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217 “A Place That Didn’t Count Any More”: The Maritimes 8 | Given the substantial tradition of historical iction in the region, it is curious that there has not been a profusion of historical iction in the Maritimes equivalent to that in Newfoundland and Labrador over the last few decades. The writing of historical iction in the Maritimes goes back at least to what is considered to be the irst novel published by a nativeborn writer in Canada, Fredericton-born Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart’s St. Ursula’s Convent, or the Nun of Canada (1824). At the turn of the century, the inluential New Brunswick poet and critic Charles G.D. Roberts wrote historical iction among his many other works, as did his brother Theodore Goodridge Roberts and numerous others. Nova Scotia’s Thomas Raddall was widely known in the middle of the twentieth century for historical novels such as His Majesty’s Yankees (1942) and Roger Sudden (1944). While historical iction has undergone a revival and redeinition at the end of the twentieth century, that trend has yet to register as much in the Maritimes as it has elsewhere in the country. This is not to say that concern with the past is absent in contemporary Maritime literature. David Adams Richards’s River of the Brokenhearted (2003), for instance, is modelled on his grandmother’s experiences as a pioneer in the early-twentieth-century motion picture industry in Eastern Canada, and his The Friends of Meager Fortune (2006) is set during the era of the lumber barons on the Miramichi. Nevertheless, Maritime writers have yet to exhibit the same preoccupation, often revisionist in spirit, with key igures and episodes in the region’s history as is the case in Newfoundland. There are signs, though, that this is starting to change, and the work of Harry Thurston and George Elliott Clarke offers a glimpse of what is likely to grow into a substantial literary engagement with the past in the Maritimes. 218 Section 3: The Age of Sale “A long looking back”: Harry Thurston Perhaps the best example of the dual vision of historical iction—its simultaneous preoccupation with the present and the past—is a long poem, Nova Scotian poet Harry Thurston’s A Ship Portrait: A Novella in Verse (2005). In part the ictional autobiography of nineteenth-century Nova Scotian ship painter John O’Brien, A Ship Portrait is as much a meditation on the present as it is a glimpse into the erstwhile “golden age of sail” in the Maritimes. O’Brien’s career as a painter corresponds with the rise and decline of the global economy of the sailing ships, but the signiicance of Thurston’s choice is that O’Brien, like Thurston and his contemporaries, is land-bound, moored to the shore rather than loosed upon the unbounded sea. In that sense, O’Brien is an ideal vehicle not only for reminding us of the region’s more storied past but also for contemplating its present state within Confederation and within the larger global economy. Thurston’s principal strategy for conveying such a dual vision is his use of contrapuntal voices in the novella. O’Brien’s ictionalized irst-person musings alternate with responses and relections by the clearly modern voice of the narrator or poet, whose interventions juxtapose the present with the past and defuse any tendency to present the age of sail with rose-coloured wistfulness . Instead, their conversation—less a dialogue than a call-and-response across the decades—makes for a more nuanced and critical assessment of both the past and present. Thurston remarks in an interview that A Ship Portrait relects his ambivalence about his own culture: “In one sense I am very proud of what we accomplished as a culture. In another way, I’m ashamed that we’re very nostalgic about it, or forgetful about it, that we can’t see ourselves in a sense in a better light.” He describes how, growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, he had the sense that the Maritimes were “a kind of backwater, that this was a place that didn’t count any more,” and part of the motivation behind A Ship Portrait was his “feeling that we had lost a sense of ourselves” (Thurston 2008). Certainly, one effect of A Ship Portrait is to remind people of the vibrant and storied past of the East Coast, perhaps to restore a sense of pride to a much-denigrated populace...

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