Identity area
Reference code
Title
Date(s)
- 1970-2011 (Creation)
Level of description
Accession
Extent and medium
18 boxes (3 metres)
Context area
Name of creator
Biographical history
Sean Kane was appointed to the University of Toronto English department, following his Ph.D. there in 1972. He left to join Trent University, becoming the chair of Cultural Studies when it was founded in 1978. These institutions are remembered in his Inward of Poetry (2011), a memoir of the golden age of English Studies at U of T, seen in the letters of his teachers, and in Virtual Freedom (2002), a mass market novel about Trent that was shortlisted for the Leacock Medal.
Kane’s interests fall in the sub-fields of oral metaphysics, ecophenomenology, biosemiotics, complexity theory and (possibly) speculative materialism. These are the intellectual settings of his continuing study of the nineteenth-century Haida thinker Skaay of Qquuna, whom he presents as Canada’s first philosopher. Preparation for this enquiry was made by Kane in his Wisdom of the Mythtellers (1994, 2/e 1998) which was adopted as a text in many places and established him as “an important successor to Northrop Frye” (Literary Review of Canada). Besides the influence of this teacher, Kane’s intellectual horizons were formed by the wondertales told by the storytelling artist Alice Kane, whose work he published as The Dreamer Awakes (1995), and by his early research at the Warburg Institute and the University of Toronto on the poet Edmund Spenser, published as Spenser’s Moral Allegory (1989).
Archival history
Immediate source of acquisition or transfer
Gift of Sean Kane, 2011
Content and structure area
Scope and content
Includes correspondence with Margaret Atwood, primarily about the work of Robert Bringhurst, and Sean Kane’s The Cloud Herder; Graeme Gibson, including his screenplay of As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross; Robert Bringhurst, including drafts of works by Bringhurst; Scott Symons correspondence, partly concerning Civic Square, Helmet of Flesh, [including Morocco letters] 1974- , drafts of Civic Square; John McConnell correspondence and novel draft; extensive editorial and personal Dennis Lee correspondence, 1970-2010 and extensive draft material of poems, prose, including literary essays and other material by Dennis Lee, with extensive editorial comments by Sean Kane.
Appraisal, destruction and scheduling
Accruals
System of arrangement
Conditions of access and use area
Conditions governing access
Material may be requested in person at the Fisher Library Reference Desk, or in advance using our online stack retrieval request form: https://fisher.library.utoronto.ca/stack-retrieval-request
Conditions governing reproduction
Language of material
- English