Anthologizing Canadian Literature: Theoretical and Cultural Perspectives ed. by Robert Lecker (review)

'Every anthology is nothing more or less than the narrative record of a series of intense negotiations about literary value at a given historical moment'. Robert Lecker's statement in Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation (2013, p. 340) opens a space for the thirteen essays in this edited collection which explore the making of Canadian national literature anthologies—their purposes, methodologies, and inevitable limitations. In his Introduction, Lecker outlines crucial issues regarding anthology formation, focusing on their role as teaching tools and agents in forming/ reforming the national literary canon; he also considers the material conditions of publication, such as costs for permission fees and space limitations. (Should an anthology be small enough to fit into a student's—or a soldier's—backpack?) What kind of narrative might an anthology tell, and to whom? And what about popular anthologies which exist as alternatives to serious nationally themed collections?

Many essays examine the historical development of the English-Canadian canon, charting shifts in concepts of nation and narration and changing critical trends which affect any anthology's political and cultural agendas, while several offer in-depth analyses of individual anthologies and their production. Margery Fee's essay on the 'Indian Poems' of Pauline Tekahionwake Johnson and Duncan Campbell Scott exemplifies the long view, where she offers a comparative analysis of the changing reception of these poets' work based on her survey of forty-four anthologies published between 1887 and 2008. Turning to the material aspects of book production, Janet B. Friskney's 'Canadian Literary Anthologies through the Lens of Publishing History' examines the patterns of English-Canadian anthology publication over a hundred-year period up to the late twentieth century, emphasising the importance of historical context in analysing publishing trends. By contrast, the micro-studies bring us closer to particular editors' dilemmas and their wrangles with publishers, from D.M.R. Bentley's masterly 'Poetry of the Canoe: William Douw Lighthall's Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), 'arguably the most editorially vexed and problematic anthology in the history of Canadian literature' (p. 80), to Karen Shearer's devastating analysis of the flawed production of Michael Ondaatje's Long Poem Anthology with Coach House Press (1979). On a more positive note, Joel Deshaye's study of Robert Weaver's Anthology programme for CBC Radio 1954—84 illustrates its significance, when for the first time audiences could hear Canadian writers reading their own work. The essays by two poet-editors, Gary Geddes and Anne Compton, give a valuable personal angle on all the factors associated with anthologising activity, from an editor's own criteria of selection to historical shifts in taste to market considerations, while Compton's Lorenzo Reading Series at UNB Saint John's offers an alternative live anthology format comparable with Weaver's earlier Anthology. To end with Lorraine York's 'Why So Serious? The Quirky Canadian Literary Anthology' may serve to illustrate the multiple perspectives which this volume splendidly accommodates as it makes us think critically about anthologies, not as fixed constructions but as 'anxious objects, unstable at the best of times' (p. 31), faithful mirrors of Canada's literary traditions.