This second of three volumes in theHistory of the Book in Canada demonstrates the same research and editorial standards established with Volume One by book history specialists from across the nation.

Examining the complex and rapidly expanding world of print culture and reading in the nineteenth century, Linda E. Connors and Mary Lu MacDonald show how periodicals in the United Kingdom and British North America shaped and promoted ideals about national identity. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, periodicals instilled in readers an awareness of cultures, places and ways of living outside their own experience, while also proffering messages about what it meant to be British. The authors cast a wide net, showing the importance of periodicals for understanding political and economic life, faith and religion, the world of women and children, the idea of progress as a transcendent ideology, and the relationships between the parts (for example, Scotland or Nova Scotia) and the whole (Great Britain). Analyzing the British identity of expatriate nineteenth-century Britons in North America alongside their counterparts in Great Britain enables insights into whether residents were encouraged to identify themselves by country of residence, by country of birth, or by their newly acquired understanding of a broader whole. Enhanced by a succinct and informative catalogue of data, including editorship and price, about the periodicals analyzed, this study provides a striking history of the era and brings clarity to the perception of British transcendence and progress that emerged with such force and appeal after 1815.

The study of children's illustrated books is located within the broad histories of print culture, publishing, the book trade, and concepts of childhood. An interdisciplinary history, Picturing Canada provides a critical understanding of the changing geographical, historical, and cultural aspects of Canadian identity, as seen through the lens of children's publishing over two centuries. Gail Edwards and Judith Saltman illuminate the connection between children's publishing and Canadian nationalism, analyse the gendered history of children's librarianship, identify changes and continuities in narrative themes and artistic styles, and explore recent changes in the creation and consumption of children's illustrated books. Over 130 interviews with Canadian authors, illustrators, editors, librarians, booksellers, critics, and other contributors to Canadian children's book publishing, document the experiences of those who worked in the industry. An important and wholly original work, Picturing Canada is fundamental to our understanding of publishing history and the history of childhood itself in Canada.

Rosanna Mullins Leprohon’s The Manor House of De Villerai, A Tale of Canada Under the French Dominion is a literary milestone—it is the first Canadian historical novel, in English or French, to rewrite the conquest of the French Canadians from the perspective of history’s vanquished. Its revisionary account of the fall of New France is framed around a love triangle between the heroine, Blanche De Villerai, her childhood betrothed, Gustave de Montarville, and Blanche’s servant, Rose Lauzon. Popular in its original serial publication and once widely reprinted in French translation, but now out of print, The Manor House of De Villerai is a long-overlooked Canadian classic. In addition to the text originally serialized in the Family Herald magazine, this Broadview Edition includes extensive documents on the novel’s reception, Leprohon’s historical sources and literary precedents, and maps and art from the period.

Contemporary research in periodical literature has demonstrated conclusively that the nineteenth century in Britain was the age of the periodical. It also has shown that, in Victorian society, the circulation of periodicals and newspapers was both larger and more influential than that of books. The six essays in this volume investigate the extent to which this was equally true of Britain's colonies during the period up to 1900. In chapters devoted to periodical publishing in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Southern Africa, and the 'outposts' of the Empire (Ceylon, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore, Malta, and the West Indies), the contributors also consider the function and importance of periodicals in colonial life. They identify and describe all locally produced publications that appeared at weekly or longer intervals and that contained, for example, local news, poetry, fiction, criticism, commentary on the arts, news from home, shipping information and commodities reports. Each chapter presents an evaluation of the quantity and quality of guides available to periodical literature in each region, from basic bibliographies of periodicals, directories, and finding aids, to microfilm records and databases on the Internet. Periodicals of Queen Victoria's Empire is an initial step towards understanding and analyzing what its editors regard as the 'unseen power' of the periodical press in the British Empire of the nineteenth century.

Impressive in its scope and depth of scholarship, this first volume of the History of the Book in Canada is a landmark in the chronicle of writing, publishing, bookselling, and reading in Canada.