Professing English

"Sandra Djwa has provided readers with an artefact: a cultural biography with a human face. Roy Daniells (1902-79), an English professor who taught at the University of Toronto and the University of Manitoba and finished his career at the University of British Columbia, was an outstanding scholar, teacher, and poet, and influenced at least four generations of students. Daniells was a key figure - a cultural analyst - in the consolidation of English as a discipline and the development of Canadian literature as a recognized body of writing and a legitimate focus of scholarship, interacting with major personalities of the era such as Earle Birney, Northrop Frye, E. J. Pratt, Sinclair Ross, Margaret Laurence, and A. S. P. Woodhouse.". "Djwa's examination of his life is a personal story as well as a micro-history of literary studies in Canada. It is also the account of an individual who, struggling against a strict religious upbringing, turned instead to the devotional poets of the seventeenth century. In this biography, Daniell's life becomes a prism refracting aspects of the discipline: the old ties between religion and literature, the making of a professor, mentorship and the way it