About the Site
About the Site
Neith Project
This website was created as a practicum project by PhD student Billy Johnson for the Book History and Print Culture Program at the University of Toronto.
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The purpose of the site is to provide open access to Neith, the first African-Canadian literary magazine, for educational and scholarly purposes. Currently, only two physical copies of the complete run of Neith are available to readers and researchers. Those volumes are held in the reference archives at the Saint John Public Library, Fundy Main Branch, and in the W.F. Ganong Papers at the New Brunswick Museum Archives and Special Collections. A full run of Neith is also available on microfilm at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick.
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The website has been designed to provide access to the magazine with only a minimal amount of critical and contextual information. This has been done with view to allowing readers to interact as directly as possible with the text without the imposition of any particular critical perspective.
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Of course, the digitization and presentation of Neith in an online, electronic interface will inevitably mediate the reader's encounter with the text.
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In addition to the issues themselves, searchable tables of contents are available to assist the reader in locating specific texts or authors, providing multiple ways of accessing and organizing the magazine's contents. But it is hoped that these facilitate rather than condition the reader's interaction with Neith.
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A minimal amount of background information has been provided in order to sufficiently orient the reader to the text - to provide the "who, what, where, and when." This supplementry material consists of a brief biography of Abraham Beverly Walker, a description of Saint John and urban Africadia at the beginning of the 20th century, and a basic bibliographic description of the magazine.
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A Bibliography of secondary sources can be found here. Credits and copyright information can be found here. And visitors can contact the website creator here. Links to each of these pages can also be found at the foot of every page.
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The digital copies of Neith that appear on this website were scanned from the volume held at the Saint John Free Public Library, Fundy Main Branch, Reference Archives, item barcode 39525022593058, call no. RA 052 NEI V. 1 NO. 1.