Gerald Lynch (1953- ), University of Ottawa English professor, has authored numerous publications, including critiques and fiction, the latest of which is "Troutstream" (1995). Lynch, who has two degrees from the University of Waterloo and a Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario, has written articles about George Elliott, Alice Munro, D. C. Scott, short story cycles, Canadian comedy, and Stephen Leacock, and edited "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town: A Critical Edition" (1996, Borealis).

Sara Jeannette Duncan was a well-known journalist when, in 1888, she and fellow journalist Lily Lewis did something delightfully shocking. In a significant departure from the social norms of the day, these two young, unmarried women traveled around the world, with neither a male escort nor a chaperone, and filed a series of articles about their unorthodox adventures. Their high-profile articles were popular in the United States and Canada, so it was not surprising when a British women´s magazine called The Lady´s Pictorial invited Duncan to publish a fictional version in serial form. This text was the basis of her first novel, A Social Departure, the critical and commercial success of which led immediately to a change in Duncan´s professional status. Although she would continue to write critical essays and to work as a journalist occasionally, Duncan had suddenly become a best-selling novelist of international stature. It was the beginning of a long and productive career.

This new edition provides much context by clarifying literary, historical, and culturally-specific references, and it reprints a selection of the travel articles written by Duncan and Lewis. Exploring a range of innovative topics, it offers a selection of critical essays by Denise Heaps, Peggy Martin, Eli MacLaren, Caroline Lieffers and Aya Fujiwara, and Emily J. Bruusgaard.

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town began life in the "Montreal Star" in the first half of 1912 as a commissioned series of sketches about Canadian life, and is the only book Leacock wrote specifically for his Canadian readership. The Sketches holds in Canada a status comparable to Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in American culture. Even the titles suggest much about differences between the two nations. Twain's nineteenth century classic focuses on the alienated individual, the ingenuous outsider who tells his own story and serves as his author's mouthpiece for satirizing the community. Leacock's Sunshine Sketches speaks from inside the typical Canadian town of Mariposa, is coloured throughout by a more sophisticated humour, and ironically champions the values of the community. Huckleberry Finn ends with its hero lighting out for what becomes in American mythology the vanishing frontier; Sunshine Sketches ends with an aborted attempt to re-enter Mariposa. The last chapter of the Sketches powerfully suggests, however, that what is of value in Mariposa must be remembered and imaginatively retrieved if there is to be a full and integrated life in the present and hope for the future - of Canada and Canadians. The following writers contribute to this critical edition of Leacock's masterpiece, Alan Bowker, Douglas Bush, Silver Donald Cameron, Robertson Davies, James Doyle, Arthur Lower, Gerald Lynch, William H. Magee, Peter McArthur, Darrel A. Norris, Desmond Pacey, B.K. Sandwell, and R.E. Watters.