DOCSLIB.ORG

Reading Canadian Literature in a Light-Polluted Age

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Reading Canadian Literature in a Light-Polluted Age Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 12-16-2013 12:00 AM After Dark: Reading Canadian Literature in a Light-Polluted Age David S. Hickey The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Dr. D.M.R. Bentley The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © David S. Hickey 2013 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Hickey, David S., "After Dark: Reading Canadian Literature in a Light-Polluted Age" (2013). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 1805. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/1805 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. After Dark: Reading Canadian Literature in a Light-Polluted Age Monograph by David Hickey Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Hickey 2013 i Abstract A threat to nocturnal ecosystems and human health alike, light pollution is an unnecessary problem that comes at an enormous cost. The International Dark-Sky Association has recently estimated that the energy expended on light scatter alone is responsible for no less than twelve million tons of carbon dioxide and costs municipal governments at least $1 billion annually (“Economic Issues” 2). Emerging research also suggests that excessive artificial light at night may compromise melatonin production, a hormone that has been linked to the suppression of certain cancers (Stevens 28; Haim 32). As scotobiologists seek to solidify the connection between the disruption of circadian rhythms and compromised states of physical and mental well-being, the impetus to study the cultural and literary meaning of the night sky becomes all the more pressing. Drawing on a range of affect theorists, the findings of nocturnal ecologists, and ecocriticism’s call to memory and mindfulness, this dissertation assembles a diverse crew to consider the ways in which Canadian writers have chronicled the shift from natural darkness to artificial light. Too easily dismissed as nostalgic or sentimental, the desire to see the night sky make its return has never mattered more. To live in a time and a place where night never fully arrives is to know that the stars in a given volume of poetry may well outnumber those that remain visible in the sky. Literature itself has now drifted into an era of post-darkness, the world’s obsession with artificial light having ushered in a historical period that is, quite literally, after dark. For this reason, stories and poems that are rich in celestial allusions are worth studying because they place personal reflection, cosmological awareness, and empathetic witness in a century that has otherwise failed to appreciate the necessity of nocturnal environments the world over. Favouring lyrical persistence over nocturnal lament, the Nova Scotian poet Kenneth Leslie once set sail to “stubborn stars,” his imagination ii desiring those truths that only take shape in a sea of dark (1). Seventy-five years later, his finest sonnet still invites us to follow – headlong into the passages we find in search of better light to read by. Keywords Canadian literature, ecocriticism, night sky, light pollution, dark-sky movement, P.K. Page, W.W.E. Ross, L.M. Montgomery iii iv Acknowledgments My thanks to the following individuals who helped make this project possible: Margaret Steffler, for scanning P.K. Page’s unpublished Mexican Journals for references to the night sky; Elizabeth Epperly, for enthusiastic support; George Fleenor and Peter McMahon, for generously granting me permission to use images free of charge; John Tyndall, for six years of assistance at the D.B. Weldon Library reference desk; Lindsey Bannister, whose work with the English collection at D.B. Weldon Library was invaluable; staff librarians at the National Archives of Canada, at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and at the University of Toronto’s Archive and Records Management Services, without whom this dissertation could not have been written; Rick Stapleton, Archives and Research Collections Librarian at McMaster University, for his help with the R.G. Everson fonds; Jeremy Heil, Technical Services Archivist at Queen’s University, for retrieving materials from the William Wilfred Campbell fonds; Erica Kelly, Tina Northrup, Mandy Penny, and Phil Glennie, for reading early drafts of these chapters; Rebecca Campbell and Alicia Robinet, for sending along every reference to the night sky that they encountered in their reading; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for financial support; Peter Yampolsky, for doing the math that appears in the final footnote of this dissertation; Dr. Bryce Traister, for the conversations, Dr. Manina Jones, not only for her close reading of this project, but also for her support of creative writers in academia; Dr. D.M.R. Bentley, for generous feedback, expert guidance, and space to think and to write; and, finally, Erica Leighton, for company under the stars. v Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. iiv Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ v List of Plates ...................................................................................................................... vi Introduction: Ecology, Memory, and the Recovery of the Night ....................................... 