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This dissertation examines booksellers in multiple roles as cultural agents in the small press field. It proposes various ways of understanding the work of booksellers as actively shaping the production, distribution, reception, and preservation of small press works, arguing that bookselling is a small press act unaccounted for in existing scholarship. It is structured around the idea of “contributive” bookselling from Nicky Drumbolis, wherein the bookseller “adds dimension to the cultural exchange […] participates as user, maker, transistor” (“this fiveyear list”). The questions at the heart of this dissertation are: How does the small press, in its material strategies of production and distribution, reshape the terms of reception for readers? How does the bookseller contribute to these processes? What does independent bookselling look like when it is committed to the cultural and aesthetic goals of the small press? And what is absent from literary and cultural records when the bookseller is not accounted for? This dissertation covers a period from 1952 to the present day. I begin by positing Raymond Souster’s “Contact” labour as an influential model for small press publishing in which the writer must adopt multiple roles in the communications circuit in order to construct and educate a community of readers. I then examine the bookseller catalogue as a bibliographic, critical, and pedagogical genre of publication that mediates productive encounters between readers and books. I next position the material, affective, and effective labour of the bookseller within the small press gift economy. Finally, I theorize the bookstore as a potential small press archive that functions as a viable counterweight to institutional collection and preservation. My reconsideration of the labour of the bookseller realigns relations between production, distribution, reception, documentation, and preservation of small press publications, making possible a more complete accounting of the histories of the book and of the small press in Canada.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Season Songs is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano (or tenor) and medium sized orchestra (a perfoming version for voice and piano is appended). There are four songs and an orchestral prelude. The poems are by various authors and provide the programmatic elements of the cycle in that each poem is set in a different season of the year and time of day: winter/morning, spring/afternoon, summer/evening, and autumn/night respectively. The title of the prelude sets it just before dawn. The music of the prelude and the last song is closely related both motivically and tonally, thus reinforcing the cyclical nature of the work. The accompanying commentary seeks to explain the compositional processes and aesthetic principles which guided the creation of Season Songs. The music explores nonfunctional tonality, in that means other than traditional tonic-dominant (i.e., V-I) relationships are sought by which to create a sense of forward propelled harmonic motion. This sense of harmonic "trajectory", in conjunction with appropriate rhythmic proportions, is held to be one of the most important factors contributing toward the sense of departure and return, tension and resolution in the music. The main means used toward this end is a four-note source cell which governs much of the harmonic and motivic activity in the work, from the most local level of leading motives of individual songs to the broadest level of key relationships among songs. The harmonic manifestation of the source cell promotes root movement by major thirds and minor seconds on the local as well as broad levels. Sonorities associated with traditional tonality, such as open fifths in the bass and major or minor triads, are common, although the contexts in which they are heard are usually non-traditional. The metric pulse is usually distinctly articulated and readily intelligible, although changes in metre are frequent in most of the songs. The text setting aspires to a directness of expression. The words will be intelligible in performance and the music reflects and magnifies the emotional content of the the text. While there are several levels on which the music can be appreciated, over-obscurity is avoided, as a rule, especially in the composition of the musical surface. / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate