When Frederick Philip Grove´s novel Settlers of the Marsh was published in 1925, it produced controversy and scandal. Grove´s frank treatment of sexuality and his unflinching look at the rigours of settler life provide searing insights into the dynamics of an imagined settler community. The story of the Swedish immigrant Niels Lindstedt and the two very different women who vie for his affections not only enthralls readers with its violence and drama, but also illuminates contemporary social attitudes and mores. The novel, steeped in a European tradition and sensibility, moves beyond a prairie setting to address cosmopolitan aesthetic issues as well as regional ones. Niels´s attempts to come to terms with his new land and community, and the painful toll that these attempts take on him, open a window into settler immigrant experiences. More recently, readers have turned to the characterizations of Clara, the "gay widow," and Ellen, the hardworking, asexual farm woman, to understand the social and political forces at work on women´s lives. The discovery in the 1970s that Grove´s autobiography, the Governor General´s Award-winning In Search of Myself, was largely fictional and, more recently, the discovery that his early life included a secret marriage to an unconventional woman, led readers to reconsider Grove´s treatment of marriage in this novel. As this edition shows, readers continue to discover new and fascinating aspects of Settlers.

This critical edition of Grove´s novel provides representative reviews from the time of its publication, a literary biography detailing the complicated life of its author, and a range of critical commentary from the following: Desmond Pacey, Laurie Ricou, Lorraine McMullen, Dick Harrison, Camille La Bossière, Robert Kroetsch, David Williams, Irene Gammel, Smaro Kamboureli, Klaus Martens, and Paul Morris. Also included are two essays written especially for this edition by Christian Riegel and Alison Calder.

Alison Calder is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Manitoba, where she teaches Canadian literature and creative writing. She has published numerous articles on prairie literature and culture, and is the editor of Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn and the co-editor of History, Literature, and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies. She is the 2004 winner of the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Prize for poetry, and her upcoming poetry book is Wolf Tree.

The beauty of Frances Brooke´s The History of Emily Montague is that it can be read both as a novel of sensibility with a sentimental love story and as a highly politicized depiction of life in eighteenth-century Quebec. It has much to say about confrontations between the Old World and the New, Huron and Iroquois cultures, and progressive gender roles. First published in 1769 and often considered the "first" Canadian novel, it has an enchanting cast of characters: the modest heroine, the dashing colonial hero, the witty coquette, the waggish soldier, the unrequited lover, and the wise father. Recently, The History of Emily Montague has been received as a feminist text with Brooke participating in a critique of rituals of courtship, "petticoat politics," and fashionable "propriety." It has been newly appreciated for its use of the epistolary form representing multiple narrative voices and it has been read as a precursor to the regionalist novels of Canada. Any way you read it, though, the novel is still able to instruct and delight.

This critical edition of Brooke´s novel provides a new bibliography, excerpts from Brooke´s other works, a full biography of Brooke, and a selection of critical commentary spanning early responses to the novel to contemporary readings from the following: Barbara Benedict, Ida Burwash, Charles Blue, Carl Klinck, Frederick Philip Grove, Dermot McCarthy, Juliet McMaster, Lorraine McMullen, Robert Merrett, Ann Messenger, W.H. New, Desmond Pacey, E. Phillips Poole, Katherine M. Rogers, and Jane Spencer. Also included are four essays written especially for this edition by Cecily Devereux, Faye Hammill, Laura Moss, and Pam Perkins.

Laura Moss teaches Canadian literature, World Literature Written in English, and postcolonial theory at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of articles on authors ranging from Chinua Achebe to Zoe Wicomb and is on the editorial board of Ariel: A Review of International English Literature.

