In Hip and Trivial, historian Robert Wright challenges the pervasive stereotype of young Canadians as addicts of televisual media who are fundamentally alienated from print culture.

Examining the rise of "CanLit" and "KidLit" since the 1970s, and the more recent emergence of a powerful consensus among Canadians that reading ought to be an essential component of family life, Hip and Trivial demonstrates that young people in Canada have been extremely well served by the nation's "culture of literacy" as it has taken shape over the last thirty years. Youth today do not read less, or less voraciously, than their elders, Wright argues, but the historic linkages between youth, reading, and citizenship—so characteristic of the literary nationalism of the baby boomers—no longer obtains. However much they may mystify the keepers of the canon, for young Canadians living in a postmodern, globalized world of seemingly infinite cultural choice, reading has largely ceased to be a patriotic act.

Robert Wright, Ph.D., is a professor of history at Trent University, specializing in foreign policy. He is the author of the national bestseller Three Nights In Havana, which won the 2008 Canadian Authors’ Association’s Lela Common Award for Canadian History and is currently being made into a feature documentary. He resides in Toronto with his wife and children. Visit him at http://www.robertwright.ca/.

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