Recapturing Past Glory

W riting in the Time of Nationalism: From Two Solitudes to Blue Metropolis provides an important personalized historical account of the politics and institutions that have informed the production and dissemination of Montreal English-language fiction from the mid 1960s to the present. Linda Leith’s teleological history begins even earlier, though, with a brief account of the “glory days” or “golden age” of English Quebec fiction in the 1950s—when Hugh MacLennan, Mordecai Richler and Mavis Gallant emerged as internationally recognized authors. The story then moves into its telling of “the decline from the glorious past to the inglorious present” during the decades of the Quiet Revolution (1960s), the rise of the Parti Québécois (1970s) and subsequent referendums on sovereignty (1980 and 1995). It goes on to describe the energetic and entrepreneurial activities of Anglo-Quebec writers like herself to develop an institutional infrastructure that has enabled, in Leith’s...