Project MUSE - Anne of Tim Hortons

Although my interest in Atlantic-Canadian literature goes back to my graduate work at McGill University in the mid-1980s, this present study was truly galvanized by a conference I co-organized with Jeanette Lynes at Acadia University in the fall of 2004 titled “Surf’s Up!...

1. Introduction: Now Our Masters Have No Borders

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pp. 1-28

Thus writes Jeanette Lynes in her poem “Markings,” gesturing to the international appeal of the plucky heroine of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 classic Anne of Green Gables. Such is the power of Montgomery’s ictional world, Lynes sardonically conveys, that tourists come to Montgomery’s...

Section One: I’se the B’y That Leaves the Boats: The Changing World of Work

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pp. 29-32

In contemporary Atlantic-Canadian literature, work is a conspicuous preoccupation: the availability of work, the conditions of work, the changing nature of work, and the larger context in which that work does or not does not take place. That larger context, of course, for the last three or four decades has been shaped by economic...

2.Sucking the Mother Dry: The Fisheries

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pp. 33-54

As a whole generation of Atlantic-Canadian historians have illustrated, one of the main problems with mythologizing the life of the independent petty producer is that it tends to obscure a much more complicated economic and social reality. Writing of the reliance on wage labour of agricultural workers in the nineteenth-century Maritimes...

3. Acceptable Levels of Risk”: Mining and Offshore Oil

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pp. 55-86

The fishing industry, like the two other staple industries with which the history of Atlantic Canada is associated (farming and lumbering) readily lends itself to the kind of Folk iconography that Ian McKay and James Overton, among others, have highlighted and critiqued, especially because of the capitalist and class relations that such iconography...

4. Uncivil Servitude: The Service Sector

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pp. 87-98

Along with the more fundamentally modern, industrial, and corporatized visions of physical labour in the Maritimes and Newfoundland explored in the previous two chapters, another signiicant element of work in the region that runs counter to traditional stereotypes is the pronounced shift of the economy toward the growing service sector. If, as Margaret Conrad and James Hiller argue, the four decades after...

Conclusion to Section One

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pp. 99-100

To stress the degree to which contemporary writers in the East are increasingly conscious of the impact of these economic, political, and historical forces on the lives of Atlantic Canadians is not to suggest that Atlantic- Canadian literature as a whole has tended to perpetrate...

Section Two: “About as Far from Disneyland as You Can Possibly Get”: The Reshaping of Culture

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pp. 101-104

One of the crucial achievements of representations of work in contemporary Atlantic-Canadian literature is that they often situate people working in the resource sectors or service sector within a larger, even global web of political, economic, and social relations...

5. “The Simpler and More Colourful Way of Life”

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pp. 105-136

One of the problems with the Folk paradigm, Ian McKay stresses, is that it promotes ethnically exclusive deinitions of culture. McKay highlights how identifying people as members of the “Folk” “only worked if there were some who were not ‘Folk.’”...

6. Rebuffing the Gaze

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pp. 137-166

The work of Native, Black, and women writers in the Atlantic provinces increasingly serves to contest the prevailing power structures in the region, challenging the demographic and cultural hierarchy and exclusiveness of Folk stereotypes in the process. Another important strategy more and more evident in the literature of the East Coast...

Conclusion to Section Two

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pp. 167-168

In an economically struggling region like Atlantic Canada, satiric critiques of tourism may seem like kicking the goose that lays the golden eggs. Moreover, it must be stressed that some forms of tourism are more benign and locally beneicial than others and that these writers are not necessarily resisting tourism in and of itself...

Section Three: The Age of Sale: History, Globalization, and Commodification

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pp. 169-172

Historical iction, as many commentators have observed, tends to be characterized by a double vision: while it looks to the past, its representation of that past is necessarily refracted through, and often consciously energized by, concerns of the present. This insight is particularly salient in appreciating the current surge...

7. “A ‘Sea-Change’ of Sorts”: Newfoundland and Labrador

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pp. 173-216

The fact that the political, economic, and cultural developments described in previous chapters—especially the crisis in the isheries and a growing concern about Atlantic Canada’s place in Confederation—have resonated more clearly in Newfoundland and Labrador...

8. “A Place That Didn’t Count Any More”: The Maritimes

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pp. 217-232

Given the substantial tradition of historical fiction in the region, it is curious that there has not been a profusion of historical fiction in the Maritimes equivalent to that in Newfoundland and Labrador over the last few decades. The writing of historical fiction...

Conclusion to Section Three

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pp. 233-236

One of the possible reasons for the growing preoccupation with history, in Canada as elsewhere, is the anxiety occasioned by the mobility, deracination, and sense of placelessness that characterize our highly technological, globalized consumer society...

Conclusion: Speculative Fiction for the Rest of the Country?

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pp. 237-248

It may seem curious, at the end of a book on Atlantic-Canadian literature that is trying to counter the image of Atlantic Canadians as a backward-looking people, to have a section on representations of the past. What the examination of the texts in the preceding section...