(Re)inscriptions of Nineteenth- Century Popular Culture

These three books will dispel the common notion that cultural studies in Canada is necessarily the study of contemporary culture. All three focus on popular culture in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Canada, and the discourses of colonialism, gender, race and nationality in cultural formations traditionally excluded from the acad-emy. Together they illustrate the way a specifically Canadian Cultural Studies praxis can be brought to bear on the archive of Canadian literary history. Come, Bright Improvement is a pioneering study of the uses of reading in nineteenth-century Ontario, focusing on its reconfiguration from a private to a public activity in the forum of the literary society. Heather Murray has uncovered evidence of hundreds of such societies in municipal archives, small-town libraries and local newspapers, rang-ing from the politically engaged Toronto Mechanics ’ Institute of the 1830s, to mutual education societies in the Black communities of western Ontario in the 1850s, to women’s suffrage groups and Chatauqua Circles in the 1880s.Murray recounts how she was stimulated to look at early literary societies partly by the contemporary phenom-enon of the book club,but discovered that nineteenth-century literary societies were much more than social organisations devoted to discussion of the latest best-seller. Nineteenth-century readers considered “literary ” to be a kind of rough synonym for the liberal arts, encompassing the study of poetry, popular literature, history, T