Meet Me on the Barricades - (Canadian Literature Collection) by Charles Yale Harrison (Paperback)

About the Book

Meet Me on the Barricades is a hallucinatory, comic novel about leftism, modernism, and the Spanish Civil War. It features a "guileless" protagonist whose weak heart means that, instead of fighting on the battlefields of Spain, he daydreams about life as a soldier.

Book Synopsis

Meet Me on the Barricades is Harrison's most experimental work. The novel includes a series of fantasy sequences that culminate in a scene heavily indebted to the Nighttown episode in James Joyce's Ulysses (the novel was published a year before James Thurber's better-known short story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"). The novel is also Harrison's only foray into satire--an especially unexpected turn given that the Spanish Civil War literary canon, and particularly works of literature written in the midst of the war, tend towards earnestness rather than irony. Harrison's novel is thus a unique book, significant for its self-consciousness as a modernist novel and as a political document. Out of print since its single publication run in 1938, this critical edition recovers Harrison's important commentary on the heated "culture wars" of the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War. With an original critical introduction and extensive textual and editorial notes, this edition draws on original archival research to situate the novel within the modernist and leftist North American canons. Meet Me on the Barricades is a densely allusive text that layers global politics, revolutionary theory, classical music, literary theory, world history, and anti-Stalinism, as well as emergent biological discourses about sex. It recounts a few days in the life of P. Herbert Simpson, a middle-aged, weak-hearted oboist with the New York Symphony Orchestra and leftist fellow traveler. Simpson is subject to wild hallucinations that are sometimes daydreams, sometimes drunken delirium, and on occasion intricate dreams while asleep. He imagines escaping his unrewarding marriage with a prudish, domineering wife through a passionate fantasy of a Russian girlfriend, and escaping his day job in the symphony to fight on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. Published in English.

Review Quotes

(E)ditors Bart Vautour and Emily Robins Sharpe discuss the major variants in the three extant typescript drafts of the novel (housed at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library)....The explanatory notes, which appear in the print edition, are excellent.-- "PUO-UOP"

The University of Ottawa Press excels with its Canadian Literature Collection, recently adding several Lowry projects, including The 1940 Under the Volcano, Swinging the Maelstrom, and In Ballast to the White Sea, the last of which Mota and Tiessen discuss in Translocated Modernisms.-- "PUO-UOP"

About the Author

Bart Vautour (Editor)
Bart Vautour (Dalhousie) is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University in K'jipuktuk/Halifax, Canada. His research examines Canadian cultural production with a focus on transnationalism, modernism, politics, poetics, and editing. He is co-editor (with Erin Wunker, Travis V. Mason, and Christl Verduyn) of Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics and (with Vanessa Lent and Dean Irvine) Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media. He is also editor of a scholarly edition of Ted Allan's Spanish Civil War novel, This Time a Better Earth (1939) and co-editor of Charles Yale Harrison's Meet Me on the Barricades (1938), both from the University of Ottawa Press.

Emily Robins Sharpe (Editor)
Emily Robins Sharpe (Keene State) is Professor of English and an affiliate faculty member of the departments of Women's and Gender Studies and Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. Her book Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War was published in 2020 by the University of Toronto Press. She is also the editor of a scholarly edition of Hugh Garner's Governor General's Award-winning Best Stories (1963), and co-editor with Bart Vautour of a scholarly edition of Charles Yale Harrison's Meet Me on the Barricades (1938), both from the University of Ottawa Press.