Candida Rifkind: Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, & the Left in 1930s Canada

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CANDIDA RIFKIND

Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, & the Left in 1930s Canada

Toronto, Buffalo, London; University of Toronto Press, 2009. viii + 268 pp.

Recipient of the Ann Saddlemyer scholarly book award at the 2010 conference of the CATR/ACRT, Candida Rifkind's Comrades and Critics expands the vital field of scholarship that is rewriting our knowledge and our analyses of left-wing Canadian modernism. In the 1930s, Canadian women writers and cultural workers including Dorothy Livesay, Ruby Ronan, Anne Marriott, Irene Baird, Toby Gordon Ryan, Mildred Goldberg, Elsie Park Gowan, Minnie Evans Bicknell, Mary Reynolds, and Jim (Jean) Watts made crucial contributions to English-Canadian communist and social democratic journalism, poetry, fiction, and theatre. Rifkind surveys this work in historical context and addresses its place in national cultural memory and its reception in English-Canadian literary history.

An introductory chapter on the "Socialist-Modernist Encounter" points to the "double duty of the …