1 Recollecting Light: Accounts of the Leonids over Nineteenth-Century Canada ............. 48 Unearthly Pleasures: The Night Skies of L.M. Montgomery ........................................... 93 In Praise of Night: The Celestial Poetry of W.W.E. Ross ....................................... ..….159 Dark Spectrums: The Artful Astronomy of P.K. Page ................................................... 212 Conclusion: Reading Literature in a Light-Polluted Age ............................................... 259 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 270 Curriculum Vitae ............................................................................................................ 311 vi List of Plates Fig. 1. In order for public lighting to play its part in ensuring public safety, unnecessary glare needs to be reduced with proper shielding. As the contrast between these two photographs by George Fleenor illustrates, exterior lighting can just as easily obscure what we would otherwise trust it to reveal. Fig. 2. The front page of the Leader-Post, 15 November 1932. Fig. 3. 2013 promotional poster for London, Ontario’s Take Back the Night March. Fig. 4. The official logo of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Fig. 5. First published in 1898, Thomas Conant’s Upper Canada Sketches includes this illustration, “Meteoric shower (1833),” and twenty-seven others by the Canadian painter Edward Scrope Shrapnel. Fig. 6. The old moon wanes faintly above the tree line on the cover of the 1923 edition of Emily of New Moon. Fig. 7. Paul Renaud’s Contemplation, as it appeared in Camille Flammarion’s Astronomy for Amateurs (1910). Fig. 8. Recently installed street lights steal the show as Quebec’s 9th Battalion marches down Toronto’s Yonge Street. Illustrated War News, 25 July 1885. Fig. 9. The Hodder and Stoughton cover of Magic for Marigold (1929). The image works through pairings that frame and naturalize the intergenerational exchange: four trees rise in the distance, two on either side; two more stand in the foreground, and two especially brilliant stars rise in the enchanted sky. Note, too, how Marigold’s carefully balanced arms contribute to the sense of symmetry that governs the scene as a whole. Fig. 10. “The Brockton Comet Chart.” Toronto Daily Star, 16 April 1910. Fig. 11. “The ‘Brockton’ is Here.” Toronto Daily Star, 21 April 1910. Fig. 12. Inside the back cover of L.M. Montgomery’s Red Scrapbook. vii Fig. 13. Combining the geometric shapes of Cubism, the clean lines and angles of the Constructivists, the bright colours of the Fauvists, and Futurism’s emphasis on speed and power, Art Deco was the popular face of high art from the 1920s to the 1940s (Duncan 142-44). In his analysis of Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings, whose work is synonymous with the Art Deco period, Alastair Duncan has called attention to an “icy and enigmatic style in which contrasting angular images and bright colours predominated” (143). Montgomery’s preference for this cover design of A Tangled Web (1931) and its depiction of an Art Deco comet indicates that she, too, could appreciate the value of the “icy” and the “enigmatic” in Modern visual art. Fig. 14. Algol is located in the constellation Perseus, Alioth is the brightest star in Ursa Major, and Aldebaran and Alcyone both belong to the
Load more

Recommended publications
  • “The Great Dreams Pass On” Phyllis Webb’S “Struggles of Silence”
    Laura Cameron “The Great Dreams Pass On” Phyllis Webb’s “Struggles of Silence” “My poems are born out of great struggles of silence,” wrote Phyllis Webb in the Foreword to her 198 volume, Wilson’s Bowl; “This book has been long in coming. Wayward, natural and unnatural silences, my desire for privacy, my critical hesitations, my critical wounds, my dissatisfactions with myself and the work have all contributed to a strange gestation” (9).1 In this frequently cited passage, Webb is referring to the fifteen-year publication gap that divides her forty-year career as a poet. She put out two full volumes before Naked Poems in 1965 and two full volumes after Wilson’s Bowl in 198, but in the interim she produced only a handful of poems that she judged publishable.2 And yet, although it might have appeared from the outside in this period as though Webb had renounced poetry for good, archival evidence—numerous poem drafts in various states of completion, grant applications outlining the projects that she intended to pursue, and radio scripts elaborating on her creative efforts and ideas— reveals that this was not simply a period of absence or withdrawal. On the contrary, the middle years of Webb’s career, her “struggles of silence,” were fertile, eventually fruitful, and integral to her poetic development. The interval was characterized by “dissatisfactions” and “hesitations,” as Webb says, but also—and just as importantly—by ambition and an intense desire to grow and progress as a poet, to expand her vision and to write poetry, as she described it, of “cosmic proportions.”3 The creation of Wilson’s Bowl was “a strange gestation” because Webb’s “progeny” did not mature as expected: Wilson’s Bowl was not the volume that she had initially set out to write.
