Producing Canadian Literature

"A literature, if you can get someone to read it, will form a nation, will change that nation's form. We often think about ways in which the nation expresses itself through its writers; a few decades of Canadian criticism was promulgated on that notion. But writers are citizens, they live as citizens must, and they act politically as they write. They make a nation, but they do so by making a living. In Producing Canadian Literature a good sample of Canadian authors describe the text-making life as it has to be lived in our political reality."--George Bowering
"Smaro Kamboureli's TransCanada Institute produces cultural interventions that actively conjugate Canadian literary study into the present progressive tense.... Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies and Producing Canadian Literature ... make important contributions to the groundswell of methodological shifts in contemporary criticism seeking to unsettle the 'national' and 'literary' assumptions evoked by the category of 'Canadian literature, ' from its production to its reception.... Producing Canadian Literature makes visible how authors respond to what Jeff Derksen's foreword calls the 'forces we now rather casually generalize as "the market."'.... [The] writers' diversity in terms of form, genre, politics, age, gender, race, and success reverberates in their wide-ranging opinions, suggesting these positionalities significantly inform literature's political economy.... Most notably, these writers all reveal a keen awareness of the expectations engendered by a cultural economy that tends to cater to the middle.... Producing Canadian Literature will be valuable to writers as well as scholars of Canadian literatures, particularly those interested in print culture and sites where the arts, markets, and public policy intersect. Together with Shifting the Ground, these TransCanada books should be read by Canadianists not for what they say about actual literary works--which is little, and not really their project--but for how they open the field itself by crossing it from exterior entry points. Absent of the literature, their contribution is more to the study of the study of CanLit--an increasingly undisciplined discipline."--Brendan McCormack "Canadian Literature, 220, Spring 2014"