Cultural Taste, Literary-Scholarly Publishing, and James De Mille’s Strange Manuscript

Abstract

This research tracks and questions the publication history of James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder from the New Canadian Library’s 1969 edition, through to the two academic renditions of the novel, the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Text’s edition, edited by Malcolm Parks, and the Broadview Press edition, edited by Daniel Burgoyne. This study builds on the elegantly conducted editorial and bibliographical work done by scholars including Reginald E. Watters, Malcolm Parks, Patricia Monk, and Daniel Burgoyne to contribute to a history of taste in Canadian literature studies and publishing between the 1960s and early-2000s. Through the use of a multidisciplinary and mixed-methods approach, primarily utilizing descriptive bibliography, personal interview, archival work, and book history, this research questions the motives of Canadian scholarly-literary and trade publishers, and questions the authenticity of new editions nineteenth-century Canadian texts, illustrated through the treatment of De Mille’s novel, in the present, digital age.