    [Show full text]
  • Eli Mandel Fonds (MSS 18)
    University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections Finding Aid - Eli Mandel fonds (MSS 18) Generated by Access to Memory (AtoM) 2.4.1 Printed: April 26, 2019 Language of description: English University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections 330 Elizabeth Dafoe Library Winnipeg Manitoba Canada R3T 2N2 Telephone: 204-474-9986 Fax: 204-474-7913 Email: [email protected] http://umanitoba.ca/libraries/archives/ http://umlarchives.lib.umanitoba.ca/index.php/eli-mandel-fonds Eli Mandel fonds Table of contents Summary information ...................................................................................................................................... 3 Administrative history / Biographical sketch .................................................................................................. 3 Scope and content ........................................................................................................................................... 4 Arrangement .................................................................................................................................................... 4 Notes ................................................................................................................................................................ 4 Access points ................................................................................................................................................... 6 Series descriptions ..........................................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • FLYWAY a Long Poem
    FLYWAY A Long Poem A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Writing In the Department of English University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon By SARAH ENS © Copyright Sarah Ens, August 2020. All rights reserved. PERMISSION TO USE In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an MFA in Writing degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make its Preliminary Pages freely available for inspection as outlined in the MFA in Writing Thesis License/Access Agreement accepted by the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in June 2013. Requests for permission to make use of material beyond the Preliminary Pages of this thesis should be addressed to the author of the thesis, or: Coordinator, MFA in Writing University of Saskatchewan Department of English Arts Building, Room 319 9 Campus Drive Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 Canada OR Dean College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies University of Saskatchewan 116 Thorvaldson Building, 110 Science Place Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5C9 Canada i ABSTRACT Flyway is a long-poem articulation of home set within the Canadian landscape and told through the lens of forced migration and its corollary of trauma. Tracing the trajectory of the Russian Mennonite diaspora, Flyway examines how intergenerational upheaval generates anxieties of place which are mirrored in the human-disrupted migratory patterns of the natural world. Drawing from the rich tradition of the Canadian long poem, from my roots as a third-generation Mennonite immigrant, from eco-poetics, and from ecological research into the impact of climate change on the endangered landscape of Manitoba’s tallgrass prairie, Flyway migrates along geographical, psychological, and affective routes in an attempt to understand complexities of home.
