The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to Canada

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English (Canadian Literature) at
Laurentian University.

The more than 500 entries in this reference work are titled by the names of cities, towns, villages, hamlets, rivers, and islands. The places are grouped according to province or territory, from Newfoundland to the Yukon, and arranged alphabetically within the provincial groups. The index lists the authors alphabetically and gives the titles of the entries which mention them as well as relevant page numbers. As a reference tool, The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to Canada occupies a position between The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, with its emphasis on the literary careers of writers, and Hurtig’s Canadian Encyclopedia, with its biographical emphasis.

In contrast to Klinck’s Literary History of Canada, the Illustrated Literary Guide places Canadian literature not in literary-historical or critical contexts, but in geographical contexts. A typical entry focuses on a place, and might furnish the date and address of a writer’s birth, residence, or death there; the work the writer produced while living in the place; works set there or otherwise dealing with the place; journals and other publishing activities there; and local memorials and archives. Illustrating the text are many black-and-white photographs of residences, tombstones, plaques, and writers — “of long-deceased authors in unfamiliar portraits and of modern authors not always as they appear today, but more often as we think of them,” in the Moritzes’ words. Occasionally short excerpts from important literary works appear with the relevant entries. Surprisingly for a reference which relies so heavily on geographic orientation, the Illustrated Literary Guide has no maps.

The essays which deal with large cities are organized chronologically, but also by districts. In these entries the sense that Halifax, Fredericton, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, and Vancouver are magnetic centres of literary activity becomes palpable. The Moritzes claim in the preface that through their “treatment a richly layered — though necessarily brief — history appears, along with many curiosities and coincidences.” The book is particularly a source of curiosities and of fascinating details. As a guide, it not only leads the reader to wonder about the relationships among different writers, and about the interactions among the individual writers, their works, and their places, but also, the Illustrated Literary Guide gives directions to explore these areas more fully.