John Richardson´s wondrously extravagant frontier romance, Wacousta, was first published in 1832. Since then it has been applauded, ignored, restored again to critical favour and celebrated as a national treasure. Yet it is a novel to be appreciated rather than revered. Too much solemnity might obscure the exuberant recklessness of the text, the blood-chilling bravado of the author´s achievement. The genius of Wacousta is that it invites all manner of critical speculation yet refuses to submit to any one construct or approach. Wacousta is not a meditation. It is a gothic tale of dishonour, revenge and enduring passion, of horror, terror and moral perversity, of weird sexuality and bizarre violence. For all of that, it is a profoundly Canadian novel, written by a man who, with only slight exaggeration, describes himself as our first native-born novelist, published years before Canada became a nation. In this volume, comprehensive biographical and bibliographical information is provided; and the pleasures of an authoritative text are reflected in the insights, enthusiasms and illuminating explications in a wide range of critical commentary by the following: Carl Ballstadt, David R. Beasley, A.C. Casselman, Douglas Daymond, Dennis Duffy, Carole Gerson, Michael Hurley, Manina Jones, Carl Klinck, Robert Lecker, Gaile McGregor, Leslie Monkman, John Moss, Margot Northerly, James Reaney, and William Riddell.

John Moss is the author of Enduring Dreams, Invisible among the Ruins, The Paradox of Meaning, and other books. He is a Professor of English at the University of Ottawa.

Susanna Moodie´s Roughing It in the Bush has inspired controversy since its first publication in 1852. Readers tend to react strongly to the book and its author, and critics continue to debate its merits and idiosyncrasies with respect to form, genre, them and motifs, as well as characterization - with special emphasis on Moodie´s depiction of herself. Although ostensibly a book about one middle-class English woman´s experiences in pioneer Upper Canada during the 1830´s, Roughing It has been variously labelled history, fiction, autobiography, travel literature. What cannot be debated, however, is that this is Susanna Moodie´s one great work; her novels are cliché-ridden, romantic fiction, and the only other Canadian non-fiction, Life in the Clearings, set as it is at a later stage of settlement, lacks the emotional intensity generated by the account of an emigrant´s first exposure to Canada and documented so graphically in Roughing It in the Bush.

This new edition of Roughing It in the Bush provides a reliable primary text, a new biography, documents that help contextualize various aspects of the book, and a selection of critical commentary from the following: Margaret Atwood, Charles Frederick Briggs, Carl Ballstadt, D.M.R. Bentley, Marian Fowler, Blanche Hume, Carl Klinck, Thomas Guthrie Marquis, Michael Peterman, Carol Shields, David Stouck.

Elizabeth Thompson is the author of The Pioneer Woman: A Canadian Character Type as well as articles on early Canadian literature. She lives and writes in Clinton, Ontario.

Around 1880, the writers in this anthology began to write poetry of a calibre not seen before in Canada. Both Isabella Valancy Crawford and William Wilfred Campbell soon emerged as distinctive voices, but Charles G. D. Roberts played the vital role. His early poetry showed the possibilities of a Canadian Romanticism to Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. By the end of the century, Campbell had launched an attack on Carman that disrupted the earlier harmony of the group, and the deaths of Crawford in 1887 and Lampman in 1899 marked the end of an era. The four surviving poets would remain active for some time, but the last two decades of the nineteenth century were the great years for the Confederation poets. A Northern Romanticism includes such familiar lyrics as Roberts´ "The Tantramar Revisited," Lampman´s "Among the Timothy," and Scott´s "The Height of Land," and lesser-known works such as Crawford´s "Gisli: the Chieftain," Roberts´ New York Nocturnes (1998), and Carman´s Sappho lyrics (1905).

This anthology features introductions to each poet, bibliographies, and explanatory notes as well as essays from Charles G. D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, E. K. Brown, R. E. Rashley, Malcolm Ross, Germaine Warkentin, D.M.R. Bentley, Stan Dragland, and Susan Glickman.

Tracy Ware is the editor of Levi Adams´ Jean Baptiste (Canadian Poetry Press) and the author of articles on Shelley, Wordsworth, Poe, Naipaul, Keneally, and various aspects of Canadian literature. He teaches English at Queen´s University.

Duncan´s novel The Imperialist is about an adolescent nation seeking to define its own identity, "We are at the making of a nation": the narrator tells us at one point. Lorne Murchison, the imperialist of the title, thinks Canada is at a crucial moment in her political destiny, and seeks ardently to convert others to his vision of Canada as a leading force in an imperial partnership. In the small Ontario city of Elgin, obsessed with politics at all times, tensions mount as a hard-fought by-election takes place. As Lorne says in his fiery concluding speech, "The question that underlies this decision for Canada is that of the whole stamp and character of her future existence."