    [Show full text]
  • Meteor Showers # 11.Pptx
    20-05-31 Meteor Showers Adolf Vollmy Sources of Meteors • Comets • Asteroids • Reentering debris C/2019 Y4 Atlas Brett Hardy 1 20-05-31 Terminology • Meteoroid • Meteor • Meteorite • Fireball • Bolide • Sporadic • Meteor Shower • Meteor Storm Meteors in Our Atmosphere • Mesosphere • Atmospheric heating • Radiant • Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) 2 20-05-31 Equipment Lounge chair Blanket or sleeping bag Hot beverage Bug repellant - ThermaCELL Camera & tripod Tracking Viewing Considerations • Preparation ! Locate constellation ! Take a nap and set alarm ! Practice photography • Location: dark & unobstructed • Time: midnight to dawn https://earthsky.org/astronomy- essentials/earthskys-meteor-shower- guide https://www.amsmeteors.org/meteor- showers/meteor-shower-calendar/ • Where to look: 50° up & 45-60° from radiant • Challenges: fatigue, cold, insects, Moon • Recording observations ! Sky map, pen, red light & clipboard ! Time, position & location ! Recording device & time piece • Binoculars Getty 3 20-05-31 Meteor Showers • 112 confirmed meteor showers • 695 awaiting confirmation • Naming Convention ! C/2019 Y4 (Atlas) ! (3200) Phaethon June Tau Herculids (m) Parent body: 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann Peak: June 2 – ZHR = 3 Slow moving – 15 km/s Moon: Waning Gibbous June Bootids (m) Parent body: 7p/Pons-Winnecke Peak: June 27– ZHR = variable Slow moving – 14 km/s Moon: Waxing Crescent Perseid by Brian Colville 4 20-05-31 July Delta Aquarids Parent body: 96P/Machholz Peak: July 28 – ZHR = 20 Intermediate moving – 41 km/s Moon: Waxing Gibbous Alpha
    [Show full text]
  • Th€ Living Mosaic
    $1.2$ pw C0Py Autumn, ig6g TH€ LIVING MOSAIC Articles BY PHYLLIS GROSSKURTH, JOHN OWER, MAX DORSINVILLE, SUSAN JACKELj MARGARET MORRISS Special Feature COMPILED BY JOHN REEVES, WITH POEMS BY YAR SLAVUTYCH, HENRIKAS NAGYS, WALTER BAUER, Y. Y. SEGAL, ZOFJA BOHDANOWICZ, ROBERT ZEND, ARVED VDRLAID, INGRIDE VIKSNA, LUIGI ROMEO, PADRAIG BROIN Reviews BY RALPH G USTAFSON , WARREN TALLMAN, JACK WARWICK, GEORGE BOWERING, DOUGLAS BARBOUR, VI C T O R HOAR, K E AT H F R ASE R , CLARA THOMAS, G AR Y GEDDES, ANN SADDLEMYER, G E O R G E WO O D C O C K , YAR SLAVUTYCH, W. F. HALL A QUARTERLY OF CRITICISM AND R6VI6W AN ABSENCE OF UTOPIAS LIITERATURES are defined as much by their lacks as by their abundances, and it is obviously significant that in the whole of Canadian writing there has appeared only one Utopian novel of any real interest; it is significant in terms of our society as much as of our literature. The book in question is A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. It was written in the 1870's and published in 1888, eight years after the death of its author, James de Mille, a professor of English at Dalhousie, who combined teach- ing with the compulsive production of popular novels ; by the time of his death at the age of 46 he had already thirty volumes to his credit, but only A Strange Manuscript has any lasting interest. It has been revived as one of the reprints in the New Canadian Library (McClelland & Stewart, $2.75), with an introduction by R.
    [Show full text]
  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
    THE DECADE OF DISCOVERY IN ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee Board on Physics and Astronomy Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications National Research Council NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS Washington, D.C. 1991 NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS • 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW • Washington, DC 20418 NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for the report were chosen for their special compe_nces and with regard for appropriate balance. This report has been reviewed by a group other than the authors according to procedures approved by a Report Review Committee consisting of members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. This project was supported by the Department of Energy under Grant No. DE-FGO5- 89ER40421, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-8901685, the Naval Research Laboratory under Contract No. N00173-90-M-9744, and the Smithsonian Institution under Purchase Order No. SF0022430000. Additional support was provided by the Maurice Ewing Earth and Planetary Sciences Fund of the National Academy of Sciences created through a gift from the Palisades Geophysical Institute, Inc., and an anonymous donor. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data National Research Council (U.S.). Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee. The decade of discovery in astronomy and astrophysics / Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee, Board on Physics and Astronomy, Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, National Research Council.
