From Field Notes to Book: Editing for Publication Three Stages of Artist Paul Kane’s Western Travel Narrative, 1845–1848
Artist Paul Kane (1810–1871) traveled by canoe and boat from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean in the mid-1840s. His aim was to sketch Native Americans in Wisconsin and Oregon territories and in lands controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company. An uneducated artist, Kane wrote in inimitable spelling both field notes and portrait and landscape logs.
Transcribing and publishing them for the first time, Ian MacLaren has chosen also to present with them both his transcription of a draft manuscript for Kane’s eventual book, written in two hands, neither of them the artist’s, and a facsimile of the first edition of Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, which Longmans published in London in February 1859. MacLaren will discuss how he reached decisions about the presentation of these three stages of the Kane narrative in his recently released four-volume work, Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America: Writings and Art, Life and Times (2024). Plus a Q&A.
Original Date: September 9, 2024 – 8PM ET
Presenter
Ian S. MacLaren
Ian S. MacLaren taught in the History and Classics, and English and Film Studies departments at the University of Alberta for more than thirty years. His recently published four-volume book Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America: Writings and Art, Life and Times aims to contribute to ethno-history, book history, fur-trade history, and art history. Recent publications by MacLaren pertain to Kane and to Captain Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific Ocean. Other areas of scholarly interest include: The histories of national parks, Arctic exploration, and the early literature of North America in English.
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