Dean Irvine

I wrote a review of this book for Canadian Literature: "It’s inevitable. Some readers of Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada will hurriedly draw blue pencils to dispute the anonymity and invisibility of editors in Canadian literature. Ellen Seligman, Rudy Wiebe, Robert Kroetsch, or Douglas Gibson, Jack McClelland, and others could be set in a list that blurs literary talents with editorial and commercial acumen. Yet the point remains: the deliberately obfuscated and belated archival recovery of editorial interventions makes editorial work more a scholarly than a critical concern. It is outside of the mainstream appreciation of culture, Canadian culture. If we comfortably ask “where is here” and acknowledge conflicted histories and territories of what we loosely call Canadian culture as a site of contestation rather than stability, then the invisible operations of power, persuasion, and painful excision or censorship are indeed doubly occluded. For this, Dean Irvine and Smaro Kamboureli have assembled an indispensible volume to theorize editing in the unique historical conditions of Canada as well as to historicize the editing of Canadian literature." http://canlit.ca/article/canadian-editing-american-pressures/… (mehr)