Authors and Audience: Popular Canadian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century (review)

Authors and Audience is a very useful book. Clarence Karr has managed to transcend that uneasy boundary that still holds between social and intellectual history and literary criticism. He has done so, moreover, with such grace and elegance as to make it appear extraordinary that the dividing line should ever have existed, much less be largely taken for granted.

Everyone benefits. Historians get a straightforward introduction to the lives and best-known writings of five of the most popular Canadian authors of the early twentieth century - Charles W. Gordon/Ralph Connor, Robert Stead, Nellie McClung, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Arthur Stringer. Historians also acquire a new lens from which to peer at the much observed concept of modernism and perhaps reassess its applicability to their own field of study. Literary critics get a broader perspective of the canon and its relationship to readership.

Karr selected his five authors for being 'the most representative, the most relevant and the most enduring examples' of 'Canadians who achieved international recognition,' yet continued to draw on 'their own experiences of adjusting to changing times [in Canada] in their fiction.' According to Karr, 'although each of the five authors realized the importance of the American market, the one area in which they never compromised was in consciously writing for the us audience alone.' Karr seeks to understand the relationship between the authors' response to change and audience reception of their writing.

All five authors Karr defines as popular, and his complementary purpose is to nudge them into the canon, long defined by literary critics, most often academics, in exclusionary ways. To write books that sell in large numbers is somehow demeaning. 'It has been common practice for many academics, even while they purport to respect popular literature, to approach it with condescending attitudes. They assume that, because the titles are popular, they merely provide entertainment and escape and conform to the standard conservative tastes and values of society.'

Authors and Audiences employs a multi-dimensional approach. Karr engages with each author in a separate chapter, but also highlights commonalities in their life courses as writers. They all shared in the middle-class advantage of being encouraged to read as children. They all served a literary apprenticeship in journalism, the only way for an aspiring writer to make a living in Canada, if a mean one at that. All but Montgomery had mentors, but that lack was not, for her, an insuperable obstacle, given that she 'was the most possessed by a creative spirit.' Each of them exercised enormous self-discipline in finding the time to write, all but Stringer in longhand. They all made money, due in part to their access to the religiously based presses then very active in Canada, but also because they responded to the literary fashions of the day. While Karr does not ignore the influence of gender and region, including canon makers' perception of writers as male and Toronto as the centre of the universe, he pays less attention to these factors than he might. At the same time, he devotes an enthusiastic chapter to the emerging motion picture business, with which only three of the authors engaged.

Karr explores at length the five writers' adaptation to modernism within a Canadian framework. He is concerned both with publishing, as in the rise of mass production and the magazine short story, and with the quickening pace of everyday life. Each of the authors took advantage, at least into late middle age, of changing times in their plot lines and characterizations. By doing so, they helped their readers to make sense of their circumstances and to accommodate to them. The authors did so at the cost of offending critics, who 'intensely disliked commercialized mass culture of any sort.' Karr is admiring, as we all should be...