Canadian Modernism at the present time

In this lecture Brian Trehearne identifies and comments on a number of current preoccupations of Canadian literary modernist studies: the impact of feminism on the modernist canon; exaggerated attention to Canadian leftist modernism; the curious prominence accorded to Canadian expressions of antimodernism.

These preoccupations affirm both Canadian modernism’s typicality within modernist studies and the field’s uniqueness.  Canadian modernists unlikely to be familiar to the U.K. audience are briefly introduced and situated in relation to the field’s current concerns, with some attention to the rise and fall of their reputations in Canada.

Brian Trehearne is a leading scholar of Canadian modernism. Among his many publications are the monographs and Aestheticism and the Cana­dian Modern­ists: Aspects of a Poetic Influ­ence (1989) and The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition (1999). He has edited The Emigrant; A Poem. In Four Cantos [1841], by Standish O’Gra­dy (1989); A.J.M. Smith: The Complete Poems (2007);  and Canadian Poetry 1920-1960 (2010). Work on another edition – John Glassco: The Complete Poems, forthcoming 2017 – is currently nearing completion.

All welcome.