Year: 2017
Type: paratext
Abstract: This book had its genesis in a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.In the earliest phase of this project, our team of English-and French-language literary scholars in New Brunswick took its cue from health researchers in asking a basic, but complex, question about literature: namely, what are the determinants of the literary?Is literature mostly the creation of hypersensitive antennae of the race, as Marshall McLuhan suggested (Gutenberg Galaxy 269), or is the artist enmeshed in social matrices of language, narrative, and history that speak through, and thus index, artistic creation?In the pages that follow, we not only historicize that question and the tensions that follow from it, but also locate its address in distinct periods of New Brunswick literary history.We are concerned primarily with social determinants, the latent complex of forces that contributed to periods of literary ferment or flowering in New Brunswick.To extend the flowering metaphor, we focus less on the smell of the rose, or its sheen, or its symbolic resonance, than we do on the soil it grows in, the water it consumes, the air quality around it, and the attentions of its quirky gardeners.Thus, we are not setting out to describe the manifest components of distinct periods of literary ferment in New Brunswick (key figures and achievements), but to examine the conditions that were in place to enable, stifle, or augment production.In adopting that approach to understanding a provincial culture, we do not imply that social conditions are solely responsible for an artist like Herménégilde Chiasson, or that a straight line can be drawn from social factors
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4391372786