    [Show full text]
  • Primary Sources
    Archived Content This archived Web content remains online for reference, research or recordkeeping purposes. It will not be altered or updated. Web content that is archived on the Internet is not subject to the Government of Canada Web Standards. As per the Communications Policy of the Government of Canada, you can request alternate formats of this content on the Contact Us page. Roughing It in the Backwoods Student Handout Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill are two of Canada’s most important 19th-century writers. Born in England, the two sisters became professional writers before they were married. In 1832, they emigrated with their Scottish husbands to Canada and settled in the backwoods of what is now Ontario, near present-day Lakefield. Their experiences as pioneers gave them much to write about, which they did in their books, articles, poems and letters to family members. This activity will give you the chance to view primary source materials online and learn about aspects of life as an early settler in the backwoods of Upper Canada. Introduction: Primary Sources A primary source is a first-hand account, by someone who participated in or witnessed an event. These sources could be: letters, books written by witnesses, diaries and journals, reports, government documents, photographs, art, maps, video footage, sound recordings, oral histories, clothing, tools, weapons, buildings and other clues in the surroundings. A secondary source is a representation of an event. It is someone's interpretation of information found in primary sources. These sources include books and textbooks, and are the best place to begin research.
    [Show full text]
  • Five Wild Years Reminiscences of the Leonids Experience 1998 – 2002
    Proceedings IMC Bollmannsruh 2003 29 Five wild years Reminiscences of the Leonids experience 1998 – 2002 Daniel Fischer K¨onigswinter, Germany Abstract This is not a scientific review of the surprises, discoveries and sensations the Leonids brought from 1998 to 2002, but a look back by one observer (and science writer) who often witnessed first-hand what went on in the sky — and also how science finally got its grip on the elusive and striking phenomenon of meteor storms. It was a truly an experience with a deep impact (no pun intended) that is not likely to be repeated... I admit it: before about ten years ago I had considered meteor observing, especially with your own eye, as one of the most useless branches of (amateur) astronomy, with no serious data reduction possible and dubious results. This was not true, at least at that time, of course (see Roggemans, 2004), but the progress made by the IMO had not been widely known to the outside world. Not in- terested at all in systematic meteor watching, I was struck by the idea of meteor storms nonetheless: I had read a lot about the fabulous Leonids storm of 1966 and eagerly devoured two big reviews of meteor storms in British journals. Beech et al (1995) had described these rare phenomena as both spectacular and little understood, while Mason (1995) predicted — using a crude model — storms of the Leonids with ZHRs around 5000 in 1998 and 1999. Would it be worth chasing after those possible storms? I was already travelling a lot for astronomy’s sake, both in the quest for eclipses (1983, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1995 and so on) and comets (Halley in 1986), but for meteors? Then again, Brad Schaefer, the American astronomer famous for his professional work on astronomy with the naked eye, had told me in 1988 that for him one meteor storm would be “worth ten eclipses”.
    [Show full text]
  • The Leonid Meteor Shower3
    135 Chapter 5: Observational Record of the Leonid Meteor Shower3 5.1 Introduction Meteor Science in its modern form was born on the morning of November 13, 1833. It was the great Leonid return of that year which provoked widespread interest in the subject after being observed extensively in North America (Olmsted, 1834). With its unique nature of producing strong showers every 33 years, the Leonid shower is probably the most extensively written-about meteoroid stream. This observational database permits useful constraints to be placed on modern theories of the stream’s evolution. Numerous past works have examined Leonid records both ancient (e.g. Hasegawa 1993) and more modern (e.g. Mason 1995). However, in virtually all of these secondary works, no examination of the original records was attempted and the actual activity profiles, locations of peak activity and other characteristics are ill-defined. Our motivation is to re- examine as many original accounts of the shower contains usable numerical information as possible and determine the characteristics of past showers, independent of the many secondary accounts which appear in the literature, in an effort to better understand the stream’s past activity and interpret its basic physical properties. These data will also provide the basis for comparison with the numerical modelling of the stream, which is developed in Chapter 6. We examine the available original records of the Leonids for modern returns of the shower (here defined to be post-1832). In doing so, we attempt to establish characteristics of the stream near its peak activity, as borne out by the original records, for the years near the passage of 55P/Tempel-Tuttle.
