Profiles in Canadian Literature 4

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Profiles in Canadian Literature, 3 and 4, continues a handsome series of monographs designed to introduce various literary figures of Canada’s past and present. In the current two sturdily bound volumes, 30 authors and poets are presented, each with a lengthy “exploratory essay,” followed by a chronology, comment by and on each author, and a selected bibliography of primary and secondary materials. Among those included are Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie, Louis Hémon, E. J. Pratt, Raymond Souster, Timothy Findlay, Austin Clarke, and Miriam Waddington, to name but a few.

These brief introductions should pique the interest of secondary and post-secondary students of Canadian writing, providing them rather with signposts to areas worth exploration than with roadmaps of travelled territory. The four volumes in the series available to date belong in all libraries with a serious commitment to Canadiana.