Like many nineteeth-century Quebec writers, Arthur Buies is memorable less for the brillance of his career and for the clarity of his ideas than for the light he shed on the Quebecois struggle to earn a living from writing, even at the expense of sacrificing permanent artistic worth. His evidently selfless and unspectacular professional life has indirectly freed contemporary francophone writers not just to develop exclusively artistic careers but to realize that there is an artistic dignity in writing to support oneself, which is to be distinguished from the indignity of hackwork. Buies ushered in the modern age for Quebec writers, surveying through a variety of journalistic forms the physical and cultural geographies of his province in the context of Confederation, as writers today use the journalistic forms of literary and critical articles to analyze the sociologies of a province testing the waters of distinct society status and...