Canada and the Spanish Civil War: An Anthology

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) inspired an outpouring of responses among Canadian cultural producers. Yet, the war and its influence on Canada literature have received little attention in histories of Canadian cultural production. This anthology attempts to remedy this gap and inspire future research into Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. The anthology brings together a selection of diverse literary materials—fiction, poetry, drama, reportage, journalism, pamphlets, memoirs, and other life writing—representing just a fraction of the Canadian cultural production inspired by the Spanish conflict. Many of these texts have never been published before, having been largely dispersed in archives across the world.This selected anthology joins Ted Allan’s This Time a Better Earth, Hugh Garner’s Best Stories, and Charles Yale Harrison’s Meet Me on the Barricades in the Spanish Civil War subseries of the University of Ottawa Press’s Canadian Literature Collection. Together, these edited texts are now re-circulating under a common banner to establish what we consider to be the first stage in the recovery of anglophone Canadian literature about the Spanish Civil War. To further situate the literary texts included here, we include a scholarly introduction, and a full apparatus of author biographies, textual notes, and explanatory notes. The introduction provides an historical-cultural overview of the 1930s to contextualize Canadian involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the cultural production the war generated. After establishing a historical and cultural context, we explain the rationale we’ve applied to the selection of texts for inclusion. The notes explain specific historical-cultural terms and trace the publication histories and editorial evolutions of each text.