This collection of essays focuses on the varied and complex roles that
editors have played in the production of literary and scholarly texts in
Canada. With contributions from a wide range of participants who have
played seminal roles as editors of Canadian literatures--from
nineteenth-century works to the contemporary avant-garde, from canonized
texts to anthologies of so-called minority writers and the oral
literatures of the First Nations--this collection is the first of its
kind. Contributors offer incisive analyses of the cultural and
publishing politics of editorial practices that question inherited
paradigms of literary and scholarly values. They examine specific cases
of editorial production as well as theoretical considerations of editing
that interrogate such key issues as authorial intentionality, textual
authority, historical contingencies of textual production, circumstances
of publication and reception, the pedagogical uses of edited
anthologies, the instrumentality of editorial projects in relation to
canon formation and minoritized literatures, and the role of editors as
interpreters, enablers, facilitators, and creators.
Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada situates editing in the
context of the growing number of collaborative projects in which
Canadian scholars are engaged, which brings into relief not only those
aspects of editorial work that entail collaborating, as it were, with
existing texts and documents but also collaboration as a scholarly
practice that perforce involves co-editing.
