anurse

Personal Information

Full Name

Andrew Nurse

Bio

Andrew Nurse is Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. His scholarly work has appeared in Acadiensis, Scientia Canadensis, and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, among other venues. In addition, he is co-editor (with Raymond Blake) of Beyond National Dreams and Trajectories of Rural Life. He lives in Sackville, NB, with his wife Mary Ellen and children, Hayden and Bryn.

Affiliation

Mount Allison University

Country

Canada

Personal Statement About Topic

Writing about Publishing

My interest in publishing history began as a question: how was a book actually produced? At the time I started to research Marius Barbeau, scholarly work on anthropology and folklore made use of post-structural theory that focused on the instability of the text as a feature of its linguistic structure. My interest pushed me in different directions: what factors affected the way in which a text emerged in its final form.

Case studies by Andrew Nurse

Case study :

Marius Barbeau and the History of Anthropological and Folklore Publishing

Marius Barbeau (1883-1969) was nothing if not productive. At the time of his death, his bibliography stretched to over 1,000 items, although we may never know the precise number of texts that appeared under his name. Barbeau’s publishing interests were varied, ranging from reprinted oral traditions collected from First Nations and French-Canadian informants that appeared in newspapers, to scholarly monographs, to tourist-oriented picture books, and to a novel. Barbeau’s long career, his varied publications, and his voluminous correspondence provide a window in the history of publishing in the social sciences in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century.