Sexy, saucy, and unsparingly satirical, Barney Allen’s They Have Bodies is the most experimental book written by a Canadian until well into the 1960s. Gregory Betts reintroduces this censored “realistic novel in eleven chapters and three acts”.
Published in 1929, and almost instantly censored by the Toronto City Police, They Have Bodies has been completely overlooked by generations of scholars and writers interested in the Canadian avant-garde. It is not just the novel’s extreme formal innovation that is immediately startling about They Have Bodies. There is also its close attention to the depraved, licentious behaviour of Toronto’s elite, its revelation of moral hypocrisy, and its exposure of the means by which aristocratic and church power provides succour to egregious duplicity.
Its social criticism and dark humour were too much for Canadian readers at the time. It is, however, exactly the kind of book contemporary Canadian readers, writers, and scholars hope lies buried in the archives waiting to be recovered. A gem of insight, innovation, and novelty: finally, here is a new edition of one of the rarest, wildest books of the twentieth century.
Published in English
Price: $29.95
Pages: 271
Publisher: Les Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa/University of Ottawa Press
Imprint: University of Ottawa Press
Series: Canadian Literature Collection
Publication Date:
26 February 2020
Trim Size: 8.00 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9780776631240
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
LITERARY CRITICISM / Canadian, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Gregory Betts is a scholar, editor, and experimental poet with collections published in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Ireland. He is most acknowledged for If Language (Book*hug, 2005), a collection of paragraph-length anagrams, and The Others Raisd in Me (Pedlar, 2009), 150 poems carved out of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 150. His other books explore conceptual, collaborative, and concrete poetics. He has lectured and performed internationally, including at the Sorbonne Université, the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, the National Library of Ireland, and the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games as part of the “Cultural Olympiad,” among others. He is a professor of Canadian and avant-garde literature at Brock University, where he has produced two of the most exhaustive academic studies of avant-garde writing in Canada, Avant- Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013) and Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959–1975 (2020), both published with University of Toronto Press. He has served as the President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin, and the Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence at Brock University. He is currently the curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive and Associate Director of the Social Justice Research Initiative.
