Authors and Audiences: Popular Canadian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century by Clarence Karr (review)

470 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 in their target readership those who want to disinter the distinctly national and regional characteristics of our film-making and to use this book as a springboard for further study. (DAVID CLANDFIELD) Clarence Karr. Authors and Audiences: Popular Canadian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century McGill-Queen=s University Press 2000. xx, 318. $65.00, $27.95 The subtitle of Authors and Audiences, >Popular Canadian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century,= does not do justice to what is covered here. Clarence Karr, a professor of history at Malaspina College, sets out to explore one of the prime causes of >modernity= B the way that increased access of ordinary people to information through education and reading effected social change. His terrain for excavation is the golden age of print (roughly between 1850 and 1920), and the portal through which he approaches his ambitious topic is the popular fiction of five best-selling, internationally read Canadian authors: Ralph Connor (Charles W. Gordon), L.M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, Robert Stead, and Arthur Stringer. Factors such as the industrial revolution and the development of faster printing techniques and faster distribution systems (such as the railways) all made this golden age possible, and these authors, all born between 1860 and 1880, wrote novels that educated, entertained, and challenged millions of people in Canada and beyond. Karr=s book, which draws on knowledge from several fields, is a brilliant, exhaustively researched synthesis and analysis of Canada in great transition as the entire Western world was undergoing cataclysmic change. In analysing the cultural formations of modern Canada, Karr avoids reading each author in isolation but instead goes to great lengths to place them in a larger context, notably that of the history of the book: he examines the regional settings from which these authors came, the process by which they became writers, the social attitudes in and genres of their books, the ways that publishing was becoming a capitalistic enterprise (with the help of editors, publishers, agents, and international copyright legislation), the impact of popular fiction on readers, and the growth of an elitist criticism that relegated popular literature to the trash bin by calling it >provincial.= Unlike the cultural elite, whose centre of reference was Britain, these five best-selling authors all focused on Canada, writing about the regions they knew in natural and unaffected language and with plots that explored concerns of ordinary people. As a result of these creative choices, books by these authors were read and widely discussed. In showing that books by these five authors provided >significant assistance in their understanding of and integration into an ever-changing modern society,= Karr=s book presents a strong challenge to the widespread assumption that popular fiction humanities 471 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 simply reinforces traditional values. Karr is masterful at compressing large amounts of complex information into succinct, readable prose. His overview of the tangled international copyright situation during this period is exceptionally clear. He blends overview and detail with grace throughout the 220 pages of analysis and the nearly 100 pages of explanatory endnotes which draw on a huge array of archival and library resources. (Maddeningly, there is no overall bibliography of sources consulted). We did not check for factual accuracy in the text, but we did note one error in the Montgomery section: Karr states that Montgomery=s lawsuit against L.C. Page cost her $75,000, but in fact, this figure was what it cost Page. Though small errors may always creep into massive projects like this one, what is valuable here is the sweep of information and the sense made of it. Karr=s interdisciplinary approach and the ways in which he turns technical material and remarkable scholarly insight make for a highly readable story of Canada in the period leading up to the Great War. (BENJAMIN LEFEBVRE) Diane McGee. Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Eartly Twentieth-Century Women Writers University of Toronto Press. viii, 222. $60.00 Much like the character in a recent popular trade paperback who gets her PhD in physics...