Dennis Duffy

Things can get complex when you are considering the relationship between life and art within the pages of a novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby is actually a self-made man who has refined himself from the lowly Jimmy Gatz into the figure whose distinguished family hailed from San Francisco. At one point in his career, Gatz/Gatsby appeared in a photo with the Earl of…

When you look through a peephole into the past, you hope for a clear view, but more often than not what you get is a kaleidoscopic vision. Little pieces, multifaceted and multicolored, that fit together to make a knowable pattern…—Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln We can find one such small kaleidoscopic bead when we consider the career of Alicia…

It is 1882, and Egerton Ryerson, who shaped Ontario’s system of public education as no other individual before or since, speaks to a patriotic gathering at the Bay of Quinte. They have assembled to commemorate the centennial of the arrival of exiled United Empire Loyalists there. His lengthy address winds its way to the subject of…

How do you review a reference work? Not by arguing with the information, unless you find a typo or a sheer misstatement. Rather, you review a reference work best by letting readers know who the book is meant for and what it offers in the way of enlightenment. So what does this Cambridge History of Canadian …

Gertrude Stein’s definitive skewering of Ezra Pound—“He was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not”—applies to an earlier American epic poet as well. The Walt Whitman of this novel (Pound would claim imaginative kinship with him in 1916) was trafficking in the same line of goods—the egotistical sublime—a few decades…

You’d never mistake him for Indiana Jones. Still, how Charles Trick Currelly, a small-town boy from Ontario, drifted into the booming field of archaeology at the turn of the 20th century, gained the attention of a group of wealthy Torontonians intent on putting their city on the world cultural map, and ended up at the centre of a…

Monuments conclude tacit narratives. They provide a happy ending and a sense of purpose to a process frequently marked by neither. There is no such thing as a private monument, a fact that the funeral industry understands better than does its clientele. We may assume that how we remember our dead is a matter purely between us and…

Any recognition of distinguished disservice to Canadian literature must highlight American publisher Lewis Coues Page (1869–1956). Only a tenured professor or two of my acquaintance has exhibited greater staying power when it comes to punishing Canadian writers, and Page wielded his cudgel while his victims were alive. From the historical novelist William Kirby (The Golden Dog) to Canada’s best-loved juvenile writer Lucy Maud Montgomery…