Nick Mount is a professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of English at the St. George campus, where he teaches Canadian literature. He regularly gives public talks on the arts in Canada, including appearances on TVO’s Big Ideas and CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition. Full cv here, highlights below.
Department of English, University of Toronto, 170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 / nick.mount@utoronto.ca
Books
My latest book is Arrival: The Story of CanLit, published by House of Anansi in September 2017. From the preface:
I wrote this book because it didn’t exist. We have many excellent biographies of the writers who emerged during what came to be called the CanLit boom. We also have some good histories of the publishing side of the story in both English and French Canada, and a great many books about the time itself. What we don’t have is a book that puts all those stories together. This is the first book to try to do that, to tell the whole story, for both those who know parts of it and those who know none of it. It’s a book is about the past, but like all such books, it’s for the present, a book that I hope helps explain how we got from there to here, from a country without a literature to a literature without a country.
My first book is called When Canadian Literature Moved to New York, published by University of Toronto Press in 2005. From the introduction:
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, powerful obstacles to a domestic literature together with powerful attractions to other literary centres caused most Canadian writers who mattered, and many who didn’t, to leave Canada, most for the United States, most of those for New York. As a profession, as the inspiration for a domestic literature, and as the groundwork of a national canon, Canadian literature began here: not in the backwoods of Ontario, not on the salt flats of New Brunswick, but in the cafés, publishing offices, and boarding-houses of late-nineteenth-century New York.
When Canadian Literature Moved to New York won the 2005 Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best book in Canadian literary criticism.
Selected Articles
“Tradition and the Individual Canadian Talent.” Forthcoming in Studia Anglica, 2020.
Introduction, Civil Elegies and Other Poems, by Dennis Lee. Toronto: Anansi, 2012.
“Lana Del Rey, Meet Your Boyfriend.” Ryeberg Live, Drake Hotel, Toronto, March 19, 2012.
“Searching for Banksy.” Queen’s Quarterly 117.2 (summer 2010). An earlier version of this article about the British street artist’s first works in Canada appeared in the Torontoist.
“Listening to Tom Dawe.” Queen’s Quarterly 117.1 (spring 2010). An interview with the Newfoundland poet.
“What Thunder Bay Burned: How Lady Chatterley Wrote Our Obscenity Law.” Walrus, Jan-Feb. 2010.
“On Hugh’s Watch: The Watch That Ends the Night Turns Fifty.” Walrus, July-Aug. 2009.
“Waiting for Godot without Existentialism.” Raritan 28.2 (fall 2008). About Beckett’s play.
“The Renaissance of Cute.” Walrus, Sep. 2008. About street art.
“The Return of Beauty.” Queen’s Quarterly 115.2 (summer 2008), reprinted in 2019. This article–also partly about street art–won a National Magazine Silver Award.
Some interviews / things about my work
“‘We will write ourselves into existence’: Nick Mount on the Rise of CanLit.” A conversation with Michael Enright on CBC’s Sunday Edition about my book Arrival. Sep. 10, 2017
“Sermon from the Mount.” An interview I did for Sam Bowman of the University of Toronto’s Varsity, in April of 2012. Sam is a brilliant editor.
Cynthia Macdonald, “Literature Junkie: From Street Art to Hip Hop, Nick Mount Connects English Lit to Pop Culture.” UofT Magazine summer 2011.