What is the relationship between literature and the society in which it incubates? Are there common political, social, and economic factors that predominate during periods of heightened literary activity? New Brunswick at the Crossroads: Literary Ferment and Social Change in the East considers these questions and explores the relationships between periods of creative ferment in New Brunswick and the socio-cultural conditions of those times. The province's literature is ideally suited to such a study because of its bicultural character--in both English and French, periods of intense literary creativity occurred at different times and for different reasons. What emerges is a cultural geography in New Brunswick that has existed not in isolation from the rest of Canada but often at the creative forefront of imagined alternatives in identity and citizenship. At a time when cultural industries are threatened by forces that seek to negate difference and impose uniformity, New Brunswick at the Crossroads provides an understanding of the intersection of cultures and social economies, contributing to critical discussions about what constitutes "the creative" in Canadian society, especially in rural, non-central spaces like New Brunswick.

For many Canadians, the small province of New Brunswick on Canada's scenic east coast is "a nice place to visit but no place to live," plagued for generations by outmigration and economic stagnation. In The Fiddlehead Moment Tony Tremblay challenges this potent stereotype by showcasing the work of a group of literary modernists who set out to change the meaning of New Brunswick in the national lexicon. Alfred Bailey, Desmond Pacey, Fred Cogswell, and a formidable group of local poets and cultural workers - collectively, New Brunswick's Fiddlehead School - sought to restore New Brunswick's literary reputation by adapting avant-garde modernist practices to the contours of the province, opening it to the contemporary world while also encouraging writers to make it their subject. The result was a non-urban form of modernism that was as responsive to technical innovation as to the human geographies of New Brunswick. By placing New Brunswick writers and critics at the forefront of Canadian literature in the midcentury modernist project, Tremblay adds an important new chapter to our understanding of Canadian modernism. The Fiddlehead Moment is the first critical examination of this group's considerable influence. Whether through Bailey's ethnomethodology, Pacey's critical ordering, or Cogswell's editorial eclecticism in the Fiddlehead magazine and Fiddlehead Poetry Books, authors in New Brunswick, Tremblay argues, had a profound impact on writing in Canada.