In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ix 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! The Rising Tide of Atlantic-Canadian Literature.” This installment of the Department of English’s ongoing Raddall Symposium series was a vigorous, intimate, and apparently contagious gathering of established and emerging scholars and graduate students busily engaged in revitalizing the ield (many of the papers from the conference appeared in a revised form in Surf’s Up! The Rising Tide of Atlantic-Canadian Literature, a special issue of Studies in Literature published in 2008). David Creelman had recently published Setting in the East: Maritime Realist Fiction (2003), the irst book-length monograph on East Coast writing in nearly twenty years, and at the conference we had the opportunity to celebrate the publication of Danielle Fuller’s Writing the Everyday: Women’s Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada (2004), a sophisticated cultural materialist investigation of the writing of women in the region. Anne of Tim Hortons owes much to David and Danielle’s work, as well as to the contributions, collaborations, collegiality, feedback, and friendship of others working in the area, particularly the indefatigable Tony Tremblay (especially his invaluable scholarship on David Adams Richards), Jeanette Lynes, Cynthia Sugars, Chris Armstrong, Christian Riegel, Tracy Whalen, Jennifer Andrews, Bill Parenteau, and Paul Chafe (to whom go special thanks for putting me on to Frank Barry’s Wreckhouse). Parts of this book were presented at various conferences, particularly of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English and the Atlantic Canada Studies association, and I am indebted to the valuable feedback Acknowledgements x Acknowledgements from various colleagues at these gatherings. The book also obviously owes a huge debt to Ian McKay’s The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia, which has had a profound inluence on Atlantic Canada studies since its publication in 1994. I am grateful to McGill-Queen’s University Press for permission to quote from McKay’s book in numerous instances in the following study. Portions of this book were previously published in the form of articles. The segments on Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven appeared in integrated form as “As for Me and Me Arse: Strategic Regionalism and the Home Place in Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven” in Canadian Literature 189 (2006). The chapter on tourism was published in slightly different form in English Studies in Canada 34.2–3 (2008) as “Going Out of Their Way: Tourism, Authenticity, and Resistance in Contemporary Atlantic-Canadian Literature.” Finally, my discussion of Lisa Moore’s February appeared as “February Is the Cruelest Month: Neoliberalism and the Economy of Mourning in Lisa Moore’s February” in Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 25.1 (2010). I am grateful to the editors of these three journals for granting me permission to reprint that material here. Some of the ideas in this study, furthermore, were irst developed in different contexts in earlier publications. My discussion of George Elliott Clarke’s George & Rue here owes a debt to an article I wrote on Clarke and Michael Crummey, “Making a Mess of Things: Postcolonialism, Canadian Literature, and the Ethical Turn” in University of Toronto Quarterly 76.3 (2007). The groundwork for the discussion of Michael Crummey’s novel River Thieves was laid in a reading of the Gothic motifs in the novel, “Beothuk Gothic: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves,” published in Australasian Canadian Studies 24.2 (2006). Finally, the section on Wayne Johnston’s work reframes my treatment of Johnston in an earlier article, “Historical Strip-Tease: Revelation and the Bildungsroman in Wayne Johnston’s Writing,” which appeared in The Antigonish Review 141/142 (2005), and in Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). I am also grateful for permission to quote from a number of poems in the study. “Civil Servant,” “What Rhoda Remembers about the First Five Minutes,” “The Fashion Show,” “If I do say so myself,” “Marie’s Lullaby,” “Jane’s Observation Notes,” “Barbara,” and “Filling Out the Form” were originally published in In This House Are Many Women and Other Poems by Sheree Fitch.1 “Filling Out the Form” and excerpts from the other poems are reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions. I am also grateful to Jeanette Lynes...

Share