‘The Voice of the People’ presents a series of essays on literary aspects of the European folk revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and focuses on two key practices of antiquarianism: the role that collecting and editing played in the formation of ethnological study in the European academy; and the business of publishing and editing, which produced many ‘folkloric’ texts of dubious authenticity. The volume also presents new readings of various genres, including the epic, song, tale and novel, and contributes to the study of several crucial European literary figures. Above all, it investigates the great anonymous authors of the European folk tradition – in narrative and lyric art – and their relation to the cultural movements and imagined identities of the peoples of the emerging nineteenth-century European nation.
Written by professional historians, this book traces the growth of human settlement in Newfoundland and Labrador from Aboriginal pioneers to the current era. It also addresses common misconceptions about elements of Newfoundland and Labradors history.
The true story, drawn from official documents and hours of personal interviews, of how Newfoundland and Labrador joined Confederation and became Canada's tenth province in 1949. A rich cast of characters--hailing from Britain, America, Canada and Newfoundland--battle it out for the prize of the resource-rich, financially solvent, militarily strategic island. The twists and turns are as dramatic as any spy novel and extremely surprising, since the "official" version of Newfoundland history has held for over fifty years almost without question. Don't Tell the Newfoundlanders will change all that.
In Imagined Nations David Williams explores works by authors such as Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje, and Timothy Findley, examining the ways in which these writers show how our sense of time and space and our sense of personal and national identities have been altered by changes in modes of communication. He discusses how they have dramatized a series of shifts from the oral clan to the nation of the book (Alistair MacLeod), from print-nationalism to radio-confederacy (Wayne Johnston), and from print-stasis to an electronic space of flows (Michael Ondaatje). Some writers have resisted the threat of filmic images to print-formed communities (Timothy Findley, Guy Vanderhaeghe), while others have sought release from the prison of print (Hubert Aquin), or attempted to infiltrate cyberspace in the border war against globalization (William Gibson). Building on the work of Harold Innis, Williams joins other Canadians such as Marshall McLuhan, Ronald Deibert, and Gerald Friesen in extending and clarifying our understanding of the way differing media environments predispose us to imagine unique forms of political community.
No other figure, historical or political, features more prominently in recent Newfoundland history than Joey Smallwood. During his long career in Newfoundland politics, Smallwood used the literary, rhetorical, and theatrical skills honed in the first five decades of his life to create a distinct and celebrated persona. He told his own story in his lively autobiography, I Chose Canada, published in 1973 only a year after he left office. Talented, venturesome, and above all resilient, he was no ordinary Joe. Smallwood was born in Gambo, Bonavista Bay, but grew up in St John's. Leaving school at fifteen, he quickly established himself as a journalist and as a publicist for Sir William Coaker's Fishermen's Protective Union. In the early 1920s Smallwood sojourned twice in New York, where he planned a Newfoundland labour party. Ambition, however, led him to support the Liberal Party of Sir Richard Squires. Defeated as a candidate in the general election of June 1932, he next promoted producer and consumer cooperatives, but with mixed results. In 1937 he edited The Book of Newfoundland and thereafter enjoyed great success on the radio as "The Barrelman." The book culminates with Smallwood's adoption of the cause of Confederation and his swearing in on 1 April 1949 as premier of the new Province of Newfoundland. There are multiple J.R. Smallwoods, but the aspiring and ambitious figure presented in this biography stands apart. Melvin Baker and Peter Neary use the largely untapped sources of Smallwood's own papers and his extensive journalistic writing to add a documentary basis to what is known or conjectured about the first five decades of Smallwood's remarkable life, both public and private.
