English prof releases book on depictions of unemployment in Canadian literatures

In his book Unemployment and Government (2000), Carleton professor William Walters observes that in our current historical moment, unemployment has come to seem “obvious, mundane,” “self-evident”––the “eternal opposite of ‘work’” (1). How did this come to be, how might we understand this statement in relation to Canada, and what role does cultural activity play in shaping conceptions of worklessness? In Writing Unemployment: Worklessness, Mobility, and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literatures, a new release from University of Toronto Press, Jody Mason maps out responses to these questions.

Mason, an assistant professor in the Department of English at Carleton, asks how writers––activists of the radical left, social democrats, and reformists – participated in and protested against the discursive framing of unemployment and its normalization in everyday life during Canada’s twentieth century. Writing Unemployment argues that a distinct conception of the jobless emerged in the 1930s, when the cultural left appealed to the state as a benevolent protector of the deserving unemployed. This appeal subsequently shaped much of the discourse of unemployment in the latter half of the twentieth century, when the figure of the Depression-era, unemployed male assumed an important position within narratives of the nation’s coming-of-age. The keywords “mobility” and “citizenship” are important to this project: Mason argues that an appreciation of Canada’s history of itinerant labour complicates the dominant narrative of the pioneer settler in English-Canadian literature. The book also demonstrates how the mobility of the unemployed male accrued different meanings during the twentieth century; by the postwar period, for example, the antithesis of the settled national subject was often figured as a model national citizen who could allegorically represent the maturation of the welfare state. Yet New Leftists and socialist-feminists in the 1960s and ’70s were not uncritical of this postwar compact between state and labour, sealed as it was in the welfare state that promised to make a nation, and the fault lines of this postwar project became particularly apparent as unemployment rates escalated in the 1970s.

Mason examines novels, periodicals, short stories, poetry, manifestos, and agitprop, and considers the well-known Canadian writers Frederick Philip Grove, Dorothy Livesay, A.M. Klein, Hugh Garner, and Al Purdy alongside lesser-known figures such as Claudius Gregory, Jean-Jules Richard, and Helen Potrebenko. She situates the literary history of the cultural left in a broad context, often locating intriguing connections between reformist and radical discourses.

To learn more, and to purchase Mason’s book, please visit this website