The essays collected here have been written against the background of Davey's long and close intellectual engagement with the major critical issues of his day...(and) provide a clear sense of his very substantial contribution to contemporary criticism in Canada... To critical theory he has added his voice on behalf of post-modernist writing, and perhaps as clearly as any other writer has articulated the theory of post-moderism. He has given our criticism its contemporary voice, its sound and its rhythms, and to the mood of our most recent critical writing added his generous and welcoming spirit. A writer on the side of life, he has spoken for life and vitality as an active engaged spirit of our time.

Born in Vancouver, Frank Davey was Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario. Upon his retirement in 2005, the conference “Poetics and Public Culture in Canada” was held in his honour. Davey attended the University of British Columbia where he was a co-founder of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. Since 1963, he has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. With fellow TISH poet Fred Wah, Davey founded the world’s first on-line literary magazine, SwiftCurrent in 1984.

A prolific and highly-esteemed author of numerous books and scholarly articles on Canadian literary criticism and poetry, Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it, and the struggles between different identity-based groups in our globalizing society—racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, economic—that drive this play.

Frank Davey's profile page