When asked by the Globe and Mail "What book would you recommend to a foreigner who wants to understand Canada," Carol Shields picked The Imperialist: "It deals with how Canadians think in the moderate sense of being Canadian. What it means to be liberal, for example. Having been written during the early part of the century, you wouldn´t have thought The Imperialist would have been so prophetic. Her book is charming as well as intelligent."

This edition includes extensive explanatory notes and the complete texts of Duncan´s letters about The Imperialist. Reprints essays or extracts from published books by: Peter Allen, Carl Berger, Carole Gerson, Ajay Heble, Michael Peterman, Clara Thomas, and Francis Zichy; as well as essays written specifically for it by: Terrence L. Craig, Frank Davey, Teresa Hubel, Elisabeth Köster, and Thomas E. Tausky.

Thomas E. Tausky is the author of Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of Empire (1980) and also of Sara Jeannette Duncan (1988) in the Canadian Writers and Their Works series (ECW Press). He has edited both Sara Jeannette Duncan: Selected Journalism and Duncan´s The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib for Tecumseh Press. He teaches Canadian and post-colonial literature at the University of Western Ontario.

Charles G. D. Roberts´ animal stories have been only sporadically in print over the past while, and this edition of his stories is an attempt to recover what its editor sees as twenty of his finest works. Along with Ernest Thompson Seton, Roberts was the co-founder of the modern ´realistic´ animal story, a version of the animal story which was supposed to take the reader closer to the felt weight and texture of the animals themselves, and make us feel involved in their daily lives close-up. It was a controversial genre in Roberts´ time (see the Documentary and Reviews section of the edition), and has remained a controversial one on into the present (see Criticism section for more recent takes on the genre). These are entertaining but they are also philosophical stories, as they involve their readers in consideration of what it means to live as an animal in a somewhat bewildering place, on a fierce and beautiful planet.

Misao Dean, Joseph Gold, W. J. Keith, T. D. MacLulich, and Terry Whalen have contributed to the Criticism section. There is a short biography provided by Terry Whalen, a series of anonymous reviews in the Reviews section, and a number of commentaries on animals and the animal story by Charles G. D. Roberts in the Documentary section. There is an extensive bibliography at the end of the section.

Terry Whalen is the author of Bliss Carman and His Works, Charles G. D. Roberts and His Works, and Philip Larkin and English Poetry. He is a past editor of Atlantic Provinces Book Review, and editor of The Atlantic Anthology: Criticism. He is a Professor of English at Saint Mary´s University, and an Adjunct Graduate Professor of English at Dalhousie University.

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.

Gerald Lynch is the author of Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity (1988) and three books of fiction, the most recent of which is the novel Troutstream (1995). He teaches English at the University of Ottawa.

This collection of short stories written in Canada before the end of WWI navigates between the extremes of commercial fiction and "serious literature," and between the canonically sanctioned and the marginalized, in order to be at once historically representative, inclusive, and open to a variety of critical approaches. It includes works by well-known authors such as Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Stephen Leacock, as well as lesser-known writers (such as the Chinese-Canadian Edith Eaton) and many such as Gilbert Parker and E. W. Thomson who have become less popular in the last thirty years. It places a variety of popular forms, including the detective story and the wilderness adventure, alongside serious stories of psychological realism, spiritual renewal, and political advocacy.

These stories are just plain great reading, especially for those interested in Canada and our history as Canadians. They offer a chance to laugh with Pauline Johnson at the stereotype of the "Indian Princess," to experience "camping out" in Muskoka in 1886, and to lament, with J. MacDonald Oxley, the US domination of the Canadian literary market. They also offer students the opportunity to discuss some of the most interesting issues in current literary studies: the ways that genre encodes cultural assumptions; the construction of gender in early Canada; the ways that Canadians have understood themselves as members of a national community, and the ways this community has constructed its racialized "other." They invite readers to rethink what Canada is, and imagine what it might be in the future.

This critical edition includes contributions from these Canadian writers: Frank Davey, W. H. New, James Doyle, Mary Louise Pratt, Stephen Scobie, and Daniel Francis.

