Abstract
The article critiques major debates in Canadian modernist criticism and assesses their impact on readerships in the present time of anti-elitism, resurgent nationalisms, and widening distrust of expertise. Feminist critics articulate women writers' conflictual relations to the modernist canon and have restored or introduced disregarded female poets to an academic readership. Commentators on ‘antimodernism’ defend traditional writers of the period against modernist ridicule and suggest an antimodernist nostalgia for indigenous national authenticity within modernist writing itself. Leftist critics emphasize the political radicalism of major Canadian modernist writers as well as promoting and editing little-known authors who share their politics. Theorists critique the editorial practices of the field and promote genetic editing and digital publishing. Three less prominent trends are likelier to provoke and keep new readers for Canadian modernism: philosophically and ethically driven criticism; renewed attentiveness to cosmopolitanism in Canadian modernist discourse; and candid engagement with the problem of Canadian modernism's derivation from modernisms elsewhere.
Published Version
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