    [Show full text]
  • The Development of Narrative in the Writing of Isabella Valancy Crawford
    THE DEVELOPMENT OF NARRATIVE IN THE WRITING OF ISABELLA VALANCY CRAWFORD Margo Dunn B. A. , Marianopolis College (de 11universit6de ~ontrgal), 1964 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English @ MARGO DUNN 1975 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY April 1975 All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENSE I hereby grant to Simon Fraser University the right to lend my thesis or dissertation (the title of which is shown below) to users of the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. The kvelopmt of Nmratim ih the !Wng of Isabella Author : (si&ature) Margo Dunn (name ) #~LYA/28 / f 7f (date) Approval Name : Margo Dunn Degree: Master of Arts Title of Thesis : "The kvelopnt of Narrative in the Wxitinq of Isa??llaValancy Crawford" Examining Committee : Chairman : Jared R. Curtis David Stouck 'Senior Supervisor Andrea Lebowitz Dawn Aspinall Instructor Department of English University of British Columbia Date Approved: && 25, /975 / f ABSTRACT Narrative, in its original sense, orders the world vision of an individual.
    [Show full text]
  • Stellar Luminosity Functions of Rich Star Clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud
    A&A 369, 74–86 (2001) Astronomy DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20010004 & c ESO 2001 Astrophysics Stellar luminosity functions of rich star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud B. Santiago1, S. Beaulieu2, R. Johnson2, and G. F. Gilmore2 1 Universidade Federal Rio Grande do Sul, IF, CP 15051, Porto Alegre 91501-970, RS, Brasil 2 Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Rd., Cambridge CB3 0HA, UK Received 8 September 2000 / Accepted 12 December 2000 Abstract. We show the results of deep V and I HST photometry of 6 rich star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud with different ages and metallicities. The number of stars with measured magnitudes in each cluster varies from about 3000 to 10 000 stars. We build stellar density and surface brightness profiles for the clusters and extract half-light radii and other structural parameters for each. We also obtain luminosity functions, Φ(MV ), down to MV ' 6(M/M ∼> 0.9), and investigate their dependence with distance from the cluster centre well beyond their half-light radius. In all clusters we find a systematic increase in the luminosity functions slope, ∆logΦ(MV )/∆(MV ), with radial distance from the centre. Among the clusters displaying significant mass seg- regation are the 2 youngest in the sample: NGC 1805, NGC 1818. For these two clusters we obtain present day mass functions. The NGC 1818 mass function is in excellent agreement with that derived by other authors, also using HST data. The young cluster mass function slopes differ, that of NGC 1805 being systematically steeper than NGC 1818. Since these are very young stellar systems (τ ∼< 40 Myrs), these variations may reflect the initial conditions rather than evolution due to internal dynamics.
    [Show full text]
  • Another Preface to an Uncollected Anthology
    Another Preface to an Uncollected Anthology: Canadian Criticism in a Commonwealth Context Ft. T. ROBERTSON OST Canadian literature studied at University ap• pears in Canadian literature courses. But in M about hall' of the thirty courses offered in Com• monwealth literature there is a sprinkling of Canadian texts. Some of these are anthologies which, together with anthologies of Australian, African and Indian writing, make up a sort of multi-volume anthology of Common• wealth literature. There is no single anthology of that literature in existence, although there are anthologies such as Howard Sergeant's and W. H. New's of Commonwealth poetry and stories. Responding to criticism of the use of anthologies in university courses (during the ACUTE programme at the Learned Societies meeting), R. E. Waiters reminded younger teachers that when the Canadian Anthology* first appeared in 1955 it was the only available source for much of its material. It seems that a discipline in the making needs a primitive tool like the anthology. How that tool assists the process is indeed a fascinating area of study, as Alec Lucas has recently remarked.-' Equally fascinating in Commonwealth literary studies is the way a development in one national literature will recur later in another, and in the general discipline now aborning in those thirty (or so) courses. The itch to anthologise is beginning to infect teachers of Commonwealth literature, and while we are not likely to break out in a rash of an- ANOTHER PREFACE 71 thologies we are certainly casting round for a model we can imitate. At which point Klinck and Watters enters Commonwealth literary studies not as a text to be used in our courses but as a form more advanced than any available in other national literatures.
    [Show full text]