Women's Writing in Canada by Patricia Demers, and: Sharing the Past: The Reinvention of History in Canadian Poetry since 1960 by J.A. Weingarten (review)

Is it just me, or has the term "interdisciplinarity" become less of a buzzword during the last decade? Once trumpeted on the homepages of humanities departments nationwide, or as part of mission statements for universities as a whole, this concept (which my word processing software refuses to recognize as a legitimate word) seems to have been eclipsed by such administrative favourites as blended or transnational or experiential education. But while interdisciplinarity may not have the critical cachet it once did, that has not stopped scholars in the humanities from learning from each other's disciplines, nor from appealing to each other for what might be gained by listening to each other's debates and discoveries. Two recent books, both written by literary scholars, can offer much to Canadian humanists outside the discipline of English – and in particular, historians, with one of the two books directly interpolating historians and making a case for lyric poetry's contribution to historical knowledge and analysis.

Patricia Demers, an established scholar of early modern literature and gender, has turned more recently to an extensive examination of gender and national literature with Women's Writing in Canada, an engaging account of mid-twentieth-century and contemporary writing in Canada, with some nods to pre-1950s women in the field, although not reaching as far back as Catharine Parr Traill or "the mother of us all" Susanna Moodie. After an introduction, which establishes the historical context of writing post-1950 in Canada, including key moments such as the publication the Massey Report (1951), the Status of Women Report (1970), and Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015), as well as manifestos from the Quiet Revolution in Quebec such as Refus Global (1948), Demers structures her account generically, with chapters devoted to women's writing in fiction, film, poetry, music, drama, children's literature, and non-fiction.

These individual chapters hearken back to the pre-Wikipedia times of intelligent and opinionated print-based encyclopedia entries, where readers could trust that the author was an engaged scholar (although never infallible, and with their own prejudices) rather than an anonymous crowd-sourced aggregate of IP addresses. Demers approaches each genre in an accessible and jargon-free tone, most often outlining prominent women and their texts generally, before focusing at greater length on representative figures – for example, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro in fiction, or Judith Thompson and Sharon Pollock in drama. Her approach is also inclusive, going beyond white anglophone writers to discuss Québécoise writers, racialized and Indigenous writers, and trans women writers.

Anyone who has attempted writing concise entries on literary or historical figures will recognize how difficult this task is without becoming reductive or falling into clichés, and Demers succeeds in making hundreds of women writers and their works, across many decades and genres, comprehensible, as well as demonstrating how they may be placed within a larger cultural map of Canadian literary expression. There are, of course, inevitable absences, with Demers appearing to privilege realist and naturalist writers – and thereby neglecting such linguistically innovative writers as Lisa Robertson and the women of the Kootenay School of Writing – or making no more than passing reference to challenging novelists like Gail Scott, Hiromi Goto, and Lynn Crosbie.

The structure of Demers' study, while logical and coherent, also appears to be hierarchical with the chapters on fiction and poetry each taking up scores of pages respectively, while music, film, and children's literature form only brief interludes of a dozen pages, making these genres seem marginal and mere sorbets to the main course of novels and poems. It might have made more sense to combine film and music with drama into a "performance arts" chapter and thereby balance the divisions, but...