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In post-war Quebec, the fascicle format experienced a meteoric rise in popularity. In order to draw all the heuristic potential from an analysis of this format, our article is based on a detailed study of the editorial peritext of some forty fascicles of sentimental novels published between 1945 and 1963 by the Éditions Police-Journal. On the one hand, these dime novels are comparable to "small books"--each issue generally contains a single story spanning 32 pages. The publisher's branding, ostensibly serves as a guarantee of its quality. On the other hand, these objects with their soft and colourful covers are in constant dialogue with the magazine, often emulating its fundamental mechanisms. Through a detailed analysis of these little-explored romance novels, we hope to inspire a reflection on the popular print formats of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first novel by Frances Burney, Evelina, Or, the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, published in 1778, has enjoyed long-standing popularity and has never gone out of print in English. A distinct cluster of its editions appeared at the end of the nineteenth- to the beginning of the twentieth-century. This period in book history was marked by the creative work of private-press book designers, printers, binders, and illustrators inspired by the aestheticism, arts and crafts, and art nouveau movements. Even though their pioneering work was destined for narrow circles of collectors and connoisseurs, it profoundly influenced the development of both industrial and artists' book design, heightening the awareness of books' aesthetic appeal. The fin de siècle was a time of nostalgia for idealized pre-industrial society, symptomatic of late Victorian and Edwardian escapism, which found its expression in lavish book ornaments and illustrations executed in the Directoire and Louis XVI styles. Late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Evelinas, illustrated and decorated by Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Hugh Thomson, produced by Dent, Newnes, and Macmillan, reflect a profound influence that innovative private presses had on general publishing practices and the quality of industrially produced books. These Evelinas, beautifully illustrated, bound in decorative covers, and well-printed, exemplify both the newly awakened interest in the book's physical makeup and aesthetic aspects and the late-Victorian and Edwardian escapist nostalgia characteristic of fin de siècle publishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 1944, when the influential Toronto critic William Arthur Deacon lamented the absence of a Canadian "equivalent of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'" because Canadians are "still pioneering, still afraid of ourselves intellectually and emotionally," little did he know that a significant candidate was on the horizon. Gwethalyn Graham's second novel, Earth and High Heaven, which appeared later that year, launched an analysis of anti-Semitism that was quickly embraced by cultural arbiters and the general public in both Canada and the United States. This article situates the production and reception history of Graham's book in relation to other novels by English Canadian women writers that advocated for social change, and offers cases studies of the three most widely disseminated works that used the power of fiction to marshal empathy: Marshall Saunders's Beautiful Joe (1894), Graham's Earth and High Heaven (1944) and Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many critics have studied the relationship that unfolds between black men and white women in the novel How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (1985) by Haitian-born Quebecois author Dany Laferrière. However, another type of relationship in Laferrière's work seems just as important, if not more important: the relationship between the aspiring writer and female readers as mediated by the book. This new angle allows for a rereading of the novel around a central axis--the idea of the literary Other, and the way it is articulated in the novel through the fictionalized book. This article first examines how, at the diegetic level, women own books, which makes them desirable to the narrator; in contrast, at the metadiegetic level, the terms of this equation are reversed, for it is now books, as mediators, which make objectified women attractive by being possessed by them. The relationship between the male reader (subject), the book (mediator), and the female reader (object) is then replaced by the relationship between the female reader (subject), the book (mediator), and the male reader (object), as the English-speaking white woman undertakes to judge the French-speaking Black (novelist) on the basis of books. In this context, the black male reader has no choice but to analyze the white female reader using her own book-based preconceptions. Indeed, whereas the white female reader judges the human subject based on his relationship to the book as an object, the black male reader uses the book to understand said human subject. It is therefore up to the aspiring black writer to help the white female reader rethink her relationship with books in general, and with literature in particular. This article shows that the narrator's objective (as a writer) is ultimately for his book to be read--in other words, to be possessed--by women, as he himself possesses women (as a womanizer). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how the seminal focus placed on portability as the defining characteristic of the book is erroneous and misguided. Based on Western concepts and early-modern bias that ultimately equates codex to book, the notion of portability is inapplicable to all book cultures and deserves re-examination. By redefining the meaning of the book to be an idea, an idea that can then be transposed textually and/or pictorially onto a substrate, scholars can come to understand how in ancient Egypt wall inscriptions and art were considered books, and how stone was a primary and fundamental book medium. Using Western, modern, and even global examples to explain how the book in its original state is a metaphysical entity, the notion of the book as object is in turn discarded because defining the book by its medium causes numerous restrictions - the object is not the book, merely its carrier. The importance of physical portability therefore becomes replaced in favour of metaphysical portability and its various implications. By using ancient Egyptian tomb walls as a case study, the meaning and boundaries placed on the book in book studies will be reframed and redefined by drawing Egyptian cultural practices, literature, ideologies, and the use of stone to establish examples of non-portable books. Any discussion of ancient book cultures primarily remains focused on papyrus or clay tablets (i.e., portable materials), a focus that skews the reality of ancient book cultures and gives rise to bias due to the neglect of other mediums that were far more important for ideological purposes. Egyptian book culture was, in fact, more than papyrus; a variety of materials were used as substrates, not all of which were portable in the conventional sense, but neither their use nor their significance to ancient Egyptian society should be dismissed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the uses of literature in The Labor Advocate: A Weekly Labor Reform Newspaper (Toronto, 1890-91). As editor of the Advocate, Thomas Phillips Thompson aimed to increase awareness of the means and consequences of industrial capitalism, and thus enhance the possibility of social justice for the working class. He did so in a mixed format periodical that included poetry, short fiction, and serialized novels as well as editorials, biographies, obituaries, reports, letters, and columns. Over forty-four issues, Thompson experimented with literary expression to attract readers and foster the democratic reform of social organization. Analysis of the Advocate points to the importance of communication strategies in both the early history of the Canadian labour press and the longer history of labour in transnational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]