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• W2068300067 abstract "Reviewed by: Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada Leslie Monkman (bio) E.D. Blodgett. Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada University of Toronto Press. xii, 372. $65.00 Responding in 1886 to the publication of Charles F. Richardson's widely read literary history, The Primer of American Literature, Matthew Arnold could only react with astonishment: 'Are we to have a Primer of Canadian Literature too, and a Primer of Australian? ... [T]hese things are not only absurd; they are also retarding.' Presumably, Arnold's resistance to the idea of national literatures written largely in European languages but with distinctive literary histories would have increased to consternation at the prospect of a volume such as E.D. Blodgett's history of Canadian literary histories. As his title indicates, Blodgett predictably sees Canadian experience defeating unitary narratives as literary histories contribute to the invention of a nation. Literary histories focused on English Canada, French Canada, First Nations, Inuit, and immigrant communities reveal five distinct positions of power and ideological commitment in reading and writing the past. Most English-Canadian literary histories begin from Arnoldian assumptions of extending English literary space into North America and read Canadian literary history through questions most succinctly captured in Northrop Frye's 'Where is here?' From Camille Roy onwards, most [End Page 339] Québécois literary histories choose not Cartier but the Conquest as a starting point, and the insistence on that movement in time governs underlying assumptions of a literary history moving 'from Egypt to Jerusalem.' Histories of First Nations, Inuit, and ethnic minority writing also begin from a defined moment of rupture, but 'the paucity of historical markers' for these literatures also pushes their historiography towards an English-Canadian emphasis on culture as a space to be occupied. Ultimately, however, the preoccupations of these histories are less with either time or space than with threats to continuity and continuation within the specific cultures. As a distinguished scholar of comparative literature, Blodgett is unapologetically Eurocentric in his insistence on placing literary stock-taking in Canada in relation to European precedents and parallels. Thus, he eschews postcolonial comparisons with Australia, New Zealand, or the United States in order to begin instead with patterns apparent in the literary historiography of 'new nations' in Europe: Belgium (1830), Italy (1872), and Czechoslovakia (1918). Moving fluently through comparisons with histories written in German, Flemish, Czech, or Italian, Blodgett reflects his 'long and affectionate relationship with classical and European literatures.' Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he also displays occasional impatience with literary historians whom he views as contextually challenged, as when Françoise Van Roey-Roux fails to note a comparison with either St Augustine's Confessions or Petrarch's Secretum meum. The final chapters of Five-Part Invention - 'Canada as Alterity: The View from Europe, 1895-1961' and 'Canada by Canadians for Europeans, 1974-1989' - extend Blodgett's focus on placing Canada's literary histories in relation to Europe. Here he places Gérard Tougas's Histoire de la littérature canadienne-française, first published in Paris in 1960, but does not consider the impact of the 1966 English translation of Tougas's book on English-Canadian readers of the nationalist 1960s. More frustratingly, he ignores the attention given to the history of literature in Canada emanating from the introduction of 'Commonwealth' literary study in Britain spearheaded by A. Norman Jeffares in the 1960s. Survey essays by British critics such as William Walsh and by Canadians writing for British readers, including Frank Watt and Peter Stevens, would seem to meet Blodgett's selection criteria of 'perceived influence' and 'scope,' particularly given his emphasis on European contexts. A. Norman Jeffares was also the commissioning editor for W.H. New's History of Canadian Literature, and the book can be seen as a postcolonial successor to the early attempts to place Canadian literary history in Commonwealth contexts. Available only from Macmillan London when Blodgett was writing Five-Part Invention, New's History has since been published in Canada by McGill-Queen's University Press and has gone into a second edition. Although Blodgett acknowledges New as 'exceptional' in [End Page 340] attempting 'both to address history..." @default.
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• W2068300067 title "Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (review)" @default.
• W2068300067 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/utq.2005.0161" @default.
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