In this Book

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This collection of essays studies the cultural and literary contexts of narrative texts produced in English Canada over the last forty years. It takes as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses on the cultural identity of the country. That type of metaphor provided the nation with the distinctive elements it was looking for and contributed to the creation of a sense of tradition that has survived to the present.

In the decades following the 1970s, however, critics, artists, and writers have repeatedly questioned such a model of national identity, still fragile and in need of articulation, by reading the nation from alternative perspectives such as multiculturalism, environmentalism, (neo)regionalism, feminism, or postcolonialism. These contributors suggest that the artistic and cultural flowering Canada is experiencing at the beginning of the twenty-first century is, to a great extent, based on the dismantlement of the images constructed to represent the nation only forty years ago. Through their readings of representative primary texts, their contextual analysis, and their selected methodological tools, the authors offer a tapestry of alternative approaches to that process of dismantlement. Together, they read as an unruly Penelopiad, their unravelling readings self-consciously interrogating Canada’s (lack of) ghosts.

1

Rewriting Tradition: Literature, History, and Changing Narratives in English Canada since the 1970s

Coral Ann Howells

This chapter provides a historical analysis of the role of English-Canadian literary histories in the construction of Canada’s discourse of nationhood since 1970.

2

(Reading Closely) Calling for the Formation of Asian Canadian Studies

Smaro Kamboureli

This chapter explores recent scholarship that proposes the development of Asian Canadian literature as area studies and examines the paradigm shifts through which that call for its institutionalization occurs.

3

When Race Does Not Matter, "except to everyone else":  Mixed Race Subjectivity and the Fantasy of a Post-Racial Canada in Lawrence Hill and Kim Barry Brunhuber

Ana María Fraile

This chapter assesses Canadian multiculturalism vis-à-vis the notion of racialization through a critical reading of  two novels: Lawrence Hill’s Any Known Blood and Kim Barry Brunhuber’s Kameleon Man.4

Of Aliens, Monsters and Vampires: Speculative Fantasy’s Strategies of Dissent (Transnational Feminist Fiction)

Belén Martín-Lucas

This chapter offers a critique of  Canadian multiculturalism through the scrutiny of speculative fiction by Canadian racialized women authors such as Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai, Nalo Hopkinson and Suzette Mayr.5

The Production of Vancouver: Termination Views in the City of Glass

Eva Darias-Beautell

This chapter provides an analysis of the representation of Vancouver in a selection of contemporary texts and artworks, which are read vis-à-vis one another with the aim of disclosing the labyrinthine structures of the social construction of place.6

Jane Rule and the Memory of Canada

Richard Cavell

This chapter deals with the question of cultural memory and with identity-formations outside traditional nationalist models, with special attention to the work of Jane Rule.7

Confession as Antidote to Historical Truth in River Thieves

María Jesús Hernáez Lerena

This chapter looks at recent historical fiction from Newfoundland as testimony, stressing the power of witnessing and the limitations of historical discourse in Michael Crummey’s River Thieves.
8

Indigenous Criticism and Indigenous Literature in the 1990s: Critical Intimacy

Michèle Lacombe

This chapter analyses a selection of Indigenous responses to both nationalist and post-structuralist schools of thought in Canada since 1970, positing, in so doing, an emerging cultural tradition of its own, different from mainstream Canadian discourses.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. v-vi
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  1. Acknowledgements
  2. p. vii
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  1. INTRODUCTION: Why Penelopes? How Unruly? Which Ghosts? Narratives of English Canada
  2. pp. 1-18
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  1. ONE: Rewriting Tradition: Literature, History, and Changing Narratives in English Canada since the 1970s
  2. pp. 19-42
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  1. TWO: (Reading Closely) Calling for the Formation of Asian Canadian Studies
  2. pp. 43-75
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  1. FOUR: Of Aliens, Monsters, and Vampires: Speculative Fantasy’s Strategies of Dissent (Transnational Feminist Fiction)
  2. pp. 107-130
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  1. FIVE: The Production of Vancouver: Termination Views in the City of Glass
  2. pp. 131-156
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  1. SIX: Jane Rule and the Memory of Canada
  2. pp. 157-181
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  1. SEVEN: Confession as Antidote to Historical Truth in River Thieves
  2. pp. 183-198
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  1. EIGHT: Indigenous Criticism and Indigenous Literature in the 1990s: Critical Intimacy
  2. pp. 199-224
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 225-227
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 229-243
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