A materialist feminist analysis of Dorothy Livesay, Madge Macbeth, and the Canadian literary field, 1920--1950

Drawing on materialist feminist theories, theories of nationalisms, and Pierre Bourdieu's cultural materialist theories, this feminist cultural history turns to the politics and writing of two Canadian women writers, Dorothy Livesay (1909--1996) and Madge Macbeth (1878--1965), as a means of focusing the major issues of the field. Articulations between nationalism, internationalism, and continentalism, between internationalism and modernism, and between modernism and Victorianism are addressed through a consideration of the debates circulating within literary circles of the period. An examination of the articulation of institutions, politics, power relations, and the economy with the literary field and with writers' position-takings reveals the systemic marginalization of women in this field. The differing works and lives of these two writers illustrate the various positions available to middle-class Canadian women writers on the popular-literature/literary-writing continuum and in the Canadian literary field of 1920--1950. Livesay's poetry, Macbeth's fiction, and the journalism, correspondence, and speeches of both reveal the strategies they employed to negotiate the politics of a literary field based on masculinist assumptions. In addition, the process of the construction of the canon is examined through a survey of thirty-eight anthologies published between 1923 and 1957. Through Livesay and Macbeth, this project historicizes the canon and questions the oppositions that are often attributed to the popular-literature/literary-writing binary.