Rewriting Roughing it in the Bush, at Borealia

At Borealia, there's a fascinating history of the various editions of Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in The Bush by Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, with a lot of attention to the politics of it all.

In the first edition of her book in the 1850s, Moodie, good expat upper-class Brit that she was, celebrated the British Empire, denounced nasty local radicals like William Lyon Mackenzie, and regretted the "yankification" she saw in her backwoods neighbours. But soon the most common edition of her book in North America was an American one "edited" by Charles Frederick Briggs:

Without Moodie’s permission or knowledge, Briggs excised many of the epigraphs and most of the pro-British patriotic poems. Gone are also all textual expressions of loyalty to the British Crown, as well as the words ‘ultra-republican,’ ‘republican,’ and ‘democratic,’ which Moodie customarily used as pejorative terms whenever describing the egalitarian social mores of the colonies. John Moodie’s chapter on Canada and the U.S. was also expurgated, and the result was marketed as a sort of frontier adventure, an exotic ‘far-west’ romance of life in the Canadian backwoods.

Meanwhile, Moodie came to understand that her Canadian readers were not best pleased with the views in her original British edition. When she published a new edition in Canada in 1871, she too changed the emphasis:

Still smarting from the negative colonial reception of the first edition of Roughing It two decades earlier, the author purposely removed “many objectionable passages” that might still “arouse [the] anger” of her Canadian readers, and drafted a new introduction that praised Canada’s economic, political, and social progress in its journey from colony to Dominion.  Overall, the textual changes toned down the book’s old pro-imperial tone, and shifted the focus on Canada’s potential as a young country, away from the immigrant nostalgia which dominated the first edition. The pro-British epigraphs were eliminated, as were the sections commenting directly (and negatively) on colonial social mores and the Americanization of Canadian society, including all the rebellion poems. In fact, in a radical volte-face, the new introduction rehabilitated Mackenzie, converting him from republican “felon leader” (in the British edition) into proto-national hero, the driving force behind Canada’s move towards colonial reform and the healthier state of affairs in the colony after Confederation.

I'm sure some at least of this is familiar to Moodie scholars, and I should have read them, and also my friend Charlotte Gray's biography Sisters in the Wilderness. But I didn't. So it's news to me. If it's news to you too, read the whole Borealia essay by Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, who also has a new book out:  Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination

I remember William Westfall, the literary scholar, once saying he might have found Susanna Moodie a bit much in person, but he thought he would have rolled along just fine with her sister Catherine Parr Traill. Still, smart author, Susanna evidently knew her audiences, or else she was capable of revising her views without being embarassed into silence.  

CanCult history at CMQ 100

While Monique Joly celebrates how our artists have all become digital content providers for the global market, CNQ magazine celebrates its 100th issue with histories and memoirs of the emergence (and recession) of CanLit publishing when being here was more vital than selling foreign. It has excerpts from Nick Mount's CanLit history Arrival and from Handover,  Elaine Dewar's analysis of the selling of McClelland & Stewart to foreign ownership, (both noted earlier at this blog).  Anna Porter contributes a memoir of M&S's glory days. Jim Polk does something analogous for his longer time at House of Anansi. Brian Busby evicerates the killing of the (with all its flaws) New Canadian Library, which leaves much of the history of CanLit once more out of print.

History of literary historicism

Without knowing much about the school of literary criticism known as "New Historicism," I always kinda liked the idea that it stood for understanding literary works, not as pure eternal works standing free of time and context, but as being embedded in a time and place. How could a historian not like that, even though it was clear that New Historicism had large literary-critical ambitions and its aspiration was never to kowtow to us historians by reducing literary criticism into a subfield of history.

When I read Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World some years ago, I thought it was what New Historicism should be aiming for: a literary scholar steeped in Shakespeare's plays reading deeply into the evidence of Shakespeare's times and what they suggested about the man, and then thinking about the plays in the context of both man and times. It worked for me, and that it was enormously conjectural and speculative about Shakespeare's biography did not much bother me: the author was a literary scholar, not a historian. It seemed okay to me that students of literature should let their imaginations run free, even though (history being as complex as it is) it was most unlikely that any large proportion of his historical and biographical conjectures would be precisely correct should the evidence to test them ever come to light. The author's evident passion for his subject, and for literature, and for writing and thinking vigorously and well about literature -- they all kind of disarmed me.

All this is by was of introduction to a review of Stephen Greenblatt in a conservative American magazine called New Criterion. The whole essay can be read simply as a fine example as the review article as furious diatribe. Bruce Bawer does not just disagree with Greenblatt. Actually, he holds him responsible for:the long, slow destruction of the serious study of literature in the American academy.

Few people, if any, have played as significant a role in this process as he has—and few have profited from it as much, either professionally or financially.

Bawer blames him for the  existence, no less, of the whole field of Cultural Studies:

The typical practitioner of Cultural Studies combines a breathtaking cultural and historical illiteracy with a tendency to lean on pseudo-radical tropes about Western imperialism and so forth. In sum, it’s an intellectual and scholarly disaster. And its spiritual father is Stephen Greenblatt.

Bawer says Greenblatt's new book, about Adam and Eve in literature, feels:

like a gratuitous contrivance, a mishmash of second- and third-hand material that doesn’t seem to add up to anything particularly coherent or compelling.  ,,, [It will] affirm yet again his position at the forefront of the very institution, the academic humanities, for whose ongoing demise no one on the planet is more responsible than he.

There is way too much personal abuse in the review, which denounces Greenblatt as a cynic, a fraud, and a willing liar who will write anything just for the money, That strikes me as absurd as well as nasty. Surely any serious reader can see that Greenblatt loves his subject and writes for the pure pleasure of it. And any serious observer of modern academic culture knows that as longtime holder of an endowed chair at Harvard, he would hardly need the money anyway.

I do rather agree, however, with the contention that Greenblatt's speculations constantly go way beyond what the evidence will sustain. Maybe it's just that I don't think of him as a historian, and therefore don't mind that much, in the same way that I don't expect historical movies or historical novels to meet historical standards.