A young Canadian marches over the Pyrenees and enters into history by joining the International Brigades—men and women from around the world who volunteered to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. This new edition of Ted Allan’s novel, This Time a Better Earth, reintroduces readers to the electrifying milieu of the Spanish Civil War and Madrid, which for a short time in the 1930s became the epicentre of a global struggle between democracy and fascism. This Time a Better Earth, first published in 1939, tells the story of Canadian Bob Curtis from the time of his arrival in Spain and the idealism and trials of the international volunteers. Allan’s novel achieves the distinction of being both a work of considerable literary and historical significance and a real page-turner. This is the first installment of a series of titles to be published in the Canadian Literature Collection under the Canada and the Spanish Civil War banner. This is a large-scale project devoted to the recovery and presentation of Canadian cultural production about the Spanish Civil War (spanishcivilwar.ca), directed by Bart Auteur and Emily Robins Sharpe. A young Canadian marches over the Pyrenees and enters into history by joining the International Brigades—men and women from around the world who volunteered to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Published in English.
Bart Vautour (Dalhousie) is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University in K'jipuktuk/Halifax, Canada. His research examines Canadian cultural production with a focus on transnationalism, modernism, politics, poetics, and editing. He is co-editor (with Erin Wunker, Travis V. Mason, and Christl Verduyn) of Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics and (with Vanessa Lent and Dean Irvine) Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media. He is also editor of a scholarly edition of Ted Allan’s Spanish Civil War novel, This Time a Better Earth (1939) and co-editor of Charles Yale Harrison’s Meet Me on the Barricades (1938), both from the University of Ottawa Press.