Speaking volumes

Dean Irvine, Associate Professor of English. (Danny Abriel Photo)

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) annual book launch took place in the Marion McCain Arts and Social Sciences Building on February 20. Each year FASS hosts a reception to celebrate the most recent research and scholarly work produced by its faculty members. (For a full list, click here.)

This year, we saw contributions from all areas of study within the liberal arts including publications from our researchers in the social sciences, the humanities, the languages and the performing arts. What distinguishes the FASS book launch from other faculty events is actually seeing the volume of academic publications, the diversity of topics and the quality of work that is produced by our researchers and presented as one grand literary collection.

But then again, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie is home to some of Canada’s most distinguished scholars.  

One recent publication is a book entitled Editing Modernity: Women and Little Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916 -1956 (University of Toronto Press, 2008) by Dean Irvine, an associate professor of English at Dalhousie. Editing Modernity is a fascinating examination of women who worked in the publishing world from the First World War through the early Cold War.

The period between 1916 and 1956 is especially significant in the history of Canadian publishing. As an industry the publishing business was flourishing triggering the production of non-commercial literary, arts, and cultural magazines. With this boom came new publishing opportunities. It was during these years that an unprecedented number of women entered the field as front line editors and writers. Editing Modernity examines the role and influence these Canadian women had in the production of the little magazines both modernist and leftist alike. In essence, this research captures a history of literary women between 1916 and 1956 within the emergent conditions of cultural modernity that existed in Canada at the time.

Prof. Irvine’s study relates women’s editorial work and poetry to a series of crises and transitions in modernist and leftist magazine communities. Furthermore, it connects us to the public hearings and published findings of the Massey Commission of 1949 -1951 and to the later development of feminist literary magazines and editorial collectives during the 1970s and 1980s.

Prof. Irvine talks about an earlier time when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Victoria where he actually met some of the women who produced the early magazines. One of these women, P.K. Page, told him about her days editing a magazine called Preview in the 1940s. During one of their conversations, Ms. Page reflected on a poem she wrote in the early 1940s and published in that magazine entitled “The Stenographers,” a poem about women who worked in the high pressure war offices during the Second World War.

If you would like to know more about the research and scholarly work created by members of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie please contact the Office of the Dean at (902) 494-6288 or send an e-mail to jim.darnbrough@dal.ca.