Past Event

Professor Jody Mason

Department of English

*Literary Labour and the Politics of Reconstruction in Depression-Era Canada

October 21, 2009

Wednesday, 4:30-6:00 pm

ICSLAC Seminar Rm. 201 D, St. Patrick’s Bldg

In 1930s Canada, the cultural left mobilized dissent and articulated their cries for social revolution and parliamentary reform in the pages of cultural periodicals such as the radical Masses (1932–34), the social-democratic Canadian Forum (1920–2000), and the Popular Front magazine New Frontier (1935–36). Yet for a variety of reasons, few authors or activists published novels that directly engaged Depression conditions or offered critiques of the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to deal with the unemployed. The two novels that do risk such direct engagement––Claudius Gregory’s Forgotten Men (1933) and Irene Baird’s strike novel Waste Heritage (1939)––are therefore crucially important texts for the theorization of the relations among the state, publishers, literary authors, and leftist or reform politics during the turbulent 1930s. Waste Heritage thematizes the author’s anxieties about libel charges, and the novel’s critique of war as the state’s solution to the problem of joblessness was subject to state censorship on the eve of the Second World War. The story of its publishing history thus suggests that Canadian novelists of social protest wrote under conditions of considerable constraint during the Depression. Forgotten Men appears to offer a contrary example––a novel that was written with the enthusiastic political and moral support of its publisher and, indeed, a novel that thematizes the crucial nexus of publisher, author, and print technology in order to mediate the central question of access to print. Yet the story of its production and the history of its intersections with the Conservative politics of reform and reconstruction that emerged in the latter half of the 1930s suggest that while Forgotten Men may be a novel of social protest, it is also the complicated product of the kind of coercion that can exist between an employer––Thomas Lisson, whose company printed the novel––and an employee––Claudius Gregory, who was that company’s sales manager. This paper thus expands the history of Depression-era literary production in Canada, arguing that the few novels of social protest that do exist must be read from a thoroughly materialist perspective in order to appreciate the varieties of constraint that operated within the field of cultural production.

*Please note that papers are pre-circulated, and discussed in the workshop. To obtain a copy contact Franny Nudelman at franny_nudelman@carleton.ca