Tremblay, Tony, The Fiddlehead Moment: Pioneering an Alternative Canadian Modernism in New Brunswick, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019

The Fiddlehead (1945–), published in Fredericton at the University of New Brunswick, is the longest-running literary magazine in Canada. What were the origins of The Fiddlehead , and how did it develop so successfully? These are the questions pursued by Tony Tremblay in his monograph, The Fiddlehead Moment: Pioneering an Alternative Canadian Modernism in New Brunswick (2019). This review summarizes Tremblay’s account of the magazine, describing the education and accomplishments of the three principals behind it: Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey (1905–97), Desmond Pacey (1917–75), and Fred Cogswell (1917–2004). The Fiddlehead thrived because these founders converted the political and economic disadvantages of twentieth-century New Brunswick into an “alternative modernism” that came to a head far from the metropolitan centres of Montreal, Toronto, New York, and London. Tremblay’s book demonstrates how literature can make a place. The review applauds this scholarly accomplishment, while noting, in its scholarly method, a tension between Marxism and liberal individualism.