Misao Dean is the author of Practising Femininity: Domestic Realism and the Performance of Gender in Early Canadian Fiction (1998) and A Different Point of View: Sara Jeannette Duncan (1991). She teaches English at the University of Victoria.

"CHEER UP, EVERYBODY." With these words and the following note Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich was introduced by its publisher to readers of the November 18, 1914 issue of The New York Times Book Review:

Stephen Leacock is a humorist who puts big ideas into satire and fun. These delicious adventures take us into the realm of financiers, American clubmen and clubwomen, and the magnificent homes of the wealthy, and literally bubble over with wit and farcical satire.

A week later (and perhaps at Leacock´s request) the last phrase of this advertisement was changed to "good-natured fun," and a week later again, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich was included among the Review´s "Two Hundred Leading Books of the Season," where it was "classed with" Leacock´s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, and credited with "great clearness . . . the utmost good nature" and an "apparently . . . spontaneous" manner of bringing out "the humor of personalities and incidents . . . ." None of these qualities has diminished in their appeal or effectiveness and none of the targets of Leacock´s "farcical satire" and "good-natured fun" has either disappeared or become less needful of critique: Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich is as funny and pertinent today as it was in 1914. So long as there is a "realm of financiers," Leacock´s humour will remain a "delicious" reminder of what is truly valuable in life.

A rediscovered classic, J.G. Sime´s Sister Woman, originally published in 1919, is a pioneering book of short stories, focused on the social and sexual changes in women's lives underway in the early twentieth century. Set in the Montreal of World War I, the twenty-eight stories deal with the lives of middle and lower-class women with a frankness that startled Sime's contemporaries.

Sime´s characters—seamstresses, munitions workers, secretaries, cooks, charwomen and prostitutes — struggle with issues of sexuality, maternity and work, amid the immigration, urbanization and industrialization underway in the Canada of the day. Georgina Sime, herself an immigrant to Canada, used her short story cycle — interrelated stories about the "Woman's and the Man's Question" — to examine issues of gender, class, ethnicity and place and their impact on the lives of the women of her day. As a result, Sister Woman is a work of short fiction significant not only to Canadian literature, but to Canadian history and women's studies.

The following writers contributed to this critical edition of Sister Woman: Sandra Campbell, Misao Dean, Peter Donovan, Gerald Lynch, Ann Martin, Lindsey McMaster, and K. Jane Watt. Sandra Campbell, co-editor of Pioneering Women, Aspiring Women and New Women, three anthologies of short fiction by Canadian women to 1920, is currently completing a biography of Lorne Pierce, editor of Ryerson Press, 1920-1960. She teaches in the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women´s Studies, Carleton University. She is General Editor of Tecumseh´s Early Canadian Women Writers Series.

Swamp Angel was first published in 1954 and eventually became a Canadian classic. The novel and its heroine, Maggie Lloyd, played a part in inspiring such other classics as Margaret Laurence´s The Stone Angel and Carol Shields´ The Stone Diaries. Ethel Wilson´s lucidly spare and elegant prose tells a wonderfully crafted tale of jealousy, loyalty, and deliverance, at once regional and universal, realistic and philosophical. The story engages with themes of family, marriage, love, nature, religion, race, compassion, independence, and, above all, human understanding. Wilson´s masterful descriptions of the green world of the British Columbia interior continue to contribute much to the reader´s pleasure. As George Woodcock observed, "No other writer has more successfully evoked British Columbia as a place or its inhabitants as a strange and unique people than Ethel Wilson."

At the time of its original publication, there were two rival editions of Swamp Angel, by Macmillan of Canada, and Harper & Brothers of New York, respectively. These editions differ from each other. This Canadian Critical Edition is based on the sole surviving manuscript, collating it with the authorial readings, from those two earlier editions. The accompanying essays provide background information and offer critical insights.

The following writers contribute to this edition of Swamp Angel: Anjali Bhelande, Burke Cullen, Li-Ping Geng, Janet Giltrow, John Gray, W. J. Keith, and David Stouck.

Li-Ping Geng is the editor of James Austen´s The Loiterer (2000) and The Novels of Henry Mackenzie (2005). He has taught English at universities in China and Canada, and is the Dean of the School of Foreign Languages at Yan Tai University.