Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation by Robert Lecker (review)

Robert Lecker’s Keepers of the Code provides an extensive analysis of the forces that have shaped the construction of pan-Canadian literary anthologies and the Canadian canon since the nineteenth century. As Lecker demonstrates, anthologies remain a pillar of canon-making as well as a foundation for the university-level introductory study of Canadian literature, and the creation and dissemination of anthologies continue to have a profound effect on Canadian literary scholarship and the transmission of cultural capital. Lecker identifies a code shared by anthologists from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. By anthologizing literature and constructing a canon, editors of national anthologies offer readers “a symbolic means of experiencing the country through the always-conflicted pages of the text.” This nation is most often expressed in narratives of wholeness, continuity, and concreteness, which explains the tendency of anthologies to select “conservative works that tend towards the mimetic and the realistic, rather than towards the expressive and the experimental.” The expression of the national impulse may vary, but the core value remains the same: literature provides a way to know and belong to one’s country, even if the shifting, plural nature of nations makes these anthologies always conflicted and in doubt.

Keepers of the Code proceeds chronologically, starting in 1837 with John Simpson’s Canadian Forget Me Not MDCCCXXXVII and moving through the nineteenth century in the first chapter. Subsequent chapters divide the twentieth century into periods of approximately fifteen to twenty years. Keepers moves through the imperial, masculine, Romantic nationalism of the 1800s to the introduction of modernism, the explosion of Canadian literature in the wake of the Massey Commission, the disappearance of Québécois literature from anthologies purporting to be Canadian, and the solidification of and eventual challenges to the canon over the 1980s, 1990s, and early part of the twenty-first century. This trajectory demonstrates that though ideas of nation and literature change, the core assumption of literature’s mimetic relation to a holistic nation and culture is remarkably resilient. The canon itself can be extended to demonstrate openness to diversity, but the essential vision of reading practice as connected to national identity remains. Even alternative anthologies that critique the canonical ultimately reinforce its existence: alternative anthologies establish the canon as something worthy of attack, while canonical ones give these collections a reason to exist. Recent anthologies, including Lecker’s own Open Country, continue to struggle to exceed the limitations of traditional theoretical frameworks and material conditions determined by the economics of publishing and the pedagogical needs of instructors. Theoretically and practically, producing an anthology that represents the literature of Canada without embracing nationalist fallacies and that offers more than a token effort at recognizing diversity is a challenge. Anthology production is a fraught experience; Lecker’s conclusion is that the anthology-making process is “not energized by the certainty of editorial selection or the transmission of canonical value but by anxiety over the whole process” and that making an anthology of Canadian literature is “a process of self-discovery.”

Keepers of the Code is admirable in its ability to place work in a material context as well as synthesize a broad range of individual and historical backgrounds, secondary criticism, and close readings of the anthologies themselves, with a particular focus on their editorial statements, scholarly apparatus, and physical appearance. Each chapter provides a close analysis of the major anthologies as well as a thorough discussion of their reception, the cultural and economic circumstances of their production, and the intentions and aporias of their editors. Particularly impressive are Lecker’s personal interventions in the narrative, from his reasons for embarking on this study to his struggle with assembling his own anthology. Lecker also excels at recognizing continuities. He argues convincingly, for example, for seeing the dispute between John Sutherland’s social realism and A.J.M. Smith’s cosmopolitanism as a modernization of an earlier debate between...