While New Brunswick at the Crossroads represents an important lesson in the history surrounding the province’s literatures, however, it is problematically lacking in several key aspects. Perhaps the most obvious of these issues, speaking formally, lies with the fact that no texts are written in French—not even those concerning Acadian literature. For instance, Marie-Linda Lord’s chapter is translated from French into English (with more than a handful of hiccups) and uses the English translations of Acadian texts, taking away from the importance of the period and literature that she discusses. Some might argue—and rightly so, to a certain degree—that Anglophones need be exposed to this knowledge and literature; however, the onus, as it has so many times before with respect to New Brunswick, falls on Francophones to translate criticism to ensure this communication. This commentary is trite in particular circles, but the Anglophone majority continues to demand “Anglo Rights” in an officially bilingual province—thus, these editorial decisions do matter on some levels, especially that of social change.
Getting into the book’s critical framework, I have difficulty in certain instances empathizing with Christl Verduyn’s foreword, which stumbles at times in situating this recent work within the matrices of broader concerns in Canadian literary studies. In particular, it rightly points out the postcolonial nature of New Brunswick’s literatures as a key point of entry for their study; however, some of her claims appear to be reaching, trying too hard to show the significance of the book on the wrong terms. For instance, her opening statement that Tremblay’s collection “can be placed firmly at the forefront of the evolving landscape of twenty-first-century literary criticism in Canada” (vii) is a stretch, considering that the text is a long-overdue piece of criticism in Canadian literature, and especially in the context of her citation of Trans.Can.Lit. (2007), which is already over a decade old. Moreover, the remainder of the foreword mostly links this book to current literary studies in Canada, arguing that studying literary production outside of the text is in some way ground-breaking, while it has, in reality, been a fruitful method of reading for many years now. So, while Verduyn is correct in claiming with respect to the future that “New Brunswick at the Crossroads expands the terrain and substance of literary criticism,” the idea distracts from the important work that the text does for New Brunswick’s past—a past seemingly largely forgotten by New Brunswickers and the rest of Canada alike (xvi).
Not to disregard the future, however, I note that the most glaring absence in New Brunswick at the Crossroads is that of Anglophone writers after the mid-twentieth century—does that absence mean that this book is the first volume in a future collection? I certainly hope so, else I would seriously question the exclusion of these writers while discussing contemporary Acadian ones because, as Tremblay points out, “Acadians are much more advanced than their English neighbours in cultural and critical enterprise” (3).