Canadian Literary Power

by Frank Davey, Smaro Kamboureli (Editor)

Frank Davey is both participant and witness in his provocative examination of the nature of literary power as a part of the nature of literary power as a part of general cultural and political relationships in contemporary and Anglophone Canada.

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 16, 1994

About the author

Frank Davey has been a poet, editor, small-magazine publisher, literary critic, and cultural critic in Canada since 1961. He is editor and co-founder of the influential poetry newsletter Tish (1961-63) and since 1965 editor of Open Letter, the Canadian journal of writing and theory. With Fred Wah in 1984, he founded SwiftCurrent, the world’s first online literary magazine, and operated it until 1990. His more than forty books include Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster (1980), The Abbotsford Guide to India (1986), Reading Canadian Reading (1988), Canadian Literary Power (1994), and Back to the War (2005).

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This analysis of the ways that Canadian writers and poets navigate the channels of power in Canada is excellent; I get something new out of it every time I read it and it's now forming part of my research for my dissertation. I freely admit that I call Davey, along with Hutcheon, to task for the way they distort and manipulate ideas of postmodernism to their own political ends in surveying a Canadian literary landscape, but Davey's examination of Canlit periodicals and his opening essay, "The Power to Bend Spoons" are excellent resources.