David Williams

Born on an RCAF base in Manitoba during the Second World War and raised on a farm in Northeast Saskatchewan, David Williams served as a Reservist in the Canadian Armed Forces, studied for the ministry at Briercrest Bible College, and played the wideout position for the University of Saskatchewan Huskies football team (1965-67). In1968, he went as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow to the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), where he received his PhD in 1973.

His novels are the subject of a collection of essays by literary scholars from India, Germany, and Canada, entitled "Essays on David Williams: A Novelist from the Canadian Prairie" (1999). As he sums up his fiction: "I set out in three books ('The Burning Wood,' 'The River Horsemen,' and 'Eye of the Father') to recreate the world of my childhood in rural Saskatchewan, where we were scarcely a generation removed from settling wild forest land; to synthesize the competing mythologies and shared histories of the people who came to settle the region after the First World War; and to create an ethnic mosaic made up of aboriginal, Welsh, English, Scottish, German, Norwegian, and Ukrainian peoples.

"As a literary critic, I wanted first to situate a relatively new literature like the Canadian novel within the wider field of modern literature written in English. More recently, I have tried to rethink and extend the pioneering work of the great Canadian historian Harold Innis concerning the effects of media change on our conceptions of time and space, especially the space of political community, as well as to explore a number of changes in Western culture by using the novel as a diagnostic tool to show how each medium has both expanded and limited the ways we think.

"My latest (and perhaps last) book is entitled 'The Communion of the Book: Milton and the Humanist Revolution in Reading' (2022). It concludes a quartet of books written over the last two decades on the social, psychological, and political effects of rapid media change. The first title, 'Imagined Nations: Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction' (2003), examines the changing meanings and experience of the 'nation' in oral, scribal, print, and digital cultures. The second book, 'Media, Memory, and the First World War' (2009), charts the ways in which each new medium has altered our remembrance of that war. And the third work, 'Milton's Leveller God' (2017), shows how printed books and newspapers swiftly eroded the "naturalness" of monarchical government and helped to shape our democratic values.

"The concluding title in this quartet sets out a history of readers and new ways of reading from Petrarch, Bruni, Valla, Reuchlin, and Erasmus to John Foxe, John Lilburne, and John Milton. 'Communion' consequently portrays manuscript and print readers of the Renaissance as creators of the modern world; the social, psychological, and political values they created continue to underwrite our culture today. It also explores how digital forms of reading appear more and more as a looming nemesis to print-shaped values of freedom of expression and individual rights; of private goods balanced by the public good; and of the rule of reason maintained through free and open debate."