The period between 1916 and 1956 was a unique interval in the history of Canadian publishing. During this period not only were a significant number of non-commercial literary, arts, and cultural magazines established, but it also happened that an unprecedented number of those involved in the creation and subsequent editing of this new type of magazine - the little magazine - were women. Based on extensive new archival and literary historical research, Editing Modernity examines these Canadian women writers and editors and their role in the production and dissemination of modernist and leftist little magazines.

At once a history of literary women and of the emergent formations and conditions of cultural modernity in Canada, Irvine's study relates women's editorial work and poetry to a series of crises and transitions in modernist and leftist magazine communities, to the public hearings and published findings of the Massey Commission of 1949-51, and to the later development of feminist literary magazines and editorial collectives during the 1970s and 1980s. Writers and editors examined in this study include Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Floris McLaren, P.K. Page, Miriam Waddington, Flora Macdonald Denison, Florence Custance, Catherine Harmon, Aileen Collins, and Margaret Fairley.

Dean Irvine is an associate professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University and director of the SSHRC-funded Editing Modernism in Canada project. He is the author of Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916-1956 (University of Toronto Press, 2008), and editor of Archive For Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay (Arsenal Pulp, 1998), Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924-61 (Vehicule, 2003), and The Canadian Modernists Meet (University of Ottawa Press, 2005). His forthcoming work includes a new monograph, Variant Readings: Editing Canadian Literature in English, under contract to McGill-Queen's University Press, and a two-volume critical edition, co-edited with Robert G. May, of F.R. Scott's complete poems and translations. He is a general editor, with Zailig Pollock and Sandra Djwa, of the multivolume print edition and digital archive of the collected works of P.K. Page and the director and English-language general editor of the University of Ottawa Press's Canadian Literature Collection/Collection de littérature canadienne.

Dean Irvine's profile page

'In Editing Modernity, Dean Irvine explores the role of little magazines in Canadian modernism and the scandalous neglect of the contributions made by women as founders and editors of these magazines. He combines a keen sensitivity to the individual achievements of Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, Miriam Waddington, Anne Marriot, and many of their lesser known contemporaries, with a scholarly and theoretically informed account of the material and social conditions which shaped these achievements. The story he tells is a complex and fascinating one of competing social and political agendas that shaped, not only the evolution of modernism in Canada, but also the stories we tell about it. After Editing Modernity, these stories will never be the same.'