A QUARTERLY OF

• Main Authors: Phyllis Grosskurth, John Ower, Max Dorsinville, Susan Jackelj, Margaret Morriss, Henrikas Nagys, Walter Bauer, Y. Y. Segal, Zofja Bohdanowicz, Robert Zend, Arved Vdrlaid, Ingride Viksna, Luigi Romeo, Padraig О Broin, George Bowering, An Absence, Of Utopias
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.467.8290; http://cinema2.arts.ubc.ca/units/canlit/pdfs/articles/canlit42-Full_Issue.pdf

LIITERATURES are defined as much by their lacks as by their abundances, and it is obviously significant that in the whole of Canadian writing there has appeared only one Utopian novel of any real interest; it is significant in terms of our society as much as of our literature. The book in question is A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. It was written in the 1870's and published in 1888, eight years after the death of its author, James de Mille, a professor of English at Dalhousie, who combined teach-ing with the compulsive production of popular novels; by the time of his death at the age of 46 he had already thirty volumes to his credit, but only A Strange Manuscript has any lasting interest. It has been revived as one of the reprints in the New Canadian Library (McClelland & Stewart, $2.75), with an introduction by R. E. Watters. One cannot go quite as far as Dr. Waiters in his arguments for the great originality of A Strange Manuscript. As even he admits, the conception of the work, with its presentation of an imaginary society — that of the Kosekins at the South Pole — whose values are the opposite of those we sustain, owes an