Hailed as a landmark in Canadian literary scholarship when it was originally published in 1965, the Literary History of Canada is now being reissued, revised and enlarged, in three volumes. This major effort of a large group of scholars working in the field of English-language Canadian literature provides a comprehensive, up-to-date reference work. It has already proven itself invaluable as a source of information on authors, genres, and literary trends and influences. It represents a positive attempt to give a history of Canada in terms of writings which deserve attention because of significant thought, form, and use of language. Volume I comprises Parts I to III of the original edition, and covers the years from the beginning of Canadian literature in English to about 1920. The contributors to this volume are David Galloway, Victor G. Hopwood, Alfred G. Bailey, Fred Cogswell, James and Ruth Talman, Carl F. Klinck, Edith Gordon Roper, Rupert Schieder, S. Ross Beharriell, Brandon Conron, Elizabeth Waterston, Alec Lucas, John A. Irving, A.H. Johnson, A. Vibert Douglas, and Frank W. Watt.

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.

On 7 October 1825, a massive forest fire swept through northeastern New Brunswick, devastating entire communities. When the smoke cleared, it was estimated that the fire had burned across six thousand square miles, one-fifth of the colony. The Miramichi Fire was the largest wildfire ever to occur within the British Empire, one of the largest in North American history, and the largest along the eastern seaboard. Yet despite the international attention and relief efforts it generated, and the ruin it left behind, the fire all but disappeared from public memory by the twentieth century. A masterwork in historical imagination, The Miramichi Fire vividly reconstructs nineteenth-century Canada's greatest natural disaster, meditating on how it was lost to history. First and foremost an environmental history, the book examines the fire in the context of the changing relationships between humans and nature in colonial British North America and New England, while also exploring social memory and the question of how history becomes established, warped, and forgotten. Alan MacEachern explains how the imprecise and conflicting early reports of the fire's range, along with the quick rebound of the forests and economy of New Brunswick, led commentators to believe by the early 1900s that the fire's destruction had been greatly exaggerated. As an exercise in digital history, this book takes advantage of the proliferation of online tools and sources in the twenty-first century to posit an entirely new reading of the past. Resurrecting one of Canada's most famous and yet unexamined natural disasters, The Miramichi Fire traverses a wide range of historical and scientific literatures to bring a more complete story into the light.

Physician, surgeon, natural historian, educator, Protestant evangelical. Andrew Fernando Holmes's name is synonymous with the McGill medical faculty and with the discovery of a congenital heart malformation known as the "Holmes heart." He also played a critical role in the creation of a scientific culture in early-nineteenth-century Montreal. Born in captivity at Cadiz, Spain, Holmes immigrated to Lower Canada in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He arrived in a province that was experiencing profound social, economic, and cultural change as the result of a long process of integration into the British Atlantic world. A transatlantic perspective, therefore, undergirds this biography, from an exploration of how Holmes's family members were participants in an Atlantic world of trade and consumption, to explaining how his educational experiences at Edinburgh and Paris informed his approach to the practice of medicine, medical education, and medical politics. This fascinating biography also examines Holmes's deepest religious convictions, positioning them at the centre of his work and life.