literature Association at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg (1 June 2004). The following conference was hosted by the CCAC at the Universität des Saarlandes (28-30 October 2004). The CCAC then hosted a small international symposium devoted to "Emerging Modernisms in Canada and the United States 1914-1941 : A Comparative Approach" at the Universität des Saarlandes, which concluded the series (23 February 2006).\n\nThe subject of the three mediation conferences included here, was a cluster of themes related to the complex topic of modernism as a cultural period and a literary movement in Canada and the United States. Modernism in Canada and the United States was framed not only by different historical parameters but also assumed different cultural shapes in response to the separate social and literary forces at play in the two countries. The modernism of the United States, as exemplified by such epochal international events as the Armory Show of 1913, for example, signals a form of participation within an international movement which was slower to develop in Canada. The subsequent emergence in the United States of writers, critics and artists supportive of the broad cultural goals of modernism in poetry, fiction, drama and the visual arts attests to the success of the movement.\n\nIn Canada, although the innovations of the Group of Seven may be compared to the earlier modernizing thrust of the Armory Show in painting, the success of modernism in launching itself as a broader based cultural trend was slower and more restricted than in the United States. In Canada the establishment of a literary institution, gaining strength in the 1920s by the efforts of such writers as Frederick Philip Grove, A.L. Phelps and Watson Kirkconnell, among others, was closely related to the development of a national identity. They had tackled a vast cultural project which seems to have taken priority over the more closely defined aesthetic goals of modernism as a literary movement. Regions, populations, religions, national historical events, economic products and the means of production had not yet been wholly explored in their Canadian contexts and meanings. It is perhaps for this reason as well that in Canada the tradition of modernist writing extended longer than in the United States, in fact, it was continued well into the post-WW II period, a time when American critics, writers, and literary institutions were forging an aesthetic and period concept of postmodernism.\n\nWhile papers from the two earlier conferences (2004) address particular authors and works, essays from the third (2006), also collected here, add the complex field of interlocking cultural and literary issues. It was intended to foster an international exchange of research and critical opinion involving issues of literary history, gender studies, intermediality, transculturality, translation studies, poetry, and editing problems centred on, though not limited to, the crucial period between the wars. The papers collected treat issues related to the study of primary texts, but also to critical texts and related theoretical approaches dealing with the subject of modernism, as well as the inter-relations between the social and artistic forces, including music and painting, which fostered or hindered the development of modernism.

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