The materials we turn to for the construction of our literary pasts - the texts, performances, and discussions selected for storage and cataloguing in archives - shape what we know and teach about literature today. The ways in which archival materials have been structured into forms of preservation, in turn, impact their transference and transformation into new forms of presentation and re-presentation. Exploring the production of culture through and outside of the archives that preserve and produce CanLit as an entity, CanLit Across Media asserts that CanLit arises from acts of archival, critical, and creative analysis. Each chapter investigates, challenges, and provokes this premise by examining methods of "unarchiving" Canadian and Indigenous literary texts and events from the 1950s to the present. Engaging with a remediated archive, or "unarchiving," allows the authors and editors to uncover how the materials that document past acts of literary production are transformed into new forms and experiences in the present. The chapters consider literature and literary events that occurred before live audiences or were broadcast, and that are now recorded in print publications and documents, drawings, photographs, flat disc records, magnetic tape, film, videotape, and digitized files. Showcasing the range of methods and theories researchers use to engage with these materials, CanLit Across Media reanimates archives of cultural meaning and literary performance. Contributors include Jordan Abel (University of Alberta), Andrea Beverley (Mount Allison University), Clint Burnham (Simon Fraser University), Jason Camlot (Concordia University), Joel Deshaye (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Deanna Fong (Simon Fraser University), Catherine Hobbs (Library and Archives Canada), Dean Irvine (Agile Humanities), Karl Jirgens (University of Windsor), Marcelle Kosman (University of Alberta), Jessi MacEachern (Concordia University), Katherine McLeod (Concordia University), Linda Morra (Bishop's University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia, Okanagan), Felicity Tayler (University of Ottawa), and Darren Wershler (Concordia University).

Jason Camlot is the author of three previous collections of poetry, The Debaucher (Insomniac Press, 2008), Attention All Typewriters (DC Books, 2005), and The Animal Library (DC Books, 2001). He co-edited the essay anthology Language Acts (Vehicule Press, 2007), about English-language poetry in Québec, and has done extensive research into sound recordings of 19th- and 20th-century poetry. Jason teaches Victorian literature, among other things, at Concordia University in Montreal. He edits the Punchy Poetry imprint for DC Books.

Jason Camlot's profile page

Katherine McLeod is an affiliated researcher with SpokenWeb at Concordia University.

Katherine McLeod's profile page

"Not short of speculation about possible remedies and alternative arrangements, this valuable collection is full of newly opened-up archival pathways to reimagine CanLit." Canadian Literature

"An intellectually rich and focused analysis of various closely interrelated examples of 'un-archiving,' a compelling and extremely useful concept that eschews all of the time-worn talk about the archive as vault and maps how we might actually move past it in an age that includes but is not exclusively devoted to printed books or digital media. There are no other books on this topic that are as smart, as useful, as rich in scholarship, or as abundant in new material." Jennifer Blair, University of Ottawa