Timelines & Map

New Brunswick Literary Timeline (PDF: 1.6MB)

The New Brunswick Literary Timeline is a chronological list of the extensive body of work – mostly books, but also journals, plays, and other literary miscellany – published in English and French by New Brunswick writers who have entries in the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia. The timeline is thus as close to a complete literary publishing record as currently exists in New Brunswick.

Each entry in the timeline has full bibliographic information, as well as headers that indicate the key historical moments around which the work or activity appeared.

The potential research uses and questions to which the timeline can be put are numerous. A few are the following: the effect of Confederation on the province’s literary output in English; the shifting gender profile of New Brunswick authors over time; the periods of ferment (English and French) in the province’s literary history; the points at which New Brunswick authors moved from foreign to domestic publishers, and the effect that had on literary aesthetics; and the traces of literary influence (or swerve) when powerful authors hold dominion over the cultural imagination.

The timeline is long (123 pages), as is the list of research possibilities it holds.

Timeline of New Brunswick Author Dates (PDF: 226KB)

The Timeline of New Brunswick Author Dates is a shorter chronological timeline that foregrounds biographic rather than bibliographic information. It includes birth and death dates (if known), author names, genders, and predominant places of residence in New Brunswick. Like the previous timeline, it is comprised of English- and French-language writers who have an entry in the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia. This shorter timeline shows, at a glance, the who’s-who of provincial writers from the past 280 years; it shows who was contemporary with whom; and it shows where the literary capitals of New Brunswick were over the course of the province’s history.

Literary Map of New Brunswick

The Literary Map of New Brunswick indicates where the centres of English- and French-language literary activity have been in New Brunswick. The map is a particularly useful resource for locating writers from different regions of the province. For research purposes, the map is best used with the Timeline of New Brunswick Author Dates. Putting both together will show how the centres of literary activity migrated from place to place over the course of New Brunswick’s history.