Similar to the CBC and BBC, the Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland was a public broadcaster that was at the centre of a cultural and political change from 1939 to 1949, during which Newfoundland faced wartime challenges and engaged in a constitutional debate about whether to become integrated into Canada. The Voice of Newfoundland studies these changes by taking a close look at the Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland's radio programming and the responses of their listeners. Making excellent use of program recordings, scripts, and letters from listeners, as well as government and corporate archives, Jeff A. Webb examines several innovative programs that responded to the challenges of the Great Depression and Second World War. Webb explores the roles that radio played in society and culture during a vibrant and pivotal time in Newfoundland's history, and demonstrates how the broadcaster's decision to air political debates was pivotal in Newfoundlanders's decision to join Canada and to become part of North American consumer society. An engaging study rich in details of some of twentieth-century Newfoundland's most fascinating figures, The Voice of Newfoundland is a remarkable history of its politics and culture and an important analysis of the influence of the media and the participation of listeners.
Frederick Rennie Emerson (1895-1972) was a dynamic presence in the cultural and intellectual life of Newfoundland and Labrador for much of the twentieth century. A musician, lawyer, educator, and folklore enthusiast, Emerson was a central figure in the preservation and mediation of Newfoundland culture in the tumultuous decades prior to and following Confederation with Canada in 1949. Glenn Colton shows how Emerson fostered greater awareness and understanding of Newfoundland's cultural heritage in local, national, and international contexts. His collaboration with song collector Maud Karpeles in the late 1920s preserved some of the most cherished folk songs in the English language, and a decade later, his lectures at Memorial University College emphasized folk traditions and classical repertoire to inspire cultural discovery for an entire generation. As Newfoundland's representative on the first Canada Council and vice-president of the Canadian Folk Music Society, he played a crucial role in shaping Canadian cultural policy during the transformative years of the mid-twentieth century. Colton also reveals the meaningful creative works Emerson composed in response to the same cultural heritage he documented and preserved: his one-act drama Proud Kate Sullivan (1940) is a pioneering depiction of Newfoundland life, and the folk-inspired Newfoundland Rhapsody (1964) is one of few examples of symphonic music composed by a Newfoundlander of his generation. Newfoundland Rhapsody explores Newfoundland society, Canada's emerging arts scene, and the international folk music community to offer a new lens through which to view the cultural history of twentieth-century Newfoundland and Canada.
In 1951, musician Kenneth Peacock (1922–2000) secured a contract from the National Museum of Canada (today the Canadian Museum of History) to collect folksongs in Newfoundland. As the province had recently joined Confederation, the project was deemed a goodwill gesture, while at the same time adding to the Museum’s meager Anglophone archival collections. Between 1951 and 1961, over the course of six field visits, Peacock collected 766 songs and melodies from 118 singers in 38 communities, later publishing two-thirds of this material in a three-volume collection, Songs of the Newfoundland Outports (1965). As the publication consists of over 1000 pages, Outports is considered to be a bible for Newfoundland singers and a valuable resource for researchers. However, Peacock’s treatment of the material by way of tune-text collations, use of lines and stanzas from unpublished songs has always been somewhat controversial. Additionally, comparison of the field collection with Outports indicates that although Peacock acquired a range of material, his personal preferences requently guided his publishing agenda. To ensure that the songs closely correspond to what the singers presented to Peacock, the collection has been prepared by drawing on Peacock’s original music and textual notes and his original field recordings. The collection is far-ranging and eclectic in that it includes British and American broadsides, musical hall and vaudeville material alongside country and western songs, and local compositions. It also highlights the influence of popular media on the Newfoundland song tradition and contextualizes a number of locally composed songs. In this sense, it provides a key link between what Peacock actually recorded and the material he eventually published. As several of the songs have not previously appeared in the standard Newfoundland collections, The Forgotten Songs sheds new light on the extent of Peacock’s collecting. The collection includes 125 songs arranged under 113 titles along with extensive notes on the songs, and brief biographies of the 58 singers. Thanks to the Research Centre for the Study of Music Media and Place, a video of the launch event, held in St.John's, Newfoundland, is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghj6E6-QiLI&t=21s.
