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...these there was none but said that he had failed. What others called their achievements, they considered mere byproducts of their striving for something greater, something beyond their reach, perhaps beyond man's reach. What made them great was not what was within their grasp; it is so easy to do what is within one's grasp. What made them great was that they reached for the stars. For only he can, even in the smallest thing, go beyond the limit accessible to all men who sets his goal in the realm of what is accessible to no man. beacon reached, as I have expressed it in another connection, is a beacon left behind; only the beacon that cannot be reached will always beckon (From F. P. Grove, "A Treatise on J. W. Crow," p. 4-5).
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Of Frederick Philip Grove, the great German-Canadian writer based in Manitoba during perhaps the most important period of his life, a great deal needs to be said or needs saying again. In the years since his central role in the shaping of the Canadian literary institution much has changed. Canadian literature has developed enormously; it has recovered equally from traumas of colonial and post colonial heritage to develop a firm identity of its own. At the same time, reassessing some of what has been said and left unsaid about Grove, but also about Canadian literature, has become a literary and historical debt due. Often pushed aside in more recent compilations of Canadian literary history, Frederick Philip Grove, as the first Canadian writer of intercultural significance, can now be introduced to a new audience as an intriguing avant-garde author in his own right, but also as a figure central to the inception of modern Canadian literature after the Great War.
Grove's life and career may be told as three interlocking stories. First, there is the story of Grove's personal struggles and his past in Europe as an accomplished and prolific novelist, essayist and highly productive translator of French, English, and Spanish poets and novelists but also of the Arabian Nights. Second, we follow the odyssey of a pseudonymously living immigrant teacher through the small towns and the lonely villages of pioneer Manitoba--Haskett, Morden, Winkler, Virden, Gladstone, Leifur, Falmouth, Ferguson, Eden, Ashfield, Rapid City, Winnipeg--and his human struggles as a Canadian writer and dedicated family man. Third, the story of Canada's literary and cultural development in the 1920s to 1940s must be told.
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In his public and private life, Grove has been known as a controversial figure. It is perhaps less well known that he was a fascinating and often admirable human being, besides having clearly been one of the most pivotal figures in the making of twentieth-century Canadian literature. At the beginning of the third millennium, almost sixty years after the author's death in 1948 and the many conflicting findings and sometimes hasty speculations about his hidden European past and his life in Canada, a reassessment of Grove's life and achievement in the context of his times is a task of restitution long overdue.
As early as 1951, the...
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