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Gone Albertan Donna Coates and George Melnyk, eds. Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature. AU P $34-95
The high quality of literature from or about Alberta is a matter of fact. Names like WO. Mitchell, Sheila Watson, Rudy Wiebe, Robert Kroetsch, and Aritha Van Herk dominate Alberta literary FAQs; readers of this journal are certainly familiar with other prominent names. Yet it is telling that the editors of Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature feel compelled to entitle their preface "The Struggle for an Alberta Literature" and that the title of Van Herk's introduction to the anthology, "Wrestling Impossibility," supplements the figure. Such fighting words echo George Melnyk's threefold ambition, articulated in his groundbreaking The Literary History of Alberta, to construct a history, tradition, and canon of Alberta literature, an enterprise that seems essential, if only to establish a greater sense of identity and legitimacy for what has evolved into a distinctive geopolitical region. Fred Stenson's enlightening afterword about the development of Alberta literature and its concomitant institutions, particularly the Writers Guild of Alberta, founded in 1980, and the passion with which he defends it, befits the general editorial purpose of this...